WanderingKid Posted September 1, 2017 Share Posted September 1, 2017 Hello, nice to meet you all. Don't Starve ate me in all it's updates (you evil Volcano!) so I figured due to developer quality and my interest, I'd pick up Oxygen Not Included. So far, interesting, but there's a number of points for a new player that I'm sure your veterans just deal with that I'd like to point out, both good and bad. To give you an idea of my experience/ability in the game so far, I've yet to dig far enough to find an Ice Biome or a Geyser, but I can make it to cycle 50 or so before things start getting awkward. I've got ~8-10 25+ (?!) hours in the game so far. I think Steam lies to me. Anyway.... Before there's any concerns, particularly since I'm new to the boards, I'm well aware this is an Alpha state of the game and there's many things being worked on. I wouldn't have bothered with being either this detailed nor explicit if I didn't think the game showed tremendous promise and wasn't reasonably entertaining already. I simply wished to provide feedback on a number of areas of the game that I've encountered so far. Take it for what it is; simply one person's opinions and experiences who hopes he has constructive feedback on ways to adjust or fix the encountered concerns. New World Generation So, you're new, and you're failing (continuously). I'm good with the iterative learning curve, kinda like it, certainly kept my attention in Don't Starve. What I could do without is spinning the starting three over... and over... and over... to find what I'd like to use (non-destructives who aren't overeating or mouthbreathing and can dig/research/runner (one each)). I'm spending time to try to 'lower' my difficulty level, I get this, but it can get old after a while. Specifically since I've got enough other things I'm trying to figure out, randomly getting Wes repeatedly is frustrating. Simply being able to grab the 'starting three' from an old world would make the iteration much less painful. Side note: The list of randomly generated names is hysterical. More evil, please! Hello, New World! The mini-tutorials that pop up are nice. They help you get started but the entire overlay is overwhelming at the opening, and not everything is close to explained. This I blame on Alpha, so no worries, just a mention of there's a bit more to do here. Like what?! I'm so glad you asked. This is either things ranging from what I would have liked to know up to being on google instead of in the game to figure out what was going on, which can break immersion along with other things. I have some later game comments down below, but this is basically a run down of the first few days (or iterations of opening days once you get past the first part) I found to be recurring thoughts. Duplicant Movement or the digging note could include a comment that a duplicant can reach two tiles away from them. It's hard at first to figure out what they can and can't reach with the beams. Aggressive Hatches: Thankfully the giant "Attack" button on screen made this relatively easy to find, but the first time a hatch dropped from the ceiling I was digging with an attitude problem I spent a good 30 seconds poking around figuring out how to deal with it. For some reason, I started searching for traps. No idea why... nasty spiders! Anyway, being able to click on fleeing and highlighting the attack button briefly to show a player where to go would be nice. Yay, I've dug some stuff. I've got a comment on screen about needing some toilets. Toilets... Toilets... Toilets... clicking on the warning brings me to center on the printer, instead of popping open the plumbing menu on the bottom so I know where toilets are in the 40 buttons on screen... cause I can't find it in Base... Colony requires a food source warning. This comes very quickly and while it's important to start getting your act together pretty quickly on this, you have NO idea how to go about it when you first start. The only thing available in your food build menu is a ration box. You see a few plants here and there that you'll have to dig out half the world to get to all of them, and then you harvest them... and nothing happens. It's not full grown but you didn't realize that was a concern yet. You might want to save this warning for the second, or even start of the third day, and have them concentrate on getting to where they can create said food source, such as power and research construction instead. It causes a stress point for a new player who's expecting to be able to start doing these things immediately since the game is being so quick to get them involved in that. Other than the food source warning, there's nothing informing you what you should be aiming for while you dig your base out a bit, such as: Oh, it's night. Why are they ... oh, right... beds. Search for metals so you can build power systems. Access to water. Algae storage for air production. Digging towards oxylite to stave off needing to immediately begin power production for oxygen. Coal for power