Nebbie

Very excited to see swamp start and revamped surface/space tech. How much of that will be added to the base game when the DLC comes out, as opposed to being DLC-exclusive?

I wondered about this, since I've started a Rime playthrough and noticed dupes down below room temperature seeming to be just fine. It's really quite bizarre that they both can just become fine with being cold, and there doesn't seem to be any point at which they start taking damage akin to scalding; hopefully that eventually gets changed.

Well if they return with mercury from it, it'll be worth the wait!

Is there anything special about 6 weeks?

Without a way to distinguish critters, there's no way to detect prince presence, so it would be rather difficult. I think you'd need an automatic way to move hatched princes from a special room in, that only allows one at a time, and that feeds into a timer timed to about how long they live before it lets in more; really roundabout.

Oh, don't worry about the bug, the biggest issue is breeding them. You need to pen a prince in or else they'll lay prince eggs and give you a whole big generation of princes, but princes are awful bastards that destroy resources. Even with the prince in, you end up with pufts of the wrong type coming in, which just gums up everything. I started ranched dense pufts recently just to try it and it's been my worst ranching headache yet, worse than no-automation pokeshells was when I first tried those and worse than the shove voles I'm ranching in that same base (only a few floors above the printing pod...there's been a few escapes, as seemingly they can burrow diagonally). And that's without having to have a special gas type sealed off in there! You'll definitely need atmo suits, cause grooming takes ages, especially if you don't use a trick to limit where they can go.

Sad is quite fitting, I love the tree-related production chains, but the dirt part is the worst; compost piles are still basically a noob trap and pip ranching isn't really taken seriously. It beats pufts, but that's a low bar. Oh, perhaps I am. I suppose it just takes so long to become an issue, normally there's a ridiculous buffer of igneous, and a ton of magma before geothermal gets started up. Plus, I overestimated the prevelance of volcanos, last year I was playing on a map with like 10 of them near my base. Ah, that is also something I forgot. In the base I had with tons of volcanos, I was bothering with sage hatch coal power. In fact, steel production from pokeshells instead from the polluted dirt is also power-positive, though I'm not sure how much (probably fairly low when averaged). And then there's slicksters for the CO2 instead of sieving it... This is what I love about the whole system relating to trees: It produces high-volume outputs of apparent waste products, but they tie in with ways you can use them, unlike the older production chains that tend to be a bit stingy (coal generator CO2 output is especially pitiful). I think early in game design, Klei was a little overly worried about players struggling to handle flooding their bases with waste.

Sage hatches are on-paper better for producing coal. The problem is just feeding multiple ranches of them. Igneous rock beats dirt both in available starting quantity and in producability (volcanos). It's almost worth it on forest starts, but in the end, pips just aren't very good at dirt production, and the whole ethanol system is cumbersome and barely power-positive. I do like them myself...when I'm not bothering to ranch them, and just storing dirt in a room with some wild ones so I've got a source of refined carbon forever.

I did not have a material science background. While I did study quite a bit of physics, thermal conductivity was one thing that was barely touched on, and I mainly learned about it as a result of ONI, not prior. My main background is in computer science. I would caution in general against making these assumptions about where people are coming from, because it can serve to dismiss their reasoning. I do like to tinker and experiment and discover, it's just with ONI, I feel like after learning about things that I'm looking at a poor design that doesn't make much sense given a few selective injections of realism would fix some parts. I would like to note that a lot of what I take issue with in ONI is related to choices Klei made in regards to processing chains and material properties in things added very early in the game. Lead and aluminum tossed in with realistic thermal conductivities has done a lot more for the game than copper and gold at their weirdly-average values. Knowing about copper specifically is actually fairly common I think, as it's commonly used in pans meant to quickly heat up oil in cooking. I wasn't aware until I looked into it just how good it was, but my expectation coming in was that it would be up there with aluminum, not down with iron. I would also like to point out that there are always reasonable breaks from reality, such as with pressure mechanics, but what frustrates me about copper is that the game has thermal conductivity overall much like real life, and no apparent reason to make copper so bad, given how well aluminum has worked out, and so it ends up being a curveball you run into after ONI has already set up some differing expectations from reality, and that specific curveball messes with the potential of builds. I think it would be more sane if thermal conductivities were nearly realistic (not exactly, maybe thermium > diamond > copper/aluminum > gold > current copper/gold) and starting biomes always had decent iron ore, and aluminum/gold/copper/diamond were goodies you found around the map in smaller amounts than present; starting forest biome having an absurd thermal conductor in it is just...weird. Actually, I think it would be interesting to have a small amount of refined copper sitting around buried nearby (this is how ancient civilizations got started with it to my knowledge), and push players to refine metals once they run out of it. Lead kind of does this right now, but in absolutely ridiculous quantities and far too far from the base (pretty much you go from famine to feast with being able to run conductive wire etc., sure lead sucks for heat but there's just so much it feels stupid).

