Is disease going to be broken like food?

[chemie]

13 hours ago, Whispershade said:

I didn't quite want to spell it out like Sevio, but yes, If you never breach pockets of PO or always deal with it very quickly, you're unlikely to have much danger from slimelung. But being wary of polluted oxygen because of the slimelung risk is the very definition of not ignoring slimelung.

Incidentally, you can safely store slime and bleachstone in compactors in liquids like water or polluted water to keep them from sublimating. Since they're both fairly valuable resources.

I have been using closed rooms for slime but I forgot you could store in water.  Might be worth it; not sure.

For some reason, my compactors with bleach stone are not emitting chlorine (not immersed).  Maybe it is pressure related but my chlorine room never happened....but...much easier way below.

 

Edit: OK.  That was stupid easy.  I had a pool of -5C PW in an ice biome so I put the slime compactor in there and after only a few cycles, all was dead.  I then tried an algae compactor out in the open -25C ice biome and it seemed to take much longer to cool down.  Moved the algae to the cold water and presto, no more slimelung in about 3 cycles.

So, slimelung can be ignored via a -5C polluted water storage system.  Just send all algae and slime there and never worry about it again.

[brummbar7]

3 hours ago, chemie said:

Can someone provide a use case?  Do they use so little chlorine it is viable from small pockets vs a geyser?, 

I tried to use them as I thought Klei intended them to be used in a closed testing world, even though I was very uncertain there would be much benefit.   I was washing slime, to try it out.  One thing you need to be aware of is each individual ore scrubber will only clean a max of 480k germs.  I've had over 2 mil on individual slime.  So it's not just a scrubber for each dupe, but multiple.  They can sort of conga-line though, so I think the base number is 4 for 1 dupe with access to the slime biome, and add an additional for each additional dupe you're letting in the biome, perhaps.  Unless your slime containers are sweep-only and so a little easier to control.  And if you're not storing slime in the base, or growing mushrooms in base, you might be able to start with 2 or 3, for gold amalgam.  I don't like it.  But that's how it is currently.

They do seem to use very little chlorine, relative to the amounts just sitting around in hot biomes, but I don't know how much as I never saw the 10kg of chlorine they contain go down.  I know they were using it as I could see tiny dots moving between pipe sections.  But even the pipe sections almost never showed a decrease.   When they did I think it was like 20g, but this was ongoing over time so I don't know what the total is.  Would be a nice text blurb to have in the build screen.

As for their utility, I was never sure.  Because of the way the germ mechanics work, germs are only a danger when you actually ingest them via breathing or eating.  Germs on the dupe's surface are not a direct threat.  It seems like the only way slimelung on mined resources is a threat is if you use it to get oxygen.  But in the case of extended chains (amalgam->distiller>algae>oxygen?), it might be hard to trace accurately.   In my experience the natural slimelung in PO is far more of a threat. I've been busy for a couple weeks now and haven't had time to play the new update yet.  But I'll probably try it without scrubbers this time, to see.

[chemie]

Like I said, putting a compactor in water at -5C destroyed millions of slime lung in only a few cycles.  Seems a much better way to just move all slime/algae to that compactor and enjoy infection-free slime biome mining.

 

I don't know what I am doing differently than you, but I just avoid the PO pools in the slime biome and have no issue with all dupes ming away and staying at 100% immunity (on default settings.

[brummbar7]

14 minutes ago, chemie said:

I don't know what I am doing differently than you, but I just avoid the PO pools in the slime biome and have no issue with all dupes ming away and staying at 100% immunity (on default settings.

Well like I said I was just trying them to try them (kind of 'my job' in the closed testing branch).  Not because I was seeing a clear need.  Also as mentioned I haven't played the game since the update.  And they've done a lot of hotfixy tinkering since then.

[chemie]

OK.  Thx for reply

[Coolthulhu]

3 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

In my experience the natural slimelung in PO is far more of a threat.

This

The infinitely stacking pO2 above polluted water pools is orders of magnitude more dangerous than any other source of disease. The only role of slime here is infecting the clouds of existing pO2. And those float around much more than slime does.

Basically, the most dangerous form of slimelung is also the hardest to avoid. If you can avoid it, you can avoid all disease easily. If you can't avoid it, you are doomed to get infected and ore scrubber won't help even the tiniest bit.

It seems that ore scrubber was created in mind with a clean base where bringing an infectious piece of ore is a big danger. But this situation never happens in an actual game - the clean bases can take few puffs of pO2 just fine, while unclean bases are full of heavily infected pO2.

 

The only actual use of ore scrubber that I can imagine would not suck would be to scrub dirty food before eating it/dumping it into the fridge. I didn't test it because it didn't sound useful enough to consider.

