Geyser Changes

[Ayka]

Remove Dormancy from Geysers. They all work out to an average output anyway; having a double cycle system only serves to confuse new players. Instead, make all geyser output a mystery (Hell, even hide its name if you're feeling masochistic) until you research the geyser. You can still make researchers useful, and remove a part of the geyser update that simply feels bad to play around.

[Kasuha]

Maybe dormancy could be removed from the more vital geysers - cold steam and natural gas. Those are something players need early on and discovering a steam geyser at the start of its dormant period when the player is just about to run out of water may ruin the game unnecessarily. Plus, dealing with the dormancy periods is awkward, especially since we don't have very convenient tools for it. Lack of gas and liquid storage was not a big deal before but to get the granted average output with the dormancy period in the game, every geyser needs a sizeable collector room to smooth out the fluctuations.

At the very least, the game could tell us what the grand average output of the geyser/volcano is and what's the size of buffer needed to smooth out the production. It's been analyzed by a scientist so it could give us some useful numbers.

[ImpalerWrG]

I disagree, dealing with the feast/famine nature of a geyser is part of the games challenge.  More information on the dormancy is fine, but don't think about eliminating it, that's a dumbing down of the game.

[TheExceed]

I think being able to upgrade or research on geysers during their dormancy period would be cool. I suggested it before.
Being able to:
Increase/decrease temp
Increase/decrease output
Increase/decrease active period
Maybe even changing the geyser.
Like water <-> p2ho or chlorine <-> NG <-> Hydrogen
This would be useful in maps that don't have some geysers but excess other geysers.
By no means would changing the geyser or upgrading would be easy, definitely a late game addition

[Coolthulhu]

18 hours ago, Ayka said:

Instead, make all geyser output a mystery (Hell, even hide its name if you're feeling masochistic) until you research the geyser.

Against

Hiding information that the player can get from earlier playthrough or by measuring easily measurable variables (total mass in area certainly counts) is bad design. Worse than just having useless scientists.

Rest is fine, just not the information hiding idea.

[Kasuha]

35 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Hiding information that the player can get from earlier playthrough or by measuring easily measurable variables (total mass in area certainly counts) is bad design. Worse than just having useless scientists.

Maybe the values could be just rounded until analysis. Instead of "242.3 g/s, 70 s every 132 s" it could be something like "approximately 250 g/s, 75 s every 125 s".

(Yeah I know it's strange kind of rounding. But two places is already too much and one is too little so it kinda needs to be something in between)

[ImpalerWrG]

Rounded numbers are confusing, I'd recommend using a non-numeric indicator like "High/Medium/Low and Frequent/Infrequent", you would feel that you have learning something and you can immediately see if a geyser is studies bye if it's description is numerical or not.

[BlueLance]

On 15/04/2018 at 2:30 AM, Ayka said:

Instead, make all geyser output a mystery

Sure, you talk about confusing new players and now you don't want them to see what they are going to get till it erupts? if that's a volcano they are practically dead. New players most likely could not cool it down.

[Stoof]

I kind of like the dormancy thing, it adds an extra layer and makes you have to plan ahead. I do believe some of the dormant times are just too long, it's fine for a volcano to go dormant for 45 cycles but when it's your cool steam vent it feels a bit harsh.

[BlueLance]

21 minutes ago, Stoof said:

I kind of like the dormancy thing, it adds an extra layer and makes you have to plan ahead. I do believe some of the dormant times are just too long, it's fine for a volcano to go dormant for 45 cycles but when it's your cool steam vent it feels a bit harsh.

Just gotta try to recycle as much of it as you can!

[Ayka]

8 hours ago, Stoof said:

I kind of like the dormancy thing, it adds an extra layer and makes you have to plan ahead. I do believe some of the dormant times are just too long, it's fine for a volcano to go dormant for 45 cycles but when it's your cool steam vent it feels a bit harsh.

Its the 100 Cycle Dormancy Geysers I'd be happy never seeing again.

