A few small suggestions

[NoobixCube]

I have a few small suggestions for gameplay that are just little quality of life issues.  Some of them barely effect gameplay, while others are things which I think would make sense, without adding a substantial complication.

1.  Coloured duplicant shirts.  Selecting a colour for each guy might make them easier to tell apart from a distance.  Star Trek rules for their uniforms?  I want their colours to be set based on the roles I give them, basically.

2.  Anything with a gas or liquid input or output should be orientable.  For example, showers, lavatories, and water purifiers.  It sucks when your pure and contaminated water reserves are on the wrong sides for something.  I may be wrong, but I think the purifier is backwards compared to the hygiene stuff.  The inputs and outputs are on the same sides, but of course they operate in the opposite direction.  Maybe that's intentional, to screw with us so we don't get to have neat pipes, but it seems like things like this should be flipable.

3.  The resource consumption and byproducts sometimes don't make sense.  Algae terraria should, of course, require an algae culture to get started, but I don't understand why they continue to consume algae, rather than produce it.  The hydrogen generator should produce water as a byproduct.

4.  Mousing over gases and liquids should be able to tell you how much is available in the contiguous area.  I get that a tile of water is 1000 kg, because that represents one cubic meter, but if there's a large pool of water, I'd like to know how much is in the whole pool, by mousing over it.

 

I have one more suggestion, but it's a bit more substantial in gameplay impact than the others.  I think there should be compressed gas tanks.  For a big thermal output, you should be able to compress gases you don't want in circulation, or for whatever reason want to store for later use.  Dry ice?  Liquid hydrogen?  It might nerf some of the gas management, but that could be balanced by explosion risk, or how much it heats your ant farm up.  It would also cost quite a bit of power to run pumps and compressors.

 

I'm no game designer, these are just the weird "why isn't this a thing?" moments I've had while playing ONI so far.