Feedback after 99 hours

[DerLoBo]

Hi,

I'm currently 99 hours into gameplay and managed to reach the first colony that I would call somewhat stable, only limited by the amount of water in the world. With almost 30 dupes, a stable farm and in cycle 577. Since this game is still an alpha, here's my feedback from what I've noticed while playing. Some of these are just minor things, some are major things, some are objective, some are subjective and just what I personally would enjoy more. I'm no native english so please ignore the mistakes Feel free to comment, discuss etc.

Liquid and gas pipes - This is a mayor issue for me.

I find pipes very strange in their physical behavior. Both seem to work not properly to me. When I split a pipe into two the throughput goes down to 50%. Also when joining two pipes the resulting pipe should be full (if both sources transport enough of course). Please have a look at the two gifs:

The resulting pipe (bottom right) should be full but is roughly filled by 60%:

 

The throughput goes down to ~50% when splitting pipes

 

This is very annoying since it makes pipes a very inefficient thing when used with more than one producer and or one than more consumer. Same is for mixed liquid/gas in pipes, it reduces the throughput dramatically.

Liquid physics - This is a mayor issue for me.

Sometimes liquids behave very strange. As far as I could observe this behavior it only appears to happen when different liquids are mixed. Then "the surface tension" seems way too high.

The liquid in the upper left shuold be flowing to the pump in the bottom right but just flickers arround. Water and polluted water are mixed.

Another example of mixed liquids having a party:

 

This behavior is annoying from two points. Firstly: The liquid doesn't flow where it should. Secondly: The flickering is just visually annoying unsettled.

Feature requests/perks/improvements
A list of features I'd like to see:

Building things out of different materials
... is basically a good idea. However, I often build accidentally stuff with rare materials because it's still selected from the last time. I think the material selection should be somewhat more prominent.

How To's
For the final version of the game there should be more ingame "how to use" things. Like little animations explaining how to use something. Example: It took me like ages to see that the tube access station is only required to enter the tube system but exits can be build anywhere when placed correctly (Altough the description says "enter" and implies that it isn't required to exit)

Rooms
I like the ideas of rooms - but they should be bigger in general. I like to build big. 
Example: Bath rooms can only have 64 tiles and I don't understand why it should limited to be so small

 

ALSO: The tooltip should show how many tiles the room currently has, otherwise you sit there and count them like an idiot

Mouse Tooltip while creating dig jobs
When creating a dig job there should be an indicator at the mouse pointer that shows which size the dig in tiles has (like "16x4")

Digging
Digging can be somewhat frustrating since you have to fiddle arround with a of ladders, example:

 

An idea to make it a bit easier would be to increase the range of the digging tool for the specialists. Like +1 for Miners and +2 for Seasoned Miners.

More "Update build jobs"
You can currently upgrade tiles (normal tile to airflow tile for instance) and pipes (normal pipe to insulated pip) _WITHOUT_ interrupting the function. This should be possible for other things aswell: Like building a wire from a different material on an already existing wire. Upgrading (or downgrading vice versa) a normal wire to heavy watt or conductive wire (as long as not run through a tile of course). Hydro farm tile from normal farm tile etc. Especially with power wires this would be very helpful. The only chance is currently to build a completely parallel wire setup and then deconstruct the old one. at least while exchanging the direct power plugin to consumers/producers removes them from the net for that duration.

Airlocks
Airlocks shuold be airlocks. They are currently just non penetrable doors. While the door is open (as in used by a dupe) gas flows normally. Maybe even a new building type that is actually an airlock would be great.

Disable desinfect
Currently I can only turn off desinfection for a single object. I don't want my dupes to desinfect in areas where they wear exo suites, so a tool like the auto harvest tool would be great

Overlays and build menu
When switching to an overlay the corresponding build menu shuold be openend automatically (Example: When switching to plumbing overlay with F6 the plumbing build menu shuold open)

Tubes
Transit Tube crossings should be able to cross ladders aswell.
Dupes should not be able to switch direction in the middle of the tube
I think the transit tubes require to much energy, I'd suggest lowering it by 20% to 30% (7KJ to 8KJ instead of 10KJ). The reload speed/consuption should be lowered correspondingly.

Science
Once everything is discovered the Science Stations are useless, as well as the Scientist. I think there should be something like repeatable researches that take a bit longer with every level. Like "Generator efficency: Increases the generated power of your generators by 1%". The required cycles to finish a level should be increased quadratic or something like that.

