Bionic Duplicant + Atmo Suit = No Dock Needed (Bionic Weakness Discussion)

[FoldableHuman]

Bionics have a functional resistance to germs in that they don't do a lot of the primary things that expose dupes to germs. They don't eat, so no food poisoning outside of truly exceptional circumstances, and they only get exposed to slimelung if they gulp slimelung-infected air, which is much, much easier to control by simply having canister fillers available with clean O2.

A third branch on the skill tree that provides some environmental resilience (+50º scald/frostbite, immunity to various irritants) would be good, balanced by the challenge of managing Bionic morale w/o food/hall/bedrooms.

[Shintai]

I tried out bionics for a while now. At first I was very happy with them, then I started to realize how massively OP they are.

The biggest problems with the bionics is that you can pretty much skip half the game and challenges entirely. After around 50 cycles I had a completely sustainable colony that could never fail.

Hot oxygen from a SPOM? No problem as you only need gas canisters and you can delete heat this way. Use Polluted Oxygen? No problem, gas canisters again and +30% oxygen usage? Not a problem is it with unlimited polluted oxygen?

Power? Not a problem even with hamster wheels. Because you essentially do not have to do much else very quickly. No food, no sleep, no ranching, no bathrooms. No temperature control that matters.

Gunk you have several ways to dispose off, depending if you have a clean water source. Either ignore it and vent it to space. The penalty is irrelevant. Or simply have a closed recycle if you use polluted oxygen as a source.

Boosters you can almost also ignore. As you can easily limit a bionic to just use a few boosters. But even then, the replace on demand is so powerful. This is also why for example increasing power usage with amount of boosters is trivial.

So what can we do to help fix this?

The oxygen tank needs to go. Power consumption up? Also require them to need something that is plant or animal based. The liquid penalty also needs to be severe. As it is now its another thing to ignore.

[mitboy]

Apparently bionic dupes don't actually take damage from water, they just get stressed? This is something that can be made of a harder penalty. 

[Maxposting]

On 12/1/2024 at 6:32 AM, Henlikuoth said:

In that case, I think the bionics should at least get an increased resistance against germs, maybe an inherent +2. That would give them longer times without getting sick, but sometimes they would still catch a disease and need medical treatment. That would be a good balanced solution.

I'd personally think they'd be more fragile to germs, with their organic system being more strained by the implants and gunk.
Not sure how you'd implement it though, since they hardly interact with germs.

[speckle21]

i do agree that food is one the most fun and intricate systems in the game. You have to control temperature, fertilization requirements, irrigation, dirt type, decay, egg cycles, butchering, ranching, hostility, room construction (pesky drecos!), etc.

To eliminate all of that in favor of power makes bionics way OP and also somewhat boring. It's the intricacies that make ONI fun. So i think more should be added for bionics somehow.

I'm thinking a fun intricacy mechanic is to require they get an overhaul every 30-50 cycles or they just stop. It picked 30+ cycles so there is plenty of time to figure it out. But short enough that you need to do it often. And they don't die, they just stop until another dupe picks them up and takes them to the overhaul station.

Its a different mechanic than food that must be replenished every day. And if you miss it you die. 

To perform an overhaul you need an overhaul station, and also a bunch of other things like refined metal, microchips, lots of power, water, lubricants, etc.etc. you still need massive infrastructure to perform the overhaul, as much as food infrastructure. 

Maybe to add complexity the water must be in steam form. And maybe some of the other materials need to be frozen. So you have to build out complex temperature control infrastructure.

And it takes maybe 10-20 cycles to build the replacement components in a high tech cleanroom fabricator. Maybe even make it huge and the dupes enter it to work like a semiconductor fab. The time length is to roughly copy the time it takes to make food.

An incomplete overhaul may be performed, but the penalties are EXTREMELY punishing so you can't just ignore it. But at least an incomplete overhaul allows you to not die if you run a 100% bionic colony and don't set everything up in time.

An alternative mechanic is to add to their maintenance list. We already have the lubrication mechanic. So how about more? and each mechanic has another requirement. Maybe they need "optic realignment" so they need glass and dupe labor at a station, looks you need a glass forge now. Perhaps "Gear replacement" so you need to craft gears, and you need refined metal, looks like you need to find that too!

A bit of food may be necessary so the food system isn't completely discarded. Maybe the microbe musher makes "nutrient paste" exclusively for bionics. And the paste is made from multiple food sources. Alternatively make a new machine that only makes "sterile bionic paste". 

Alternatively rather than material requirements, make their MORALE and SOCIAL requirements their "food"! Right now, if you have good deco and good food, you can ignore all those other moral devices and furniture. Maybe make the bionics require even MORE pampering and coddling than the dupes, or they go terminator crazy and start the AI apocalypse. So to keep them happy you gotta build Soda fountains, wind tunnels, arcades, jukeboxes, etc. keep them docile and placated... or else...

