[Game Update] (Preview Branch)- 210162

[Ecu]

1 minute ago, StormHUN said:

As I said earlier, my problem is not that meal lice is not a "free food forever" thing anymore, but that it became completely non-renewable, which IMHO is not a good balance. Make it hard to renew, but not impossible.

Why is it a bad thing that some things are not renewable?  If the resource is not required to survive and continue a colony, what does it hurt if it isn't able to be renewed?

[Storm Engineer]

5 minutes ago, Ecu said:

Why is it a bad thing that some things are not renewable?  If the resource is not required to survive and continue a colony, what does it hurt if it isn't able to be renewed?

For once, because then we are back to the previous situation of there being only one single food source that makes sense in the long run.

Second, because it makes no sense, logically - yes, it's just a game, but I prefer games to make some sense. Just think about it: You suddenly arrive to this place that has mealwood naturally growing, and seeds of it existing, but having no any means of producing said seeds. That makes no sense.

Also, now that I think about it... does this mean that then all the mealwood I don't dog up early is pretty much wasted, because it will just die after a while, and the lice will rotl leaving me nothing (but fertilizer)?

[Ecu]

2 minutes ago, StormHUN said:

For once, because then we are back to the previous situation of there being only one single food source that makes sense in the long run.

Second, because it makes no sense, logically - yes, it's just a game, but I prefer games to make some sense. Just think about it: You suddenly arrive to this place that has mealwood naturally growing, and seeds of it existing, but having no any means of producing said seeds. That makes no sense.

Also, now that I think about it... does this mean that then all the mealwood I don't dog up early is pretty much wasted, because it will just die after a while, and the lice will rotl leaving me nothing (but fertilizer)?

Meallice aren't a plant though, and if you look at the 'seed' for them, it resembles a bunch of meallice in a ball.  Essentially you're growing that colony of larva until they are large enough to eat.  Once the larva have all matured and been harvested, there is nothing left.  Seems to make reasonable sense to me.

With regards to there only being one renewable food, that would be incorrect.  You technically have three renewable food sources currently.  You have Mushbars, Fried Mushbars, and Bristle Blossoms.  Granted, you probably would not want to use mushbars without frying them, but you do have that option.

In addition, this a very early alpha representation of the game.  There could very well be additional food sources presented in the future, each with their own unique environments/requirements to cultivate.  Some may be renewable, others may not.  I know that in the game files, we already have a type of fish...

[mjom]

10 hours ago, qb. said:

It is actually. Go to Settings of the game and choose beta you want.

just only me find stupid a beta branch in a alpha game???

[Storm Engineer]

55 minutes ago, mjom said:

just only me find stupid a beta branch in a alpha game???

Feel free to contact Steam Support and request that they rename the "Beta participation" feature to "Testing branch" only for ONI.

[Beercules]

7 hours ago, Vilda said:

The combination of Overheating and autorepair is biting me in the ass.

The Super computer runs so hot it damages itself in 5 seconds even turned of and in Ice biome. Then someone runs there to autorepair only for it to damage itself again.

EDIT: immediately found out the repair can be canceled and is not picked again

 

6 hours ago, Vilda said:

Damn, just realized what is screwing me so much - thermal conductivity of CO2. Once it heats, that really stays. Shame it does not affect surrounding tiles in any way.

I had the same issue with CO and the coal generator, even with a cooling fan manned 24/7 right next to it and the coal generator is paused due to batteries being full, my generator was being damaged and needed repair continuously. I think their is a bug with how quickly CO / Thermal damage effects a objects, I think they need to increase the propagation of heat vs staying in one area and damaging the item.

 

Great update, I couldn't be happier to be wrong about no release happening today

 

BEERCULES!

[DragonMaster77]

Quote

Duplicant traits no longer prevent them from performing their profession task

Does this mean that they will not be assigned a trait that goes against their primary stat?  

For Example a Scientist will not get Yokel?  