[Whispershade]

10 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

The infinitely stacking pO2 above polluted water pools is orders of magnitude more dangerous than any other source of disease. The only role of slime here is infecting the clouds of existing pO2. And those float around much more than slime does.

Exactly this. Though the ore scrubbers can be used to reduce the amount of infected slime you'll get in your base. Even a tiny pocket of infected PO can stick around for a long time breeding and seeding germs into ambient oxygen. It probably isn't going to kill anyone, but it can set you up for problems down the line.

Their use may become more of an issue later with future diseases, too. And to be fair, it was a late building in the process that was probably intended to address a collective desire by the early testers to manage contaminated materials better. So at the moment, it probably addresses more of a psychological need than a practical one.

[chemie]

I just stay away from the PO2 while digging through slime biomes anyway so easy to ignore.

 

To summarize:

food poisoning - just have wash basins by outhouses early game; toilets late game to ignore

slime lung - stay away from PO2 and keep base clean with O2.  Store slime and algae outside your base.  If you are OCD on base being clean, store gold,clay,slime and algae in compactors immersed in PW at -5C for 3 cycles.

Food: Just use mealwood.  All game.  No penalty to feeding this as only food to dups even late cycle

 

With above, I stay <10% stress and 100% immunity.  So apparently my original worries came true.

[Vim Razz]

Those are mostly significant concessions to gameplay and base design, tbh. 

That's not very close to the same level of broken-ness as planter-box sleet wheat in AU, where you just put a few planters in reasonable locations and dropped a grill anywhere, and then could do literally nothing else related to food for the rest of the game if you weren't actively expanding your population.

You can't expect much more than that out of an update that's all about environmental hazards, especially if you keep your population small (which applies far less pressure than a large population). By their very nature, they're things you just learn to deal with and play in spite of -- even well designed ones.  (And I do think the disease mechanic is pretty well designed.)

 

Mealwood is definitely off-balance.  It's bad enough that making liceloafs out of them is actually POOR gameplay right now, but it's not nearly as broken as comments here had lead to me to believe before the update. 

I feel like ~25 kg/cycle plain water irrigation and ~2 kg/cycle of fertilizer would pretty well bring them in line relative to other foods, while still being readily accessible in the early game.  Maybe reducing the water cost of liceloafs a little as well, effectively displacing it from meal prep to irrigation.

 

 

[Coolthulhu]

5 hours ago, Vim Razz said:

That's not very close to the same level of broken-ness as planter-box sleet wheat in AU

Sleets produced a lot of food, but it still took work (cooking) and required possibly long trips.

Now mealwood produces much less food per plant, but grows anywhere, requires no cooking, is available at all times (won't suddenly all disappear due to entire stack rotting at once, as in AU). It's pure "fire and forget" and it actually trivializes farming MORE than sleets. You can actually turn off collecting the lice in fridges to save dupe time.

It's probably better that mealwood is the trivial calories option now, because it is the noob option (sleets were a bit hidden).

5 hours ago, Vim Razz said:

Mealwood is definitely off-balance.  It's bad enough that making liceloafs out of them is actually POOR gameplay right now, but it's not nearly as broken as comments here had lead to me to believe before the update. 

I feel like ~25 kg/cycle plain water irrigation and ~2 kg/cycle of fertilizer would pretty well bring them in line relative to other foods, while still being readily accessible in the early game.  Maybe reducing the water cost of liceloafs a little as well, effectively displacing it from meal prep to irrigation.

Liceloafs were poor gameplay back in AU. You could always make dirt loaves instead, because diarrhea was not working.

Requiring both fertilization and irrigation would not bring them in line with others, it would bring them well below shrooms. Actual amount does not matter, it's just the part where fertilization requires dupe time and irrigation requires second tier farming and either dupe time or full pump setup.

[Vim Razz]

 

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Sleets produced a lot of food, but it still took work (cooking) and required possibly long trips.

That's Dupe time, not player time. From the player's perspective you literally just set things up then never have to check or adjust them again.

 

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Now mealwood produces much less food per plant, but grows anywhere, requires no cooking, is available at all times (won't suddenly all disappear due to entire stack rotting at once, as in AU). It's pure "fire and forget" and it actually trivializes farming MORE than sleets.

I would disagree.  You "fire and forget" your mealwood in a region which is easily overtaken by 30° temperatures if you're expanding carelessly.  That's a trap that I'm certain is going to catch a number of new players offguard, who aren't going to know the game well enough to effectively manage their growth or climate in the beginning.

I think you're underestimating the amount of background knowledge and familiarity with game mechanics necessary to make mealwood now seem easier than planter-wheat was then.  AU planter-wheat, by the time you knew enough to grow them at all, were far less likely to placed where they might suffer catastrophic crop failure for the unwary than mealwood are now.

