Geysers need a complete overhaul

[Hexicube]

I've been sitting on this one for a while and it's about time I spoke up about it. The current geyser system is basically broken; it's not a case of making do with what you have, but more that the geysers you get can make or break a world and cause extreme difficulty swings one way or the other. All I have to do is get either a cool slush geyser or polluted water geyser and both heat and water are just outright solved, but without them it can be way harder, especially if you also don't get any extra water sources.

For the uninformed, the way geysers currently work is this:

• You are guaranteed (very rare exceptions) to get two steam vents, one nat gas, and either a nat gas or chlorine; these are the uncovered vents
• You will get up to 8 covered geysers, typically 6; the two in the oil biome like to not spawn
• The covered geyser types are completely random
• All geysers have an average yield, and the minimum is 10% of the maximum (couple exceptions where it's worse)

This system could basically be used as a case-study on why pure randomness is bad for video games. You do not want pure randomness, and the fact that there are guaranteed geysers via the POI system shows that the devs know this already but haven't yet done an overhaul.

The thing that started to push me over the edge was when I decided I wanted to casually play a map without looking up a nice seed, to get a feel for how rockets worked in a legitimate game. What I got was the worst geysers I've ever seen by a long shot; 1719g/s total water, an admittedly decent fissure, and five volcanoes. FIVE.

There's also the problem that some are effectively useless, or otherwise outclassed. Take the CO2 vent/geyser for instance; the vent, which is the better one, produces up to 50g/s which can be converted into 25g/s petroleum via a slickster. This is such a small amount that there's no point in even setting it up, that would be 25W with a petro-gen or maybe 20g/s of natural gas via the sour gas process.

Here's my suggestion for a complete rework of geysers:

• Remove the 500C steam vent, it's basically impossible to balance it against the 110C one.
• Remove the polluted water geyser (60C FP one), FP is meaningless. Alternatively, make FP matter, or add a new water-borne disease.
• Remove the minor volcano, it's just a worse version of the regular volcano.
• Make the minimum output of all geysers 50%, instead of 10%.
• Categorise all geysers, vents, and volcanoes into four categories
  • Power Producers
    • Natural Gas Vent
    • Hydrogen Vent: 5x output, so that it can compete. 500C is the challenge.
    • Leaky Oil Fissure: 2x output. Worst output unless you do sour gas, in which case best.
  • Water Producers
    • Cool Steam Vent
    • Water Geyser
    • Cool Slush Geyser: 1/5th output. It's good because of the temperature alone.
  • Volcanoes
    • Volcano
    • Copper Volc.
    • Iron Volc.
    • Gold Volc.: Increased temperature. Gold is easy to cool down, and gives a decor bonus.
  • Misc.
    • CO2 Geyser: 10-20x output: CO2 is only good for slicksters (becomes oil/petro), the rate is awful.
    • CO2 Vent: Match above output, same reason.
    • Hot Polluted Oxygen Vent: 2-5x output, same reason.
    • Infectious Polluted Oxygen Vent: Match above output, same reason.
    • Chlorine Gas Vent: Probably fine as it is, chlorine really needs more uses.
• When generating maps, randomly pick geyser types from categories to get more consistent (but still very varied) results
  • Keep the current POI geysers (two steam, one nat gas, one nat gas or chlorine)
  • Pick one from each category
  • Remaining geysers pick from all remaining geysers; no duplicates allowed

Nothing sucks more than finding out several hundred cycles in that your world is garbage. Instead of moving on and finding a better world, possibly looking up seeds, maybe it should just not be possible for a world to be actually bad? Variety is good, tying difficulty to that variety is not.

[Machenoid]

First and foremost i have to state: Fix bugs first. (Duh) Playing a 6 geyser seed and finding out that it's actually a 5 geyser seed due to a map spawning problem of one POI over-writing another should never happen.

With that done, i do definitely agree that geysers need fixes, but i think simply increasing the output quantity or removing certain geysers isn't the right way to do it. The main problems with current geysers i see are these:

• There's a whole bottom 1/5th of the map that's not used! It's filled with magma (which is fine) but most of that is trapped in neutronium that can't be excavated or otherwise used. Nothing spawns there; it is completely wasted space at the moment.

The solution is obvious: Open the magma biome and do some interesting things with it. There are player-made biome mods that do this already; Replace the neutronium with 80% obsidian mixed with other very hard minerals. Obviously with concerning geysers, put a definite major volcano in the bottom somewhere; this makes sure every game gives a new player the chance to actually use and comprehend the steam generator. As for the actual layout and theme, put some pools of molten sulfur, or "low temperature" molten metals, or new geysers that dump sulfur/sour gas or molten glass... 1/5th of the map is currently empty! Please add something to it! (It probably shouldn't have taken this long to do it)

• Every geyser that's not water, chlorine, or natural gas is basically a generic placeholder. There's no theme or life or excitement beyond "What's in the stone box?!"