 

IDK, i'm just spitballing here. I know most of what i said is silly or too much work to code. But I agree bionics are awesome... a bit too awesome in that they ignore some of the most fun and intricate systems in the game. 

 

[NeoDeusMachina]

@speckle21 I agree food production can be quite interesting to set up and drives a lot of resource chains to be set up, which bionics are lacking. However, you can have dupes live on meal lice for hundreds of cycles which only require the first research in the tech tree. I think a "replacement" system for bionics should be a bit forgiving and not be something that requires a super intricate system with a lot of resources to be implemented on a large scale by cycle 30. There's probably a balance to strike here, but I also feel like the bionics need some sort of elaborate system that diverges a lot of resources towards to be as interesing as organic dupes. If they don't end up with something similar, then I might just favor going for hybrid colonies just to keep thing a bit more interesting

[Tigin]

In my head I think it’d be cool to use the spice grinder/a new building to attach morale bonuses to batteries from food (frost burger has a food quality of +6 and that can give +6 morale for example). I agree it’s not appetizing that I’m interacting with less content using bionics

[speckle21]

I think power is still a strong way to differentiate and make the bionics interesting. Make their final consumption 5-10kw once fully upgraded. I'm not arguing that specific number, what i mean is the number should be high enough that a fully loaded colony can support many more organic dupes easier than bionic dupes. So bionic dupes may be easier to start, but if you want to go wild you still need organic dupes, and deal with all their requirements. Providing +50kw of power is not trivial, Especially sustainably. A sour gas boiler can do it... but those aren't trivial to make, and provide exactly the sort of complexity challenge i think the bionic DLC needs. 

 

 

 

[Shintai]

Another thing I was thinking on is that they have no gas output. So that's another factor that you do not have to clean up or deal with.

If you have access to a polluted oxygen source that's renewable. Lets just for the sake of argument say you got a cold slush geyser. This also solves any potential heat issues that you can avoid anyway. But for simplicity.

4 Bionics, using polluted oxygen as source. The only downside will be yucky lungs and it wont trigger all the time. But lets say you use 300Kg of it per cycle, theoretical max 312Kg. But this is a 240W pump non stop. the 4 bionics themselves uses 800W non stop. You vent gunk to space. You accept the grinding gears debuff. So now we have a colony that can run forever with no heat build up or material usage besides the cold slush geyser. And no work required at all. You can easily add some breaks and decor to max all skills and counter the debuff.

Out of the 24 "hours" in the cycle, 12 will be used to power the bionics, another 1.2 will be used to power the pump. Lets be generous and give them 3 cycles for breaks. And you sit back with 7.8 cycles worth of work you can do. With a SPOM you get over 9 cycles back. And with the polluted oxygen, you only need a gas pump, gas canister filler, gunk extractor, charger and hamster wheels to leave everything unattended. Boosters you can switch out as you please to instantly rearrange your crew for any task with max efficiency. This just doesn't sound like ONI at all.

So just increasing power alone isn't going to change much. The entire booster concept is also not working. Because if we tie power usage to boosters you just run with a minimum for the task. That usually means 2-4 boosters. Nobody would run with 8. This also lowers the morale requirement. The booster skill tree is not worth it. The 2 extra power banks in the other? No. So this leaves you with a morale requirement of 6 and getting 2 extra boosters, half grind penalty and +6 athletics. This pretty much translates into a +14 athletics bionic. And getting a morale of 7 to counter grinding gears as well is very easy. I actually can not see an endgame where I would need more than 4 boosters. Crop tending, medicine, ranching, piloting, electrical engineering, 3x science and construction lose all value. Art is a very temporary one. So that leaves 7 boosters in total to have spread on your team if not less.

Athletics is another issue I have. You can very very fast end up with +27(24 with debuff) athletics on a bionic. A regular dupe have to spend a long time to max out at 24.

But how to fix this? Exhaust output? Higher power draw? Mandatory lubricant? Harder to increase morale on? No oxygen tank? Nutrients from food?

[Tigin]

15 minutes ago, Shintai said:

Another thing I was thinking on is that they have no gas output. So that's another factor that you do not have to clean up or deal with.

If you have access to a polluted oxygen source that's renewable. Lets just for the sake of argument say you got a cold slush geyser. This also solves any potential heat issues that you can avoid anyway. But for simplicity.

4 Bionics, using polluted oxygen as source. The only downside will be yucky lungs and it wont trigger all the time. But lets say you use 300Kg of it per cycle, theoretical max 312Kg. But this is a 240W pump non stop. the 4 bionics themselves uses 800W non stop. You vent gunk to space. You accept the grinding gears debuff. So now we have a colony that can run forever with no heat build up or material usage besides the cold slush geyser. And no work required at all. You can easily add some breaks and decor to max all skills and counter the debuff.