Exo suites
Currently mixed areas are not possible (well, maybe with automation somehow) since the suites will lay arround everywhere. I think the areas shuold be mixable to reduce required micro management a bit.

Balancing and ai/dupe behavior

Dupes in general - This is a mayor issue for me.
Sometimes the priority of the dupes is really frustrating. Like running 60 seconds through half of the world, building like 10% of a single ladder and than running back 60 seconds just to take a shower. And run 60 seconds back again, a lot of time gone for 10% of a ladder. My idea: The higher the distance to the base (assigned location for job <-> base or assigned bed) the higher the minimum time building/digging/what ever should be before being interruptable by being hungry, a full bladder, need for a shower or what ever. Critical things like no oxygen or the night cycle should overcome this rule of couse. In addition the dupes still tend to kill themselfes by digging their own graves.

Game speed
It feels like the game speed is too low, sometimes everything takes ages, even on triple speed. I'd suggest to decrease the night cycle time by 10% to 20% (and increase the day cycle correspondingly).

Plastic
I think the smelting point for plastic is too low. Sometimes my tubes just disappear. Also the polymeer press produces a lot of heat. I already had the situation that the plastic almost instantly turned into liquid after being produced. I'd suggest to increase it from 76.9° to something like 120°
The polymeer press seems to produce way too much heat for its purpose

Animal traps 
Animal traps shuold be accessible earlier in the game (in the tec tree and as not made of plastic). Especially the hatches are basically a great thing, yet I tend to kill them in the early game since they eat all the stuff (and than they are missing in the mid and late game). Maybe making the trap for land animals (not the flying ones) accessible in the early game would already be enough.

Steam turbine
I currently don't think the steam turbine is balanced well. I recently tried to build my first turbine (2 turbines). After adding water all the magma became pretty quickly completely solid. and cooled down to ~250°. It requires a lot of rare materials and planning - for a potential 2*2000 watts. That doesn't seem to be worth the effort. Just vaporizing crude oil and building natural gas generators is definetly the better deal.

The magma cooled down very quickly. All after spending a lot of time and a lot of rare mats.

Other bugs/issues I've noticed

Sometimes "Submit Bioscan doors" just don't work. Assigning a dupe (by clicking Submit Bioscan) just has no effect

Slicksters sometimes just seem to stop producing oil. The keep consuming CO² but never product oil - I'm not sure why

This dude already ate 1196kg of CO² - that must hurt a lot

With almost 600 Cycles and quite a big base my FPS dropped a lot, the game seems to be very slow overall.

 

Keep up the great work!
DerLoBo

[Tobruk]

A very good, thorough and well illustrated post. I wish every suggestion post was that well-prepared.

[Saturnus]

3 hours ago, DerLoBo said:

Slicksters sometimes just seem to stop producing oil. The keep consuming CO² but never product oil - I'm not sure why

Slickster keep consuming CO2 when it's available. You need to make sure the pressure drops to below 200g/tile occasionally to make sure they poop on a regular basis.

3 hours ago, DerLoBo said:

Other bugs/issues I've noticed

Sometimes "Submit Bioscan doors" just don't work. Assigning a dupe (by clicking Submit Bioscan) just has no effect

The doors needs to be accessed from one specific direction. Annoyingly that not always the direction facing out.

3 hours ago, DerLoBo said:

Animal traps 
Animal traps shuold be accessible earlier in the game (in the tec tree and as not made of plastic). Especially the hatches are basically a great thing, yet I tend to kill them in the early game since they eat all the stuff (and than they are missing in the mid and late game). Maybe making the trap for land animals (not the flying ones) accessible in the early game would already be enough.

There is. Place a pneumatic door on the floor a hatches will jump into it trapping themselves.

3 hours ago, DerLoBo said:

Liquid and gas pipes - This is a mayor issue for me.

I find pipes very strange in their physical behavior. Both seem to work not properly to me. When I split a pipe into two the throughput goes down to 50%. Also when joining two pipes the resulting pipe should be full (if both sources transport enough of course). Please have a look at the two gifs:

The resulting pipe (bottom right) should be full but is roughly filled by 60%:
 

The throughput goes down to ~50% when splitting pipes

This is very annoying since it makes pipes a very inefficient thing when used with more than one producer and or one than more consumer. Same is for mixed liquid/gas in pipes, it reduces the throughput dramatically.

Use bridges and valves to control liquid and gas flow. In the top example, the inputs to the exosuit docks should be a single line without splits. That will fill them in order without affecting gas flow.

