First 100 hours of Oxygen not included feedback

[LuuMor]

Hi,

I think the game has a lot of potential, but has it issues given that it's not a full game yet. Gameplay has been solid, but there are things that need fixing or updating:

• Duplicant AI: Atm they seem to randomly choose same priority task instead of nearest one. There are instances where they start doing a near task like picking up water, but the run back to deliver the water is insane. You can notice this well; if you dig left and right while building a ladder in the middle. (I know that you can use doors with permissions to fix this problem, but it takes time before you can spare power to that kind of stuff without running out of power. I can understand the need for the doors in late game, but early game?)
• Duplicants are not fully random: It seems that stress effect is tied to duplicant name/appearance. I want my duplicants to be pure random and not from pool of preset rules.
• Stress effects are not balanced: Atm Binge eater is like a never pick for me. Destructive is just not fun so I tend to avoid it as well.
• Job delivery needs to be split in to two: Building Delivery and Stocking Machines. This would make Binge eater and Destructive be more viable to prevent them going out to dig and build, but still be able to deliver stuff inside the base.
• Farming priority doesn't affect autoharvest priority: If you set priority to 9 they will plant etc fast, but the harvest priority is only 5 and using the priority tool doesn't change the priority. You can set autoharvest priority 9 for one plants life with the harvest tool, but that autoharvest will reset to 5 when duplicants replant the plant.
• Liquid cooling is too much work and is the reason why I don't have motivation to play this game atm: We need a better way to cool liquids and liquid seems to hold it's temperature for ages and will spread the heat all over the place. (I made a cooling battery in a ice biome the result was that my liquid started to get warmer, because the water heated the whole biome and made pipes and air so hot that it started to gain more heat.)
• When enough time goes by the biomes start to lose their unique features, because the temparature will even out from it leaking from biome to biome: There might be a need for wall tiles, because this way you could make it that the biome area warms air or cools air to certain temp at a certain rate. Walls would prevent this from happening so you could still make a living space in a cold biome with heated air.
• Research doesn't have end game research or effect: Atm you rush the tech tree and get rid of the sience buildings. I would like somekind of end game tech where you need like some kind of gas and water piping for it to work (renewable recourses). It could make like permanent buffs like -1% for stress gain or make getting better yields from plants easier. These might not be best examples, because these kinds of researches wouldn't be infite. But somekind of infinite research would be nice addition.
• Wild animals die randomly. I guess that they get burried under consturction or something. I would like it that it's my choice to kill them.
• Wild animals need a way to be tamed and catched: This would add a new layer of designing contraptions that use animals. Breeding them would be nice, but maybe unbalanced.
• Gas preasure can be abused with vents using small amount of liquid: This enables delivering oxygen to one place and it will spread to a huge arena. I like this, but I feel like it should be higher tech like using powered gas vents that can work at high preasures. To fix this bug just add flooded to gas vents.
• Duplicant cooldown is ready every 3 cycles: so it feels weird if you are 0.1 cycles away from it or just past it by 0.1 when you get a new duplicant. You should cap the next after this duplicant cooldown to 2.5 cycles and then it will be locked into 0.5 cycles.

I'm sure that I have forgotten somethings that bothered me, but this list should cover most of them.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about the current state of the game and hopefully this will be helpful for the devs!

[x4550]

+1 on fully random dupes, farming priority, and liquid cooling!

[Kasuha]

54 minutes ago, LuuMor said:

Atm they seem to randomly choose same priority task instead of nearest one.

Different jobs at the same priority level have different sub-priorities. Dupes will e.g. always prefer building over digging. These sub-priorities go approximately right to left in the jobs menu. From two jobs of exactly the same priority, a dupe will always select the closest one.

With that said, the AI and job selecting definitely needs some improvements.

56 minutes ago, LuuMor said:

It seems that stress effect is tied to duplicant name/appearance.

'Uncultured' trait makes dupe more resistant to bad decor, but also uglier. So he's getting stressed less if your base is a mess, and dupes meeting him are getting stressed more because he's lowering the decor value in the area just by his presence.

59 minutes ago, LuuMor said:

• Atm Binge eater is like a never pick for me. Destructive is just not fun so I tend to avoid it as well.

Binge eater is probably the most punishing ... err ... punishment for not taking proper care of stress, but nothing that can't be handled. The main strategy is to not start panicking, there are many ways how to handle it. Avoiding traits you don't like is of course valid strategy, it just adds up to the time you need to keep rerolling before you start the game. 

I agree that responses are not very well balanced, though in my opinion binge eater is not too hard but the others are too easy. For reference I did have a binge eater to hit my base. Twice.

1 hour ago, LuuMor said:

• Job delivery needs to be split in to two: Building Delivery and Stocking Machines. This would make Binge eater and Destructive be more viable to prevent them going out to dig and build, but still be able to deliver stuff inside the base.

Make massage tables higher priority than commands you give to your dupes and they will go get a massage when they get stressed regardless where they are. Splitting delivery would make sense too. I'd also split farming (delivery of fertilizer) from the rest.

1 hour ago, LuuMor said:

Farming priority doesn't affect autoharvest priority:

That should change with the next release. The planter box/tile has separate priority from the plant, they're separate objects. What's about to be introduced is plant inheriting priority of the planter when planted or when planter settings are copied.

1 hour ago, LuuMor said:

Liquid cooling is too much work

There's an exploit to rapidly cool water now. You can cool large body of water by dripping small amount of cold water on it. It's exploit though, when it's fixed, yes, we'll need something better to cool liquids.

1 hour ago, LuuMor said:

When enough time goes by the biomes start to lose their unique features,

That's correst, they become what you make of them. At the start they're separated by layers of abyssalite, matter with almost no heat conductivity. But they don't have separate physics.

1 hour ago, LuuMor said:

Gas preasure can be abused with vents using small amount of liquid

Yeah that's also kind of abuse. It's up to everyone's tastes if they want or don't want to use it, it's true that trying to go without it makes the game somewhat harder.