A variety of brief thoughts

[despairbear]

Here's some the things I jotted down in my first few hours with the game:

• It's unclear if planter boxes (eg mealwood) require water and light like algae does.  (I think they don't? But this is a UI discoverability issue.)
• The resources inventory table at top right indicates the supply of meal lice in different units than the microbe musher uses. This makes it unclear how much liceloaf I can make.
• At one point I accidentally flooded the room with my algae farms and noticed that the farms survived being under water. I don't think they were producing oxygen, but an "underwater algae farm" might be an interesting advanced technology (since it obviates having to water the farms).
• Gas pressure is difficult to see. I often can't tell if my problem is not enough O2 or too much CO2. 
  • ie "Should I be building more scrubbers, or more algae deoxygenators?"
• Is the coal generator meant to consume O2? It seems to only expel CO2.
• I tend to end up with a lot more dirt than I need, which makes fertilizer unnecessary. Unless fertilizer has some added benefit I'm not seeing?
• Gas pump isn't able to suck up enough hydrogen to make the hydrogen generator viable.
• Corollary of the above two: a "biomass burner" which turns fertilizer/slime into electricity might be a cool advanced tech.
   
• I found myself building elaborate water catchbasin/recycling/cistern systems in the two colonies I built. This was quite fun (fluid flow bugs notwithstanding). 
  • In the first game, I built a watering loop like in your live stream.
  • In the second game, my duplicants got into a vomiting cycle, contaminating all the water. So I realized I was really building a sewer system, with the contaminated water flowing into a basin which I then pumped through a filter into a clean water cistern.  
    • The contaminated water mixing issue prevented this from really working properly, but that can be fixed
  • Anyway the point I'm making is that building a water sewer/catching/recycling system is a fun engineering challenge and can be gameplay.

 

Been enjoying it so far, thanks for releasing the alpha!

 

[Whiskydog]

50 minutes ago, despairbear said:

At one point I accidentally flooded the room with my algae farms and noticed that the farms survived being under water. I don't think they were producing oxygen, but an "underwater algae farm" might be an interesting advanced technology (since it obviates having to water the farms).

I have tried putting water in the algae room too, but it doesn't count as watering them I believe, dupes still had to carry water to them. Maybe I didn't submerge them enough?

[despairbear]

2 minutes ago, Whiskydog said:

I have tried putting water in the algae room too, but it doesn't count as watering them I believe, dupes still had to carry water to them. Maybe I didn't submerge them enough?

To be clear, my submerged algae farms didn't actually work. I'm just pointing out that it might be interesting if they did (as a later tier technology).

[Whiskydog]

Ah I see yeah, it'd be a nice addition to the game.

[Salm77]

Also, another thing I noticed with underwater algaes.

I build my algae rooms at the bottom of my bases with some gas permeable tiles on the floor and on the ceiling, so that the CO2 can get down from my base, go through the algaes (and be recycled), and down into my "CO2 reservoir" below my base.

If your algae room (or any other room with a gas permeable tile floor) has water on the floor : the CO2 will stop passing through, and start accumulating/going up.

 

[DNsingbanana]

15 hours ago, despairbear said:

Gas pressure is difficult to see. I often can't tell if my problem is not enough O2 or too much CO2. 

Normally the brightness of the color in the first display indicates the concentration. Light blue is high oxygen, darker blue is few oxygen, and then pink-ish red is a bit  of co2, and red is a lot of co2. Basically the brightest an area the better.  I personally spend a lot of time reading the gas mass on the mouse because it's much more precise. 

 

15 hours ago, despairbear said:

I tend to end up with a lot more dirt than I need, which makes fertilizer unnecessary. Unless fertilizer has some added benefit I'm not seein

It's used in farm plots if you use the second seed available. Normally once it's planted and fed fertiliser the plant will have a "fullness" indicator.