Various Suggestions (Mostly Quality-Of-Life)

[Yushatak]

Instead of spamming topics for each suggestion (do let me know if that's preferred, seems to vary by place), here's my input at present after many hours of gameplay, especially recently. I do apologize if some of these have been said or announced or etc., I haven't had the time to read through all of the existing suggestions and such.

Add a medical job line, "Nurse", "Doctor", "Surgeon".
"Medical" skill renamed from "Kindness" or newly added so that it can be used for both what it was before as well as the Apothecary (and any other medical stuff added later). If kindness is used for other things like social or something at present then maintain it as its own stat.
Can add requirements for job level for using medical buildings - the pod could require "Doctor", for example. Perhaps the Med-Bed would require "Nurse" and then duplicants could use regular cots to rest and be cared for but with a very minimal effect compared to a real Med-Bed?

Label all tasks (mouse-over tooltip?) with what stat and/or job is relevant for them so that you can tell. Some things are very ambiguous/unlabeled, such as the Apothecary.

Ability to swap priority/sub-priority so that what is presently "Sub-Priority" takes precedence over the duplicant priorities. I.e., instead of seeing if there are any tasks for each highest priority skill first, then checking task priority, it would see what jobs are priority 9, then check which is a priority for said duplicant, then move down from there.

Ability to set global priority for each structure, probably added as a click-through 1-9 button on the same UI "tile" that the "Build" button resides on. Changing one of these will change the priority of every placed instance of the building to whatever the value of that button now reads when "Apply" is hit (i.e., if you want to change all Algae Terrariums to "7", changing the button to read "7" and hitting "Apply" would do that to all existing ones). The reasoning for the apply button is in case you want to use the below option(s) but not change existing buildings' priority assignment.

Checkbox for each building to use its global priority for its build task's priority by default (this makes sense in many/most cases to do).

Checkbox for build tasks to maintain their assigned priority after being built OR perhaps instead just allowing you to assign the priority of an as-yet-unconstructed building for when it is complete.

Perhaps add a distinction between "infrastructure" buildings and regular ones (where infrastructure is wiring, piping, generators, pumps, etc.) and add this as an engineer-related task?

Add a "Repair" priority option - I find that repairs are always very low priority, forcing me to do things like build wires around existing wires that break to avoid waiting for the repairs to get done forever. I'd like repairs to always be top priority, personally, so being able to adjust this would be nice. Perhaps repairs should be tied into the "Engineer" job (to flesh it out, and also then use "Tinkering") or given their own job? If "Infrastructure" building idea above is used and made engineer-specific then a corresponding "Infrastructure Repair" option would be relevant here.

Perhaps make wiring be engineer-related, piping be plumber-related, etc. to make it harder to tech up and to give more use to these jobs, much like the advanced wiring requires an electrician at present? Haven't considered all of the implications of this, just a thought.

[Yushatak]

It would be good if there were a way to prevent duplicants from dying due to unexpected fallen sand that blocks a path to air or food when the duplicants are perfectly capable of mining the sand. It's annoying to lose great duplicants to this when you put a mining order and are looking elsewhere only to hear that your guys are dying and look to see that. Perhaps make sand that falls (as a result of a mining/building order) automatically marked as "Dig", or make miners do that, or make it an option..?

Similarly, apparently duplicants won't go to a med-bed on their own when wounded, instead walking around and doing work very impaired - not as severe, but it would be good if there were an option (perhaps on the med-bed you could mark it as "Injuries Allowed" or something?) or if they behaved as when sick. I also noticed that when injured and sick a duplicant may be assigned to the pharma chamber automatically rather than a med-bed, which is inconvenient as it only helps with part of their issues - this is likely related to the game not automatically having duplicants treat injuries like they do with sickness.

