Rocketry Upgrade Testing Branch Now Open! - [Game Update] - 282822

[trukogre]

13 minutes ago, Denisetwin said:

I'm using Goldberg here to reference building a huge complex build to do the same thing that one small machine does.  For example, building a a complex oil boiler (i've tried three times now unsuccessfully even with hundreds of hours in game) vs building the oil refinery - one building that would do the same thing my very complicated build does.  I get a reward as my complex build had a better conversion rate (well if it had worked, LOL) and that's what I want kept.  This leaves something in the game for casual, don't want to think too hard about it players as well as the science/mathematics players who are busy calculating watts and joules and the most efficient way to do something.  Casual player doesn't care to spend the time to learn how to keep a vacuum etc to keep the magma molten, he just builds the oil refinery and moves on while the techno-nerds who love making a huge design that will wring every drop of energy/heat etc out of a build can still have their fun too.  THAT was the fun for me.  Why I love the game.  I hope it doesn't go away. 

wringing every drop of efficiency out of a build is literally the opposite of a goldberg machine, sorry.  Your terminology seems quite mixed up here, you keep saying a very efficient machine is a goldberg machine, which is just bizarre; you keep saying that a refinery does the same thing as your machine, but then explain exactly what makes them different, which means that they aren't the same.  Same =/= similar, efficient =/= goldberg.  There was plenty of room between the old conversion ratio and the energy conversion ratio of the pet. refinery to tone down oil cracking without turning your machine into a Goldberg machine, but Klei opted not to.  I think that at the least Klei should be open about their intentions, do they want these complex machines to be viable, in general, or no.  Currently it seems like they like complex machines that play weird songs, but nerf complex machines that do very efficient things.  They have a roadmap but they've reached the end of it, and this is exactly the type of a question that a roadmap could answer.

Edited August 24, 2018 by trukogre

[_Q_]

11 minutes ago, RonEmpire said:

Overall,  all this trouble for   Space Cows to fart Natural Gas.   But really, we should just be all picking Dupes that have the farting trait if farting natural gas is such a big deal.

Chlorine is going to be the big issue and I can see old map seeds being forced to have 1 fixed Chlorine Geyser.

I did notice one of the maps seed that I play on got a new geyser added to the map  - though it was hydro geyser added   but it already had a chlorine geyser to begin with. not sure if that was the effect.

You just don't bother with space cows if you don't have chlorine vent on the map. Its just situational content.

Seems like main source of power will be hydrogen and petroleum.

Also they need to add other use for gas grass, not everyone wants to keep cows. I want my dupes to live on grass diet.

Edited August 24, 2018 by _Q_

[AzeTheGreat]

1 hour ago, trukogre said:

This is important, everyone keeps saying they love complex machines, but many people just stop there without specifying further.  Do they love complex overpowered machines? complex but balanced machines? or complex rube goldberg designs?  

At least personally, I want internal consistency in gameplay. 

ONI has a fairly amazing system of gas/liquid/heat interactions - it's not perfect for sure, but it allows us to make super interesting builds, like oil boilers.  These require a lot of thought and design to make functional, and there's so much room for optimization.  It creates in depth and rewarding gameplay. 

Now, contrast this with the default buildings ONI provides - many of them essentially serve as 'magic boxes'.  Stuff goes in, stuff comes out, with almost no consideration for the processes that are required to occur there.  Compare an oil boiler with the refinery - which one is more interesting to design?  However, I completely understand that there must be some minimum level at which we accept the 'magic boxes', after all, nobody wants to design a pump and test different impellers...and the early game would be too difficult otherwise.  The problem is that, when it goes too far in the direction of magic boxes, we lose the interesting interactions with the rest of the game world and it feels weirdly inconsistent.

