Feedback after 200 cycles

[Mariolo]

I did a 200 cycle playthrough get a feeling for the new features introduced. This was a classic sized map with the spaced out dlc activated. My goals were to make a stable colony, heat up the main living area to a confortable temperature, ranch all the new critters and setup stable steel and plastic production. I wrote my experience here to provide feedback on the new features for balance.

OXYGEN

Early on, alveo vera is very good. You can probably last a long time with it, but you need to be careful about producing too much or too little CO2 and you should move the oxylite away from the plant to prevent overpressurizing the area.

I decided to make a spom early in order to raise the temperature of the living areas. This is harder than usual because there's no liquid water nor gold amalgam but if you insulate an area and use a few ice liquefiers you can get there. Later on I rebuilt the machines with steel.

TEMPERATURE

The wood heater is pretty bad. The buff only lasts for .2 cycles. Chilly sorroundings is manageable but I recommend making warm coats as soon as you start ranching Bammoth, they are very helpful. After building the spom, I just insulated the base and made the rest only atmo-suit accesible.

POWER

Power is a struggle on this map. Wood burners and floxes can get you through the early game but floxes aren't enough to sustain ethanol production for power. I built two petroleum generators to start steel and glass production with the intention to replace them with a shine bug reactor. I originally wanted to make a nuclear reactor but there are no beetas on the map so I abandoned that idea. Overall I feel like the options for power in this map are quite limited

FOOD, FLOXES, AND BAMMOTH

Food was very easily managed. Pikeapples are like mealwood but way better. There's enough phosphorite on the map to last thousands of cycles, not to mention that food gets refrigerated automatically. Bammoth are probably a little overpowered at the moment. There's more than enough ethanol to sustain a full ranch for a long time and they make a lot of meat. You could probably double how much they eat and still be great.

Floxes, on the other hand, are not very great. They do the job early on but they are much worse than arbor trees. I don't recommend relying on them for power after the early game.

MERCURY, NECTAR AND MAKING STEEL

Mercury is very niche. By the time you can keep a room cold enough to not melt you probably have enough refined metal to mater, and as a liquid I don't know how to use it because it's a terrible coolant. I tried to use it on a metal refinery but making steel raises its temperature by over +1000. If anything it's more of a nuisance since afte strip mining an area the mercury is likely to melt and create a huge mess.

Nectar was more useful than I anticipated. Farming bonbon gourds domestically is very annoying, but the surface layer has so many wild plants that you can just hook up a pipe along the entire thing and get your plastic this way only needing some upkeep after every meteor shower. It felt easier than setting up an oil well at least. It is also an excellent coolant although I never used it like this.

The biggest issue with this map is the lack of coal. I had some coal around the hermit's story trait which gave me enough to get started but you need to get coal from somewhere else. In the base game, your only option is a lucky care package, so yeah, I think this needs to be revised. Besides that there's nothing particularely difficult about making steel in this map.

SPIGOT SEAL AND DEEP FRIER

Ranching seals is annoying. I don't recommend keeping more than 4 of these guys. For the early game, providing the light is very difficult as you can't afford to run 2 sunlamps and for the late game since snow is not renewable you don't want to have more than a couple plants. Their ethanol production is ok but don't try to power your colony this way. Their best use is probably feeding Bammoth since their ethanol comes out already cold and they provide some tallow for pemmican, making it an easier rocket food than berry sludge

I never ended up using the deep frier. It has an akward place in the game at the moment. For the early to mid game, it uses x8 more power than the electric grill and, as I said, food isn't the problem in this map, it's power. For the late game you'd rather make higher quality foods. It's kind of insulting that squash fries require 3 different ingredients and are only standart quality. The recipes really need to be higher quality and/or be used in gas range recipes like fish and chips or cachopo or something.

 

That was my overall experience with the map. It plays different than the other starts and is fairly challenging, but I wish it changed the late game meta a bit more.

[Masarius]

47 minutes ago, Mariolo said:

TEMPERATURE

The wood heater is pretty bad. The buff only lasts for .2 cycles. Chilly sorroundings is manageable but I recommend making warm coats as soon as you start ranching Bammoth, they are very helpful. After building the spom, I just insulated the base and made the rest only atmo-suit accesible.

Just no, no and no.

Wood heater is OP as it removes 2 annoying debuffs and grants immunity which allows your dupes to chill in extreme cold or wet environments. The buff invalidates any supposed difficulty the new map is supposed to bring and makes the existing content easier as well.

[Mariolo]

5 hours ago, Masarius said:

Just no, no and no.

Wood heater is OP as it removes 2 annoying debuffs and grants immunity which allows your dupes to chill in extreme cold or wet environments. The buff invalidates any supposed difficulty the new map is supposed to bring and makes the existing content easier as well.

I get what you are saying but I felt that the dupes wasted a lot of time warming up and the buff lasted too little so they got the cold bedroom debuff anyways. For the time that I used it it was useful but I wanted to replace it for something better quickly