production later. Hey, look! Storage containers... I tripped on those while looking around for the outhouse. Neat, let's drop five of them. Hrm, some kind of warning label, oh, need to turn them on. (5 minutes later) Well, that didn't hold much. Let's build 10 of them where they're convenient, right in the center of where I'm digging! ...and everyone stresses out. Queue 30 minute dive into décor, what it is, how it works, why it matters... (Side note on décor: The décor levels on Heavi-watt wire needs to come with a warning label.) Okay, I want to put a ladder HERE. I can't. Why can't I? All it shows me is it's red. Oh, there's some plant in the way. Alright, I guess I'll just harvest it, I saw that button before. Nope, I can harvest this thing... a bristle blossom, but not the briar. Errr, okay, how do I get rid of you? Deconstruct? No. Sweep? No. Dig?! Ah hah! How weird. You're a plant. (Yes, I know NOW you can uproot it from clicking on it...) So you've dug a bit, walled off your storage containers somewhere completely out of the way, and poked around in the stuff you can build menus until you've got an idea of what's where. This is when your digging runs into two small lakes and you want to drain one into the other. Oh, look, a Bottler, and an Emptier! Sweet. (5 minutes later) well, that obviously doesn't work. What ARE these for? (Off to the wiki!) A note on the Bottle Emptier that it's for releasing mopped up liquids would make it a lot more clear that you can't (directly) transport between these two objects as an easy way to move a liquid around by dwarf power duplicant. Day 2: I'm not making enough oxygen, I still don't have a food source, and now the first thing I see when they wake up is Germs and Diseases! Oooh, an overlay... Heh, what do the rest of these do?! Oh, that oxygen one looks important. I seem to be doing pretty well on oxygen, what's the problem? Oooooh, it's consumption vs. available... At this point you begin a power scramble for the deoxidizer because it's the only thing available. A simple comment in the warning that this does not take into account the oxylite that's dispersing you more oxygen would help tremendously here that there is a built in component that is basically an 'assist' during the first few days. A tip on the first day or two would also help with that information. Also, once again clicking on the warning here opening up the menu(s) in question instead of focusing on the duplicant printer would be nice. What the heck do you mean, "No Restrooms built" ?! It's right the...re... oh. You whine when there's not ENOUGH restrooms. Got it. That could be more clear: "No available bathroom for duplicant" or something like that. Okay, obviously I need to take care of food and oxygen. So, let's see. I can't make food, but oxygen... 500 g O2/s. Alright, that seems easy enough. Now, my duplicants need... errr. Okay, inhaling! Well, that took some poking. I found food the first day when it was complaining but why isn't this under 'breath' instead of some random status on top? (You find out later why, when they're holding their breath, weak concentrations, etc). Just took me a while to put it all together. For once, I don't have a good change here other than putting an 'average /s requirement' in the breath overlay. Holy crap how long does it take you guys to eat?! I went and made dinner while I waited! Maybe you'll get faster when I give you a table and chair. (or not...) Day 2 has dead time. This is probably a good time to bring up some tips about things like the Jobs and Consumables menus. In particular, you may want to limit Research, Cooking, and Art while reducing side jobs for those particular duplicants. Consumables you may want to remove eating the raw sources for foods you intend to be cooking for higher quality later, as Duplicants are just going to eat whatever they can get their hands on quickly... or at least that's how it appears. Oh, a tip! Duplicant Temperature... about really hot or cold environments. Yay, another overlay explained, nice... okay, this is temperate... why are they complaining about the water they had to dive into to get the copper ore they dropped in there when building me a floor? This could use some more information/explanation about wetness affecting things. For example, they'll complain about being cold in water WARMER then the atmosphere around them. This is just strange. Alright, we'll build out a few hamster wheels, some batteries, and... why are you already running on the hamster wheel when I don't have batteries even BUILT yet, nevermind wired up to them? ... Oh, because you're hooked up to the single light in the room and you're... ARGH. Yes, it makes sense. Starting off the hamster wheels disabled should cure this particular concern when you're trying to setup your initial power supply. Somewhere in day 2-3 you've cracked open a huge CO2 deposit or something else that's now made your air supply go south for one reason or another. This would be a great time for a tip to discuss how air moves, what's