Just to make some comparisons of where there are ways to do things both with compositions of smaller parts and with the inbuilt structures:

• Oil boiler vs Oil refineries
• Physical gas tanks vs Gas Reservoir
• Door pump vs Actual pump
• Density vs Mechanical vs Standard filters
• Heat exchanger vs Aquatuner
• etc

My issue is that different buildings seem to have different levels of granularity and viability.  In a perfectly consistent world - everything would be built out of the same fundamental building blocks.  Minecraft is a good example of this: everything takes up a block - a massive auto smelter is just a combination of many smaller and simpler blocks, working in harmony to create something greater.  There isn't some 'automatic smelter', 5x5x5 structure that could optionally replace it, and I doubt anyone would want there to be.  ONI can operate like this as well - just look at any oil boiler design, they're all made of the same fundamental parts: blocks, pipes, doors, and automation.  That feels consistent.  Now look at a refinery - oil goes in, petroleum and other stuff comes out.  There's no concern for us to control temperature ranges, no flowrate concerns, it's a magic box that just somehow works - and it does the job of many smaller parts.  Compare that to something like a door pump vs the standard pump.  The door pump does do a better job of feeling like it's made from constituent parts, but the pump isn't really a problem because it only does one thing.

So, this brings me to my evaluation of what's wrong with the current state of the game / path it's heading down:

It's almost always possible to replace an inbuilt machine with a composition of basic parts; this is good and adds depth to gameplay.  The problems arise when the inbuilt solution is orders of magnitudes worse, rather than being a trade off with positives and negatives for both, as was the case with oil boilers and is the case with filters; that reduces depth of gameplay because there are objectively better options to take.  Finally, the game feels inconsistent because some machines don't just do a single thing - they excessively simplify complex processes into magic boxes; this removes depth from the gameplay because players can just plop down magic boxes without having to perform any sort of design.

So, I believe that, as it currently stands, many of the buildings in game are too simplistic for their purpose, and should be split into multiple small buildings.  I'm not versed in the process of refining oil, but assuming it requires some kind of reaction and heating process, the refinery could easily be re-purposed into a reaction chamber while a new heating vat could be created.  Make the reactor operate continuously while the heating chamber operates in batches and you've already added some depth in design to the oil refinery without making it significantly more complicated to build (New players will actually have to think about how they construct it, but it's not so many pieces that it takes more than a cycle once they come up with a design).  This has the added benefit of allowing buildings to be used flexibly: a reactor could have a sour gas -> natural gas recipe, petroleum  -> rocket fuel, etc.  It could have the ability to accept catalysts to improve reaction conversions, rates, etc.  The water sieve could be repurposed into a general filtration machine for removing impurities, the slime distiller could be turned into a distillation tower, and so on. 

By breaking buildings up into small, single-use structures that also interact with the environment, more design depth is added to the game without making it outright harder, it feels more internally consistent, and it makes it easier for developers to give pros and cons to choosing either the inbuilt structures or player crafted alternatives.  Theoretically...

Edited August 24, 2018 by AzeTheGreat

[trukogre]

30 minutes ago, AzeTheGreat said:

 

So, I believe that, as it currently stands, many of the buildings in game are too simplistic for their purpose, and should be split into multiple small buildings.  I'm not versed in the process of refining oil, but assuming it requires some kind of reaction and heating process, the refinery could easily be re-purposed into a reaction chamber while a new heating vat could be created.  Make the reactor operate continuously while the heating chamber operates in batches and you've already added some depth in design to the oil refinery without making it significantly more complicated to build

That doesn't sound like interesting depth so far, that sounds like pseudo-depth.  Real depth would have been toning down the old oil crackers instead of obliterating them, so that building a custom oil cracker would still be more energy efficient than just running the single building, but not an order of magnitude more efficient. Just splitting up into more buildings is mainly cosmetic, if we want to add depth to 'magic boxes' we need to add complexity by making them react to input conditions in a more complex way, i.e., the way crops used to have ranges of acceptable conditions, make a range of acceptable temps to go into the distillation chamber, for example, could even have the efficiency of the reaction inside that magic box vary according to a curve depending on that temperature.  You referenced the fact that that input ranges don't matter earlier but instead of proposing they be made to matter you proposed splitting one machine into a bunch of little machines.  Wouldn't the first step to tackle the problem 'input conditions don't matter' simply be to make them matter?  I suppose in a sense this would add more small machines to the process, i.e. if we add temperature pre-conditions to the existing oil refinery, then people would build a precooler/preheater step before the refinery.

