feedback Early-game oxygen options feel too difficult to establish

[SamLogan]

Hi,

After testing the new DLC on the beta branch, I feel that the early-game oxygen progression on the aquatic starting asteroid is currently too restrictive.

The new oxygen sources are interesting in principle, but they are difficult to establish before the colony starts running out of oxygen. Flue Coral requires Pearls to craft the pots needed for cultivation, while relying on Blowters requires setting up a fairly intensive fish-breeding loop. Both systems ask for a significant amount of infrastructure and resources before they can provide a reliable oxygen supply.

The problem is that the starting reserve of Oxylite disappears quickly, and there does not seem to be enough Algae available to comfortably bridge the gap. As a result, the colony is pushed toward rushing a conventional Electrolyzer setup rather than experimenting with the new DLC mechanics.

This feels slightly inconsistent with the other early-game systems introduced by the DLC:

• Electricity is relatively easy to establish with the new Tidal Generators, since their required ingredient can be found directly in the starting biome.
• Food also has a simple early-game option that works as an aquatic equivalent to Mealwood.
• Oxygen, however, does not currently have an accessible equivalent capable of supporting even a small colony of around 3–4 Duplicants without a fairly demanding setup.

I think the two new oxygen sources should be adjusted so that they become attractive early-game choices rather than later alternatives that players may never use.

A few possible solutions could be:

• Reduce the Pearl cost of the first Flue Coral pots, or provide a small number of starter pots in the initial biome.
• Add a cheaper basic cultivation option with lower efficiency, leaving the Pearl-based pots as an upgrade.
• Slightly increase the amount of Algae or Oxylite available at the start to give players more time to experiment.
• Improve the early output or accessibility of Flue Coral and Blowters, while keeping larger-scale production dependent on more advanced infrastructure.

The main issue is that rushing an Electrolyzer is currently not only simpler, but also extremely efficient. Filtering salt water provides the water needed for oxygen production while also generating Salt for farming or food-related uses, and the Electrolyzer additionally produces Hydrogen for power. Once this loop is established, there is little incentive to explore the new oxygen systems.

The aquatic start would feel much more distinctive if the DLC mechanics could realistically sustain a small colony during the first phase of the game, with Electrolyzers remaining a later upgrade rather than the obvious immediate solution.

What has been your experience with the early-game oxygen balance so far?

 

EDIT : I've tried with Vanilla and make a Glass Forge really early (easy in Vanilla) help me to setup a complete Flue Coral / Beakon / Starnacle setups to have large amount of oxygen in early game around cycle 50.

Edited May 31 by SamLogan

[Lacero]

I don't think I've ever found oxygen (and food) as easy as this on any other asteroid.
you just carry a beakon egg to a coral and you have oxygen.  you don't even need husbandry skill to get as much as you like early.

[Tenedas]

We are talking about early game.

You receive one gasket from poi for 300W.

Use a couple of ceiling lights near wild flue corals, preserve blowters ponds and you are good already.

If you want to go extra mile cultivate some waterweed (got buffed since don't requires bleach anymore) and ranch some blowters or use the new glass plant pot(made of pearls easy accessible) to have domesticated flue corals (1.5 dupes each)

I think you just need to approach early game differently but it's really doable

[Twiki]

For early game, the map also includes tons of algae to handle o2 needs until you get a long-term setup ready.

The main thing (as always) is to avoid taking more dupes until you have their needs met already. I stick to 4 for quite a while so that I can plan for my final base without them all dying in the interim.

[suicide commando]

While algae is hard to find on the map overall, the starting biome has a metric ton of the stuff. More than enough to support 3-5 dupes for well over a hundred cycles. Which gives you more than enough time to harvest some wild pearls and set up some flue corals. These things produce O2 like mad. One flue coral can sustain 1.5 dupes, and setting up a tank with some of them in there is not a hard thing to do.
 

[Gurgel]

I found it very easy via wild-planted Flue Coral. Like no challenge at all. 

[Carib94]

Depends on World Gen, the starting biome have good deposits of algae that can last you a good bit. Also it is best to have a low dupe count until you setup up the corals. 

There is the kelp biome where it has lots of Polluted Water which can provide off gas oxygen,

[Wharflord]

I had a similar experience when I started the aquatic expansion. I wanted to use only new mechanics to cover the basics, but didn't realize how critical making pearls early was to farming the new plants. I had a seed with very little algae, and burned through it in about 40 cycles without the ability to plant flue corals yet. However, the abundance of salt water made it easy to plug in a desalinator and electrolyzer as a stopgap measure.

In hindsight I think oxygen isn't much of a problem. There is usually enough algae for a few dozen cycles. Blowters + Waterweed are very easy to set up in an early ranch which also gives plentiful food. Then Starnacles + Beakons + Flue Corals are only slightly harder to set up for an absurd water to oxygen conversion rate. (I argue that this is overpowered in another thread).

Worst comes to worst, a standard SPOM is fairly simple to build early given the amount of water and free power from tidal turbines.

[blakemw]

I actually found it very easy to get enough oxygen.

