Let's Talk Gassy Moos.

[goboking]

I think Gassy Moos need a serious rework for the following reasons.

• They're resource intensive.  You're expending rocket fuel to collect them, dupe time to groom them, and power to cool and pipe in chlorine and pump away the natural gas they produce.  All of this for a bit of natural gas, which at this last stage of the game is of diminished value.
• The opportunity costs are high.  The stringent nature of gassy grass requires us to grow it on the surface.  This plant has no useful byproduct; it exists solely to feed gassy moos (i.e. convert chlorine to natural gas).  Instead of investing in a gassy moo ranch on the surface, you could instead use that space to setup a fire-and-forget solar panel farm.  Instead of assigning dupes to tend to your gassy moos, you could instead have them ranching hatches for eggs, meat, and ever-useful coal.
• They don't reproduce.  This means you have to reinvest rocket fuel and flight time to replace them when they die.  It also means there are no gassy moo subspecies, which I suspect people into critter ranching find disappointing.

 

How can these issues be mitigated?

• Less stringent growing requirements for gassy grass.  If gassy grass required normal lighting to grow or if we had access to higher wattage lights in the mid- to late-game we could grow them in our colonies instead of on the surface.  This means gassy grass farms would no longer compete with solar panels for space.
• Bring them more in line with other critters.  That is to say allow them to reproduce and give them morphs.  If they reproduce then the initial investment to bring them back from space is a one-time investment.  This makes the subsequent resources required to maintain a proper gassy moo ranch more palatable.
• Have them produce a unique byproduct.  If gassy moos or a gassy moo morph produced, say, milk, then we could get a unique production line out of a gassy moo ranch.  The gassy moo produces milk, a new building processes the milk into cheese, cheese could be a medium quality food when consumed on its own, or it could be combined with raw egg to make an high quality food, giving eggs an end-game purpose.

 

Let me know if I've overlooked anything or if you have any suggestions for making gassy moos more desirable.

[suicide commando]

I think reducing the amount of Chlorine required to farm their grass should be decreased as well. Right now, you can't moo ranch unless you have a chlorine geyser, and even if you do, the amount of grass you can grow is very limited.

Also, as mentioned, grass has no use other than feeding moos, maybe add some kind of medicinal use to the grass?

 

[Sasza22]

Gass grass should definetly get some sort of use. Either as a construction material or a medical or food recipie. Maybe even something for the molecular forge.

Moos should produce something more than nat gas. Milk is an obvious choice. Maybe it could be refined into isoresin or fullerene.

Chlorine should be renewable somehow. Either a guaranteed geyser or a gas nebula destination relatively close (under 40k).

[afetogbo]

gas grass should be used to make skin cream to instant cure sunburn

[goboking]

On 10/26/2018 at 3:45 AM, suicide commando said:

I think reducing the amount of Chlorine required to farm their grass should be decreased as well. Right now, you can't moo ranch unless you have a chlorine geyser, and even if you do, the amount of grass you can grow is very limited.

I don't have the game open atm, but IIRC the amount of chlorine needed to irrigate gassy grass is rather insignificant.  But it's still not renewable if you don't spawn a chlorine vent, so perhaps the odds of rolling one needs to be 100%.

[anton_stezhkin]

How about nanofibers? The moos could produce nanofibers. An end-game material, that can be used to produce nano-composit (like steel but lighter). It could reduce the weight o rockets, increase flight duration of jetpacks.  It would be also great to build an anti-asteroid web made of nanofiber...

[Daxterr]

I think they need to change the way they look lol. They're so ugly.

[Neotuck]

3 hours ago, Daxterr said:

I think they need to change the way they look lol. They're so ugly.

They are space manatees with cow utters.

I think they are adorable!!!

[goboking]

4 hours ago, Daxterr said:

I think they need to change the way they look lol. They're so ugly.

I quite like them.

[TheGCat]

Critters in whole are not useful. They looks cute, the animations are pretty nice, but they burn the performance of your PC.

Besides that:

Hatch ? I ranching only hatches, but later in the game, coal is not important anymore. U have better ways to produce energy as coal gens.

Puft's ? Why ? Send a rocket to a planet and collect slime. It's a better solution as ranching them.

Slickster ?  Oil geyser! No Slickster needed...

Shove volves ? Just a digging animal. Regolith ? One word! Meteor!

Pacus ? Polluted dirt for earth ? One Word! Rocket!

Morb ? Oxygen geysers! Or a critter just to feed Puft's? hmm...

Lightbug ? In my opinion a cute critter, but also useless.

Gassy Moo ? How the OP said, why invest work to deal with it for just a few methan ?

