Coolthulhu

Unless you tediously plant it wild, seed by seed.

Why would that happen, though? What would that add to the game?

Sounds intended, especially considering that in the outbreak update, wild plants have lower needs than domesticated ones.

It shouldn't. Dupes being dumb should not result in extra player frustration. Dupes should not kill themselves as soon as you stop micromanaging them. This sounds like a bad idea. It penalizes mistakes and being new to the game rather than bad design and cutting corners. A good player would not be hampered by it, a bad one would get even worse. The proper ways to increase difficulty in a game like ONI would be more like: Nerf infinite food options, requiring more and more strict and specific farming setups as the game goes on. Energetically costly fertilizer production (say, extracting sulfur from natural gas), problematic designs involving recycling renewable but costly resources (nitrites). Those would be easy to mine early on, but costly to produce from renewables. Buff temporary food options (muckroots), but keep them to early game. Emergency mushing should be costly, using resources that are hard/costly to renew (algae). Drop seed storage. It hurts early game (before proper farming is set up) while providing a buffer for late game. Seeds should be infinite and balanced with infinity in mind. Nerf automated systems. Natural gas generator requires no supervision (and it shouldn't require any, that would be tedious), so it should produce low power and significant problematic outputs. Coal generator requires dupe supervision and so doesn't need much nerfing. Player supervision (other than setting up) should never be required - that's an inherently bad idea. Buff algae, nerf hydrolysis. Give difficulty to those who earned it, not to noobs who will perish immediately. Punishing but easy is the worst possible combination - tedious but not challenging.

Slime can be "baked" into dirt and dirt into sand.

Also the whole thing takes place on an asteroid, which may have arbitrarily weak gravity.

Dupes can carry 75kg just fine. They only pick up 1kg when they harvest a bugged puddle.

It's not really a balance issue if you have to avoid growing peppers/mealwood just for it to exist.

I'd say no, although in some cases it could be better. Well set up mealwood doesn't need active temperature control (just isolation), sleetwheat will always eventually require cooling. Mealwood has multiple problems, such as occupying a lot of food storage, frequent but small harvests, requirement to keep good+ yield. Its primary advantage over wheat is that it doesn't need cooking - in fact, you shouldn't cook it in current version. For mealwood to actually beat sleetwheat, you'd probably need to have it completely automatized, with no fertilization, so that dupes only plant the seeds and then harvest good yield drops. Or even better: have the farm double as food storage (CO2 atmosphere to prevent rot), to prevent frequent haul jobs that make mealwood extra inefficient. Then you'd save time by not having to cook anything.

The fact that you don't need anything above standard yield for it to work well. With mealwood and berries, you need at least good yield not to lose seeds, with sleet wheat you can just plant everything in planter boxes and wait.

There's enough babysitting already due to bad pathfinding and mopping is tedious enough with all that manual re-applying (there is no "keep this area mopped at all times" command).

When herding hatches and morbs, you can save yourself a lot of boring, tedious, menial (but easy) work by using this little exploit: You can get them all to stand on one tile. Then you can feed them almost anything solid you want - I use them to get rid of ice.

Here's my take: tl;dr Have HW wires be on a separate layer since you never want to connect them to regular ones, do the same to pipes by creating "big" pipes, require explicit connections from big to small

Since you already use questionable mechanics (tepidizer overheating exploit), you could go all the way and also use the following: Medical cot instead of food (bugged perma-ill dupes can lie on it all day) Use polluted oxygen (from evaporated piss) instead of clean one, polluted oxygen doesn't get used up by breathing Are you sure the base is truly sustainable, though? What's the math on water usage? I assume you are getting some extra water from the toilet (it produces more than it uses), but if your dupe relies on the oxygen produced from water, that may not be enough.

Algae efficiency is not as important as it looks like to a new player. Early on, algal deposits are plentiful. Later on, they are obsolete. That mealwood comparison is good. Mealwood, like terrariums, is harmful to inexperienced players: if you mush it you waste water, if you store it in powered refrigerators you waste a lot of power (mealwood takes more space than usual), if you try to get good ratings on it you waste dupe-time and fertilizer. It takes more skill to use it efficiently than sleet wheat, but it pretends to be the new player option. Similar with terrariums: their CO2 consumption is minuscule and you're better off just dumping all the CO2 into pits until you can scrub them, their massive consumption of water will drain your water resources quickly and you will need to waste sand or find a geyser (and deal with heat), their oxygen production is low enough that you need to stack them, their seeming portability is just a trap because it will make dupes haul water from afar while not generating enough oxygen to cover the wasted time.