Out of the 24 "hours" in the cycle, 12 will be used to power the bionics, another 1.2 will be used to power the pump. Lets be generous and give them 3 cycles for breaks. And you sit back with 7.8 cycles worth of work you can do. With a SPOM you get over 9 cycles back. And with the polluted oxygen, you only need a gas pump, gas canister filler, gunk extractor, charger and hamster wheels to leave everything unattended. Boosters you can switch out as you please to instantly rearrange your crew for any task with max efficiency. This just doesn't sound like ONI at all.

So just increasing power alone isn't going to change much. The entire booster concept is also not working. Because if we tie power usage to boosters you just run with a minimum for the task. That usually means 2-4 boosters. Nobody would run with 8. This also lowers the morale requirement. The booster skill tree is not worth it. The 2 extra power banks in the other? No. So this leaves you with a morale requirement of 6 and getting 2 extra boosters, half grind penalty and +6 athletics. This pretty much translates into a +14 athletics bionic. And getting a morale of 7 to counter grinding gears as well is very easy. I actually can not see an endgame where I would need more than 4 boosters. Crop tending, medicine, ranching, piloting, electrical engineering, 3x science and construction lose all value. Art is a very temporary one. So that leaves 7 boosters in total to have spread on your team if not less.

Athletics is another issue I have. You can very very fast end up with +27(24 with debuff) athletics on a bionic. A regular dupe have to spend a long time to max out at 24.

But how to fix this? Exhaust output? Higher power draw? Mandatory lubricant? Harder to increase morale on? No oxygen tank? Nutrients from food?

That argument applies to normal dupes as well - just replace power with wild planting/bog bucket plants/pacus/shove voles or whatever. Just surviving has always been easy for normal dupes too. (In fact, this strategy doesn't work on max difficulty due to the the gear stress) I believe the point is that both power and oxygen are in huge surplus by the time mid game rolls around, and it generally feels nicer to have higher quality dupes rather than maximizing dupes per watt.

[Shintai]

But it doesn't really apply to normal dupes. Its excessive to base dupes on wild plants and you still have all kinds of issues to deal with, toilets, water, co2, oxygen etc. Even your wild plants need the correct temperature, light etc. And you need to process this food. This is one of the main issues with the bionics. They do not need any of these. You can base them off an extremely tiny setup with low heat output and balanced resources right away. 

Whenever I look for a downside of bionics vs regular dupes. I cant find any. Bionics wins every time hands down.

[Tigin]

CO2 can be door crushed. Toilets are optional. Shove voles don't have space requirements although it does take time to initially get. Food processing/grooming takes a lot less time than spending over half a cycle on a treadmill. The footprint is a lot smaller, but but no one really plays like this except for the memes.

[Carib94]

Basically what im seeing here is some peeps want bionic dupes to be useful but not sidegrade or upgrades to normal dupes. but just a small downgrade that requires more needs.

[speckle21]

1 hour ago, Shintai said:

But it doesn't really apply to normal dupes. Its excessive to base dupes on wild plants and you still have all kinds of issues to deal with, toilets, water, co2, oxygen etc. Even your wild plants need the correct temperature, light etc. And you need to process this food. This is one of the main issues with the bionics. They do not need any of these. You can base them off an extremely tiny setup with low heat output and balanced resources right away. 

Whenever I look for a downside of bionics vs regular dupes. I cant find any. Bionics wins every time hands down.

 

So what?

if you want to half ass it, regular dupes can be crapped on ALOT. No showers, sinks, toilets, bed rooms, cots, decor, etc...

....but i almost never see anyone play that way. We LIKE pampering and coddling our dupes. Maybe not in every dimension, but most. I see people go to great lengths to make the best food even though lice loaf is good enough. 

I see no problem with bionics also providing a higher base level of play vs regular dupes. I betcha people will still have giant skynet bases to coddle their bionic dupes at maximum booster just because they WANT to. 

You want the game to FORCE you NOT to play minimalist.... don't you have the willpower to do that yourself? I'd really like to see your base setup and see how you're torturing your dupes with no beds and no toilets. They don't need them. So you don't use them right?

I play Spaced Out DLC a lot. I never NEED to go into space to get the high end materials like fullerene and niobium. By the time i get space tech going, my colony is fully sustainable already... But i still go into space because I WANT to, not because i need to. Its fun to upgrade my cooling systems with super coolant rather than keep using pWater. 

The reason why i said bionics should need more power is NOT as a nerf... but to encourage MORE complexity. To make players WANT to build giant power systems to feed them.

That's the exact same reasoning as providing higher morale bonuses to expensive food. To encourage players to build massive food infrastructure. We could have easily gotten by on meal lice for the whole game. But almost everyone upgrades to nice food because they want to.

