A bit too complex/hard to read

[Izzy248]

First, I'll start off by saying I know I have the unpopular opinion here. But I still feel like I need to address it not only for myself but newcomers.

So I had the game and put it down for a while, and I'm aware of how much they update the game but man it seems like it's been lightyears since I've played with the amount of things that have changed and been added. I only stopped for a few months but you would have thought it was at least a year or two. 

 

Granted, the game was a bit difficult for me to grasp before but now it seems near impossible to get into anymore...everything is just so overwhelming. It's hard to tell where to start, what to build and how to build what properly so that it works. I feel like I need a well drawn out schematic just so I can have a semblance of how to fully utilise something. I gave my friends access to the game for a week to see how they faired in it and some of them quit within the first day or two, and the others couldn't wrap their head around it. I personally still find the game interesting, but feel like the learning curve is far too high. I still dont get the full use of the automatons and how to properly implement some structures, and even some of the basic stuff like properly getting wiring flowing through my building sometimes becomes an issue. Let alone juggling all the other hurdles like transferring heat let off from machines throughout the base, dealing with disease and germs, properly ventilating the cold/hot air throughout the base, filtering hydrogen and other gases, etc. It all becomes a lot to take in and given you have to do so all at once because every single second counts and the slightest mistake means either the loss of dupes or the loss of functions in your building your constantly working at a frenetic pace, the game becomes a bit much to handle quickly and draws some out from what I've seen.

 

Once again, I love the game and now that Ive started playing it again I'm still enjoying it even though I barely understand most things. But I feel there should be a bit of stepping system so everything isn't hitting you all at once and the learning curve doesnt feel so steep.

[babba]

Understandable. Being an experienced player myself I often play with "No stress reactions" and such settings, as its my personal play preference. I haven't played the current new rocketry test builds yet, I read on the forum that it's now possible to set the game to "easy" in an simplified menu before game launch. I also can recommend to play the game in debug god mode, to learn and test how everything works, especially if one plays with dozens or hundreds of dupes and one wants to see what works or fails on a larger scale ( Example: Giant automized mushroom farm covering 25% map size and such projects ). Enjoy

PS: There is still no way to generate daily gigatons of Slime for my monster mushroom farm Even a thousand Puffts just produce a fraction what I need per day. There is still certain substance which are finite in the game.I read that "The steel situation" got better, so I will start playing the game again. Please implement a new industrial way to aquire, generate, convert, steal or buy Slime on a large scale in the game, thank you. Currently I add 300000 tons of Slime every now and then via god mode.

I saw the Utube rocketry stuff and will enjoy getting in to fuel mass production and building heat launch containments, launch pad cooling solutions. Game on! 

 

[Sasza22]

The game might be overwhelming for new players. One of the reasons i didn`t wait for full release but joined early when it was easier to grasp. I can say watching the game on twitch helps but if you don`t know what the streamer is planning to do you can get even more confused.

So lets make it simple. The goal is to survive. You die - you learn what you did wrong. The starting zone has everything you need for quite a while depending on how many dupes you print. Outside there are dangers (heat, slimelung, lava, meteors, more heat) the game doesn`t do a good job explaining the risks so you have to fail before you understand how to fight them. The problem is how long it takes. Players might give up after 10 hrs of failed attempts. At least now we have an easy option visible to new players but there`s still a lot that needs to be done in terms of tutorials.

1 hour ago, babba said:

There is still no way to generate daily gigatons of Slime for my monster mushroom farm

I`m not sure but there`s some kind of biomass asteroid you can send your rockets to. Maybe that`s a potential source of infinite slime.

[babba]

Thanks for the rocket hint, dear Saza22

For anyone finding the game to overwhelming, in the options things can be switched off or deactivated. I played very long without debug mode, believing that it would break the immersion for me. To be honest, I enjoy the game much more now with debug access, it's feels more like the time of playing Populous 30 years ago - A god game. There is game content which currently leads to dead ends and the only solution to continue (for me) is the god mode. IMHO basically finite Steel and Slime are such resource dead ends, need to check out with the Rocketry update if those resources are now available in large scale and for long term gameplay. It would be great if resources could be traded, with a terrible conversation rate or costing an insane amount of energy for conversion and such. Being able to pay with resources for the delivery of an oil transport ship and such things would be awesome. It just needs to be very expensive and/or be a long way in to the game to be able to trade, exchange or have deliveries. I'm also keen on more game desasters and ingame content/tools to prevent, contain or counter them. 