heavier and lighter, and things of that nature. I would recommend the tip come up instead of on a particular timing do it when a certain percentage of the air 'attached' to the duplicant printer is CO2, Chlorine, or Hydrogen contaminated... if possible. Hopefully the newbie has decided "Brown is safe, Other colors bad right now", but who knows what they might dig for... like food... *sigh* Once again, I need more copper ore. Fine. DIG OUT EVERYTHING... (10 days later)... okay, bad idea. (restart new board) A single decent Copper Ore area about 5x8 near the printer would get the player past the opening game without having to dig out half the board to get at the copper when it spaces out all over the place. Not a lot, but 2,000 would get a decent opening to research down without having to try to oxygenate the world or deal with the slowest airlocks ever made. Day 3.5: A new duplicant! ... and a recommended new tip. A comment here about introducing another breather and feeder to your already limited and dwindling supplies, because you're still digging around for some ore you didn't realize how much you needed at first. The extra body seems smart at first, until you realize just how much it takes to keep a duplicant up and running. That and that the duplicants will wait until dismissed so that you don't feel like you'll lose them if you even go and look would be nice. It's insanely easy to overwhelm yourself with 'extra hands' until you realize just how much infrastructure each one needs when you're new to the game. You setup your first research station. YAY! Now what? Well, yes, this is where path and choice for the player becomes interesting, but a tip to recommend starting with Basic Farming *because it opens up better oxygen management as well* would be an excellent choice. It's very easy to go up the wrong paths since you don't really know what's further up the tree for things like "Hey, plants need light! Let's get overhead lights!" or "Oh gods, we need that carbon skimmer NOW"... and don't understand that without plumbing infrastructure to deal with contaiminated water, it's useless. So, that's some of the places I saw that better tooltip/tutorial kind of information could be applied, along with a few newbie mistakes that could be avoided with some recommendations. Finally, a 'don't show this again' would be nice for some of them that I just don't need to be reminded about anymore. Not really a big deal, but they're distracting. Overall UI Discussion: UI in general is fine. It feels a bit cluttered but there's a lot going on so it needs to be, and you learn the shortcuts as you go, they're well marked. It's just incredibly daunting when you first open up the game, which is where a lot of the above comes up. There are however a number of places that can become frustrating. For the longest time I didn't realize that the build menus could be scrolled, so I'd research stuff, and never be able to find it. Yes, it's right there, a scroll bar in front of my face... and I never saw it. In general, making the slider/scroll area contrast more would help with that, pretty much across the boards. I personally find myself in the wrong menu time and again looking for something. For example, I tend to look for the meal table in the food menu before I remember it's in the furniture menu, or the wash basin in plumbing, next to the outhouse. Certainly not a problem in its own right, but when coupled with the above 'scroll the available items' it becomes a bit frustrating to me when I forget if they're even scrollable yet or not, so now I try to scroll everything when I can't find something. There are things I'd expect to see in the game when the item became available. An example, for the Thermo Regulator, I'd expect to be able to set it to what cooled value I want coming out of the end of it. Yes, I can make some Rube Goldberg contraption with multiple vents, a Thermo Switch, and wires and vents everywhere to get where I want to go, but that should be a lot simpler. I'm looking at you, Blossoms. While on the topic of the vents and pipes systems, please overhaul the information system behind blockages and problems. Sometimes I can hook an input directly on top of another machine's output (liquid bridge), sometimes I can't ( output to the input on a drain). Now, after disassembling and reassembling it 4 times trying to get what looks like it should work to simply work, I have no idea WHAT the problem(s) were. A lot more feedback on these systems would be really nice, as they're integral to the base and I'd like to not have to go searching for JUST the right forum post to figure out what the issue was, particularly since sometimes I can't even find one. Sometimes I think it's just the order in which it was built compared to the next piece. For example, I wanted the liquid filter to take polluted water out of my water pool when it got sucked up in the pump. Simply could NOT get it to pump right. Rip it out, replace with a straight pipe, and worked like a charm... to either