Raw Abyssalite should be undestructable by meteors

[Vampyre_by]

Title is a pretty much self-explanatory. I can deal with never ending flow of a regolith. I can build an airlock, an automated system for protection from meteors, I even agree to rebuild a telescope each time when it's burned down from a regolith which has fallen from the bunker door (I guess you will require ~20 rebuilds for all cycle of research) and so on. But I really don't want to build dozens of solar panels/steam turbines to protect the map from destruction. Steel is too expensive and hard to produce for building the whole "roof" so you merely force players to abuse the game mechanics.

[InternetGuy]

I tried doing it the fair way but meteors nearly decimated my base. I was forced to cheat in bunker tiles because I couldn't keep up with steel production even with surplus amount of eggshell, refined carbon and iron in my disposal.

Definitely feel that the surface should be covered with abyssalite that can withstand meteor attacks.

[yoakenashi]

3 hours ago, Vampyre_by said:

rebuild a telescope each time when it's burned down from a regolith which has fallen from the bunker door (I guess you will require ~20 rebuilds for all cycle of research)

I’ve never had to rebuild or repair a telescope. You could cool the telescope base with water and auto sweep away regolith that lays on the surface (never actually tried this)

Or you could place the telescope on doors so that the regolith falls through/past the telescope. This is what I’ve done.

I have about half of my surface covered and some biomes as broken into, but it is not catastrophic. It is another game challenge, without challenge the game would be no fun.

[Sasza22]

5 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

Or you could place the telescope on doors so that the regolith falls through/past the telescope. This is what I’ve done.

I did that as well but it still got overheated after each shower. Not sure what i did wrong.

 

8 hours ago, InternetGuy said:

ried doing it the fair way but meteors nearly decimated my base. I was forced to cheat in bunker tiles because I couldn't keep up with steel production even with surplus amount of eggshell, refined carbon and iron in my disposal.

Currently we have the fossils to get extra lime (it`s a lot of extra lime). With that i think it`s possible to get your biomes protected early enough. I`m on cycle 200 atm and i got a steady steel production and the only biome that got hurt was the one where the ruins spawned removing part of the abyssalite.

My strategy for early biome defence is to build a couple of layers of granite on the top of the biome and a layer of insulated tiles below them. It should protect the biome long enough to get the steel shell ready.

[InternetGuy]

7 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

I did that as well but it still got overheated after each shower. Not sure what i did wrong.

 

Currently we have the fossils to get extra lime (it`s a lot of extra lime). With that i think it`s possible to get your biomes protected early enough. I`m on cycle 200 atm and i got a steady steel production and the only biome that got hurt was the one where the ruins spawned removing part of the abyssalite.

My strategy for early biome defence is to build a couple of layers of granite on the top of the biome and a layer of insulated tiles below them. It should protect the biome long enough to get the steel shell ready.

I was at the point that I was flooded with lye using eggshells alone. I was farming shinebugs which have a pretty quick lifespan and a high reproduction rate. My bottleneck was producing steel itself with the forge. I may need to improve my forge setup.

[linainverse]

i second this because i prefer to play inside and not expand a lot so it's a crappy situ when you SUDDENLY regolith from above.

[crypticorb]

My first impression when I approached the surface for the first time at around cycle 350 was "Holy **** everything is hot!" This was because the entire top layer of every biome had been stripped away, and the first layer of abyssalite had been breached at multiple points.

I'm okay with the outermost layer of regolith and mafic rock, and any exposed biomes being stripped bare by the harshness of space, but I don't understand how an asteroid that probably sat here for a very long time is suddenly able to be completely cored out by meteors. That topmost layer of abyssalite should be impenetrable.

When starting a new game, the player is put on a death timer. The meteors start immediately, and if the player takes too long (3-400+ cycles), there will be multiple breaches deep into the second or third layer of biomes. This added with the ludicrous amount of regolith piling up, the player is almost overwhelmed with the amount of work to do before any surface exploration or rocketry research is possible.

