Farming, Piping, Wiring & Storage Feedback

[Jigsawn]

Back again with a 4th base under my belt (it's about to go pear-shaped at about 150 cycles). I have a lot more feedback on helping make the game more accessible and fun to play. This time I am splitting it between topics to avoid an uber-thread. Original feedback from my first few attempts is in this thread.

In this post a collection of random feedback:

Farming

Plants Have Died - The "Plants have Died" warning pops up when you uproot crops, but this is a bit misleading and is alarming for new players who may not realise it's just their dupes executing the uproot orders. Suggest removing it in this instance, or changing it to "Plants Uprooted" as a notification rather than a warning/alert.

Hydro Farm Bug? - I have experienced what I believe is a bug with hydro farms, which others have also seen. If you run your piping in a straight line through a row of hydro farm tiles, it's possible for the water to suddenly stop flowing at one of the tiles, even though there is nothing wrong with the pipe, plant or farm tile. The preceding pipe reads at full capacity. This can randomly start working again or just remain stuck until you reconstruct the pipes.

Piping

I re-iterate my feelings about piping from my original thread - for new players it is confusing and could do with better examples and tutorials.

Input/Output Icons - Even after so long playing the game, I still find these horribly confusing. The In/Out icons look too similar and the colours white and green are not traditionally associated with in/out. For new players it's even more confusing because the arrows make it look like you need to build pipes physically in the direction the arrows are pointing. It's a tricky one though, I sat down and thought about alternative icon ideas, and hit a blank. Perhaps at least changing the colours to be Green for input, and Red/Orange for output would make more sense (keep yellow for filtered output). But overall it could really use with a better visualisation, especially for complex pipe systems it's a total nightmare with the icons to tell what's going where.

Utility Piping Warnings - Some utilities, such as sinks, toilets and showers, do not warn the player when their water supply runs out, or their waste pipes are blocked. This can be fatal and can be hard to spot for the player. It's especially bad in cases where a sink is on a critical germ path, or all your toilets stop working due to a water supply problem, and you don't find out until the whole base suddenly wets themselves - then you also need time to find and fix the problem. Anyway, it would be very helpful to have at least an "out of resource" or "broken" icon to appear over utilities which have water/waste blockages/shortages - if not an actual notification. This may also apply to other buildings but I just noticed it with my toilets, showers and sinks.

Piping Bug/Inconsistency - Build a straight pipe, then put a pipe bridge at 90 degrees over it, then dismantle the straight pipe only, under the bridge. Have a liquid flowing over the bridge. Now build a different straight pipe over the path that the bridge takes, running in the same direction as the bridge. This will actually cause a blockage stopping liquid flowing through both the bridge, and the new straight pipe, when logically it should still flow through at least one of them. If this is not a bug, then at least have it give you a blockage warning (my main water supply was unexpectedly cut off this way).

Storage

Sweep Only Tickbox - This is confusing. It's unclear about what to expect when this is ticked or unticked, and how that combines with whatever you have ticked within the contents checkboxes. If I want dupes to store both swept and normally stored items in one container, how do I achieve that, for example? Perhaps it needs wording to clarify.

Storage Defaults - Also, as I've said before, I highly suggest that storage is set to all materials by default so new players don't have to go in and set them up manually - and to avoid busywork for every new storage container you create.

Dupes Storing in Stupid Places - There is conflicting info on the forums about how dupes choose where to dump their carried loads. What's incredibly frustrating in the early stages of a base is to have dupes picking up items next to empty storage containers (with the correct permissions set, btw) and then walking across half the map to another identical storage container to dump it there. Then they'll return to the same place (for example if you have a sweep order for debris in a room), and do it all again. By default dupes should just store items in the closest storage container to their position, chosen when they pick up the item. Even building new storage containers close to a big sweep order is completely ignored, which is highly frustrating.

[Jigsawn]

Allow Bridging from Piping/Wiring outputs

When dealing with confined spaces and complex systems, its frustrating to be unable to connect pipe/wire bridges directly to building outputs. This may apply to inputs as well, I'm not sure. Currently, at least with pipes, you have to build a 1 tile section of pipe before it's allowed to connect to a bridge. Logically there's no reason for this (as the start and end of the bridge just looks like normal piping) which also makes it confusing for new players. 

I've seen this a few times with wiring systems too, although that seems like more of a bug.  Example in the screenshot below - look at the bridge on the left which says no wire is connected, even though the whole wire system is intact. The one on the right with the exact same layout was working. Dismantling the normal wires on the left (as well as the bridge) around the transformer and rebuilding them fixed the problem.

Make Branching outputs from Pipes Work Consistently

Sometimes when you have more than one pipe connected directly to a pipe output, the liquid/gas refuses to travel in one of the directions. For example, a pipe running in a straight line through a water pump output, where you want to pump water in both directions along the pipe. This happens even when you have a clear pipe with flow directions set correctly. Sometime the gas/liquid will travel down one pipe branch, and then turn around and go back again.

I've seen this behaviour a few times with both gas and water. It only seems to happen if you have a pipe running through an output. If you build a single pipe out 1 tile from the output, and then branch it, it always works fine. So maybe it's a bug. If not, for confined spaces/complex systems, it would be nice for it to work consistently. 

Water Gravity

I realise we are on an asteroid, but the way that liquid "sticks" to surfaces and sometimes refuses to spread out can be infuriating. When there's a flood/vomiting etc, it works fine. But pumping or adding/removing blocks makes liquid act really crazy. 

Take this example:

The pump suddenly runs out of water because the rest of the body of water refuses to descend. If this was a flood or in most other circumstances in the game, the water would descend fine. It seems like a bug, but if it's not, please relax the physics on liquids a little to avoid this kind of behaviour.

[Jigsawn]

Building Valves on Top of Pipes

Right now you can build valves on top of their respective pipes. Liquid/gas will continue to run in the pipes passing *behind* the valve. This is hard to spot for new players.

Instead, this would be much more convenient, and easier for communication: If you build a valve on top of existing piping (traveling at the same orientation as the valve), have the pipes behind it dismantle and automatically hook up the valve.

 

Insulated Liquid Bridge

Why is there no insulated pipe/gas bridge? With some systems you want everything to be insulated. Yes you can build a normal bridge from abyssalite, but it seems like an obvious gap, and newer players won't know about the importance of changing building materials.

 

Allow Heavy Watt Wire to Replace Wires

It's really annoying, with both micromanaging and time spent, to have to dismantle normal wires manually before you can replace them with Heavy Watt Wires. Please just make it so that you can build Heavy Watt over exisiting normal wires and the wires are dismantled automatically, in the same way as how pipes are automatically dismantled if you replace them with insulated pipes. It's also a big barrier for new players learning the advanced electronics, forcing them to have to uproot whole parts of the base and have it go without power whilst they upgrade to Heavy Watt - if done automatically the power downtime will be lower.

Wire Inputs Affecting Decor

It's quite minor, but this seems a bit off:

The wire used for powering machines/lights reduces decor - even if the machine is covering it. There is no way to cover up this tiny bit of wire and the dupes shouldn't be able to see it anyway.