Seaquine and Clampum Suggestions

[zergologist]

This started off as me wanting clampums to have a seed chance to allow you to properly scale them, since there's only so many clampums you can get on a singular map before care packages and the printerceptor come into play. Pearl is in an interesting spot given that it's the first glassy material you'll get access to, yet it quickly gets outclassed by diamond as soon as you can dig into the abyss biome in terms of both availability and decor. Pinpokets, which do have a seed chance, allow you to farm a glassy material much more efficiently than clampums on top of having the ability to be turned into food. This leaves the only real utility for clampums and pearl past the early game to be for feeding seaquines, which is still limited by the total amount of clampums you have from when the map is generated. Even at that point, you'd really only farm seaquines for their ovolene given their minimized slime output on top of that, which pushes the need for pearls even further out. For these reasons, I feel that seaquines and clampums could use some more attention to give them more utility and scalability normally.

Clampums should be given a seed chance, and the base slime output of seaquines should be increased. The amount of pearl they consume per cycle shouldn't be increased, but instead their slime output should be increased; each seaquine should turn 3.125kg of pearl per cycle into 12.5kg of slime per cycle. With the prehistoric planet pack enabled, amber should be an additional source of food for seaquines, letting them turn 11kg of amber per cycle into 11kg of slime per cycle. The amber change would give you an additional way to farm them if you have the PPP and, at least in my opinion, fits in with them eating pearl to extend it to them eating organic gemstones.

These are my suggestions and reasons for making clampums and seaquines a bit more consistently useful, but I'm willing to listen to what other people think about the topic.

Edited May 27 by zergologist

[Cautious Cookie]

Another way to enhance this resource loop would be to tune up the quantity of pearls that Clampums generate.

In my playthrough with 7 dupes, I ran out of algae way before the pearls would have given me enough glassy materials to make hydroponic farm tiles for the amount of Flue Corals I needed for oxygen production.

And even if I planted my own Clampum right away, it would take 16 cycles for the pearls generated (at 6.3kg/cycle) to make 100kg of glassy resources, just to replace its own farm tile.

This caused me to rush the glass forge instead, which is fine. But as mentioned, this leaves little use for Pearls as a Glassy material, even if the player chooses to plant them.

And for long term stability, the use up quite a bit of sand for the amount of pearl production, and i would probably keep them in the wild as they are unless they could get seeds for pip planting.

And for the Seaquine, I would maybe consider ranching 1 or 2 for the Caviar, but not for the slime production with the current numbers.

One more suggestion would be that you could have a couple pearl tiles (or pearl backwall tiles) generated around the Clampums on Worldgen. 

[zergologist]

3 hours ago, Cautious Cookie said:

Another way to enhance this resource loop would be to tune up the quantity of pearls that Clampums generate.

I ran through the dlc at a significantly different pace and managed to squeak by with fewer duplicants and wide hydroponic farm tiles, started getting diamond probably around the 30 to 40 cycle mark due to pinpokets, but I could see how spending more time in the starter biomes and taking on more dupes would definitely warrant a higher requirement for glassy materials. Oxygen balancing in the early game for the APP isn't something this thread is focusing on, but it is definitely a concern when you directly need glassy materials early-game to breathe easy. They consume more sand per unit of glassy material generated than even the glass forge does, and only produce 50kg of pearl after eight whole cycles of growing. Maybe having most of the clampums generated at the map generation be ready to harvest would be beneficial to getting things started, but that only really solves the bootstrapping issue. 

Having actually played with Seaquines, I feel like I have more developed opinions on them. There are obvious things to fix with them, like the gleamer just not working after processing just a bit of ovolene or their eating animation being a bit unfinished, but in general they feel fairly alright to work with. Milking them directly reduces their reproduction by 50%, something I feel the new happiness affecting reproduction rate change was created in mind with. Each seaquine, even without the happiness boosts from the aquatic critter condo or the critter fountain, seems to produce quite a bit of ovolene and far too much caviar than I know what to do with - the mucin I can find appropriate uses for. Still, there seems little reason to farm seaquines prior to getting the milking station, as well as difficulty ranching them should you not have quite a few clampums already, and I feel like that should change.

I still recommend the slime output increase and the amber inclusion to their diet, but I feel like there should be a couple more things changed with them as well. Cracking seaquine eggs should produce caviar instead of raw egg, as it does appear that caviar is the actual egg mass of seaquines. This would grant an additional reason to ranch them prior to obtaining milking technology, and wouldn't invalidate their ovolene production otherwise. This second change I'm more hesitant on suggesting, and it is to add sucrose to the diet of seaquines. My reasons for that are due to the fact that sucrose can be sourced from quite a few different sources, including gum palms through latex, nothing eats sucrose in the DLC, and that my mind is making some association with rock candy, sucrose's natural tile texture, and the idea that seaquines eat organic gemstones. While I do acknowledge that not every critter should not always have utility depending on your given resources and environments, the seaquine feels like an interesting enough critter to warrant an expanded diet given its aquatic nature and ovolene/caviar production.

Edited May 28 by zergologist

[Cautious Cookie]

56 minutes ago, zergologist said:

Having actually played with Seaquines, I feel like I have more developed opinions on them

That's fair, I haven't actually ranched them yet, I've just been looking at the numbers so far. I was thinking more pearls => More Seaquines => More Ovalene => More Mucin => More Polluted Water & Slime.

The direct slime output currently is almost negligible, I agree that increasing it would be helpful.  And indirect slime output requires way more effort.

I hadn't considered their synergy with increased happiness (probably via squid ink), that's really interesting.

As for the pearl production, I know "glassy" scarcity isn't inherently bad game design. But I wasn't really sure if it was intended here and I'm sure others will end up in my situation. I felt a little bit bamboozled when I traded away 250kg of pearls and then realized I needed them more than the gasket lol.