[blash365]

As already said you can select an easier game mode at the start.

Other than that nobody forces you to build the perfect base in your very first game. Why not start out simple? Run your base with 3 dupes and see how you can manage.

You need food? Dig out some muckroots/harvest mealwood.

You need oxygen? Dig through to the next oxilite cave.

Let the needs of your small dupe population drive you through the game. As long as you have only few dupes, the consequences should be manageable.

Eventually you will fail and will add this token of experience to your strategy in your next colony.

[Kunio]

I failed plenty of bases starting out. Even now after almost 800 hours I can start a new base, and things just dont seem right / theres a volcano under my printing pod or whatever so ill roll a new seed after a few cycles. It's part of the challenge of the game. I've learned a lot from watching youtube or reading forums and just trying over and over. 

My current bases go like this. I build all of the stuff I know how to build with slight improvements each time and then I branch out and build stuff I've never tried before, or build things in a different way.

New Player Tips: 

- Use algae deoxidizer, no terrariums.

- Insulate your base with an Abyssalite shell or insulated Igneous rock (build a barrier around your base)

- Try not to dig straight up or open huge spaces and let your oxygen flow out. If you have to go up to get copper or w/e you need in the starting biome, sweep it up then build a block or a door on the ladder so  your oxygen pressurizes the rooms you use, not all the open space you just dug out.

- Build bathrooms and have wash basins / sinks on the way OUT of your bathroom. Compost behind the outhouses, enough sinks for each toilet. I start with 3/3.

- Don't worry too much about the polluted oxygen in your base from the wash basin bottles. I usually just put a few deodorizers around and as long as you aren't letting slime lung in its basically giving you extra oxygen. Eventually I just dump it into a pit somewhere/switch to plumped lavatories.

- Stick with your starting dupes for as long as you can until you are stable.

- Grow a bunch of mealwood and keep cooking it into lifeloaf until you have another food source. Stash it in fridge/ration box in Co2. I usually make a room with a waterlock or just have the door at the top and make it a deep pit-like room. You can pump all your early co2 in here.

- Learn how to build waterlocks. 

- Don't touch slime until you have exosuits as a new player. Stash all slime / bleach stone in a compactor under water.

- Get a hatch ranch going asap and use coal generators with smart batteries. Coal gen > automation wire > smart battery. Set battery value to 70 (what i usually do) it will only run the coal gen to recharge the battery when it drops to 70.

- Plan out your design a bit. I use rooms that are 4 tiles high and try to have decent symmetry. Anything works, but it helps me stay organized / fits most things.

- Use your room bonuses and get your decor up.

- Leave yourself room for pipes/wires. I usually leave 3 spaces between rooms. Room > ladder > firepole > ladder > Room. This will allow nice pathways for piping / a space for a transit tube down the road.

- When exploring, dig through the Abyssalite veins. You'll need plenty of Abyssalite and it will protect heat transfer/gases going everywhere.

- Try not to get frustrated. You are dumped into an asteroid with nothing. Its gonna be challenging to sustain yourself at first, but there is plenty of game out there to enjoy.

 

[babba]

FYI ...just now checked in the Rocketry Preview Build - The "No sweat" setting puts everything on easy, ideal for new players or advanced ones which dont want to be bothered with certain things. Enjoy

[Lumina]

I do think there will still be a need for a more complete tutorial, there is a lot to learn, a lot to understand in this game. I started in the alpha, and i play every now and then and i'm often lost, so it will be hard for new players that will have a lot of content at once.

Since it's still EA, i strongly expect this kind of things to be improved over time, anyway. It's just a feedback, i do think that the need is here and strong for better tutorial or guides about the game.

[Bagdar]

Yo empece viendo videos de youtube de Iepcast que lo explica todo y de forma exelente, tenia una serie de 20+ episodios, y aprendi casi todo desde ahi. Luego empece mi propia base y fue morir y morir alrededor de los ciclos 300 por diversos motivos, aunque mas que todo por falta de agua. 

Acualmente he aprendido tanto que tengo una colonia de 13 personas en el ciclo 1300 y pueden sobrevivir infinitamente, y salvo por un techo que me queda hacer de acero (11 casillas) no hay mas nada para hacer en el mapa. 

Lo unico que espero es que mi colonia se adapte bien a la nueva actualizacion y no verme en la obligacion de reiniciar todo. 