The argument that players will never use more boosters if they cost more power because they don't have to the same as they'll never make higher level food because they don't have to... yes, they don't have to...

... but they still do. And that's what makes ONI a great game.

 

 

[Curry MAMA]

Hello! Oxynists.

I'm a Japanese player. I'm using machine translation.

What I'd like to propose is that, like Murphy in the old movie "ROBOCOP", "they need to get a small but efficient protein cell to maintain their few biological parts".

To achieve this, first let's say that the bionics need to consume calories at one-third the normal rate, so they can eat Liceloaf, Tofu, etc.

However, considering planets other than Tera, we may need to add recipes to throw Bog Jelly and Spindly Grubfruit into the Microbe Musher.

Even if they can eat Mush Bars, Mush Fry seems to be too hard on the bionics' precision parts.

From the mid-game onwards, to get more efficient protein, the bionics will get 1500kcal by getting nutritional paste from the juicer, so they can get +6 morale for longer than usual.
Nutripaste is a thick liquid that glows green, and is a delicacy for bionics, but a 'Grisly Meal' for fleshy dupes.

It may be okay to make nutripes with a very small amount of uranium ore (say 100g per serving).

Fleshy dupes may not want to make mixed juices with the juicer that usually makes nutripes, so the recipes should be separate.

This is also a change to focus on the juicer, which is not as important.

Another suggestion is for bionics that consume polluted oxygen, and they have a deodorizer built into their body, but they need to set up an activated charcoal filter made from carbon and green algae to make it work.

They do not consume this filter under fresh oxygen, so it becomes useless once you can prepare oxygen tanks, but I think it provides a good level of complexity for the early game and as insurance for bionics working in remote areas in the mid-game and later.

Thank you for reading.

[FoldableHuman]

A thing that a lot of posters are missing here is that it's very unlikely to run an all-bionic colony without mods unless you're also running an extremely small colony. There's only 6 bionic personalities. You can start with 3, but once you print the other 3 that's it until you've printed all 40 non-bionic dupes. You could maybe save scum frozen friends for a max of 3 more if (and only if) you rolled a start with FF on two other asteroids (plus the guaranteed one on the teleporter planet.) So... 9. Max. If you jump through a lot of hoops. That's functional, but really lean for a fully developed colony.

Bionics don't need a full-complexity alternative to food production because the colony will still need food.

[NeoDeusMachina]

3 hours ago, FoldableHuman said:

A thing that a lot of posters are missing here is that it's very unlikely to run an all-bionic colony without mods unless you're also running an extremely small colony. There's only 6 bionic personalities. You can start with 3, but once you print the other 3 that's it until you've printed all 40 non-bionic dupes. You could maybe save scum frozen friends for a max of 3 more if (and only if) you rolled a start with FF on two other asteroids (plus the guaranteed one on the teleporter planet.) So... 9. Max. If you jump through a lot of hoops. That's functional, but really lean for a fully developed colony.

Bionics don't need a full-complexity alternative to food production because the colony will still need food.

You can print copies of the same dupe by just renaming dupes you have. For example, rename Ren to Reno and the printing pod will offer you Ren again. That's without mods. I used to have a 20 Leira colony, it works. 

[Primalflower]

I agree completely with FoldableHuman. You're supposed to have both, so i'm not exactly sweating over not having the years and years of scaling development that food has received

In practice, it is already fairly engaging

[Cmagik]

On 12/1/2024 at 12:13 PM, NeoDeusMachina said:

No thanks - then this approach would more or less force everyone to use a mix of dupes, which is kind of lame. It's a paid DLC, I hope they are made viable on their own, with their pros/cons, whatever those end up to be.

I agree, atmosuit protect biodupe from chemical and heat/cold.or bionic dupe from liquids.

Regarding the cold and heat, I'm kind of on the fence. They're still biological, I don't see why a few electronic would make them immune to cold/heat.

However, one thing that could be done is adding cardridge which upgrade their defense in that regard
- Bionic Eye Lid Booster : Grants immunity to Eye irritation , +2 athlétic.
- Bionic antifreeze Booster : Grants +50 cold resistance, +2 athletic
- Bionic vascular enhancer : Grants +50 heat resistane, +2 athletic

[Henlikuoth]

19 minutes ago, Cmagik said:

cardridge

I would be okay with Klei implementing such a feature. I like the idea of more boosters to increase bionics' defense.

More boosters add variety, modularity, and more strategic maneuvers during the game.

[Henlikuoth]

Just quickly:
I am noticing the enormous metal consumption for the metal power banks. That is not sustainable in the early game. I am losing too much copper or iron ore with only one or two bionic dupes.

The uranium power banks are the only reasonable option for a long time and consume only a bit. However, I usually play with the highest difficulty setting for radiation, which comes at a price.

Maybe the renewable gold amalgam will help later on.