of the outputs I was sending the splitter to (yeah my polluted water ditch got some fresh water, I was trying to figure out if there was a problem further up). They're really finicky and frustrating to deal with. My guess is they simply need to be done 'Just So', and I'm not used to that yet. Intermediate Gameplay This is a wall of text, but let me drop off with a beginning TL;DR. There are minor adjustments to duplicant behavior that I believe can help remove some of the stress of intermediate players trying to get ahead of the 'shower/toilet/eat/run algae/run hamster wheel' cycle and get things done in the base. The midgame is currently too compact for newer players, like myself, to learn the systems (and their quirks) needed to get past it before we've run into an endless loop where we don't have enough duplicants to run the base AND continue expansion and exploration without running out of food because we can't get someone to dig out the new farm. It was interesting getting here, but it feels like hitting a wall where either you MUST go faster to the endgame with exploration for geysers or you just won't have enough water/coal to get there, and up to that point the game makes you feel like you'll be alright... right till the coal runs out. Forget Algae, coal kills me every time, right after I get water purification up to get more of it. Longer version: So I can get my 5/6 duplicants fed, aired, relaxed, and sanitized. That's great. I ran out of coal ages ago because, well, I did. It's ~cycle 25, and "Winter is coming", IE: My algae is running low and it's time to invade the slime. My duplicants simply can not get away from house-hold chores long enough to get anywhere. I've given up on doing the advanced researches quickly because I need those duplicants to just keep up with the Terrariums because everyone's in the shower all day. I'd like to enlarge the farm so I can support more duplicants, but: my cook currently works non-stop At 44 g/s oxygen gen, it's 2.3 (roughly) terrariums/duplicant. So, we're feeding and watering 15+ terrariums to keep up on oxygen generation. That's even when I sink them in water in self defense to lower how much they have to water them. Bathroom/shower/washbasin time. Disinfecting time. Feeding the Algae Distiller and Water Purifiers (1:2 seems to work out alright) Sleeping Harvesting The occasional massive mop up because they all woke up needing the bathroom and the power went out. Repairs on the sandstone walls... upgraded to granite walls who still need repairs and I don't have any idea why (some feedback in game here would be nice as to what caused the damage) Running on the hamster wheels ... I can't seem to get anywhere unless I abandon most of the daily duties. I'm sure this is a learning curve and design problem that I've created for myself, but a huge chunk of the problem seems to be my power needs and my severe lack of coal about the time I need to start slime distillation. I could just be getting unlucky the times I get this far, but I doubt it. I think the step up from coal -> Hydrogen (Found pockets/Electrolyzer) / Natural Gas (which I've yet to find) is far too quick. It takes me, personally, weeks of cycles to get even a decent water purification and plumbing system up and running because of all the 'little things' the folks have to do to keep the place up, particularly when one is dedicated to researching and another is pretty much running half the day he's not on the can or eating... the other 1-3 of them have to get the farms up, food going, air continuing... etc. Somewhere in the middle of all that you get a stress run if you haven't kept up on décor, not an easy thing to do without 20+ storage chests and people spending entire days cleaning up debris from digging, no matter how hard you try to use existing open pockets. Deerclops help you if you ran heavy wire up your main staircase... This is where the game should get ahead of 'Let's take care of day to day concerns' and move on to 'let's go play and get really complicated!'. Instead, I find myself trying to fight with rebuilding plumbing 7 times so I have a shot at getting there because something, once again, didn't go perfect and I'm not quite sure where the problem is this time... I can just see where the water got stuck. I think. If it will flow when it doesn't have an output... right, does it flow... I forget... oh, no, it doesn't, so I can't.. ARGH. Where I think the difficulty for me in this scenario is the # of people to work ratio, and some of the choices they make. Here's an example: Someone goes up to harvest the farm. Great. Someone else comes by to pick up the.... oh, no, you're going to harvest the bush right next to him... errr, okay... so someone else .. AH! There's someone to grab the stuff and bring it to the... fridge... you grabbed 8, ran to the musher, and are coming back to... grab another 5. wut. It was right there when you left! No, not an uncommon problem in worker games, but it'd be nice to see a more optimized solution to this... like