[Izzy248]

19 hours ago, babba said:

Understandable. Being an experienced player myself I often play with "No stress reactions" and such settings, as its my personal play preference. I haven't played the current new rocketry test builds yet, I read on the forum that it's now possible to set the game to "easy" in an simplified menu before game launch. I also can recommend to play the game in debug god mode, to learn and test how everything works, especially if one plays with dozens or hundreds of dupes and one wants to see what works or fails on a larger scale ( Example: Giant automized mushroom farm covering 25% map size and such projects ). Enjoy

PS: There is still no way to generate daily gigatons of Slime for my monster mushroom farm Even a thousand Puffts just produce a fraction what I need per day. There is still certain substance which are finite in the game.I read that "The steel situation" got better, so I will start playing the game again. Please implement a new industrial way to aquire, generate, convert, steal or buy Slime on a large scale in the game, thank you. Currently I add 300000 tons of Slime every now and then via god mode.

I saw the Utube rocketry stuff and will enjoy getting in to fuel mass production and building heat launch containments, launch pad cooling solutions. Game on! 

 

That "easy" mode thing would be interesting to see if it's true. I'll have to check later. Also I've tried building things with god mode and while sometimes it helps me understand them a tad better, actually implement them into a base in regular mode is another beast. As doing so seems to come with hurdles, if you can even get to that point in the first place.

[Enno]

One of the things I do if I want to have a relaxing asteroid, is to just unlock all of the Research. After that I don't touch the debug anymore (well besides putting a steel layer on top to secure against the meteor showers). 

This way I don't have to worry about machinery and fixing issues, but I can focus on other things. I still have to fix things but I have the technology and don't have to always worry about a temporary solution. 

I often had the feeling that I was just trying to fix a problem and immediately had to rush to the next one until everything collapsed. This does not happen anymore and I think I learned a lot about the game this way. 

[BlueLance]

I think one of the other things is that a lot of people probably are not used to the whole "You die and start over and learn from the mistakes" mechanic. Dying to me is probably the biggest teacher, if you are not dying you are either not learning "(Because you know everything) or you are not experimenting (Fear of dying I suppose) I used to be the latter but then i started taking risks, trying builds etc and having more fun experimenting

[Djoums]

2 hours ago, Izzy248 said:

That "easy" mode thing would be interesting to see if it's true. I'll have to check later. Also I've tried building things with god mode and while sometimes it helps me understand them a tad better, actually implement them into a base in regular mode is another beast. As doing so seems to come with hurdles, if you can even get to that point in the first place.

Actually it's already in the game, when you start a new game go into the custom game tab, you can reduce the difficulty settings there. Dupes can become immune to germs, to morale etc.

[Kabrute]

58 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

I think one of the other things is that a lot of people probably are not used to the whole "You die and start over and learn from the mistakes" mechanic. Dying to me is probably the biggest teacher, if you are not dying you are either not learning "(Because you know everything) or you are not experimenting (Fear of dying I suppose) I used to be the latter but then i started taking risks, trying builds etc and having more fun experimenting

This was me until the devs began systematically removing each bonus or benefit of tactical thinking, not nerfing, not rethinking, smashing with rediculous hammers then moving on like none of it ever mattered while not providing functional systems in what they give for their replacement.  Instead we are left with hacky patch overly exploitative(either needs exploits or becomes them) swill that I would rather flush than both rehashing.  By grabbing game files from various updates and using the mod loader i've begun compiling "Science sold separately"

TLDR; I think the game is broken

[BlueLance]

I don't need or use exploits, but I do feel that the game has lost a lot of creativity that it used to have.

Although i do welcome the change that came to fertiliser synthesizers and nat gas boilers, yes the magma boilers were a great design, but it literally became a copy paste power system which overshadowed all others. 

 

[NathairNimheil]

4 hours ago, BlueLance said:

Dying to me is probably the biggest teacher, if you are not dying you are either not learning

1

Exactly so. We always tell our seven year old," you either win or you learn" (and, needless to say, he has done a lot of "learning" in ONI.)  If my seven year old finds the game challenging but fun then I'd submit that people saying it is "broken" are saying more about their own approach than they are about the game itself.

[babba]

On the exploits issue, personally I dont look them up and Im not interested in knowing about exploits.If want to have an easier life I can run the game in debug by just pressing a key. Of course, if no debug would be available in this game - Maybe I would look for exploits in the internet if I would not manage to solve a problem in the game. But thats me...

