New geysers are awful

[trukogre]

Just now, goboking said:

Not everyone runs or even knows about debug mode.  If the current geyser algorithm is currently imbalanced - that's not an argument I'm making, for the record - then that's going to negatively impact the experience of new players and those who don't know about debug mode.

Well, that's a completely separate point from what I was talking about, but it's completely true.  It's true whether there's too much or too little water, though.

[Roboson]

3 minutes ago, goboking said:

Not everyone runs or even knows about debug mode.  If the current geyser algorithm is currently imbalanced - that's not an argument I'm making, for the record - then that's going to negatively impact the experience of new players and those who don't know about debug mode.

Yeah, the game shouldn't require debug mode to be playable. As of now, sustainability is really the only end goal for this game. And whats unfortunate is, some maps are simply incapable of achieving true sustainability with bad geyser sets. 

[trukogre]

1 minute ago, Roboson said:

Yeah, the game shouldn't require debug mode to be playable. As of now, sustainability is really the only end goal for this game. And whats unfortunate is, some maps are simply incapable of achieving true sustainability with bad geyser sets. 

This is false, sustainability is achievable without geysers.

[Roboson]

Infinite sustainability without any geysers? Doubtful. Perhaps on a very small colony, or through using exploits and debug mode. Either way, if possible, immensely difficult or relies on cheating in one way or another. 

[Guest]

For the record, made a calculation on my second steam geyser, which produces 240kg each cycle on average.

I'll let that sink in.

[BlueLance]

6 hours ago, PickPay said:

You have to keep in mind the number of Dupes in a colony. Some play with minimal Dupes (5?) I play with around 20 and can't sustain water just from the starting amount provided...

The game should encourage growth to some extent not discourage it.

I usually stop at 32 dupes:) i used to accept every dupe but with jobs etc. Its more crippling for me to.

[PickPay]

If the game is going to be harder than it is, I agree there should be more difficulty options. Just because some advanced players manage their water extremely well it should still be completely playable for new comers !

[onlineous]

1 hour ago, Roboson said:

Sort of. I find my new base is actually less realistic. Just going to set up a giant nat. gas farm instead of my typical geyser based system (which I can't really do anymore). 

Where will you get the polluted water? Ferth.Synths take a lot of water.

[BlueLance]

Well if you guys want sustainability i can just share my seed with you, two steam geysers with fairly decent output. And an Actual hot Water geyser which spits out so much water i actually stopped it, all near the starting biome. All in all i think you guys are worrying a bit too much about a Geysers output versus the fact that you get at two confirmed steam fumaroles, with a fairly high chance at some water ones. Polluted or otherwise. Sure geysers give out less, except my water one I actually think its giving out the same more or less. But its not like those arr the only ways of getting water, all Co2 can be converted into water via slicksters>petroleum + nat gas, all natural gas can be converted into water, all the polluted water geysers can also give you water. These all existed beforehand. Now you have geysers which give you Co2, and polluted water. 

I will still hit 32 dupes and most lukely still not even have to worry about water, the issue i see at the moment is coal is lacking, which kinda sucks but i will live. Hydrogen is my best friend.

15 minutes ago, PickPay said:

If the game is going to be harder than it is, I agree there should be more difficulty options. Just because some advanced players manage their water extremely well it should still be completely playable for new comers !

I do agree with that, but if a new player starts playing this with the update etc as is, they will never know any better, for instance it used to be you could have over a dozen geysers either nat gas or water. They were all removed. That was a hell of a lot of gas and water suddenly gone. But new players still played and they would never know the difference. It will be similar here, most new players dont go and utilise a geyser to a massive degree. I rarely used to, and i only started using geysers etc because i wanted to try out new things, like trying to use natural gas, boy was that fun cuz 5kg tiles spread fast.

So for new players its a bit iffy, i think water is an issue for them for traps such as algae terrarium and mush bars, i used to sink so much water into mush bars that my colonies would eventually run out of water. I died, i learned and i adapted. The biggest issue for new players would probably be when they crack open a geyser and the heat kills everything. But i reckon they will be too busy trying to figure out how things work inside their bases etc to be worrying about geysers far away etc. 

But for players who have played since the patch before inthink it could be a bit difficult, but its an alpha, things will change, they should hopefully know that, and to be honest, its a good challenge to be kept on your toes!! If we go colony wise i think ive lost/stopped almost 300 (lost a lot in the beggining, power systems and food crisis) so i started again since the patch and I am on Vault 003, 000 died to carbon dioxide..... ran out of Algae before i noticed, Vault 001 heat death, opened a Volcano and my dupes put the solid stuff in my base, Vault 002 Starved due to Stress, self explanitory. 