 

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Liceloafs were poor gameplay back in AU. You could always make dirt loaves instead, because diarrhea was not working.

Mushbars cost 75 kg of clean water per 1000 kcal.  Liceloafs only cost 50 kg.  That's not a big deal for a colony of six, but if you like to expand then preserving that early clean water makes a big difference.  The diarrhea thing wasn't even a consideration, for me at least.

You may disagree (and you may even be right), but in AU there's still an argument to be made.  In Outbreak, there isn't.  Loaves are currently just wasted water relative to the lice themselves, and any balance change should address that.

 

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Requiring both fertilization and irrigation would not bring them in line with others, it would bring them well below shrooms. Actual amount does not matter, it's just the part where fertilization requires dupe time and irrigation requires second tier farming and either dupe time or full pump setup.

Why shouldn't they be well below mushrooms?  Dusk Caps require a significant learning curve to grow effectively compared with mealwood (requiring the player to figure out how to safely handle what is now the most dangerous material in the early game), and should be situated appropriately on the reward scale.

Aside from that, mealwood should be positioned so that the player feels an incentive to transition away from it eventually.  It should be easy to get started with, but bad enough to encourage experimenting with other crops.

Requiring token amounts of both irrigation and fertilization would serve as a basic introduction to how those mechanics work so that the transition would be less daunting, and there's already enough of both resources in the starting biome (in addition to early composting and purification) to get a handle on the basics.

As for the numbers I suggested, it's true that they're pretty loose and offhand, but they aren't completely random.  At 25kg water per cycle there's a specific resource incentive to produce liceloafs rather than just eating the lice themselves, and 2kg fert is a token number that's maybe somewhere close-ish to what's sustainable by composting alone if I did my back-of-the-napkin maths correctly.

[BlueLance]

Right now it seems this topic is irrelevant as disease is now broken, people seem to be able to get by with 0 immunity dupes and no wash basins since the last patch XD

[Segato]

6 hours ago, BlueLance said:

Right now it seems this topic is irrelevant as disease is now broken, people seem to be able to get by with 0 immunity dupes and no wash basins since the last patch XD

Its true, first couple of days after OU the difficult was very hard.

In AU your biggest challenge was the temperature of your colony, but in OU (before last patch) everything was different, I remember thinking twice before mining Slime biomes or eating Mush Bars. But this last patch make it everything easier, disease is not anymore a thing.

[Cilya]

On 29/08/2017 at 0:06 PM, Vim Razz said:

That's Dupe time, not player time. From the player's perspective you literally just set things up then never have to check or adjust them again.

Like most of the things in this game. The player goal is often to concentrate on "how to build things so I don't need to care anymore about them". There are two mechanism to force the player to change what they have built. The first one is the resource shortage : you have easy oxygen at the beginning but it don't last and you have to think about oxygen making. You fix the problem but after some time, algae is the missing resource and you have to change your setup. This mechanism is not very strong at the moment since the tech tree is small, techs are fast to research and you can thus "skip basic design" to go directly to the final one which you will never have to change. The second one is the growth of the colony. If your colony is constantly growing, you will need to constantly expand and eventually rebuild things. Personally, I try to play with a continuous growth but many players don't and thus lose the opportunity to have to build more.

For me, the problem is not much that you don't need to do anything when your farm is built. The problem is that it's much easier to build a mealwood farm than a sleet wheat one. Not much more, but the temperature requirement forces the player to think about what method should be used to cool the farm down and how to insulate the farm. I've been even further by selecting a few farmers and equipped them with a suitable vest for cold environment.

So, with AU, it was nice that to fulfil your dupes requirements you had to farm at least two kind of plants ; the two best meals which had the required quality needed two ingredients. That means more to design and build than just a mealwood farm.

Still, I think it was not that good. The best, in a game designer point of view, would be that anything in the game has its usefulness. Sure it's cool if some food production chain are good for starting and as the game advances you have to switch to "better" food production chain. But it's even better if all chains remains useful at the end, because this need you will have to manage all of them at the same time which would probably be a better game experience. What's the point of adding contents to a game if its not to use it ?

There may be an answer to that in OU : some culture which have very good charecteristics (mushrooms) also renewable requirements (slime) but these requirements are renewable up to a certain amount. It would mean that, the number of mushroom you can grow depends on the number of puft you have captured. If it's not enough mushroom to feed your colony, you need other farms as well. This mechanism is a bit weak as it only works if things are well balanced (slime requirements, number of pufts, etc.). This balance is really likely to change and break the mechanism. There are much easier mechanism in similar games that are much easier to maintain : either have the dupes require varied meals or have some dupes not wanting some meal or more generally varied tastes.