[Zarquan]

I do not really appreciate that there is a timer on the game when you get near space to have a decent early space experience.  I had to dig up in the early game because of a slime biome below (on miserable you avoid slime biomes like the plague), and I set off the meteors early.  This hurt me later when I actually tried to get to space and everything was damaged

[JahwsUF]

On 10/3/2018 at 7:32 AM, Vampyre_by said:

...Steel is too expensive and hard to produce for building the whole "roof" so you merely force players to abuse the game mechanics.

Come again?  I mean, I guess the good ways to produce Steel may involve some minor abuse of game mechanics, but that's the closest complaint here I can condone.  And by 'minor abuse', I mean our Lord and Savior for simple cooling, the Water Sieve.  (Seriously Klei, put a tooltip on that thing noting the fixed 40 C output or something!)

I've been building my space wall in a world based on Expressive, without any preexisting Fossil supply for easy Lime.  Still got the critical parts walled off around Cycle 300 and over half of it done by Cycle 400.  No use of any 'simple' large-scale in-game cooling solution like Cool Slush Geysers either, though that's more of a self-challenge in my case.  It may have required draining a number of pre-existing Polluted Water pools to facilitate, but it's definitely possible to make all that Steel.  No need to abuse 'meteor-immune' buildings aside from Bunker Tiles.

19 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I do not really appreciate that there is a timer on the game when you get near space to have a decent early space experience.  I had to dig up in the early game because of a slime biome below (on miserable you avoid slime biomes like the plague), and I set off the meteors early.  This hurt me later when I actually tried to get to space and everything was damaged

This right here is a gripe I can get behind.  While meteors are always active from Cycle 1 now, new players have absolutely no warning about "hey, so meteors are going to start wrecking your day in a few hundred cycles."  If they take their time and breach the surface late, there's little to directly tell a newbie what went wrong or how to get better - just a ton of seemingly near-molten death between them and the surface.

Maybe some sort of in-game warning/tooltip around cycle 50 or 100 about "My scientists have detected seismic activity above them, coming from the surface" would be appropriate.  That should help prompt players to find the surface and at least find the asteroid's outer layer.

Then, once the first visible Abyssalite tile takes damage from a meteor strike:  "My asteroid is taking significant damage from meteor strikes!  I should start taking measures to protect it!  Large amounts of Steel should help."

[Vampyre_by]

14 minutes ago, JahwsUF said:

Still got the critical parts walled off around Cycle 300 and over half of it done by Cycle 400. 

I reached surface approximately on 300 cycle in my last survival and 2 biomes were already opened and hot as hell. I think it's not fair that you're forced to do something just by a timer. You can choose when you're going to open the slime biomes and prepare for this, you can even live only on urine refinement from toilets and don't go for geysers, you choose when you want to start to dig into oil biome and so on. Meteors are ruining this paradigm, when you start a game you already now that you need to rush for steel and dig to the surface to protect yourself.

[stoeberhai]

I second that; would even prefer that meteors only destroy things you have build (except bunker tiles and bunker doors). Just imagine the surface is a stable biome and could be explored or used as the other biomes. Just like a "real" moonbase:

[JahwsUF]

Just now, stoeberhai said:

I second that; would even prefer that meteors only destroy things you have build (except bunker tiles and bunker doors). Just imagine the surface is a stable biome and could be explored or used as the other biomes. Just like a "real" moonbase:

For that, I think things just need a little tweaking, though I may have a slightly different definition of "stable."  Many meteors dump extra Regolith onto the surface, which serves to help buffer against future meteor strikes.  The current issue is that the resulting buffer isn't quite enough - meteors are a little too damaging.  If they tweaked the numbers right, they could balance the 'extra regolith' rate with the 'meteor damage' rate so that the cracked surface issue is no more.  I'd personally prefer this solution, since the "real Moon" does take meteor damage.  It's got a lot of craters for a reason.

While I also wish some of the meteors would dump in-place Mafic Rock, I can understand that the game's engine isn't set up to allow that.

[stoeberhai]

By stable i mean: not changing in its topological appearence without interference of dupes.

By "real" moonbase i mean: "real moonbase" not real moon. Like the ability to build rooms in the surface area and make it a usable space without gigatons of steel floating above the surface. It is not even possible with steel since by the time you reach the surface, everything is destroyed. The screenshot is from a cycle 2 savegame.