Just curious cause my first starting three after updating had just that.  A Scientist with Yokel.   I'll get a screenshot if it happens again.  

 

[sai05]

- Edit already know how to get this update -

 

How to get Update ? 

Edited March 16, 2017 by sai05

[HeavyRain92]

Awesome game, been playing for 40 hours now loved every minute of it.

I just hope it gets easier to make somewhat a self sustainable colony

hate to see these lil guys die

[vonVile]

This update has be great so far! The loading has been really smooth and no data slow downs so far.

[Risu]

5 hours ago, Ecu said:

Meallice aren't a plant though, and if you look at the 'seed' for them, it resembles a bunch of meallice in a ball.  Essentially you're growing that colony of larva until they are large enough to eat.  Once the larva have all matured and been harvested, there is nothing left.  Seems to make reasonable sense to me.

With regards to there only being one renewable food, that would be incorrect.  You technically have three renewable food sources currently.  You have Mushbars, Fried Mushbars, and Bristle Blossoms.  Granted, you probably would not want to use mushbars without frying them, but you do have that option.

In addition, this a very early alpha representation of the game.  There could very well be additional food sources presented in the future, each with their own unique environments/requirements to cultivate.  Some may be renewable, others may not.  I know that in the game files, we already have a type of fish...

Thankfully Mushbars are bugged where you can only get sick from food if you have the trait that prevents getting sick from food: Iron Gut.
 

[Ecu]

33 minutes ago, Risu said:

Thankfully Mushbars are bugged where you can only get sick from food if you have the trait that prevents getting sick from food: Iron Gut.
 

That's a rather awkward bug, lol.

[Troxism]

On the topic of food sustainability post update: 

There are two obvious ways to make food long term: Bristle Berries and Mush Bars.

Note: I make some assumptions here: AFAIK a cycle is about 600 seconds real time (but obviously its 150 seconds on 4x, but this matters for building consumption rates), and this is used in some of the math. So if I'm wrong correct me, although tbh this value would have to be WAY off for it to change much.

Bristle Berries produce 5 fruits (5000kcal total) in 18 cycles (10 for the initial growth then 4 regrowths at 2 cycles each). The plant consumes 20kg fertiliser a day. AFAIK a dupe consumes 1000kcal a day, so to sustain a single dupe this way you need: 18/5*20 = 72kg of fertiliser a day.

The methods of producing fertiliser are:

1: Outhouses convert dirt to polluted dirt and then Compost that into fertilizer (both conversions are 1 to 1), so you would need 72kg of dirt per day per dupe. Except dupes only use the Outhouse once a day AFAIK (even if it's twice, it doesn't change this much), so you could only produce a maximum of 6.7kg of fertiliser per dupe per day this way, far far far short of the required amount. And this would ofc still require dirt. So this method is clearly nowhere near being sustainable.

2: Use the Fertiliser Maker building. This uses Polluted Water at 1333g/s to make 22.2g/s of fertilizer. Yes I double checked those numbers (this thing is absurdly useless in it's current state). Note that it confuses me where all that mass goes, but that is beside the point. If you were to use this method, you would require 72000/22.2/600 = 5.405 of these buildings per dupe running at 100%, which would also consume 5.405 * 120W = 648W of power, far more then that dupe could produce themselves. It would also create an absurd amount of waste heat. And finally, it would require: 22.2/1333 = 0.01665 ratio of fertilizer to water, then 72kg fert required = 72/0.01665 = 4324kg of polluted water per day per dupe. This is so hilariously unrealistic that between this and all the other problems of this method, this option is obviously completely unusable.

Now maybe there is some far more efficient method of making fertiliser that I missed, but it seems like Bristle Berries are completely unsustainable after your initial supply of mined fertiliser runs out (and there doesn't seem to be that much of it either).

