Glass Backwall vs Pixel Pack

[Cautious Cookie]

I think the glass backwall is a great idea, but it currently pales in comparison to the pixel pack in terms of a decor bonus.

The glass backwall requires 400kg of glassy material for 4 spaces, and the pixel pack requires 100kg of glassy + 25kg of refined metal.

But more importantly, the glass backwall gives +15 decor to its own tile, while the pixel pack gives +20 decor in a 4 tile radius. (Radius works diagonally, so a radius of 1 means 9 spaces are affected)

This means that the 4 glass wall tiles give a total of +60 decor across 4 tiles, while the pixel pack gives up to +2160decor across 108 tiles, assuming there are no wall tiles preventing the spread of decor (which there likely will be).

If we take a 4x12 room, you can put either 12 pixel packs or 48 glass tiles in there. Currently, the middle space will give +240 (20*12) decor from the pixel packs, and only +15 decor from the glass backwall. I'm using regular materials for these numbers (no gold/pearl/diamond).

If the glass backwall were updated to have a 1 tile radius, they would get  up to +135 (9*15) decor for tiles fully surrounded by other glass backwalls. If they were updated to give a 2 tile radius, then the tiles would get up to +375 (25*15) decor. And a 3 tile radius could theoretically give up to +735 (49*15) decor.

It's worth noting that you can have a max decor value of +120, so the extreme decor bonuses would only ever be useful near heavy watt wires, which can often net me around -400 decor.

There are a few ways the tiles could be buffed (They could just give like +100 decor on that tile, or be cheaper), but currently they cost a lot of glass for very little decor bonus at the moment.

I went down this rabbit whole because I was looking at how I can use all the abyssalite from my glo squids, and realized I could feed it to shatter fluxes for huge glass outputs.

And glass walls are one way spend a lot of glass... But I might just be making pixel packs instead at the moment.

[Nogard78]

6 minutes ago, Cautious Cookie said:

It's worth noting that you can have a max decor value of +120

Unless something changed recently, that is not true. You can have as many decor points in a tile as you want, the game won't show it to you, but your dupes will gain that decor value.

[Cautious Cookie]

18 minutes ago, Nogard78 said:

Unless something changed recently, that is not true. You can have as many decor points in a tile as you want, the game won't show it to you, but your dupes will gain that decor value.

Oh I see, I think I misunderstood how it worked. An average of +120 decor gives you the max morale bonus.