This one gets a bit confusing to read, apologies for that.. Another instance is when duplicants are mining or building, they are capable of closing themselves in or stranding themselves on a platform. When a build order is being executed they should run a check to see if either side of a tile or other solid block to be built will be in a closed space (taking other build orders into account to avoid it happening if there are two blocks to build and they walk inside and build one of them), and if so then prefer to stand on the other side. For mining they should always stand on a block that is not marked to be mined out, and probably it would be best if they just refused to do a job as "Unreachable" if there was no block to stand on that wasn't slated for removal. They should also prioritize building blocks that will provide them an escape when they are building and have stranded themselves. I understand that in both cases it could still happen, but this would greatly reduce the chances.

When duplicants need food so badly that they will die before getting to a mess table, they should be able to eat on-the-spot. I've had many duplicants end up dead because they went far to grab food (ex. in a "wild" area where a mushroom dropped it naturally) and couldn't get back before running out of calories. Unless you can get a duplicant to go toggle the mess tables off they will continue to reassign themselves and head to the mess tables, and it's difficult to rectify this in the time it takes them to starve even if you're aware of the situation.

When duplicants need air there's some situational glitch in their pathing where they will run back and forth (possibly chasing a single tile of oxygen?) when they could be using that time to get to a reasonable area to breathe in. Unless there aren't other options, they should prefer more dense pockets of oxygen.

Finally, when a job is in an area with hot liquids/air and the "Scalding" effect applies, duplicants should retreat before getting to the point where they knock themselves unconscious. This would be consistent with the "Suffocating" behavior they exhibit, doing a job until they have a limited amount of air but not zero. Currently they will bullheadedly work in a hot environment until they collapse.

[Yushatak]

When duplicants go on a destroying rampage, it would be nice if there were an option to leave a repairable tile, build order or *some* kind of placeholder for a broken tile. Sometimes a tile can go unnoticed for a long time making you lose the benefit of a room or building until you do notice.

There are no progress bars for repairs.

Would be nice if there were a way to color-code pipes/wires/etc. so you could more easily trace them visually while setting them up, and also an ability to label them would be helpful.

Similar to the last one, being able to put down labels (in-world "signs" or just labels visible in an overlay) would be useful to note things for whatever reason (i.e., geyser under these blocks, etc.).

Tool for detaching a piece of pipe or wire from anything so it can be set up differently without having to deconstruct/construct it (can already do this if you remove adjacent, but why make us do that?).

Insulated and radiant gas and liquid bridges would be nice, seem missing at the moment.

Should be able to wrangle Morbs. It would be cool if they had eggs or varieties, or some other form of reproduction, but even if not, wrangling would be useful if you want to use them to generate oxygen. Haven't checked if traps work on them, but the game says they can be wrangled when they can't, so I'm not sure if I believe it when it also says traps work.

[Yushatak]

Add hostile creatures (maybe a difficulty setting for this) perhaps including crazed duplicants, perhaps a duplicant lashing out trait of violence where they attack other duplicants as well. Add holding cell where "tamed" creature joins you or becomes neutral depending on if a duplicant or not.

Add warrior/soldier job, maybe enhanced weapons to produce and armor to craft, move combat to that job from miner.

[Yushatak]

More on the issue of duplicants dying of stupidly-preventable situations..

I've observed this much more closely and noticed that one cause is when you assign miners a high priority to mine and low (or none, for instance if they are unconstructive) priority to build. They will mine things and only build if they run out of accessible mining jobs, which easily leads to trapping themselves without materials to perform any build jobs that could get them out if the materials assigned aren't on-site. If they took into account that the materials at the time of their decision making process to decide job sequence, they could decide to not mine certain blocks before others are built, whether they are going to build them or wait for someone else to do so. Assigning an equal priority to build as to digging prevents this issue 99% of the time when caused by this (there are other causes, though). Another good fix would be to have the algorithm that decides the job sequence do a check to see if there is a pathway back to significant oxygen at each step (cache the last one and check it first for performance, but I'm sure you know that). If there isn't after the next job to perform, have them consider that job "unreachable" or some similar new label.