On 4/15/2018 at 12:26 AM, Kasuha said:

Maybe dormancy could be removed from the more vital geysers - cold steam and natural gas. Those are something players need early on and discovering a steam geyser at the start of its dormant period when the player is just about to run out of water may ruin the game unnecessarily. Plus, dealing with the dormancy periods is awkward, especially since we don't have very convenient tools for it. Lack of gas and liquid storage was not a big deal before but to get the granted average output with the dormancy period in the game, every geyser needs a sizeable collector room to smooth out the fluctuations.

At the very least, the game could tell us what the grand average output of the geyser/volcano is and what's the size of buffer needed to smooth out the production. It's been analyzed by a scientist so it could give us some useful numbers.

I like the idea of selected Dormancy. Dormant periods exist IRL for Volcanos, but not really for instance in our own Hot Water/Steam Geysers or water springs. There is a reason they call it Old Faithful.

9 hours ago, BlueLance said:

Sure, you talk about confusing new players and now you don't want them to see what they are going to get till it erupts? if that's a volcano they are practically dead. New players most likely could not cool it down.

Volcanos still look like Volcanos, Vents like Vents, and Geysers like Geysers. You'd know on visual inspection what sort of trouble you're getting yourself into (or you'd learn quickly). Increasing the speed with which an identify happens, and maybe dropping it down to Scientist could eliminate a hurdle. I'm also not married to the idea.

22 hours ago, ImpalerWrG said:

I disagree, dealing with the feast/famine nature of a geyser is part of the games challenge.  More information on the dormancy is fine, but don't think about eliminating it, that's a dumbing down of the game.

Variable output on geysers is the feast/famine nature of the game. Adjusting or removing the dormancy period simply means having to adjust the numbers for activity. A longer pause between eruptions would be a likely result; but no straight 100 Cycle Dormant time.

[tadforever]

not really feeling the dormancy thing, its a good mechanic but with some stuff i just fell like its a way to fist the player with game play

[tadforever]

also not sure how the game decides dormancy, but ive had a geyser in a dormancy period for quite a few cycles which was good, i got to build to it and when i finished analyzing it, it then decided that it was going to be dormant for another 50 cycles... not sure about that

[yoakenashi]

13 hours ago, tadforever said:

not sure how the game decides dormancy

The game generates a random number between a fixed min and max (different for different types of geysers) , which gives us the total cycle length. And then it generates another random number between 0.4 and 0.8 (typically) to identify how much of that cycle the geyser will be active. This means that they geyser could be dormant 60% of the time.

[TheExceed]

Yeah... geysers can be extremely useful or extremely useless now. Especially the 500 degree hot steam geysers.
I would still like the possibility to further analyze or adjust them as I suggested earlier.

[ImpactedTooth]

I really like the geyser change. I didn't play much into the endgame content because what was the point if I had infinite power, water and food? I would get those three and then abandon the base for a new one. Now I stick with a base much longer since all my dupe's needs aren't met for the far future.

I do agree that some of the dormancy lengths are a bit ridiculous.

[crypticorb]

I have a bit of a novel idea. What if the dormancy cycles were not static?

For example, the critical time when players need water is in the early to mid game, so for this stage have high output geysers with very short or zero dormancy. Later on they may have secured more geysers or completely different water sources, such as pH2O geysers or a water recycling plant. At that point, have the geysers start to have longer and longer dormancy until they reach a dormancy state resembling the current dormancy lengths of most geysers.

The same thing could be done with almost all geysers, very short dormancy cycles upon discovery, but lengthened dormancies as the game progresses into the 100s of cycles.

The opposite could be done for some of the more dangerous volcanos; have a very long dormancy period upon discovery, but have randomized eruptions that increase in frequency, or even have non-linear dormancy cycles, with ramp-ups in output frequency, then ramp-downs.

