Ideas how to improve the toasty-/chilly surroundings debuff on non Ceres asteroids

[imazined]

Let me say first: I think the Ceres DLC is beautiful and the new temperature dupe mechanics work very well on it. This is the baseline I assume Klei wants the new mechanics to feel like and my comparisons are made to this baseline.

First I summarize what found to be issues and after that I talk about my ideas how to improve the mechanics. Happy to to hear other ideas.

I won't engage with comments with the general message of "The game must be harder". Only about 50% of players ever left their starting biome.



After playing different asteroids and some testing I found several issues with this mechanics on non Ceres asteroids. All of them revolve around the -5 athletics and affect mostly the early game.

The reduced speed leads to a larger impact of hurtful environments like scalding and eye irritations that get worse the longer a dupe is in there. Especially with scaldings it feels like a double punishment. While frost bite environments are quite rare scalding environments are more common.

Example this dupe nearly suffocated across a very short distance after running to a triage cot at hitting 70% hp.


This leads to second issue. The way the debuff is applied. The debuff is active the moment a dupe enters a cell in which the heat transfer is above or below the tolerated level. When they enter a cell with an acceptable heat transfer the debuff gets converted into "sweaty" or "shivering" which have a five seconds cool down. The two biggest impacts I saw so far was first that an element with a higher TC than 0.6 shrinks the tolerated temperature range dramatically. In water only a temperature between 33C and 39C was debuff free. And second dupes run towards cooling heating station just to loose the debuff one the way and run back into the heat. to get "toasty surroundings" to run to water cooler and so forth. Nobody noticed this on Ceres because it's basically cold everywhere.

Examples:
- Dupes in water between 32C and 40C

- Dupes running back and forth because of loosing the debuff.

 

The third issue is how it can impact base building. This new mechanics promotes boxed bases with atmo suits only exits. Personally this is exactly my playstyle but I met a lot of players that don't like bases like this and want to play more with the terrain. But this just got punished and necessity to temperature control for ranches could lead to more box bases.

The fourth issue is what kind of mitigation tools there are for toasty surroundings. While there is plenty for chilly surroundings (the access to them is another issue on Rime and Frozen Forest). For toasty surroundings there is no protective clothing yet. The water cooler is an okayish solution but also attracts dupes in their downtime for recreational use and comes with additional food poisoning risk that the wood burner lacks.

Now to ideas how to make the existing non Ceres starts feel like more integrated in this update.

- The access to protective clothing with materials for it near the starting biome. E.g. on Ceres a wild bammoth can be sheared for one warm coat. On Rime that would take more time as the player needs to find thimble reed seeds and create an environment they can grow in. On Frozen Forest they need to visit another asteroid first.

- For heat some kind heat reflecting space blanket suit might be appropriate.

- The water cooler needs an option to deactivate it's recreational use

- Longer lasting protection against heat like the one with the sauna and hot tub would be also great.

- The tolerance of heat flow should be bigger at least at the lower end. Getting debuffed for 32C water will make every swampy start in SO way less fun.

- For the bigger impact of scaldings and eye irritation a longer grace period for them could alleviate some of the issues because else it would be a double punishment and the decreased athletics stacks up to dangerous levels for dupes fast.

- The running around because they lost the debuff on the way to a cooling station could be solved by not cancelling the the errand of getting the protection buff. It's like a storage bin build to far away. The player will eventually realize they should build a new station closer to the issue.

- Alternatively the timings of heat stroke and hypothermia would maybe a better fit. The debuff doesn't apply immediately but after enough heat/temperature exchange but also last longer. And either way can we please get the animations back?

- Another alternative could be to make temperature sensitivity of the dupes part of the difficulty settings similar to the impact of radiation in SO

That's all I have to say about this topic for now. I think it needs changes to fit the gaming experience on non Ceres starts more to what we see on Ceres.




 

[bialix]

Showers! They could provide cooling effect as well, why not? That's obvious for me.

[Tigin]

Just to dump a bunch of more ideas into the cookie jar...

Shift the athletics penalty

• Change attribute debuffs less than 0 to not be additive (-9 Athletics shouldn't be 10% move speed but rather 1/(1+0.9), or 53% move speed).  Athletic debuffs are extremely nasty and snowball-y when overall Athletics gets below 0 (hello Pajamas). May require reworking how Zombie Spores work which is intended to be nasty
• Other candidates for debuffs could be increased oxygen/food consumption, reduced operating speed, and/or increased stamina usage.

Additional usages for Medicine/Food

• Rad pills seem decently used for the perk it gives. Giving some temperature-controlling medication as well as adding some "cool" foods

I've also mentioned in another thread a sliding scale for temperature tolerances, especially as that's a core component of the difficulty of a world.

[SGT_Imalas]

On 7/5/2024 at 8:20 PM, Tigin said:

Change attribute debuffs less than 0 to not be additive (-9 Athletics shouldn't be 10% move speed but rather 1/(1+0.9), or 53% move speed).  Athletic debuffs are extremely nasty and snowball-y when overall Athletics gets below 0 (hello Pajamas). May require reworking how Zombie Spores work which is intended to be nasty

I really liked that idea, made it into a mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3294665522

[ChrisPBacon000]

On 7/22/2024 at 10:14 AM, SGT_Imalas said:

I really liked that idea, made it into a mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3294665522

Awesome work!  I'm dismayed by the negative comments you received, but that's the internet these days I guess?

One observation myself and others have made is that it appears the debuff is checking current heat loss, rather than current body temperature. 

As a result, even the slightest exposure to conditions causing heat loss instantly apply the debuff, even if the ACTUAL temperature of the environment is in the dupes comfortable range. 

I think this is the source of a lot of the difficulty on non - Ceres asteroids. Even in technically comfortable conditions (0-40 C) dupes still get the debuff if their instantaneous heat loss is too high.

I don't know if this is the intended behavior... But it does make even moderately cool or warm conditions oddly dangerous.