I've lost several people to the above two instances of this issue, and also to starvation after becoming trapped due to these or other issues even when oxygen supply is good. The notice that a duplicant is starving needs work - it comes at <1000kcal, which seems OK in most situations, but this can happen even just because a duplicant goes to sleep around 1000kcal with no danger as they can eat in the morning and have spare kcal to go. It would be helpful to have a second category of notification that they are starving at 500kcal (maybe even another at around 200), and separate the notificafions into tiers with clear difference. Could be something like:

1000+kcal: No Notification

501-999kcal: "Hungry"

201-500kcal: "Severely Hungry"

1-200kcal: "Starvation"

Also, it is a huge issue that duplicants don't modify their priority based on needs. Even if I'm policing them and telling them to move or changing priorities by hand, they will always use the bathroom before eating, even at something like 16cal, seconds from death, they will ignore food if their bladder is full. An adjustment to the speed at which their hunger depletes could fix this, but since that will impact balance a lot it would probably be easier to shuffle priorities when a need is critical, and based on how critical that need is (needing to pee will never kill a duplicant in this game, so it should only take priority over eating when they're at 500cal with food available, and at 1000cal when there's a lack of food in the colony [to allow for competition for food and the need to work to prepare it]).

[Yushatak]

Could add plumbing piece to accept bottles on pipes, allowing duplicants to manually deliver things. Ex. polluted water to a sieve from a pool of polluted water that has a pitcher pump.

Should be able to deconstruct steel ladders, desks, etc., even if they drop nothing, just because they can be in the way.

Could add buildings for training duplicants in skills, for ex. treadmills to train athletics (possibly capped to +N to prevent abuse?), a library or bookshelf to train research (especially when all research tasks are done!), weights to train strength, etc..

Would be nice if duplicants could carry gas in a low-tech container the way they can with liquids - even if it was extremely inefficient. Could be absolute garbage amount when "mopping" gas if even allowed, more likely would require a compressor or a pump building. This would allow moving gas without laying a pipeline, though, which would be nice for hydrogen deposits or cleaning out chlorine, without having to set up a system if it's a small non-recurring amount.

Could add manual pumps for gas like there are for water (supplement to above). Speaking of which, could allow hooking a pipe to a water pump so that it can be pumped into pipes manually (more slowly and/or smaller packets on top of requiring a duplicant, should balance it out).

Battery or other power source that can be moved from place to place for temporary work? Maybe small power cells/batteries that can be carried to "generators" that just pull power from them and chargers that put power into them similar to bottles.

Gas/oil powered lighting/heating? Ice or snow-fueled cooling building?

[Yushatak]

Would be helpful to be able to assign groups of buildings together in groups, and/or tie multiple rooms together, so that you can assign a restroom and bed, maybe also a table to a duplicant as a batch rather than item-by-item if you'd like to make "apartments" for them with everything included (it's nice to do this for higher-level morale-requiring duplicants if you have disparately higher-requiring ones).

Real sick of them peeing in the water supply for one of many reasons - I know there are building tricks to avoid this, but it would be nice if there were any reasonably accessible avenue to fix this with. I vote bleach stone into the water -> dead germs, or alternatively liquid chlorine (which I tested and does not work).

[Yushatak]

Some way to determine what a pitcher pump's water may be used for.. I don't mind if crops get watered with food poisoned water, and sometimes it's worth it to pollute the air but not the food, etc.. I certainly don't care if we research crappy water, but wash basins don't need to be contaminated! There's so many times this is on my wishlist, especially early game with the wash basins. If you could hook pipes to research stations and algae terrariums, etc. this would be less of a want, or if you could deliver to a pipe and the delivery point had a way to associate with a particular pump or list thereof..

[Yushatak]

It would be great if there were "advanced" priorities for a building with multiple tasks, i.e., for a grill it could have "Supply", "Cook", "Repair", "Disinfect" priorities, which you could set to different values. This could be hidden away and control all of them as it does now, but allowing it to be more granular would enable more precise management. I find that I always set outhouses to 9, for example, to prevent duplicants from failing to unclog them. This causes them to manically disinfect them, though, which is wasteful sometimes. I also see duplicants constantly dropping what they're doing to go refill a food musher to make mush bars because I set it to 6 to encourage cooking and the task they are doing was a 5.