if someone grabs a job to harvest a plant in a particular field (let's say all adjacent AND same priority) no one else will grab a harvesting job on that field and said worker would prioritize continuously harvesting all the plants in the field until complete. Next, load up on all the local Meal Lice (or your grub of choice) and roll on down to the empty fridge with a full load instead of coming back 8 times to feed the musher. Or another idea: You can carry 600kg, please stop running to the water pump for 75 at a time and feeding only one of the 10 terrariums that are right next to each other. I'm on my third (semi-successful) world iterating through this process, trying to shrink down run distances, and optimize things; like the terrariums already in water near the bottom of the base where the CO2 collects. Bedrooms centralized and musher right next to the farming areas. Specialized storage chests near where they'll be used (coal, for example). Even this, with 7 duplicants, can't seem to get ahead of things. I've come to the conclusion there *is* no midgame. To borrow from Don't Starve: There's no Rabbit Earmuffs. It's Beefalo hat or bust. If you pace yourself on research and building you lose to resource availability... which leaves you no time to learn these systems except to keep restarting because after a while, all your builders are too busy doing other things, like feeding themselves... and the majority of it seems to stem from feeding the terrariums and coal power. I've yet to find a geyser, so unlimited water is just right out. Using most of my limited water supply for oxygen seems like a good way to end up dead. And of course, as I'm writing this, I find a Natural Gas Geyser a good chunk away. Well, at least now I know they're obvious and I'm not missing some tiny hole in the wall of the asteroid, but still. So, there's a wall there. I'm not sure if it's on purpose but (lacking ripping through guides on the forum) there's no obvious solution to the wall. If this is on purpose I'm sure I'll figure out a way past it, like everyone else with 300 cycle games has already done long before I got here... but if it isn't, I figured I'd explain, in detail, where a few dozen minor things seem to coalesce into a giant slope. Frustration Bugs: Some Bugs that I keep running into that are incredibly annoying. Not all of them are game destroying but they are relatively frustrating. I am set to Fahrenheit. Please stop reverting to Celsius randomly. I have absolutely no idea why or when it does this. Disassembling and rebuilding plumbing for the fortieth time because something, somewhere, is plugged up. I find this mostly happens when I have to use the bridge. This is priority 9. That is Priority 7. You are closest. DO IT. This isn't a case of the duplicant being halfway across the board who's assigned the job, it's that it's being outright ignored because everyone's watering the plants or cooking food at priority 7 for some reason. Conclusion: Tremendous promise here, and it looks to be as entertaining as I found Don't Starve in it's many versions. There are much more complex systems here then there was in DS/DST, and their interactions, and problems, generally need to be much more transparent to reduce player frustration and requirement to go to the forums to seek help. The early game would significantly benefit from more intuitive warning click reactions and better timing on tips, with more of them. The midgame can be expanded past a mad rush by expanding coal resources so you have time to do slime distillation before you have to move to hydrogen/natural gas usage, so that you don't have a base full of hamsters and algae feeders before you can find/generate a stronger water supply. Thank you for your time, if you've read all of that. I look forward to your continued updates and enjoying your game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brummbar7 Posted September 1, 2017 Share Posted September 1, 2017 @WanderingKid Your plumbing problem may stem from a quirk of the game where, if you use something like a pipe bridge, and line up the green output arrow over the input of a building (or vice versa), you're not actually connecting the building to the pipe bridge yet. EVERY arrow must connect to a pipe section. Even if the pipe section is just 1 piece, directly over the input, and under the output, that you can't even see once its in place. Electrical connections have the same deal - all plugs must be connected by wire, so even if your wire bridge ends right on top of a building's plug, it's not connected until you put a single piece of wire there. It's interesting seeing such a detailed new player perspective. I hesitate to offer too exhaustive a list of solutions and tips, since you did not ask for such, and so maybe you still want to learn the things yourself? But suffice to say, the early access state of the game means that you're spending a lot of time and resources on things that you don't need to, wasting your dupes' time. There's a lot of things