This would add new challenges to using volcanos, and make the current geysers and vents not useless. In my last two seeds, I abandoned using the natural gas geysers entirely, as they could barely supply one NG generator, with 100+ cycle dormancy. However, the pH2O geysers put out so much water I had to dig out two biomes to contain them after 50 cycles of output overflowed my reservoirs.

[cpy]

We need much bigger output on troublesome geysers like CO2, hot steam, imagine 40KG/s hot steam + dormancy, things would be hard to deal with. Probably 2 steam engines needed

Lava trouble? First geysers could flood your base and drown you if you weren't careful, now they barely are useful. There should be at least one bad boy who is poised to ruin your day.

[Bratishka1234]

Return the old geysers. And so the patch is cool.

[scientas]

On 4/17/2018 at 10:09 PM, crypticorb said:

I have a bit of a novel idea. What if the dormancy cycles were not static?

 

Sort of like the difference between wild and tamed animals maybe?

Your "wild" unresearched geysers would be randomized so that you really couldn't tell what they were going to do. A wild geyser could go dormant suddenly for a long cycle or stay active for an insane amount of time.

"Tamed" geysers would be more reliable and work on a schedule. Perhaps there could be a need for your scientist to periodically research the geyser to maintain it's tamed state?

This could even provide a further use for research stations where you could link them to your researched geysers for maintenance, which would also allow you to continue the scientist roles and train other dupes when the research tree is tapped out. Just connect the research station or super computer to the geyser (with automation cable maybe) and it would send a signal or alarm that would indicate a need to research again.

[Kabrute]

+1 for overclocking geysers

[Oozinator]

On 17.4.2018 at 3:48 AM, tadforever said:

not really feeling the dormancy thing, its a good mechanic but with some stuff i just fell like its a way to fist the player with game play

Why?

[MythN7]

On 2018-04-15 at 12:47 PM, ImpalerWrG said:

I disagree, dealing with the feast/famine nature of a geyser is part of the games challenge.  More information on the dormancy is fine, but don't think about eliminating it, that's a dumbing down of the game.

I feel the same about this, but also agree with the comment just before, on how the game could show you the relative output per sec that this translates to as if it was never going dormant, so you can tell how much you can pull out if you require un interrupted flow from this source.

I know its solvable based on the game cycles being 600s each, but its just very annoying math to do that you need more than basic knowledge of in terms of if its kids playing this game.

Like the cycles being in decimal for the active / dormant, on top of the fact the output while active is also broken into sub dormant idle and erupting phases.  So these geysers for solving the net output as non stop, feels very similar to that if train A is traveling at this speed and train b is at this speed when will they meet at the station lol.

I am a huge fan of the game, have 959 hours played right now.

But it seems with every update they are making it leaps and bounds more advanced in the needing a spreadsheet and calculator and algebra / calculus / thermo dynamics / and static physic texts book.

I took 1 year of college engineering, so at least many of these game stats are somewhat familiar, but still well out of a practical enjoyment understand for a very cartoony  game. heh

[Ambaire]

Is there a way to mod back in the old geysers? Because I'd do that instantly if it was. No variables, fixed output, known quantities. At the very least, remove dormancy and squish the low/high end a bit. As it is right now, I've seen steam geysers that output ~800g/s and others that do 10kg/s. It's completely ridiculous.

[crypticorb]

2 hours ago, Ambaire said:

Is there a way to mod back in the old geysers? Because I'd do that instantly if it was. No variables, fixed output, known quantities. At the very least, remove dormancy and squish the low/high end a bit. As it is right now, I've seen steam geysers that output ~800g/s and others that do 10kg/s. It's completely ridiculous.

Yes and no.

There are no mods currently to change geyser output, or means to revert to old versions of the game. However, you CAN use debug mode to spawn in geysers wherever you like, and delete and reroll the dice until you get a geyser you feel is useable.

This is where I'd like to revisit the topic that Klei NEEDS to add in a world generation control panel for new games, to allow more/less geysers and control how they spawn, as well as other factors such as starting algae/water and other factors.