Dreckos ? Like the others.

From each critter u can get meal, yes, but in a good functional colony u don't need meat. It is just used by one recipe!

The eggshells are the only one reason to ranch some critters. Otherwise cute, but useless.

And don't forget, all of them need much dupe time...

Result: Useless!

The problem is also that every new critter or building need dupe time. Each new update comes along with new buildings for the dupes to interact. So, how many Dupes i should have to run all the stuff in one cycle without a break ? 50 ? 100 ? And now think about which PC u need to do that. Normally i have 16 Dupes at great bases. Too few for all the new things in the game. Result for u: "All the orders take ages". Brilliant.

I would recommend the most critter stuff should be done by machines! Grooming a critter should be done by a mechanical hand ingame. And no Klei, the shouldn't have a energy cost of 1200WATTS... U know, pet a critter, brush a critter and so on. The most problem ONI has is, anything need dupe interaction. Bad idea if the performance of the game cant handle it. Maybe give us two versions! One for dupes and the automated version. If u have a great base, add 50 Dupes and say me what u see Fun ? Of course, but also lagging...

And Klei, please, test your own game and play by yourself from the beginning to the lategame. Then,u noticed by yourself what is annoying or bad or should be changed. All the streams from u are mostly scenes from the beginning of a colony OR a debug mode build. With how many dupes u play ? Have u ever played the game with 30 Dupes and more and a great base?  Why u don't noticed the problems ? What is the concept of the game ?

The Keystone of the game is surviving. The focus is surviving and not grooming for example, so let the dupes interact with the important stuff to survive! Mechanical buildings for less important things.

[Sasza22]

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Hatch ?

Enough hatches can save you a lot of coal, especially when you need refiend carbon for steel. You can stay with the basic ones but i`d prefer going for stone morph. Basic only eat sandstone, stone can eat igneous and there`s always a lot of that, also they don`t eat meat so you can farm them withou dupe interaction and won`t lose anything.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Puft's ?

Currnetly hard to ranch but can serve as power free oxylite factories, also the only way to get bleachstone for now, not that it`s necessary. The slime production is pretty meh though.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Slickster ? 

Getting rid of excess CO2 and producing oil. Win-win. Not even mentioning the free eggs and meat. Sure they use more dupe time than an oil well but i didn`t have to use an oil well for 500 cycles when using those guys.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Shove volves ?

I`m not sure if ranching those does anything. At least until they add morphs. Thy don`t produce anything useful. Might be good for keeping the surface in shape but it still needs work.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Pacus ?

2 kg Eggshells.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Morb ?

Morbs aren`t even ranched. Take zero dupe time apart of catching them. I think they should be more like a pest than a useful critter anyway.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Lightbug ?

Easy decor with little work. Just put a fe feeders around the base and they won`t fly away to ice biomes to die. Getting the morphs is harder but just leaving a bit gristle laying around will get you wild sunny bugs for 50 decor.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Gassy Moo ?

Still hoping for some improvements on this one. Currently not really worth, but fun to do.

4 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

Dreckos ?

Easy plastic. Application for your ealry mealwood farms. Setting it up isn`t that hard and once it`s done you just forget about it. Once you get 6-7 of them you`ll get tons of plastic.

As for dupe time it`s not half as bad as you make it. Last game i had 3 hatch ranches, 2 drecko ranches and 2 slickster ranches with just 17 dupes in my base. Everything was done in time, even with 2 dupes at a time in space. I even had idle dupes at one point. The trick was to build fire poles everywhere they`d go down and transit tubes everywhere they`d go up.

I can`t say about performance. I did`t have any lag from critters even with over 40 in my ranches at one moment but jet suits seemed to lag my game instantly.

[TheGCat]

That all depends on how big u build your base! That is the point i was talking about. Great base + few dupes (15-20)+ All buildings + Ranching = Waiting to death. The performance impact is another issue.

[Sasza22]

I guess we have a different apporach. I like my "eco-bases". You prefer industrial. The nice thing is that we can both get them to work.

[anton_stezhkin]

I'm trying to fully replace oxygen production on my base with farting morbs. Just for lulz.
I think 3-4 morbs per dupe is enough.

 

[Alfons100]

I think its fair they do not reproduce or have morphs, but they should definitely generate more energy than they spend in their lifetime since that rocket fuel could’ve just been made into power directly instead. Their lifetime could be buffed 50 cycles or so.

Though if I remember correctly, the gassy moo planet is really far away, it should be brought closer, so you don’t have to go to the edge of the universe to get a new pair. Which needs liquid hydrogen I believe that is no easy achievement.