Edited August 24, 2018 by trukogre

[AzeTheGreat]

2 minutes ago, trukogre said:

That doesn't sound like interesting depth, that sounds like pseudo-depth.  Real depth would have been toning down the old oil crackers instead of obliterating them, so that building a custom oil cracker would still be more energy efficient than just running the single building, but not an order of magnitude more efficient.

Well it depends entirely on how it's implemented.  You're right that if it's just heating vat -> reactor then it's quite boring, and adds nothing to the game.  That's why I tried to expand on it a little. 

Lets say our heating vat works as a batch system, while the reactor is continuous.  So you pump in oil to the heating system, when it's full it heats for a while, then it pumps out your sour gas.  So the most basic setup of heating vat -> reactor still works for an initial setup, but you're going to have large downtimes, and it's far from optimal.

This immediately introduces more depth.  One potential solution is using two heating chambers, and using automation to alternate between the two (one outputting gas while the other fills/heats).  That gives you a much more even flow, at the cost of greater design considerations.  Maybe instead of automation, you decide to use multiple gas tanks to act as a buffer and cover your downtime.  Then, as long as your average sour gas production exceeds demand, you'll be covered.  That's not a ton of depth, but this also does something else important: introduces the ability for logistical depth as stuff scales up.  This is something that Factorio does extremely well, and ONI does horribly - small operations are easy, but as you scale up balancing resource flow and distribution becomes more challenging.  Scaling beyond anything more than 1000g/s of sour gas flow would require more design adjustments than just attaching more machines to the same piping infrastructure.

And that's just the start - think about dealing with heat now.  If the sour gas comes out hot (as it should), then you have to deal with it.  At low throughputs, just letting the environment cool it is probably more than enough, but as we scale up maybe we need to send it through an aquatuner to handle the heat quickly enough.  But maybe the reactor could have an ideal temperature, causing it to work faster or give better conversions?  That could encourage separating the cooling so that the target temperature could be more accurately reached, and cooling the sour gas through a heat exchanger built with radiant pipes.  Maybe that ideal heat is close to some explosive threshold (seriously can we get explosions and fires?), making it a risk vs reward - push it too far without proper safety mechanisms and it could go boom.  Then that ties back into the additional heating vat vs gas storage I pointed out earlier - storing more gas is inherently less safe and could cause a bigger explosion.

And that's just exploring a couple possibilities for depth...if reactions could have catalysts and different reaction pathways, then that introduces additional choices.  Maybe we use a byproduct in a different process, or maybe we use it as a recycle stream.  The germ system could probably be adjusted slightly to create a contaminant system so that filtration becomes an option.  Hopefully this shows how it could easily introduce depth, without making early designs an insurmountable hurdle for new players.

[trukogre]

Looks like I edited my comment with the same idea you responded with, so it's a pretty obvious idea.  "But maybe the reactor could have an ideal temperature, causing it to work faster or give better conversions? "  Given proper tuning, the ideal input temp with lessening efficiency outside it could eliminate some of the fixed-output temp complaints as well.  It's kinda a no-brainer...perhaps we should pause here to see if anyone dislikes the idea.

 

p.s.  if you're talking about 'dealing with sour gas' productively, that should involve removing the sulfur, which would turn it back into sweet natural gas.  sour gas liquifying into naphta makes no sense whatsoever, sour gas is just natural gas with like .1% hydrogen sulfide, it takes a very small amount of H2S to make the gas unusable as H2S is so corrosive.  Technically crude oil with a high sulfur content is also called sour crude, but the ppm of sulfur in crude oil before it's called 'sour' is much much higher as compared to natural gas.  The other strange thing about ONI terminology  is that naphta IRL is actually the main component of gasoline, I mean honestly here in the US if I'm reading a newspaper, petroleum = crude oil, and naphta = main ingredient in gasoline = what you put in your car as fuel.  what you put in yoru car is basically naphta plus a smaller amount of reformate, which is basically naphta which goes through a catalytic process that converts paraffins to alkanes, raising the octane rating, plus some other streams blended in to arrive at the proper blend.