that intuitively you would expect to be beneficial or progress in a certain way, when they in fact are not helping you at all, or in fact actively harming you, and/or do not progress like you would think, because the game is in an incomplete state right now. If you'd like all your questions answered, just ask. Or probably tons of people will pop in here and answer anyway regardless of if you wanted it or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WanderingKid Posted September 1, 2017 Author Share Posted September 1, 2017 23 minutes ago, brummbar7 said: @WanderingKid Your plumbing problem may stem from a quirk of the game where, if you use something like a pipe bridge, and line up the green output arrow over the input of a building (or vice versa), you're not actually connecting the building to the pipe bridge yet. EVERY arrow must connect to a pipe section. Even if the pipe section is just 1 piece, directly over the input, and under the output, that you can't even see once its in place. Electrical connections have the same deal - all plugs must be connected by wire, so even if your wire bridge ends right on top of a building's plug, it's not connected until you put a single piece of wire there. Thank you. That is quite possibly one of the more annoying things I was trying to deal with and had no idea what the problem was... and probably fixed by accident in many iterations by missing a piece of pipe somewhere when it suddenly 'worked!' one day. 25 minutes ago, brummbar7 said: It's interesting seeing such a detailed new player perspective. I hesitate to offer too exhaustive a list of solutions and tips, since you did not ask for such, and so maybe you still want to learn the things yourself? But suffice to say, the early access state of the game means that you're spending a lot of time and resources on things that you don't need to, wasting your dupes' time. There's a lot of things that intuitively you would expect to be beneficial or progress in a certain way, when they in fact are not helping you at all, or in fact actively harming you, and/or do not progress like you would think, because the game is in an incomplete state right now. If you'd like all your questions answered, just ask. Or probably tons of people will pop in here and answer anyway regardless of if you wanted it or not. I'm glad you feel that way. In a way I think it's better if I'm not hand fed the solutions to a lot of these, simply because it's the only way to preserve a new player's understanding of the game without being handfed by those around since the beginning. I also enjoy learning these systems for myself, at least until it becomes inanely complex. I'm just a glutton for punishment that way, between DF, KSP, AIWar, Don't Starve, and others of their ilk. So, while I don't necessarily want to be hand fed something along the lines of "Put your bed next to their meal table and a private refridgerator" kind of thing, if there's something that's absolutely bonkers sideways at the moment, by all means, please let me know... other than the 'endless water supply of stressed out vomiting duplicants'. I don't care about the exploit, GET BACK TO WORK YOU FOOL! There's farms to dig! *ahem* 'Scuse me, had a moment there. But yeah, I figured most of this is either due to the alpha state or the general mind of "We'll do the tutorials when we actually know where it's going and we know what it should say!" kind of thing. I just poked at the forum a bit, noticed that there wasn't a new perspective up for a new player for many a version, and hoped that some feedback would help make this game better in the long run. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brummbar7 Posted September 1, 2017 Share Posted September 1, 2017 @WanderingKid Hopefully you can get plumbing sorted more easily. I'll bet that frees up a lot of your time. A few not-too-spoilery tips: - The water bottler and de-bottler actually CAN be used to transport water. You have to turn on "auto-bottling" on the DE-bottler, and dupes haul water bottles directly from the pump to the de-bottler. - There is more coal than you think, not very far. You just have to look for it. Same for algae. - Not every single building in the game is actually a good idea to build. Some of them are very inefficient and are meant more as stopgaps, to be ditched when better options come along. There's several you can get by without ever building once you know what you're doing. - The food system is kind of a mess right now, due to recent revisions. Don't get too hung up on it. Same for the clothing. - If you're having water problems, try to pay attention to where your water is going, and then examine those uses, and determine if there are alternatives that use less (or no) water. The water in your starting biome can (in most cases, RNG depending) last you through turn 100 if you economize, and are not printing every single dupe along the way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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