Abyssalite Nerf

[KittenIsAGeek]

6 hours ago, nile_duart said:

Honestly, I just want to know if I'm the only person who is not at all okay with the abyssalite nerf. When I noticed I couldn't build with it, I came here to see if it was a bug or something. When I learned that it wasn't, I immediately quit my game. There are three very hot geysers less than three tiles outside of my temperate biome, and if I can't control the heat until mid/endgame... It's not that it's impossible or even exceptionally difficult to handle, it's that it's tedious and feels like something to make the game arbitrarily harder early on. Steel is already simultaneously necessary and tedious as hell - why make abyssalite the same?

Another note: While this game has exceedingly positive reviews on Steam, the negative ones that do exist pretty much all say the same thing - this game is not accessible. I realize Klei is working on that - and are doing a fantastic job - but I think nerfing abyssalite (which for me has always been the first line of defense against heat proliferation, and the best stopgap until I can come up with something better - a lifesaver in early game) is pretty counter-conducive to that goal.

That said, I'm sure people are going to say "this forces you to get creative" or "git gud", but I think that for creativity and "gudness" to thrive, there needs to be at least a teensy, tiny bit of leeway, and when I realized that I wasn't going to be able to deal with the geysers surrounding my base for quite a few cycles - as well as handling all the usual struggles of early-game - I didn't feel motivated to get creative, I felt motivated to play something else :/.

TL;DR Artificial difficulty =/= complexity. This is a base-building/survival/exploration game; I doubt anyone who loves this game needs to be forced to get creative - particularly when it comes to the already constant struggle of heat management.

This is just my opinion, and I'm sure some people agree, and some disagree. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

I've always expected a change like this to happen.  Abyssalite was too powerful for an early resource.  Most of my bases are not affected at all by this change because I've rarely relied on abyssalite for heat management. 

For early game heat management: 

1. Buildings that produce a lot of heat should be built at the top or far side of your living area.
2. Insulated tiles of any kind will slow the "heat creep" from toxic and slime biomes, as well as geysers, giving you extra time to get better methods of heat management set up.
3. Manage the output of your geysers.  Sometimes this means completely walling off a geyser to force it to stop production until you can get a system in place to manage the heat it generates. 
4. If perfect insulation is necessary in the early game, build a vacuum isolated chamber.  This can be as simple as two walls with a vacuum between them -- and various methods of doing so have been documented many many times on this forum.

In my opinion, the abyssalite nerf doesn't cause a game-ending problem.  The ability to use abyssalite to build was a temporary measure added during the thermal upgrade to handle the heat since more complicated systems had not been added to the game yet.

[Soulwind]

The only thing I really miss is the ability to easily seal up breaks in the biome borders. 

For everything else insulated igneous or insulated ceramic is good enough.   Maybe with a vacuum seal for truly extreme temps.

[ithilelda]

I totally understand the need for easy stuff for newbies, but there are already easy enough stuff in the game, and it is time for people to just move on. Igneous rock insulated tiles are simply awesome and perfect for early-mid bases, and this has been seriously cleared up both in the "Decrypting Heat Transfer" thread and Brothgar's latest video. Ceramics as an update will serve you well, and you may never need that end game stuff to have perfect insulation at all.

The problem of removing abyssalite is the pipes. Insulation factor of pipes is weird and not as effective as that of the tiles, so moving hot water around is not trivial anymore. However, that is the problem of the currently messed up heat transfer mechanism, not the problem of making abyssalite an end game only content.

[Gurgel]

9 hours ago, Soulwind said:

The only thing I really miss is the ability to easily seal up breaks in the biome borders. 

For everything else insulated igneous or insulated ceramic is good enough.   Maybe with a vacuum seal for truly extreme temps.

I did need one vacuum seal with the changes (ice biome against hot regolith), but they are not hard to do. For almost all hard cases a double wall of insulated tiles does just fine, and there is enough raw mineral around.

[AndreyKl]

On 19.10.2018 at 2:34 PM, Grimgaw said:

You need 1 full cargo bay of isoresin to make 1.33 insulated pipe. This is stupid. 