I will note here that I'm not even looking at it from the point of view of 'you should be able to live forever', but that you can at least live a few hundred cycles with a decently sized (15-20 man) colony before running out of key stuff. In the previous update this was EASILY possible even without any exploits (just don't waste water on anything but making oxygen, and you could filter all the contaminated water with nothing but Dupe powered wheels via steam). But you would run out of fertiliser far before this point even with a very small 5 man colony in this update. So this method is clearly out of the question, even if you aren't looking to live forever but just 'a while', unless there is some massive cache of fertiliser hidden in some biomes that I don't know about.

So what about Mush Bars?

Well, a Mush Bar takes 75kg dirt and 75kg of water each, so 75kg dirt and 75kg water per cycle per dupe this way. Now you can probably get the water (I don't know how much water geysers produce per cycle, but lets assume it's sufficient to sustain this, or at least just go with the logic that there is a lot of water in the world for simplicity's sake.), but what about the dirt? I know you can make dirt via turning contaminated water into steam, but I have a hard time imagining you being able to sustain 75kg a cycle per dupe (even a modest 10 man colony would require 750kg of dirt every single cycle...) Meaning you would have to boil absurd amounts of water every single day. And you would likely run out of contaminated water, even with CO2 scrubbers/showers/lavatories (none of these seem to create enough to sustain this), since this 75kg dirt is per dupe per cycle. This MIGHT be possible, if I am greatly underestimating the ratio of dirt recovered per Kg of contaminated water (if it was 1 to 1, it would work, but from what I remember it's a small fraction, and tbh if it is 1 to 1 it's really broken as it's creating tons of mass out of thin air), but it seems a huge stretch. And this basically relies on the fact that Mush Bars are bugged and don't even make you sick right now (else the requirements would double).

Point of all this is: It's actually seemingly much harder to sustain yourself then it was before the patch (even if you aren't talking about literally living forever, you are still heavily limited by resources in the 'reasonable term'), which is confusing since it seemed like the intent of adding things like geysers was to assist with that?

An obvious question one might ask is 'well why does anyone care if you can sustain yourself for a long time?'. Well, one answer I can give is that if you are heavily limited by resources, then the incentive is to never add any new dupes to your colony, which means your colony stays very small. And the problem with a small colony is that you are 'done' building up very quickly. It's fun to keep adding more people, because it forces you to expand/rebuild/rework your design to accommodate them; it keeps the game interesting for a longer period of time.

I do agree with the sentiment that food shouldn't be as easy as it was before (it was basically a non factor), but I feel this is going a little too far in the other direction. Stuff like requiring you to regulate crop temperature carefully by making them far more sensitive would have been a better move IMHO, and/or adding other requirements for sustainable farming to make it more complicated.

Anyways, that is my (long) two cents on the issue. Like I said, if the ratio of dirt per kg of contaminated water boiled is far more favourable then I remember, it might be barely possible to sustain yourself on Mush Bars, but it's still silly that farming plants is effectively completely non viable without exploiting digging up mealwood early.

 

 

[PrivateDonut]

Can we get a confirmation on rather mealwood is suppose to drop seeds or is it a intended change? 

[Kiako]

1 hour ago, Troxism said:

Thank you for this study even if it's a little bit depressing for the dupes.

 

(To answer your obvious question, I feel like we need to split substainability into long term and foreever.

• A low level colony should have a long term survivability but should be doomed by the lack of ressource. This woud help beginners to discover the game.
• An high level colony should have a short term survivability unless the player carefully manage production and maintenance. The higher the level, ,the more complex managing would be, the more the colony should be able to survive forever)

[Ecu]

1 hour ago, Troxism said:

~snip to keep post short~

Something you left out is that when food rots, it also becomes fertilizer.  I currently don't quite know the ratio for this, as I haven't monitored it closely.  However, this is another source of fertilizer.

I would say that even a 10 man colony can likely survive a reasonable amount of time (couple hundred cycles), if you play your cards well.  It definitely is not as easy as it was prior to these changes, however, I don't really consider that a bad thing.  Meallice required no effort to maintain and there was no encouragement to ever even make bars from it.  These changes shift meallice to a finite resource and ecourage using other sources.