[Kabrute]

and the tooltip does display the room size exactly as you requested in your own screenshot...
You can boost your fps dramatically by making dead end paths no loop paths for dupes to travel, each loop represents a performance spike on its own.
As for the bioscan, look at the door, look its facing one side or the other, chances are your dupe is on the wrong side because you tunnelled into the back side of a buried room.
As for the turbine, i use magma for oil-natgas conversion then slap your tubrine setup in about the middle of the gas oil exchanger using vacuum doors as a heat separator, and when the heat gets to much by the pumps in the nat gas room I let the steam turbine pull the excess.  This results in the literal free power desired.  Counter Current Exchange for the win.

[Kasuha]

5 hours ago, DerLoBo said:

Liquid and gas pipes - This is a mayor issue for me.

Pipes are specific, they work more like conveyor belts than like pipes. And yes, there are parts that are not yet well polished, in particular behavior of pipe junctions but I guess that's due to the game being early access.

Specific properties of pipes:

- material always goes from outputs to inputs. You may have multiple outputs, branch them together to a single pipe, then branch that out to multiple inputs and that will work. 

- outputs from buildings need an empty pipe segment over them for the building to work. Therefore it's good idea to make at least a short pipe branch for each separate output or you may block the building downstream by output of building upstream

- valves and bridges are the only buildings (AFAIK) that can combine packets from their inputs to their outputs. They can be used to merge two pipes with maximum efficiency, but give the joint a priority (what comes through the main pipe has always priority over what comes through the bridge unless the two packets can be merged.

These properties of valves and bridges can be used to build a lot of exciting "pipe logic" such as filters that don't use power, or bypasses that send pipe contents around a building (e.g. a regulator) when the building is switched off.

 

5 hours ago, DerLoBo said:

Liquid physics - This is a mayor issue for me.

Oh yeah, water mountains. In general the result of "one ambient material per tile" physics. A puddle of clean water, however small, still takes up whole tile. And if a pool of polluted water hits that tile of clean water, it can't push it out of the way because there's nothing like pressure in the game physics, too. The solution is to avoid liquids getting mixed.

[DerLoBo]

16 hours ago, Kabrute said:

and the tooltip does display the room size exactly as you requested in your own screenshot...

Oh my god, you are right. I stared like 100h on this and haven't noticed this. Am I the only one? Otherwise a tooltip like when queueing somthing like food would help: "Maximum size: 84/64"

16 hours ago, Kasuha said:

Pipes are specific, they work more like conveyor belts than like pipes.

That may be true, that feels, however, still like a bug to me. Even if there are workarrounds, splitting a pipe should not reduce its throughput by 50%. Have a look at my beautiful Paint creation 

This is how pipes should behave, in either directions - I'm not sure if conevyor belt like pipes are a good idea. However, even if they are a good idea, the throughput shuold still not go down by 50%. I still think if I have 1 producer and x consumers, every consumer should get 1/x of the production. The problem is the following: I made another gif, but this time all suites are empty (so all 7 suites consume oxygen).

When using a pipe I would expect all consumers to receive 1/7 of the oxgen, but actually it is 1/(2*2^(x-1)). So the first get's 1/2 or 50%, second 1/4 or 25%, third 1/4 or 12,5% ... while the last only gets 1/128 or less than 1%. (Have a graph here: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+100*(1%2F(2*2^(x-1)))+for+x%3D1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ). I just think that is a bad design for pipes.

17 hours ago, Kasuha said:

The solution is to avoid liquids getting mixed.

When melting stuff in the ice biome I can't prevent liquids from getting mixed!

Greetings, DerLoBo

[Kasuha]

30 minutes ago, DerLoBo said:

That may be true, that feels, however, still like a bug to me. Even if there are workarrounds, splitting a pipe should not reduce its throughput by 50%.

I agree with you there, but as I wrote, the game's still in development. 

30 minutes ago, DerLoBo said:

Note this does not reduce the flow, not until some branches get blocked at least. A 1-to-2 junction alternates the output branches by design, that's intended behavior, not a bug. If you want (semi-)even split between multiple inputs, you need to organize your pipe junctions appropriately. So the first junction would split e.g. between first three and last four. And then the first three would get even share from a 3-way split, and the last four would have another two 1:2 splits. Like a small tree.

Particularly for exosuits, though, it might be a good idea to give the first few docks bigger share than the rest as these tend to be used much more.

30 minutes ago, DerLoBo said:

When melting stuff in the ice biome I can't prevent liquids from getting mixed!

You can avoid melting it in place and ask your duplicants to carry the various kinds of ice to their designated melting areas.