 

Edited August 24, 2018 by trukogre

[mithrilsword1]

I have to say I am rather disappointed with this upgrade so far. But before I get into that let's talk about some of the pros:

PROS

• Rockets
• New job branch
• Advanced research

Now let's talk about the cons:

CONS

• You can not actually see the planets the duplicants travel to
• Rockets only require fuel
• No way to assign astronauts to a rocket

I feel like this update could lay the groundwork for later updates but the might not also be the case. I think that Klei should stop adding new things and start revamping old systems. For example, its been over a year since the outbreak upgrade and we still only have two diseases. We also have medbays but no doctor jobs. There is also almost no expansion on the abandoned bases the added in. Finally, they have yet to further things like farming, ranching, and duplicant interaction which were all improved but not completed. I am worried that they might expaned on the rockets and these new places the rockets can go but stop focusing on the asteroid that you are actually basing on. I really wanted an upgrade like this but the fact that you can't actual control the duplicants on their missions and the fact that this means focus might shift away from a lot of the incomplete systems implemented at the start disappoints me quite a bit. Hopefully, Klei will improve at least the rockets before the upgrade.

Edited August 25, 2018 by mithrilsword1

[Ceerberus]

May I suggest to Klei to make the "Industrial Storage" research tree available at the early stages of the game either move it after the "Distillation" research tree or after "Decontamination" research tree please and thank you. Other than that I am happy with this update and thankful for your efforts in making this game fun to play. Hope for more updates, tweaks and fixes to come.

Edited August 25, 2018 by Ceerberus
Tool tip for materials that gives bonus decor has a "+0" on them but they will still apply their bonus to decors.

[TG pro]

19 hours ago, BlueLance said:

I dno if your meaning that for regolith or the actual update XD

The update

[AndreyKl]

Update review:

I like changes so far but they seem like basics of the basics ground work.

Pros:

• Rockets!
• Art (observatory is really nice)
• Finally some liquid/gass buffers!
• Starmap UI is nicely done (sophistication/infomation relation seems to be just right)

Cons:

• While it is nice to have advanced research, observatory feels like it is mispurposed, would have been better to use it to spot and lock onto asteroids and use some kind of rocket lab for research (or some materials from asteroids, perhaps a job for piloting rockets and job for getting science mid-flight? research related section for the rocket?).
• Travel time simse fixed. It would have been nice for travel time to depend onto distance and task - flight time plus work time. Flight takes too long? Get better pilot or better engine. Work takes to long? Reduce amount of containers, add more crew or use skilled crew. Additionally would have been nice for trip to require some water/oxygen/food supplies.
• Cargo gain and fuel consumption are fixed (cargo gained per container, fuel spent whole, but hopefully it is temporary)
• Automation is non existent at this point (but I suspect it will be fixed with time)
• No randomly generated asteroids and height is fixed
• At the moment all space travels are simply 'trades' of fuel for resources, I do understand that players won't 'personaly visit' each asteroid either way (they will get tired of simply mining each rock personally), but it still should be nice to have some visitable locations

P.S. If you launch Starmap UI after loading, there will be some kind of organing planet selected (actual selection is 'none') and info about it says something about visiting planet to learn more about it (research and research module mentioned).