I know that people have done the math on this, however, I'm not quite sure how it honestly plays out in practice.  However, if you are indeed correct...it just means you cannot rely on a single source of food at all.  You have to utilize the various systems and continual resource acquiring to try survive as long as possible.  Seems pretty legitimate as a game design decision to me.

2 minutes ago, PrivateDonut said:

Can we get a confirmation on rather mealwood is suppose to drop seeds or is it a intended change? 

On the unofficial discord, Alia informed us that it was indeed an intentional change.  They were also the one who informed us that bristle blossoms would drop seeds when eaten to make them the renewable plant now.

[PrivateDonut]

2 minutes ago, Ecu said:

On the unofficial discord, Alia informed us that it was indeed an intentional change.  They were also the one who informed us that bristle blossoms would drop seeds when eaten to make them the renewable plant now.

Yeah, I was pretty sure it was an intended change. It would have been nice if they included it in the change logs provided. I just started recently using mealwood, but I'm look into my other options of food sources again. 

[Risu]

Finally got my colony to a full featured state and I noticed that the algae distillery pretty much never stops pumping out polluted water and was backing up everything else putting it out (haven't started moving water from the slime biome). So the fertilizer maker actually looks worthwhile to make, for the first time ever.

Also the gas vent UI bug is fixed, and very clearly showing how it was broken before; instantly overpressure for a second after exhausting a gas packet, which used to not remove the status icon after pressure dropped.

I'd say the current frustration is overloading the power grid, and breaking the water purifier by accidentally crossing pipes(and it took forever for me to notice).
 

[Troxism]

Even combining methods it doesn't really add up at all looking at more numbers from a few other people. Even if you did multiple recycling methods, it wouldn't be enough, although you might be able to keep a single colonist 'alive' via keeping him fed till the portal spits out another one, but that is a pretty silly way to play (and the point is having more then one colonist).

Also, while I don't know exactly how much fertiliser you get from letting food rot, unless you get many times more total mass in Kg of fertiliser then the mass of the food (You spend far more mass in fertiliser then you get back food; keep in mind a single food box only holds 150kg total so food weighs relatively little compared to other things), that wouldn't do anything at all; it would just be throwing away food. And if this actually does give more then you put in, well tbh I would call that a bug because it would make no sense at all.

Also, Bristle Blossoms gave seeds when eaten before this update; this wasn't a new change. Not that it really matters.

Also, you are correct that you could probably keep a small colony of 10 alive for quite a while, it would basically be done via burning an absurd amount of water per day, which bothers me on a realism level (obviously the Kg values are already massively inflated in this game, but burning literally 20+ tons of water a day to keep 5-10 people alive stretches my suspension of disbelief a little too far).

The other problem is even if you literally had infinite contaminated water via some method, you would still need to burn an absurd amount of pure water as well (from geysers I guess) to power hydrogen generators to power all those Fertiliser Makers you would need (as a Dupe can only do about half the power to power the ones he would need just to feed himself). Basically you would literally be using electrolysis just to generate hydrogen and treating oxygen as a waste product (you would probably condense/freeze it save space as you would be generating easily 10-20x the amount you could actually use, which btw would take even more power which would lower the efficiency and make you make even MORE electrolysers....) just to generate the required power. And then you would have to deal with all the heat from this. Which is just further into the realm of 'completely silly' tbh.

[Ecu]

8 minutes ago, Risu said:

Finally got my colony to a full featured state and I noticed that the algae distillery pretty much never stops pumping out polluted water and was backing up everything else putting it out (haven't started moving water from the slime biome). So the fertilizer maker actually looks worthwhile to make, for the first time ever.

Also the gas vent UI bug is fixed, and very clearly showing how it was broken before; instantly overpressure for a second after exhausting a gas packet, which used to not remove the status icon after pressure dropped.