~110Kg is hardly full, but a single insulated pipe is indeed nothing to talk about.

Rocket cargo capacity needs a serious overhaul. Would have been nice to have a slider in cargo that specifies how much cargo you want to return with, and for balance and sanity purposes more cargo should result in higher fuel requirements.

[Machenoid]

1 hour ago, AndreyKl said:

~110Kg is hardly full, but a single insulated pipe is indeed nothing to talk about.

Rocket cargo capacity needs a serious overhaul. Would have been nice to have a slider in cargo that specifies how much cargo you want to return with, and for balance and sanity purposes more cargo should result in higher fuel requirements.

Time spent actually obtaining the resources as well.

I would be happy to wait another 5-10 cycles if it meant i would get more rare matter into the cargo bays.

[DaveSatx]

the loss of abyssalite is a trivial annoyance unless you're working with magma. really.  hell, i encased an iron volcano in ceramic insulted and left it for over 100 turns np.  sorry they took your crutch away (the super easy material to ignore heat) but there's other materials that work just fine..

[AndreyKl]

On 21.10.2018 at 2:08 PM, DaveSatx said:

the loss of abyssalite is a trivial annoyance unless you're working with magma. really.  hell, i encased an iron volcano in ceramic insulted and left it for over 100 turns np.  sorry they took your crutch away (the super easy material to ignore heat) but there's other materials that work just fine..

So far, double layer ceramic works well for me as well for encasing 500C hydrogen vent - inner layer heats up bot doesn't seem to heat outer layer.

However when I tried to pump gas out I found that content of insulated ceramic pipes lose temperature at 0.1C per second and environment seems to heat up. If said pipe is inside insulated tile then 0.1C loss still happens, pipe itself will heat up but won't heat environment(tile). While 0.1C is not much it is critical with certain builds, for example liquid oxygen/hydrogen has very narrow liquid temperature range (-252.2 to -259.2 for hydrogen) which means we will have couple minutes to transfer liquid along pipes at most and placing insulated pipe above it won't help. It would have been simpler if we could specify temperature for cooling machines (14C constant, too much for hydrogen), otherwise it is far to much work to simply transport liquid without 'perfect insulator'.

P.S. And you need loots and lots of ceramics which means a lot of coal ((( and a fair amount of time (unles you already have a volcano).

[greggbert]

I never liked it because you couldn't tell it apart from regular non-insulated tiles/pipes just by looking.  The new change encourages more digging, which I never do enough of and probably should.

[Glassyfo]

On 10/21/2018 at 7:27 AM, AndreyKl said:

So far, double layer ceramic works well for me as well for encasing 500C hydrogen vent - inner layer heats up bot doesn't seem to heat outer layer.

However when I tried to pump gas out I found that content of insulated ceramic pipes lose temperature at 0.1C per second and environment seems to heat up. If said pipe is inside insulated tile then 0.1C loss still happens, pipe itself will heat up but won't heat environment(tile). While 0.1C is not much it is critical with certain builds, for example liquid oxygen/hydrogen has very narrow liquid temperature range (-252.2 to -259.2) which means we will have couple minutes to transfer gas along pipes at most and placing insulated pipe above it won't help. It would have been simpler if we could specify temperature for cooling machines (14C constant), but otherwise it is far to much work to simply transport gas without 'perfect insulator'.

P.S. And you need loots and lots of ceramics which means a lot of coal ((( and a fair amount of time (unles you already have a volcano).

I think Klei expects you to be able to access superinsulator by the time lox and lh2 become necessary.

[TLW]

The frustrating part of the abyssalite nerf is that it all it's been doing in my game is adding tedium. Playing without abyssalite just means that I spend a lot of IRL time digging vacuum trenches. If anything, it takes less cycles to construct. It doesn't add difficulty, it doesn't add creativity. All it does is make me have to consider "do I really want to spend the next 20 minutes going "pause-dig-unpause-wait-pause-remove-repeat" every time I build something requiring insulation.

I really don't like games where the most viable solutions in-game are gated behind IRL tedium, generally speaking. ONI's latest update is pushing things rather too far in this direction for my liking.