Edited August 29, 2018 by AndreyKl

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

On 23-8-2018 at 9:05 PM, chemie said:

What are the steel changes?  Hopefully not needing eggshells

They cut you halfway: you can either use eggshells to get lime, or dig up the new element fossil in the worldgen. 100 fossil will get you the grand total of 5 lime (and 95 sedimentary rock). You'll be swimming and choking in the steel with this! #sarcasm

[Xenologist]

Fossils Dun dun dun (tape rewind) Fossils Dun dun dun 

You can (Mysteriously) Make tiles out of dead critters. Fossils? For some odd reason, RAW MINERAL. Why? Why not make a critter that can be killed for fossils. Maybe it eats lime. Maybe eggshells? What ever it is, it could die and become fossil, or eat a substance that rivals or is an end product (And most requested in steel production) It could eat lime and make fossils that double lime. Would be an infinite way of raw mineral ( Fossil 200 kg -> 10 kg lime 190 kg sediment rock -> New critter -> 10 kg lime -> 400 kg fossil 1 kg lime = 40 kg fossil) This would solve a few problems, and could kickstart endless production of lime/sedimentary rock/fossil. This would render ranching not completely useless, and the egg shell could still be used (Who knows, maybe it would turn meat into lime or fossil at a 1 to 1 ratio, or whatever makes sense. 2 kg meat could make 10 kg fossil)

[Sasza22]

34 minutes ago, zergologist said:

Why not make a critter that can be killed for fossils

Kill a critter. Bury it underground and apply pressure. After 10000 years it becomes a fossil.

 

36 minutes ago, zergologist said:

For some odd reason, RAW MINERAL. Why?

Actually lime currently uses the same art as raw minerals and it`s descripiton says it is useful for construction (nothing about steel production). This makes me think it will eventually become a raw mineral and steel will get rebalanced. I think bunker tiles will eventually require both steel and concrete with the latter using lime instead.

[TG pro]

Pros: moo

Spoiler

Do I need to create a new world? 

 

[Christophlette]

48 minutes ago, TG pro said:

Pros: moo

  Hide contents

Do I need to create a new world? 

 

The new world generation only add fossil. It's a mineral that can be refined in sedimentary rock and lime. It helps a bit to have more steel but you still need to ranch to get the amount you need. 

So I would say no but beware that your save cannot be loaded again in EU if you convert it. 

As for now, there is still some crashes that makes the preview a bit tedious 

[TG pro]

1 hour ago, Christophlette said:

The new world generation only add fossil. It's a mineral that can be refined in sedimentary rock and lime. It helps a bit to have more steel but you still need to ranch to get the amount you need. 

So I would say no but beware that your save cannot be loaded again in EU if you convert it. 

As for now, there is still some crashes that makes the preview a bit tedious 

I meant after the testing branch 

Thx

Edited August 26, 2018 by TG pro

[chemie]

16 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

They cut you halfway: you can either use eggshells to get lime, or dig up the new element fossil in the worldgen. 100 fossil will get you the grand total of 5 lime (and 95 sedimentary rock). You'll be swimming and choking in the steel with this! #sarcasm

So we will need to use fish farming exploits to make rockets.  That's good game design

[Carnis]

Big missed opportunity with rocketry was adding liquid oxygen as Fuel.

There already were billion builds out there By players and no magic box.

[watermelen671]

On 8/24/2018 at 11:56 PM, mithrilsword1 said:

[snip]

FINALLY! Someone who's able to give actual solid constructive criticism, and provide suggestions to make it better, rather than just saying the upgrade's bare bones and calling it a night.

Let this be a note to everybody! When making constructive criticism you:

-Point out what you like

-What you don't like

-Elaborate on why you don't like it

-Make suggestions on how it could be improved

Spoiler

I honestly dunno why it's so hard for some people to do that...do they just think saying that the upgrade sucks, or that it's lacking...do they think that's enough feedback for the devs to go on? 

Spoiler

I would insert my dupe thonk here, but I'm currently on mobile...I'm already nonsensically rambling, and this post is borderline ranting.