[Sasza22]

16 hours ago, Yushatak said:

I find that I always set outhouses to 9, for example, to prevent duplicants from failing to unclog them. This causes them to manically disinfect them, though, which is wasteful sometimes.

To prevent that i set my disinfect treshold higher. (i`m adding one 0 to the default number) It works pretty nice when it comes to random disinfection around the base.

[Yushatak]

5 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

To prevent that i set my disinfect treshold higher. (i`m adding one 0 to the default number) It works pretty nice when it comes to random disinfection around the base.

Problem with that is when there are items that are extremely prone to getting infected and you'd like to keep it lower. I suppose there are other ways to manage that, though, like preventing them from being infected with air gaps/etc..

Edit: Can you set the threshold differently for different buildings? it's never been clear to me whether that's universal or not, but it seems so based on observation and testing of mine. If not, it would be useful if there were a tool to set that from that overlay.

[YaBoiTem]

Give excess seeds a use for mid-late game. Id sugest either some form of seed oil to help with stress/morale or something like granola as an optional food source

[Yushatak]

13 hours ago, YaBoiTem said:

Give excess seeds a use for mid-late game. Id sugest either some form of seed oil to help with stress/morale or something like granola as an optional food source

Or could do one of two things:

-Require replanting the plants with seeds.

- Give a small chance for a plant to die spontaneously, and/or have plants die when in the "inactive" state where needs are not met for too long (health that goes down in that state, essentially).

Cool to see someone else posting here, didn't think that'd happen but I don't mind.

I came in to post this, though - when duplicants eat they often end up dropping food on the ground due to filling up their calories or needing air, etc.. It would be quite nice if they were allowed to put food away during the downtime phase. I know I could put one or more people on another schedule and they could clean up after the ones eating, but it would be far nicer if they'd just put the food away that they don't eat. I've fouind myself trying to make sure there's a layer of CO2 or chlorine to make the environment sterile for the dropped food. It's tempting to just put the eating areas in a CO2 pit, though that has a negative side for the duplicants.

As well, I think mess tables should be able to be assigned to a mess hall or great hall, similar to in the med-bay. If I want people to eat on shifts it still requires larger eating facilities, and it seems silly to spend that much metal so that each person only ever eats at the same seat and nobody can use their special spot. Makes sense with beds, but not mess tables to me.

[Yushatak]

Decorative blocks or "carpet" (pass-through tiles that require a surface) of algae (as it looks like grass), and cloth, maybe other materials like gold, etc.. These would increase decor but not increase run speed, as an alternative to the tiles. Perhaps the carpet tile/topper could remove the "Soggy Feet" effect, giving it another benefit/use.

When a coal generator is inaccessible, it will say "Insufficient Resources: Coal" and "Awaiting Delivery" (with an amount). Even if there is coal stored in the inaccessible location this occurs, amusingly. This message should probably read "Inaccessible Task" or something when the generator is entirely inaccessible.

In the gas overlay, please make the different gasses more differentiated. If the goal is a breathability overlay, then please make that a toggle and make a form of the overlay that makes it clear which gases are which with solid colors so that I can see where natural gas, chlorine, CO2, etc. are..

[Yushatak]

Found a need for a thing that doesn't exist - a plumbing structure that allows liquid to pour in like a mesh tile from one side, and gives you an attachment for a pipe. This would allow you to create interconnected tanks with interruptions, i.e., a water tank with three sections connected with these and pipes that acts as one large tank. Vertically this would act like a funnel from top to bottom, and from bottom to top it would allow you to handle overflow and direct it elsewhere.

I suppose you could probably create this effect with the new liquid container, vents, and mesh tiles used creatively, so possibly unnecessary. Already typed it out, though, so may as well post it in case it becomes relevant for another idea or spurs someone else to come up with a need that you can't already meet or another idea.