Slight oversight regarding tile walkways in Slime biome and auto-disinfect loop

[Avid Aficionado]

Because of the walk speed bonus, I often build tile walkways. They sometimes cut through a Slime biome on the way to a Cold biome for example. However, this has the disproportionate hassle of dupes automatically disinfecting every single tile block while Slimelung continuously keeps spreading from the surrounding unmined slime blocks. Duplicants keep wasting their time disinfecting blocks that only get infected by Slimelung a second later, rinse and repeat. The solutions to this as it stands is to manually disable auto-disinfect one block at a time, disabling auto-disinfect alltogether, or to slowly mine away the surrounding slime blocks.

I've come up with two suggestions to fix this:

1. An option to disable auto-disinfect on multiple structures using click-drag with either the Disinfect or Germ tab.
2. A new type of buildable block that is specifically germ-resistant and meant to be used to create germ-free walkways and environments in the Slime biome.

Other suggestions and discussions are welcome.

[BlueLance]

The newest patch lets you toggle auto disinfect on/off thankfully. First thing I did when I hear about it

[Avid Aficionado]

Disabling auto-disinfect works well enough but it has the disadvantage of also disabling its useful applications, like automatically disinfecting main base structures that are too infected by Food Poisoning. Disinfecting Slimelung in the Slime biome is a lost cause and I'd rather there was a way to designate that area as a No-Disinfection-Zone.

[BlueLance]

Zones would be nice, some people have mentioned it because like you said, slimelung will literally just consume all your dupes time.

[Sevio]

1 hour ago, Avid Aficionado said:

Because of the walk speed bonus, I often build tile walkways. They sometimes cut through a Slime biome on the way to a Cold biome for example. However, this has the disproportionate hassle of dupes automatically disinfecting every single tile block while Slimelung continuously keeps spreading from the surrounding unmined slime blocks. Duplicants keep wasting their time disinfecting blocks that only get infected by Slimelung a second later, rinse and repeat. The solutions to this as it stands is to manually disable auto-disinfect one block at a time, disabling auto-disinfect alltogether, or to slowly mine away the surrounding slime blocks.

I've come up with two suggestions to fix this:

1. An option to disable auto-disinfect on multiple structures using click-drag with either the Disinfect or Germ tab.
2. A new type of buildable block that is specifically germ-resistant and meant to be used to create germ-free walkways and environments in the Slime biome.

Other suggestions and discussions are welcome.

You can also make sure your tile walkway doesn't touch any slime blocks by digging them up as you build the pathway. This is what I've been doing to the walls in some parts of my base that touch the slime biome.

[Avid Aficionado]

As an additional observation, the issue also extends to the undestructible tiles found in "ruins" if there's slime adjacent. Dupes will disinfect the blocks regularly by default if automatic disinfection is on.

[brummbar7]

A paintable disable-disinfect would be by far the easiest solution I think.   They could just add it as a tick-box selection under the existing disinfect tool, the same way other tools are filtered by construction type.

[Kasuha]

9 hours ago, Avid Aficionado said:

The solutions to this as it stands is to manually disable auto-disinfect one block at a time, disabling auto-disinfect alltogether, or to slowly mine away the surrounding slime blocks.

Or you can make the walkway two tiles thick. Slimelung will spread from the slime to the nearest tile, but should not spread further as it will die off in non-slime tile.