Anyway, I'm really optimistic about this game. As long as there are major updates regularly, it's good. Its not reasonable to ask about balance and well fined mechanisms when things change that much. Plus, we have what we need: each update changes the game so much, we have to change the way we plan our colonies. New things to play more. I don't need them to be balanced.

[Vim Razz]

 

3 hours ago, Cilya said:

For me, the problem is not much that you don't need to do anything when your farm is built. The problem is that it's much easier to build a mealwood farm than a sleet wheat one. Not much more, but the temperature requirement forces the player to think about what method should be used to cool the farm down and how to insulate the farm.

That's exactly why I think mealwood should have a mandatory plant upkeep cost (I think the mechanism has worked very well for balancing wheat) -- so that there's enough incentive to look into the relative benefits of other crops, and to learn how to handle their added complexity.

They should be extremely easy to build and get up and running in the early game, though.  For example, that's is why I'd suggest they be irrigated with clean water rather then PW -- with ice biomes being further away there's no longer any super-easy way to cool local PW down by the 5-10° for irrigation at the start of the game.  Or PW may be batter anyway since it's more abundant nearby.  I don't know.

 

3 hours ago, Cilya said:

But it's even better if all chains remains useful at the end, because this need you will have to manage all of them at the same time which would probably be a better game experience. What's the point of adding contents to a game if its not to use it ?

I also strongly agree here, but mealwood farming already has a potential long-term value built into the game in the form of pickled meal.  The value of pickling doesn't seem very high right now because food poisoning is so weak as of the most recent revisions (and I haven't actually checked to see if it now lasts long enough without refrigeration to be worth considering yet -- in AU it did not.), but if balance gets tweeked right then there could be a reasonably strong incentive to maintain a small mealwood farm even long after transitioning away from lice as a primary food source.

It's all the other crops that are suffering as things are now, because there's not much incentive to consider them as long as mealwood can be grown 100% for free.  In AU, free mealwood was a limited resource which kept it in check (gaining more seeds required upkeep), but now it's dominating every conversation for good reason.

 

3 hours ago, Cilya said:

There are much easier mechanism in similar games that are much easier to maintain : either have the dupes require varied meals or have some dupes not wanting some meal or more generally varied tastes.

While the current food preference mechanisms don't seem to be strongly built out yet, I'm dubious about leaning on them too hard to stimulate food diversity.  If the complexity vs reward balance required to grow different crops is adjusted right, then you've got a situation where you're encouraged to explore other foods without necessarily being forced to.  Enforcing food diversity through dupe preferences strikes me as being a lot more heavy handed and less fun.

 

3 hours ago, Cilya said:

Anyway, I'm really optimistic about this game. As long as there are major updates regularly, it's good. Its not reasonable to ask about balance and well fined mechanisms when things change that much.

I'm optimistic as well.  If nothing else, Klei is one of the (very) few developers that's concretely demonstrated that it can handle the Early Access format effectively and turn out a good game in the end.  If you compare ONI to where Don't Starve was at a similar stage in development, I think there's every reason to be positive about things.

That being said, I do think that balance around core mechanism is worth reflecting on early and often -- even if it doesn't lead to any immediate changes, it still has the opportunity to inform later features.  My experience with EA developers who seem to take the "let's just add flashy new stuff every few weeks and figure out how to balance everything in the end" approach has been not great.

 

As an aside, it feels like it's worth noting that mealwood balance or the "OU mealwood vs AU wheat" discussion  was only intended as minor side-thought in my earlier comment. 

The OP described a situation where they're doing 20x more work than is actually needed to manage disease, completely restructuring significant elements to their gameplay in the process, and has somehow convinced themselves that they're "ignoring" the entire mechanic by doing so.

That sounds a bit off to me.  It doesn't sound like they're ignoring the disease mechanic at all, with the amount of work they're putting into it.

 

But....  mealwood is very strong right now.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it continues to dominate the conversation.

[chemie]

Autodisinfect needs work.  It should default to priority 5 (or be player selectable).  Right now it defaults to "10".

You can use the slider but either you turn it way up and might as well disable or you have your dups 100% lost to disinfecting and ignoring key things (like adding water to your hand washing stations would would help stop the need to disinfect).  Having it override "9" tasks is bad design.

As it stands now, new players will keep posting "why won't my dups do what I tell them to do!"

Disease seems to be a steep curve for new players and with 2-3 minor base design principles, experienced players can ignore the whole thing.

[SenhorLevi00]

yeah, I missed some updates and now I'm completely lost in the new farm/food system...

And about the desinfect system, I think its a bit useless, its just one thing for them to do and someone always manage to get the food poisoning...