Nebbie

Glad to see my dupes won't pee themselves because they came back from a mission and I forgot to clear their assignment to the rocket's latrine, or lose morale from wanting to use its mess table. Less space radiation in general is good, though I'm concerned about a frozen forest increase. It's not exactly the most forgiving of places to start on. Is there any chance we could get atmo suits to protect from radiation, in accordance with their material? It would really help out with dupes working in space.

A well-deserved nerf. This is a nice buff, but I don't think it's really enough to make the Cartographic Module useful. You could even make it reveal all adjacent hexes outright, and it'd still be only barely useful as a supplement to a telescope in the spacefarer module. You guys might want to rethink this animation, because its very existence makes dupes be exposed to more rads by quite a bit in high-rad areas (especially crushed satellites). Space and wheezeworts commonly trigger it and just slow anything with them down. It would be better if they could just show an expression, so we know somewhere is unsafe, but the dupe doesn't have to stop to tell us. It could also work if dupes did an animation on returning to safe radiation levels, instead of entering unsafe levels.

It's definitely good to be able to make actual doors. The issue is asteroid crusts, as later asteroids, and in the new cluster type, even early asteroids, have crusts the rover can't dig, meaning you need to get lucky with a chance break to be able to get the rover in. You need a dupe to activate it.

Nice, more of a reason to use it. Well, there goes my abuse of sucrose for transferring heat for power purposes. It was a little silly that basically caramel was one of the best options. Also nice to have another way to make carbon dioxide. This is...interesting, and probably very useful, but I think it misses the mark on what the Rover should be. The main problem with rovers is they can get locked out of areas of an asteroid by materials like Granite. The other problem is they can't build the Rocket Platform needed for dupes to land without having first to come in a Trailblazer; note that the Rocket Platform is tier 3 in research, so like fridges, can't be built by the Rover. Instead of becoming useful exploration/setup tools, Rovers now are likely to be things players spam out with meaningless launches to get basically free extra dupes. I do like the idea of a colony with robots helping out, but it shouldn't be tied to rocketry, and rocketry's robots really should be about getting into an asteroid easily and paving the way for dupes.

I'm getting this too on Linux.

Storing radbolts is very nice, but I still feel like everything's bottlenecked around generation, because the storage is only double, and radbolt generators are rather power-hungry and heat-producing while being very inefficient. Now that we're expected to also spend power to store radbolts, I think it'd be reasonable for the generators be tuned down to being 320W and 3kDTU/s. Dupes shedding a whole 100 rads does feel a little more balanced with space, but I still think radiation is a little out of balance with space being 250 rads/cycle and common wheezes being even more. If both were 150 rads/cycle and radbolt generators were 50% efficient, I think things would be a touch more reasonable, both in dupe safety risks (with this you could even remove those ugly extra tiles from the top of spacefarer modules) and in Shine Bugs being a rad source.

10x is a lot, especially to do in one patch. I would've expected a 2x or a 5x increase, then maybe the other of the two later (with warning), not 10x all at once. This is going to fry a lot of dupes in people with bases not prepared for this update, and even in a normal base that avoids much radiation, I expect some issues to come with working in space or rockets, in large part because now all existing spacefarer modules are instantly very obsolete... This is going to be an utter pain for fueling things like Diamond Presses and Radbolt Engines, since now we'll need constant high rads during fueling instead of temporary high rads to store up, or multiple generators (which is a lot of heating). I get wanting to have a capacity, but could it please be something like 2000 instead? I love to see rovers get touched with how just plain weird and useless they were, but I think you'll need to buff them after this. You've nerfed their abilities and they're still quite useless for asteroids with tough crusts. Please let them dig anything, but at slower rates than dupes normally would, at least, so they're useful for colonizing those later asteroids. And please consider giving them a recharge station, as deconstruction and launching a whole new rocket is just...mega awkward.

What exactly does Radiation Eater do? Rads into calories? That could be ridiculous.

They still to my knowledge leave a permanent "corpse" behind. Yes, they'd be actually pretty useful with hard material digging, but there'd still be the annoyance of having them sitting around in some corner forever.

Numbers please. Not sure why this was felt to be needed (it's sooo much higher than the other early engines already), but damn, that makes it even more clearly the go-to for early orbital research. With all this work on rover asthetics and such, can we expect some actual gameplay changes on them? They're not great right now.

The Radbolt Engine generates a ridiculous amount of radioactive contamination, so it can still be used to fuel itself (the same is definitely true of the Carbon Dioxide Engine, and I suspect also the Steam Engine, since they generate a lot of exhaust that is also their fuel). This change really only stops significant exploiting of rockets that need oxidizer, so no easy Sucrose Engine exploiting early. I'm hoping their next move is to reduce the magic heating/radioactive contaminating cone to 2 tiles tall instead of 9. This would significantly reduce the heat generation of rockets (which is absolutely nuts and can cause serious problems if anything is too close and not made out of resilient materials), make it nearly impossible to exploit it for power generation (since the platform itself is 2 tiles tall), and make it very hard to power Radbolt Engines off their own exhaust. It would also finally give a good reason why we need a platform to begin with.

My rockets relied on outhouses with stored dirt, and thus will not be any shorter due to recent updates. It does not fill the role of the duplicant, which is the issue. The cartographic module reveals only the tile the rocket is on, while a duplicant on a telescope reveals tiles in a radius of 3. To ever send out a rocket with only a cartographic module is a severe waste of time unless you literally already know where everything is (and thus just need to carve a path out). As to using them in tandem, I really think you are underestimating how ridiculous duplicants can be at telescope usage. You see, part of the issue here is the cartographic module only starts doing anything once you come adjacent to an unrevealed tile (and even then it's just a ? until you go to it unless it's an asteroid), but in my experience, I don't think I've ever even had a rocket come up adjacent to unrevealed tiles, because a duplicant on a telescope will have revealed them already. While some faster engines (I tend not to use hydrogen or large petrol) would enable reaching undiscovered space, the slowdown from a cartographic module would likely still be to where it only reveals a tile or two on the whole exploratory journey. Spending 5 rocket height on something that will probably only do anything at all with a hydrogen or large petroleum engine, but even then just accomplish what a dupe would do in a tenth of a cycle, is patently absurd.

It takes up a lot of rocket height, makes the rocket slower due to its burden, and only reveals tiles that you fly right into, which at that slow speed...the telescope will probably have already revealed. Also, at the end of a rocket's range (when it can still make it back), the telescope can reveal more tiles...and the cartographic module can't. I do not want that on my rockets.

Finally, no more having to disable the control station so my dupe can actually be productive when the rocket's just sitting there. The two remaining QoL rocketry issues are Scout Rovers (at least make them deconstructible and able to slowly dig hard materials) and the Cartographic Module (it's really stupidly slow and useless compared to an in-rocket telescope).