I'd say the current frustration is overloading the power grid, and breaking the water purifier by accidentally crossing pipes(and it took forever for me to notice).
 

Do you feel that the distillery is bugged regarding the amount it dumps out?  Or does it seem balanced?  I've not used it at all in my playthroughs yet, so I'm not aware of the ratio of slime to water and how well that feels balanced.

[Risu]

3 minutes ago, Ecu said:

Do you feel that the distillery is bugged regarding the amount it dumps out?  Or does it seem balanced?  I've not used it at all in my playthroughs yet, so I'm not aware of the ratio of slime to water and how well that feels balanced.

According to the code it's 300g of slime for 10kg of polluted water and 10kg of algae, which is insane.
 

[Troxism]

Yeah now that I double checked they did buff the distillery a LOT; looks like it's a ratio of 33 to 1 algae and polluted water from slime but that kind of doesn't seem intended (as it's creating an insane amount of mass from thin air; over 96% of the mass it generates is just poofed into existence, much like the Fertiliser Maker deletes about 98.5% of the mass fed into it, so I guess it almost evens out in a super broken way that makes no logical sense). Honestly I think they should just change the values on this/the Fertilizer Maker to something more reasonable at least for a start. Mass shouldn't be getting destroyed/created in such absurd ratios.

This does however make my suggestion above with mass Electrolysers powered by steam vents to generate the power needed for all this stuff far less of a joke and more of a serious idea, although it further jumps the power requirements (MORE electrolysers!) because you have to feel all these distilleries. And the cable networking you would need would be a nightmare to organise to not overload any of the circuits. And I don't think you can renew enough slime from pufts to actually make this sustainable, but it would at least work to let you live a very long time which might be 'good enough'.

Edit: So yeah I think I have the framework here for maybe not a 'renewable' base, but something that could sustain quite a few for a VERY long time, but it's a very unrealistic/inefficient method. Basically use the Distilleries to make an absurd amount of polluted water from slime, then steam it via magma (no other method seems to work now as everything just overheats at around 75C, coal plants and the new heaters included) or use the Fertiliser Maker to either make Dirt or Fertiliser, and then use Electrolysers powered by steam vents to make hydrogen to generate the absurd amount of power all this would require. And then get rid of the 90% waste oxygen via freezing. 

I can already imagine the massive rows of electrolysers and the spider web of cabling and pumping systems you would need for this monstrosity of a base concept.

Edited March 16, 2017 by Troxism

[Ecu]

Just now, Risu said:

According to the code it's 300g of slime for 10kg of polluted water and 10kg of algae, which is insane.
 

That does seem rather extreme.  I wonder if that is intentional or a typo regarding the numbers.  I'm guessing a typo, but I'm not quite sure what it should actually be.  How long does it take to process?  Perhaps that is the reason for such high return?

[Risu]

7 minutes ago, Ecu said:

That does seem rather extreme.  I wonder if that is intentional or a typo regarding the numbers.  I'm guessing a typo, but I'm not quite sure what it should actually be.  How long does it take to process?  Perhaps that is the reason for such high return?

100 seconds.... But they rewrote how this is handled, and it looks stupid. Hang on have to figure this out.

Okay so they schedule the mass conversion straight up as the conversion interval, then pass that as the delta time for the convert mass method which adds that to the accumulated time, which checks if it is less than the conversion interval, does nothing if it some how is, but if it is greater than or equal to the conversion interval it subtracts the conversion interval from the accumulated time and does a conversion.

Very roundabout way to handle this now. Suspect they are getting ready to use this somewhere else but not for its intended purpose.
 

Edited March 16, 2017 by Risu

[Ecu]

Just now, Risu said:

100 seconds.
 

Hrm.  So other than the obviously questionable mass input issues, that is only 100g water and 100g algae per second.  That's honestly not all that absurd of a rate of production.  It is just a bit weird that you get so much for so little slime.  That does indeed make puft abuse a whole lot more desirable for sure.