Exosuit issues

[Thanatos994]

I have some thoughts about exosuits. First, the way automation behaves around exosuit docks is counter-intuitive and I think needs changing.

Right now, if you have an autosweeper nearby a dock and you have clicked deliver suit it will try to deliver nearby atmosuits to the dock. That's great, sure, but the point of automation is not needing to click. So, where's the way to automatically request a suit be delivered? Well, docks *do* have an automation input. But that input doesn't control whether a suit should be delivered. In fact, it can be difficult to know what that input does at all. It doesn't prevent the dock from being used. It doesn't prevent the dock from storing more oxygen. It prevents the dock from charging suits. Now why you would want that ability, I'm not sure.

I would love to be able to automatically undock suits and request suits for delivery-- the possibilities would be endless. Imagine having a single dock near your central SPOM where a hopper delivers atmosuits, a sweeper plugs them one at a time into the dock, waits for a while, the dock spits out the suit fully charged, a sweeper passes that suit to a different dock anywhere on the map. You could also use this ability to create checkpoints that verify a dupe has an atmosuit on- have them arrive at a atmo checkpoint without a dock standing on a weight plate, if the dupe drops an atmosuit on it, trigger the checkpoint open, deliver the suit to a waiting dock so that the dupe puts it back on- viola now you can have areas where dupes with and without atmosuits can pass, because you can make sure which goes where out of shared spaces.

Speaking of weight plates, that brings me to my second issue, a really nitpicky one. Atmosuits weight 200kg. A dupe weights 30. A dupe wearing an atmosuit weighs... 30. ??? Enough said. Fixing this would be enough to create checkpoints for atmosuits too.

One last semi-related thing: jetsuits running out of gas makes them kinda hazardous to dupe health; dumb suckers use them to fly to far places then get stuck. It would be great to be able to set a timer when a dupe passes a jetsuit checkpoint and then recall the dupe at the halfway point for their gas supply. But there's no automated way to require a dupe goes somewhere. I'm not sure how abuseable that would be, but something should be done to reduce jetsuit issues if not that fix in particular.

[Soulwind]

Why bother with a sweeper?  You should only ever have to deliver a suit to a dock once.

[crypticorb]

I agree that exosuit docks are a bit unintuitive at the moment. I keep extremely tight control over the regions each checkpoint can cover, always ensuring that a dupe cannot exit one checkpoint from the 4 exits in my base and return through another exit.

Checkpoints should require dupes to always return through the same checkpoint they acquired the suit from, unless interrupted from doing so by checkpoint deconstruction, manual movement, blocked access, or starvation/suffocation. If they somehow do return through another checkpoint and leave a suit behind, there needs to be an automatically generated cleanup command that janitor/courier based jobs will prioritize to return the suit to its dock.

[Neotuck]

So the idea is to have all your exosuit docks connected with convayor rails instead of gas pipes?

 

This thread might belong in the suggestion section on the forums