I would like to see eggs get nerfed a bit, right now you can feed hatches as you normally would, and get eggs and coal, the eggs are tier 2 id rather see them a 1? Maybe a 0? But i like eggs so 0 seems to little XD kr make it the eggs are less common i dno? Right now they just crash my game a lot.

[Rotintin]

Geysers simply bolster resources. You truthfully don't need anything more than the starting biome and critters to "beat" the game.

Before the patch, pufts and morbs can create an infinitely sustainable base for about 10 dupes. Although Pufts are a fraction as productive, you can make infinitely more. So what's the problem?

No water? Distill algae for O2 and grow organic.

No nat gas? Distill algae and run fertilizers.

You will be amazed on the power you save doing this type of building. You'll also be amazed with how much this breathes life into the game. It breaks your cookie cutter base design by not rushing your excessive power plant and modular farm designs. It pushes geysers to be an aspect in which reactionary and asteroid specific play style get rewarded. Ultimately this is a fantastic change. Could they be tweaked and balanced sill? Sure. 

. 

[Oozinator]

7 hours ago, Rotintin said:

Ultimately this is a fantastic change. Could they be tweaked and balanced sill? Sure.

I want to try the preview out, but i wait till it's in the update. ^^

[BlueLance]

26 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

I want to try the preview out, but i wait till it's in the update. ^^

If it makes you feel any better, geysers seem solid, as in they don't bug out etc, the information on their Info panel is poorly laid out and could be done better. But right now animal husbandry side of things does cause a lot of crashes, so holding back until you see a fix for that is probably best XD

I can see some geysers being tweaked though, or at least the min/max values being adjusted but I am not sure, I am sitting at nearly cycle 200 on my current colony and still have about 35 tiles of water remaining from my starting water, then from my geysers I have about 200 tiles of water maybe a bit more, as my geysers are currently erupting again.

[Oozinator]

15 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

If it makes you feel any better, ..so holding back until you see a fix for that is probably best XD

I can see some geysers being tweaked though, or at least the min/max values being adjusted but I am not sure,.

That are some of my reasons to wait. ^^

[Technoincubus]

7 hours ago, trukogre said:

-active period: 17 cycles

-dormant: 21.2 cycles

That is a very mild conditions and ones I have no problem with. Because I ran about 10 preview_build colonies now for 200 cycles for testing and only once I saw a geyser which were dormant for about 32 cycles. Others - 107, 91, 103, 87 cycles of dormancy. It could be a matter of luck but ONI have no such things as semi-random, like with DOTA, where some skills fire at random but have certain limits of "not longer than" and "not fewer than"

[BlueLance]

23 minutes ago, Technoincubus said:

It could be a matter of luck but ONI have no such things as semi-random, like with DOTA, where some skills fire at random but have certain limits of "not longer than" and "not fewer than"

Well they are semi-random, they all have an upper and lower limit. but so far other than my lava one, most of mine are Active for about 40% of their lifetime and inactive for 60%. The only exception was my Volcano which was active about 25% of its time. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, BlueLance said:

Well they are semi-random, they all have an upper and lower limit. but so far other than my lava one, most of mine are Active for about 40% of their lifetime and inactive for 60%. The only exception was my Volcano which was active about 25% of its time. 

It's not a big deal that they are more or less active. However, I do feel if it's less time active, it should produce more during the active period. Now I have one cold steam fumarole averaging out on 900kg/cycle, the other on 200kg/cycle (dormant and idle times included) with totally different active and dormant periods.

It would be much more fun to have geysers that stay dormant for a long while, and only have a very short active period, but when they become active they produce huge amounts, to the point you will need to have things in place to handle the sheer quantity

[Monkeygonz]

The reason why the developers nerfed geysers is to create variation of play. Think about it, is it really too fun to be able to create a self sustaining base on one natural gas geyser by cycle 300? Or is it more fun to be encountering problems with your setup, and have to find creative workarounds to your issues. I know when I get to a point where I have no problems, the game simply isn't fun anymore. It used to be possible to create a fairly large, self sustaining base on one, maybe two natural gas geysers. Generators=Power+Polluted Water=Water=Oxygen and Hydrogen and Food. You could even further this increase by using most of the polluted water to get fertilizer synthesizers, which means EVEN MORE natural gas. It's nice how the geysers are mostly nerfed, giving you a start at the beginning of the game, but not making them too sustainable. In fact, with the Ranching Update, if they had kept geysers the same, it would have been even easier to create a self sustaining base on a single natural gas geyser alone(Just feed the fertilizer to hatches). There are issues, that is to be expected, but they are issues that can be resolved. Overall, this is just a better, and more fun geyser system.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Monkeygonz said:

The reason why the developers nerfed geysers is to create variation of play. Think about it, is it really too fun to be able to create a self sustaining base on one natural gas geyser by cycle 300? Or is it more fun to be encountering problems with your setup, and have to find creative workarounds to your issues. I know when I get to a point where I have no problems, the game simply isn't fun anymore. It used to be possible to create a fairly large, self sustaining base on one, maybe two natural gas geysers. Generators=Power+Polluted Water=Water=Oxygen and Hydrogen and Food. You could even further this increase by using most of the polluted water to get fertilizer synthesizers, which means EVEN MORE natural gas. It's nice how the geysers are mostly nerfed, giving you a start at the beginning of the game, but not making them too sustainable. In fact, with the Ranching Update, if they had kept geysers the same, it would have been even easier to create a self sustaining base on a single natural gas geyser alone(Just feed the fertilizer to hatches). There are issues, that is to be expected, but they are issues that can be resolved. Overall, this is just a better, and more fun geyser system.

Nothing creative about limiting dupe count. Basically you can survive without any geyser, and just survive on eggs and slime. But you can't get creative with it.

There's also no real reward anymore going for more high tech stuff. As I see it, most high tech stuff does not add to sustainability, but instead puts more pressure on it. Previously you could do that much easier because you had the excess resources for it.

I could have accepted the same amount of renewable water coming at a bigger cost, like germed, polluted, heat, frozen,... . That would have forced the player to get creative getting the water out of it.

Sometimes I feel the developers themselves don't have clue where they want to go with this game. First it was a pure survival game, than they suddenly went fully sustainable by a huge amount of these geysers (when they first were introduced a single NG geyser could fully supply 8 NG generators and people were having problems dealing with the steam geyser output, and each map generated 10-15 geysers!). At the time that was indeed way too much, but the developers have nerved the geysers at each and every update to the point they are hardly any use anymore. Water is pivotal in sustainability. So what do the developers want?

I don't feel this brings more variation. The ranger update effectively replaces my berry farm with an egg producing range because the former is in the long term not worth the while. Just like the occupational update replaced the licewood farms with berry farms. The oil upgrade made sleet wheat farms redundant for licewood farms. The updates constantly introduce one new gameplay and make another one redundant. Atleast in my view.

I am all for making things more challenging, but challenging in a more subtle way than "oh let's just limit the amount of renewable resources", but more like "let's retain these resources and their current amount, but have the player work harder for it".

[Oozinator]

59 minutes ago, turbonl64 said:

Atleast in my view.

Same here

[Rotintin]

Due to the fact pufts can reproduce and morbs can be continually generated, the population cap has been removed. People who are saying that this patch has limited the number of dupes you can have are just wrong.

Before this update, there was a hard cap of dupes due to water limitations and how much slime you could produce. The only limitation now is how many dupes / pufts / morbs your computer can handle. Because of this, critters should be more efficient- closer to old values- to minimize this detriment. 

Also how is there no incentive for high tech? High pressure vents, exo suits, and steam turbine are all pretty amazing tools in late game, just to name a few. 

It seems a lot of the complaining is coming from melodramatic responses to people being forced to change the way they approach the game. The last two updates have revitalized food and it's allocation to dupes, and has destroyed a redundant "meta" in return for a longer mid game and a more strategical and intricate late game. 

[Hanro50]

The only real thing I would like them to change is what type of geysers spawn where.

I don't want a volcano destroying my cold subworlds, nor do I want one spewing liquid CO2 onto hot lava.

I'm also going to have fit these new features into worldgen mods in the future and I would like to preserve the random nature of these geysers without going poi crazy.

Apart from that I don't have an issue with them 

[Guest]

49 minutes ago, Rotintin said:

Due to the fact pufts can reproduce and morbs can be continually generated, the population cap has been removed. People who are saying that this patch has limited the number of dupes you can have are just wrong.

Before this update, there was a hard cap of dupes due to water limitations and how much slime you could produce. The only limitation now is how many dupes / pufts / morbs your computer can handle. Because of this, critters should be more efficient- closer to old values- to minimize this detriment. 

Also how is there no incentive for high tech? High pressure vents, exo suits, and steam turbine are all pretty amazing tools in late game, just to name a few. 

It seems a lot of the complaining is coming from melodramatic responses to people being forced to change the way they approach the game. The last two updates have revitalized food and it's allocation to dupes, and has destroyed a redundant "meta" in return for a longer mid game and a more strategical and intricate late game. 

Note I did not say capping.

I also underlined you can survive on slime, which comes from pufts long term. However, it's not really creative to just narrow the game long term sustainability on pufts. Neither is it to gamble on volcano's for long term steam turbines.

I'm maybe being a bit too dramatic, but again you are ignoring the fact they have started out with way too overpowered geysers narrowing it now to being almost useless if you have bad luck. I mean either choose for a survival game, which it was hardcore in the beta where we all struggled to get to even 50 cycles and which was REALLY fun, or stick to sustainability that is reasonable and does not depend on X amount of pufts. But don't dangle sweets in front of our heads to afterwards take them away.