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 8/28/2018 at 5:23 AM, babba said:

PS: There is still no way to generate daily gigatons of Slime for my monster mushroom farm Even a thousand Puffts just produce a fraction what I need per day. There is still certain substance which are finite in the game.I read that "The steel situation" got better, so I will start playing the game again. Please implement a new industrial way to aquire, generate, convert, steal or buy Slime on a large scale in the game, thank you. Currently I add 300000 tons of Slime every now and then via god mode.

Hmmm.  I have a mushroom farm that supports a dozen dupes.  The 'shrooms use slime from 4 to 5  tame pufts -- and there's always plenty of slime.  Here's what worked for me:

1. Keep the PO2 pressure in your puft room above 2kg per square.  This keeps the slime from sublimating.
2. Use rails in side walls to transport the slime so that it can't sublimate on its way to the 'shrooms.
3. Keep the 'shroom pressure above 2kg CO2/square.  Again, prevents sublimation.

[babba]

Thanks Kitten. Im afraid I have built such designs with 1000 pufts in debug.

I played without debug for 1000 cycles on my giant mushroom farm, by then my mushroom farm had reached the size of 25% of the map. The Slime basically was finite, it was all dug out...No more Slime to feed my mushrooms, no more supply for my dupes ( also to reach the amount of 100 dupes I played naturally without debug, it took a 100 years to have 100 dupes ). Is it possible to aquire the finite Slime now in the rocketry update ? Im talking of adding 100000 tons of Slime every now and then.

I would love to see a trading option in the game or some industrial new way to mass produce Slime on an large scale.

For me the problem with puffts is that most of my creatures are extinct as some point.I once played a few hundred cycles just building ranching stuff and taking care of creatures - Basically that killed my beloved focus of industry game play. For me ranching has also too high space requirements and is too much micromanagement for large scale production. I know ranching its very cute and perfect for more traditional smaller scale game play. I love that Klei puts all this in, to cater for a wide audience of players.

It seems the steel situation got better with the last update,I think I read somewhere that steel can now be somehow come from space ? The whole farming is nothing for me - Too low output, too much micro for me on pets, no satisfying experience for me I am afraid. Thanks again for your help, it surely will help others reading about it.

Game on

[KittenIsAGeek]

100 dupes? Wow. Um.. I usually limit my dupes to however much infrastructure I have to support them.  Mushrooms work great as a mid-range food and its fairly easy to keep up with the slime demands when you have 10 to 20 dupes -- especially if you're frying the mushrooms after.  However, I find that mushrooms are a supplemental food as you progress towards end-game bases.  You'll want a bit of everything -- mushrooms, bristle blooms, sleet wheat, pincha-peppers, meat.. 

I've found it is a LOT easier to keep dupes fed and happy with a wide variety of foods on the map rather than one single "plenty of food for everyone" farm.  Others may feel different, but I've never managed to feed a base with a single food type.

Spoiler

In my current base, I'm up to 8 dupes on cycle 40 and I've got 193000 kcal surplus.

[babba]

Yeah, I fully understand you and I know there is lots of players which will enjoy exactly what you have described. I think the problem, at least for me, is that certain substances are currently finite.

So I would love to have additional ways, next to the current options of mining a finite substance out of the map and/or playing ranching style.

Im soooo looking forward to get in to mass fuel production in the next days and to work on rockets + containing the launch heat...I saw the launch heat spreading on Youtube in the thermal overlay.

*Im handing over a nice hot coffee for you* as you are helpful my friend 

[KittenIsAGeek]

Well, if you have a reasonable number of dupes, you can feed them mushrooms forever -- as long as you don't need the 'good food' morale bonus.  I used the off-gas from polluted water to provide PO2 for my pufts.  The trick was keeping the off-gas room pressure low enough for PO2 to build up, and keeping the pufts room pressure high.  At 15kg of slime per day per puft (Regular, not "Prince"), one puft can produce enough slime for almost 4 'shrooms (3.75).  You need 2.68 shrooms per dupe (with fried shrooms).  So, with 4 pufts, that's 15 shrooms which can feed 5.6 dupes.  27 shrooms will feed 10 dupes -- 7 pufts and a prince will give a very slight excess in slime.  Very easily ranchable.  

These numbers were without a dedicated farmer, so you could do better if you've got fertilizer to spare.  Also, you have to be able to produce 30kg of PO2 PER PUFT per cycle using whatever methods you prefer.  If its morbs or rivers of PO2, whatever you chose if your pufts aren't getting enough PO2, they won't produce enough slime.  

For 20 or 30 dupes, its still easily do-able.  But after that, your rate of PO2 production becomes a major bottle-neck.