2 hours ago, bleeter6 said:

I think Klei expects you to be able to access superinsulator by the time lox and lh2 become necessary.

Yeah, it appears as though they intend to force people into one specific bootstrapping path. Not my preferred way to go about it, but meh. It's alright. I'd prefer if it was a little more branch-y instead of everything being on one railroaded path, though.

[Glassyfo]

1 hour ago, TLW said:

The frustrating part of the abyssalite nerf is that it all it's been doing in my game is adding tedium. Playing without abyssalite just means that I spend a lot of IRL time digging vacuum trenches. If anything, it takes less cycles to construct. It doesn't add difficulty, it doesn't add creativity. All it does is make me have to consider "do I really want to spend the next 20 minutes going "pause-dig-unpause-wait-pause-remove-repeat" every time I build something requiring insulation.

I really don't like games where the most viable solutions in-game are gated behind IRL tedium, generally speaking. ONI's latest update is pushing things rather too far in this direction for my liking.

Yeah, it appears as though they intend to force people into one specific bootstrapping path. Not my preferred way to go about it, but meh. It's alright. I'd prefer if it was a little more branch-y instead of everything being on one railroaded path, though.

Neither abyssalite nor vacuum tiles are needed for anything other than magma and super precise temps like 100C steam.

[AndreyKl]

14 hours ago, bleeter6 said:

I think Klei expects you to be able to access superinsulator by the time lox and lh2 become necessary.

Potentially we can get it earlier (steam engine plus two solid boosters seem to be sufficient for that), but you need roughly one 9 cycle trip to space to get materials for a single insulated pipe. Placing normal-material pipes in vacuum helps, but pipes themselves also have temperature and rockets tend to emit hot gas that doesn't help with the matter.

[Oozinator]

I have/had no real problem because of the abbyssalite nerf so far.

[Glassyfo]

9 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

Potentially we can get it earlier (steam engine plus two solid boosters seem to be sufficient for that), but you need roughly one 9 cycle trip to space to get materials for a single insulated pipe. Placing normal-material pipes in vacuum helps, but pipes themselves also have temperature and rockets tend to emit hot gas that doesn't help with the matter.

Can't you just make the materials yourself once you discover them?

[PhailRaptor]

8 hours ago, bleeter6 said:

Can't you just make the materials yourself once you discover them?

You need the raw materials to do so, which can only be obtained from the Space destinations.  And they all occur in low percentages until you get to some of the most distant ones.

[TLW]

23 hours ago, bleeter6 said:

Neither abyssalite nor vacuum tiles are needed for anything other than magma and super precise temps like 100C steam.

Virtually nothing in ONI is truly necessary. With that in mind, can you please restate your response?

[Glassyfo]

1 minute ago, TLW said:

Virtually nothing in ONI is truly necessary. With that in mind, can you please restate your response?

Nope. You most likely understood my meaning. Pedantry is a waste of time.

[Chained Phoenix]

I started the game after it was already removed, kept annoying me that I couldn't use it when ever single guide said to do so.  I've just used insulated tiles and yes heat became an ongoing problem early on, ended up building all my heat generating devices in an Ice biome, having a layer of insulated titles, vacuum, insulated tile around my base and got a bunch of Weezwort to manage individual heat spots until I got the core temp down enough.  I'm in the process of building a piping system through the walls using radiating pipes (which disperse cold in this case) and pick up that cold down at one of the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier's which I'm feeding the hydrogen from a few of my Electrolyzer's to.  It's delayed getting a lot of other stuff going for me but it's not the end of the world.

The one thing they should have done though, like everything with this game, is explain this better, the tutorial in game and explanations are so lacking... If it wasn't for google and youtube videos new players would still be lost and as so many of these are out of date it doesn't help much.  They also need to provide a use for Abyssalite now, just allow me to build something with it as my OCD won't leave it lying around so I've got half a wing of the base dedicated to the storage of it now.

[PhailRaptor]

20 minutes ago, Chained Phoenix said:

They also need to provide a use for Abyssalite now, just allow me to build something with it as my OCD won't leave it lying around so I've got half a wing of the base dedicated to the storage of it now.