[Rotintin]

Just now, turbonl64 said:

Note I did not say capping.

I also underlined you can survive on slime, which comes from pufts long term. However, it's not really creative to just narrow the game long term sustainability on pufts. Neither is it to gamble on volcano's for long term steam turbines.

I'm maybe being a bit too dramatic, but again you are ignoring the fact they have started out with way too overpowered geysers narrowing it now to being almost useless if you have bad luck. I mean either choose for a survival game, which it was hardcore in the beta where we all struggled to get to even 50 cycles and which was REALLY fun, or stick to sustainability that is reasonable and does not depend on X amount of pufts. But don't dangle sweets in front of our heads to afterwards take them away.

I think we should all expect to lose / gain comforts as the game goes through development. 

We aren't entirely dependent on pufts for water, the geysers still exist and provide many more resources now. All pufts and morbs do is increase the amount of polluter water and oxygen you can access.

Ultimately it comes down to what you want to do. What population / food do you want? Are natural plants an option or do we need water?  If it's water dependent you might not just be able to tap a geyser / cooling system. You're going to have to use polluted. Will you filter? Boil? If boil, will you use a complex system using heat of new geysers or use aquatuners? 

I'm really struggeling to see how this is less creative than potentially using a modular system with set values. 

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Rotintin said:

I think we should all expect to lose / gain comforts as the game goes through development. 

We aren't entirely dependent on pufts for water, the geysers still exist and provide many more resources now. All pufts and morbs do is increase the amount of polluter water and oxygen you can access.

Ultimately it comes down to what you want to do. What population / food do you want? Are natural plants an option or do we need water?  If it's water dependent you might not just be able to tap a geyser / cooling system. You're going to have to use polluted. Will you filter? Boil? If boil, will you use a complex system using heat of new geysers or use aquatuners? 

I'm really struggeling to see how this is less creative than potentially using a modular system with set values. 

 

Because a bad roll will leave you with 2x200kg/cycle water fumaroles without any additional geyser or fumarol that produces directly or indirectly water. Yes you can easily boil polluted water or get water from sources like slime and oil. The issue however will lie that usually you are draining your water supplies. For instance the most sustainable plant currently is the bristle berry, taking 20kg of water each cycle. You need I believe 3 bristle berries for each dupe to sustain them. Take a colony of 20 dupes, meaning 20x20x3=1200kg of water each cycle needed. Again, you will only cover 1/3th with your fumaroles, so you will need to find another 800kg, just for the plants.

Filtering polluted water is not immediately renewable unless that polluted water comes from a renewable source. Say you want to do that through a morb/puft combo. Because why not. You need 7 morbs for each puft. You need around 3.5 pufts to sustain 1 algae distiller and you will need 2 algea distillers. So 7 pufts and 49 morbs needed, just to sustain 60 plants. Atleast if the old numbers are still in play because I did hear they seriously limited critter's output!

Are there other renewable sources for polluted water? Oh yes, there are. Like the natural gas... oh wait, gas geysers are heavily nerved. How about slicksters converted C02 to... nerved!

Theoritically this all is possible. Will anybody have fun first setting up 49 morbs? Maybe the first couple of games, but they will be heavily bored going through that after the 3th or 4th colony.

And yes, you can say "but you don't need plants with the new update". Sure, but then it's not creative anymore. Then it's replacing plants with eggs. And guess what the developers will nerve the next time round? I'll give you 3 tries, but you'll probably guess it with one.

Again, if they want the game to be a hardcore survival mode, than please let them do so. If they it it a game where you build on sustainability, then give us that option like it was before.

I'm hopeful the developers will turn this around to an extent. It's a beta after all and we still have the second part of the ranger update coming. So probably the current situation is temporary. I do feel I have to voice this as I, and probably many others, don't like this current situation. Yes, you can like and you can voice that opinion too. Only, I'm looking currently at my building options and realise half of them I will not be using since they waste resources I'll need. I can't imagine that being the intent of the developers. I mean I was able to life with that for the hydrofan, but it's getting silly

[Saturnus]

17 minutes ago, turbonl64 said:

Filtering polluted water is not immediately renewable unless that polluted water comes from a renewable source. Say you want to do that through a morb/puft combo. Because why not. You need 7 morbs for each puft. You need around 3.5 pufts to sustain 1 algae distiller and you will need 2 algea distillers. So 7 pufts and 49 morbs needed, just to sustain 60 plants. Atleast if the old numbers are still in play because I did hear they seriously limited critter's output!

By a factor of 100. So multiply the number of critters needed by 100!