Ah, I forgot to mention something. The key point is that players do not exist as blank slates, they exist with preconceived ideas from real life, and so have some expectations that the things in ONI with names from real life obey similar properties to those they have in real life. Defying these expectations without a good reason creates problems, as then players are left frustrated and having to spend more time looking at game-specific information. You can of course flush all that real-world knowledge down the toilet, but doing so is not generally satisfying; it is more satisfying to see tons of parallels, to learn a thing in ONI, and then learn about it in real life, or vice versa. Ideally, you even learn about a thing in real life, come to ONI, and find better gameplay from knowing it. Coming in with no expectations of similarity makes it harder to reason about and figure out game systems, as you must spend time on even basic properties. While differences can sometimes enable learning, they often just lead to frustration; some incorrect expectations will exist anyways with realism, because of imperfect player knowledge, and it's better to limit things mostly to that so that then when players correct those expectations, they are learning about real stuff, which feels rewarding. Also, to harp on copper a moment, even if it wasn't specifically copper, there should be something with that high of a thermal conductivity as a solid; this creates problems in many designs reliant on solid tiles and stacks the deck so far in the direction of convection that it can lead to pretty much ignoring conduction in all but later game or very optimized builds; this is actually limiting gameplay right now. Why punish players for trying to use the stuff they've heard is good in real life, and have as the replacement something much worse that limits build potential? I actually like the polluted oxygen mechanics (aside of Morbs and Pufts); my problem with algae terraria is that they're a little too simple at the start, they don't do what you'd initially expect, and when you try to make them fully work with later stuff, it just isn't very rewarding because of that. Oxyferns by contrast are a little more complicated to get working, and provide a slight challenge with careful management of gas flow...only to then be completely nonscalable hot garbage anyways. Overall, I'm not satisfied with the current state of oxygen in this game, electrolyzers are just a little too good (they should probably take more power, so that they can't self-power while providing spare hydrogen, so then a reason to use the plant solutions would be lower power cost in the midgame).

I would say this is the big thing that gets missed most of the time when people argue "the devs left it in a year, so it must be intended!" Even despite the best efforts of programmers, things are often spaghetti as much as any lategame base's infrastructure, and ripping something out has real risks. On "realism" in particular, I see a lot of people argue in a way that I think misses the point; it's not that ONI by some law has to be like reality, but that good game design in a game about learning and physics involves in-game learning and real-world learning reinforcing each other, and as well, any game design should avoid punishing players for doing the intuitive* thing, before considering other issues. *Some counterintuitive things as examples (yes, I'm calling these bad game design):

It's weird the glass forge spits out liquid glass, but the metal refinery puts out solid metal, when the whole way the refinery works is based on the metal's melting heat. The glass forge is actually in my opinion a more interesting building to work with. Really, I'm not a fan of how much energy the metal refinery can produce, because it rewards the more experienced players, but severely hurts the less experienced ones (and the rock crusher's inefficiency just contributes to this, while smooth hatches are a noob trap); refining metal in ONI is kind of a strange difficulty wall. Unfortunately, molten metal coming out would just make that worse. Smooth hatches should really output the 25% lost ore mass as coal. Hell, make the refinery itself spit out 25% of the mass as rock instead of metal so it's not getting you a resource advantage to use, too. Then maybe the refinery can become crazy cool. I really think melting aquatuners is going to go away, for the simple reason that machines should overheat before melting logically and so that newer players aren't as screwed by things not being done right. Really, I think the aquatuner in general right now is in a bad state where it's the lynchpin of almost every base; .

I'm sure they're still fixing bugs in the base game (especially since some have been fixed relatively recently), and the DLC will probably only add bugs in its own area. My bigger worry right now is really performance. ONI struggles with the currently large map size and certain issues like pathing.

Taking away melting from abyssalite would create the problem of tiles in the middle of the map that you could dump an unlimited amount of heat into without any containment, unlike the other two. It has to melt into something. Mechanical filters and liquid locks are clearly intended. Bypass pumps and infinite storage, not so much, and I suspect the reason they aren't messed with is that they don't massively break the game and trying to fix them could create horrific bugs (high risk, low reward); very different from alchemy, mass loss, and thermal imbalances, which could wreck a base over time, and thus fixing would be unlikely to make anything worse.

Wouldn't work. Just use the ore from space plus generated materials (you can, in the end, make dirt from dead shove voles...) to replace everything in your base and dump your starting biome's materials somewhere.