To get into the weeds... in ONI dupes who are holding their breath don't consume any oxygen. Sure, they later need to catch breath, but the catch breath itself takes extreme liberties with how much oxygen it actually removes from the environment. So a dupe who is alternating between catching and holding breath, can use way less oxygen than nominal, potentially about 20% of what they would consume in a fully oxygenated environment.

The Swimmer trait lets dupes hold their breath much more effectively. And with all the swimming and breath holding, dupes consume way less oxygen than usual.

That means that the wild sources of oxygen more than suffice for your starter population of dupes, just take the effort to light up some wild Flue Coral and everything will be fine.

Practically I had way more issue with scrounging up enough food than enough oxygen, and I'm not saying there's any problem here, as I could scrounge up enough food. But oxygen wasn't something I noticed at all.

And I didn't have any problem setting up pearl farming and flue coral oxygen, I think it is smartest, to use your initial pearls, for pearl farming, which then gives plenty of pearls for making wide farms. Oxygen isn't really a priority, nor giving pearls to the unknown duplicant. But in my first playthrough, I did give pearls to the unknown duplicant and it didn't really matter.

Edited May 31 by blakemw

[PatrykC159753]

i didnt realy had a problem. And even if its a litle harder whats a problem. You still can have acces do the content od difrent asteroid starts. And its nice to have challenge for one.
I my selft am looking forward to the magma planet pack. That i hope will be real challenge

[Cautious Cookie]

I had a similar problem with my O2 supply because I printed dupes until I had 7. On other asteroid starts this hasn't been a problem for me, but on this start, it means that wild plants don't make much of a difference, and there aren't enough waterweed seeds to feed that many blowters, since you need 8 waterweeds per dupe.

I still wanted to use a new means of O2 production, so I rushed the glass forge, which barely saved me in time around cycle 40-50.

It is a bit surprising to me that there are 2 sources of potential oxygen generation, but you can find your self having to use electrolyzers if you're not careful. But there are a lot of ways to mitigate the issue on a second playthrough.

The easiest way is to not print too many dupes, and the second easiest way in hindsight is to search for diamonds underground, then you don't need glass or pearls.

I think the "glassy material shortage" problem is tricky to solve, because the pearl quantity we have early games is tied to the unknown duplicant quest line, and it's interesting to have to search the world for more pearls for that quest line. But then they don't actually provide enough pearls for many farms. And you need to use the glassy material to make your own pearl farms.

I don't think Klei absolutely needs to address this issue. But if that want to, I think decreasing the wide hydroponic tile glassy requirement to 50kg would be the way to go, because that would also make it much more worth it to plant your own Clampums early on and get more pearl production. 

[missasch]

I found on 1 start that there wasn’t a to of algae and so it was really difficult to try to use the new oxygen options, but when I restarted the new asteroid had plenty and so I was able to do a better job, but I still found the pearl situation annoying, so I think it would make sense to reduce the amount of pearl for the wide farm tile. 

[blakemw]

3 hours ago, Cautious Cookie said:

I think the "glassy material shortage" problem is tricky to solve, because the pearl quantity we have early games is tied to the unknown duplicant quest line, and it's interesting to have to search the world for more pearls for that quest line. But then they don't actually provide enough pearls for many farms. And you need to use the glassy material to make your own pearl farms.

I think the quest line is a distraction, although I wouldn't expect a first time player to recognize that.

What makes sense is reinvesting your pearls into growing domesticated Clampiums, they don't require much resources to grow just hand delivered sand, and they grow 4x faster domesticated, so you'll get more pearls a lot faster. Once you have like 6 of them, you have a nice pearl income going.

But doing the unknown duplicant quest puts you some distance behind the curve of exponential growth because you forgo two domesticated Clampiums. But what's worse, is the gasket it gives really is not useful, you already get a free gasket for totally free, and can use that for a tidal harness which will generally provide enough power to run early research, it isn't even that hard to research to rubber - it's the same tech as metal refinery, and and the third farming tech (juicer and spice grinder), in Spaced Out, these are both ordinaryass techs not requiring material science. So it's not a steep hill to climb to get rubber and gaskets are dirt cheap to crank out, whatever wild palm wood you've harvested will get you a bunch of them.

So there's really no advantage to starting the quest early, and there are downsides. Like the Mysterious Hermit, it's more of a long term investment and there's no point starting it before you can finish it because the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I'm not sure what the solution is, maybe making the unknown duplicant harder to find so it doesn't lead the player astray, or alter the reward scheme to make it more worthwhile actually doing it early on rather than ignoring it until you're swimming in pearls.

Edited May 31 by blakemw

[fpx007]

Considering the new wide farm tiles are also required to plant clams, I believe it is fair to introduce basic wide farm tiles. The new basic wide farm tiles use basic materials (e.g. sand and minerals) comes earlier in tech tree, but require manual irrigation,which just like the relationship between basic farm tiles (green tiles) and hydroponic farm tiles. Introducing the new wide farm tiles not only make early growth of corals more feasible, but also get rids of the possible softlock that players can't farm clams due to the shortage of the clam product, pearls.

Remember, the farming of oxyferns/ alveo veras only require basic materials and a T1 tech, so should the farming of corals.