...sorry about that by the way, but I REALLY needed to get that off my chest. ^^;

 

 

Edited August 26, 2018 by watermelen671
Syntax and Redundancy

[Bizzum22]

On 8/24/2018 at 10:56 PM, mithrilsword1 said:

I have to say I am rather disappointed with this upgrade so far. But before I get into that let's talk about some of the pros:

PROS

• Rockets
• New job branch
• Advanced research

Now let's talk about the cons:

CONS

• You can not actually see the planets the duplicants travel to
• Rockets only require fuel
• No way to assign astronauts to a rocket

I feel like this update could lay the groundwork for later updates but the might not also be the case. I think that Klei should stop adding new things and start revamping old systems. For example, its been over a year since the outbreak upgrade and we still only have two diseases. We also have medbays but no doctor jobs. There is also almost no expansion on the abandoned bases the added in. Finally, they have yet to further things like farming, ranching, and duplicant interaction which were all improved but not completed. I am worried that they might expaned on the rockets and these new places the rockets can go but stop focusing on the asteroid that you are actually basing on. I really wanted an upgrade like this but the fact that you can't actual control the duplicants on their missions and the fact that this means focus might shift away from a lot of the incomplete systems implemented at the start disappoints me quite a bit. Hopefully, Klei will improve at least the rockets before the upgrade.

i think the debug worlds should be the planets we visit like the ice planets can be helecona world, sorry if thats spelled wrong

[zerat]

So I actually kind of sympathize with the sour gas frustration for one (and only one) reason, and it's that the sour gas has absolutely no use.  Were it not for that,, I don't think I'd mind all that much.

I think a lot of people have kind of missed the point though with regards to oil boilers though.  yeah it turned oil into power at an absurd ratio compared to the alternatives, and there is some argument for nerfing how good they were without completely removing the oil boiling mechanic from the game entirely, punishing players who were making elaborate endgame machines.  That actually happened though.  With a little bit of redesign (and even more elaborate machinery) oil boilers can be made to stop heating once petroleum is produced.  This is of course useful for rockets and plastic, but it's also a power source via the much worse petroleum generator--thereby nerfing the ratio by making us use petroleum instead.

I guess my message is to make lemonade.  I've got a pencil and paper right now figuring out how I want my new design to work.  There's a lot of doom and gloom in this thread which I think is a bit misplaced.  I do hope sour gas (and naphtha, while we're at it) actually get some use though; it sort of seems silly to have it in the game otherwise.

As for the specific heat capacity and polluted water discussion, the whole point is moot--venting hot stuff into space is plenty cooling to freeze over even the most elaborate 5fps cycle 5000 asteroid.  Previously we were limited by how much liquid and gas entered our map, but with rockets now I'm not so sure.

I'll spare you all the pun about being sour about sour gas.

[AndreyKl]

On ‎8‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 4:08 PM, zerat said:

sour gas has absolutely no use

Unlikely that it will remain this way. Clorine also started as almost useless and now is needed as atmosphere for some plants, as liquid fertilizer for others and as anti-microbe solution.

P.S. Methane also has no uses at the moment, but likely will be rocket fuel.

Edited August 28, 2018 by AndreyKl

[Grimgaw]

3 hours ago, AndreyKl said:

Unlikely that it will remain this way. Clorine also started as almost useless and now is needed as atmosphere for some plants, as liquid fertilizer for others and as anti-microbe solution.

P.S. Methane also has no uses at the moment, but likely will be rocket fuel.

7 upgrades later Naphtha still has no use. 

[AndreyKl]

49 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

7 upgrades later Naphtha still has no use. 

Naphtha can be either a 'waste' product (since it is spoiled plastic) or part of some kind of advanced oil refining which we lacks tech base for... I suspect it is more like 'petroleum tar' thus won't have any uses on asteroid sans may be medical.

[FutureJohny]

I would like to see some advanced refining. As the oil processing is now, my greatest issue is refinery deleting mass and naphta and now sour gas being useless. 

What I would suggest is, making refinery to have aditional output for naphta. And output half of it's input there. Cut the nat gas output or at least add gas pipe output for it.

For naphta I would add new building, some cooker with liqiud input and gas output, producing hot sour gas.

Finally for the sour gas I would add filtering building, taking in sour gas and filtration medium or water and piped sour gas and outputing natgas and some solid waste or p. water.

This will stop the mass deletion of current buildings and keep oil boilers still viable option but keep everything in check, since more processing and more power would be needed to reach usefull product.