It's a required ingredient for a super late game material produced in the Molecular Forge.  But you will also require other much harder to obtain resources to do so, requiring multiple Rocket trips.

[Daxterr]

Geyersers are designed to overpressurize themselves so they aren't a constant heat issue. You don't even need insulation of any kind. The worst case scenario would be a steam geyser, which would take a long time to fill up, but in that case you can just pump water into it to fill it up. There's no reason to worry about a geyser as long as it's sealed off. The absolute worst it could do is force you to move some plants.

[Angpaur]

25 minutes ago, Chained Phoenix said:

The one thing they should have done though, like everything with this game, is explain this better, the tutorial in game and explanations are so lacking... If it wasn't for google and youtube videos new players would still be lost and as so many of these are out of date it doesn't help much.  They also need to provide a use for Abyssalite now, just allow me to build something with it as my OCD won't leave it lying around so I've got half a wing of the base dedicated to the storage of it now.

You are playing an early access game, remeber that?

Developers are now focusing on other things than tutorials. This will come as a last thing when mechanics are finished, so they can make valid tutorials and doesn't have to remake them with each change to game mechanics.

By deciding to play an early access game you have agreed to take the game as is. So why are you complaining? It is obvious that you will have more difficulties than with a finished game, but you volunteered for this by your own. So you should be aware of this downsides, otherwise why playing early access game?

[Chained Phoenix]

1 hour ago, Angpaur said:

You are playing an early access game, remeber that?

Developers are now focusing on other things than tutorials. This will come as a last thing when mechanics are finished, so they can make valid tutorials and doesn't have to remake them with each change to game mechanics.

By deciding to play an early access game you have agreed to take the game as is. So why are you complaining? It is obvious that you will have more difficulties than with a finished game, but you volunteered for this by your own. So you should be aware of this downsides, otherwise why playing early access game?

I'm aware it's "early access" but like it really wouldn't take more than a day to make a basic tutorial for people for things which won't change like early base setup, it can't hurt to make it somewhat more accessible.  I always find it so amazing that people get some venomously defensive of a company as soon as anyone raises a single negative observation, it's not like I said "WORST GAME EVER DO NOT BUY!", try to take suggestions for what they are.  Regardless, off topic and not the main point I was making.

[Angpaur]

1 hour ago, Chained Phoenix said:

I'm aware it's "early access" but like it really wouldn't take more than a day to make a basic tutorial for people for things which won't change like early base setup

Yeah, right. And every time something changes in the game, but tutorial is not updated, you will complain again?

I'm a developer myself and I know how frustrating is to do pointless job, which needs to be repeated continously. There is no point in spending developers time (and money - work costs) on making tutorials when there is constant risk that it have to be redone each time some mechanics change.

1 hour ago, Chained Phoenix said:

I always find it so amazing that people get some venomously defensive of a company as soon as anyone raises a single negative observation, it's not like I said "WORST GAME EVER DO NOT BUY!", try to take suggestions for what they are. 

What are you talking about? Anyone said that you said something like this?

[Glassyfo]

4 hours ago, Chained Phoenix said:

I started the game after it was already removed, kept annoying me that I couldn't use it when ever single guide said to do so.  I've just used insulated tiles and yes heat became an ongoing problem early on, ended up building all my heat generating devices in an Ice biome, having a layer of insulated titles, vacuum, insulated tile around my base and got a bunch of Weezwort to manage individual heat spots until I got the core temp down enough.  I'm in the process of building a piping system through the walls using radiating pipes (which disperse cold in this case) and pick up that cold down at one of the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier's which I'm feeding the hydrogen from a few of my Electrolyzer's to.  It's delayed getting a lot of other stuff going for me but it's not the end of the world.

The one thing they should have done though, like everything with this game, is explain this better, the tutorial in game and explanations are so lacking... If it wasn't for google and youtube videos new players would still be lost and as so many of these are out of date it doesn't help much.  They also need to provide a use for Abyssalite now, just allow me to build something with it as my OCD won't leave it lying around so I've got half a wing of the base dedicated to the storage of it now.

There won't be a tutorial until everything is essentially finalized. It would be pointlessly repetitive otherwise. Have some patience.