The mystery-geyser-box is equally obvious and ugly as the empty magma biome, and absolutely a place-holder for greater things. You don't necessarilly have to completely remove random mystery geysers; merely give us also some little model ecosystems or geyser dioramas. What's less apparent might be how the game actually balances out the resources on the map, which is the point of this thread:

• The geyser types become very predictable exactly because of their free-form randomization. There's no "extreme" factor the player is forced to account for, everything is expected to be a bell curved "Average" and ends up being disappointing when it's doesn't have a single trait that gets past that bell curve.

This is the main point and where Hexicube and i differ. Instead of merely doing a blanket "increase stats and remove useless things" method, i would rather add to the systems already in the game and put some inherent math into the game balance itself, instead of removing things.

• Currently you can go through every geyser on map and add up values and say "This asteroid produces # Quantity of clean water" ... So why doesn't the asteroid just do that? In the map generation file for that asteroid, there could be an explicit variable list that determines "There is 17kg/s of hydrogen in this asteroid map, 83kg/s Water, etc" The geysers simply exist as a tap to pour out those resources at limited amounts at certain times. This opens the possibility to expand gameplay towards geyser mining and associated maintenance or build challenges. If there's just one geyser on the map, it could be opened up to the maximum flow rate over a period of a few hundred cycles. (If there's two then each get some fraction near 1/2, if there's three then 1/3rd, etc)

Hypothetically with this change, every current "Standard" asteroid could produce enough water and other resources 'balanced for 20 dupes' internally, but the geysers can't supply that until the player spends Dupe Time^TM to fix the problem through a new gameplay feature. Get your dupes to mining the geyser open, or use the autominer to free your dupes from that labor. If the geyser is an "short" style like the leaky oil fissure is, put a Oil Well on it and pump away. (though it would probably be renamed to "Well Head" or something) Or just completely destroy the geyser into a "collapsed geyser" and then get a tenured scientist to "find a new geyser source" then you can DRILL BABY DRILL.

[Hexicube]

8 hours ago, Machenoid said:

The solution is obvious: Open the magma biome and do some interesting things with it. There are player-made biome mods that do this already; Replace the neutronium with 80% obsidian mixed with other very hard minerals. Obviously with concerning geysers, put a definite major volcano in the bottom somewhere; this makes sure every game gives a new player the chance to actually use and comprehend the steam generator. As for the actual layout and theme, put some pools of molten sulfur, or "low temperature" molten metals, or new geysers that dump sulfur/sour gas or molten glass... 1/5th of the map is currently empty! Please add something to it! (It probably shouldn't have taken this long to do it)

Actually, I think the solution is the opposite there. There's a ton of fairly bland space in the existing explorable space, and that should be better utilised. The magma layer at the bottom should just be shorter, or it should be possible to get to all of the magma. Since tungsten is non-renewable, maybe there could be solid tungsten instead of neutronium down there.

8 hours ago, Machenoid said:

The mystery-geyser-box is equally obvious and ugly as the empty magma biome, and absolutely a place-holder for greater things. You don't necessarilly have to completely remove random mystery geysers; merely give us also some little model ecosystems or geyser dioramas. What's less apparent might be how the game actually balances out the resources on the map, which is the point of this thread:

This could work, provided debug mode gives us the option to place specific geysers in order to create our own POIs to then show klei. The geyser groups I proposed could then just be a feature of the biome, where each biome picks one of the geysers in the group in POI form. I'd love to see a CO2 vent in the oil biome with a molten slickster, for instance.

8 hours ago, Machenoid said:

Currently you can go through every geyser on map and add up values and say "This asteroid produces # Quantity of clean water" ... So why doesn't the asteroid just do that? In the map generation file for that asteroid, there could be an explicit variable list that determines "There is 17kg/s of hydrogen in this asteroid map, 83kg/s Water, etc" The geysers simply exist as a tap to pour out those resources at limited amounts at certain times. This opens the possibility to expand gameplay towards geyser mining and associated maintenance or build challenges. If there's just one geyser on the map, it could be opened up to the maximum flow rate over a period of a few hundred cycles. (If there's two then each get some fraction near 1/2, if there's three then 1/3rd, etc)

I'm going to disagree here. Part of it is seeing what you get and adapting to the situation, and if maps always give 83kg/s of water then there's no adaptation. Being able to improve geysers would be nice though, maybe it pushes the geyser closer to its maximum average yield and is repeatable?