Just want to say I LOVE useful ancient machinery

[NurdRage]

The hydrogen crystal cooler thingie is so cool. I personally don't use it very much but i LOVE the idea of having to go through the ancient ruins and having to hunt down something you can't build yourself. It extends the gameplay after just making a base.

I know the neural vacilitator is one but it's one time use. So after using it you can just buried it again and never bother with it. I love a device that you can continuously use. It makes for interesting base design.

I'd love to see more ancient devices.

Thank you very much Klei!

[Bargeral]

I'd like to see a mysterious box that just outputs power. No pollution, no heat, no fuel and no idea how it works. Not so much it's unbalancing, like 600 or so just a little bit above a treadmill. fun to find and helpful early game but not game changing.

[Coolthulhu]

Would be cool if every ruin had something worth keeping. At the moment most ruins are just one time use, then permanent eyesore + ladder/path blocker.

[NurdRage]

58 minutes ago, Bargeral said:

I'd like to see a mysterious box that just outputs power. No pollution, no heat, no fuel and no idea how it works. Not so much it's unbalancing, like 600 or so just a little bit above a treadmill. fun to find and helpful early game but not game changing.

Ya know what would be funny? if the generator also did something silly while it generated free power. Like it's temperature locked and holds exactly 50% charge like a battery. If you connect it up to your grid but put power into it so it goes above 50% then the generator gets *colder*. At 100% it gets very cold. But if you start drawing power from it the generator heats up. Rather than just free power it'd be an amusing balance of trying to figure out how to deal or exploit the temperature capabilities. With the automation update it becomes possible to set up a system that adjusts power and temperature.

It'd still be useful in game for free power but becomes very interesting late game for its temperature control abilities. To make it different from the hydrogen crystal maybe it only works underwater or something. 

 

25 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Would be cool if every ruin had something worth keeping. At the moment most ruins are just one time use, then permanent eyesore + ladder/path blocker.

I agree. Maybe the computers can have useful automation improvements, or the neural vacilitator can be reprogrammed to relieve stress or something. 

at the very least, maybe after some technology research, we get the ability to deconstruct the ruins. So even if they're useless they don't get in the way. 

[Michi01]

It'd certainly be nice if more of the existing buildings were reusable. I'm not sure how it should be balanced, but the Neural Vacillator could allow you to store and transfer duplicant abilities, since that seems to be its intended purpose anyway. Just to give it some kind of purpose beyond giving you one nutrient bar, the vending machine could be capable of slowly generating more nutrient bars if you supply it with power.
I also thought about what kind of things should logically be in the ruins and one of the things that came to my mind is buildings related to power generation. While there's also another idea for that in this thread, my initial idea was maybe a generator that uses an already usable power source more efficiently. It would make sense since the ruins seem to have more advanced technology than the duplicants have access to. There could for example be a gas turbine in one of the ruins that produces more power and less heat than than the natural gas generator.