New Player Feedback (Feb 12th 2018)

[Jigsawn]

Intro

I've had my eyes on this game for a while and decided to get it in a recent sale. I saw it on Markiplier's Youtube channel a few weeks ago, and realised Oxygen Not Included was now in a state where it was worth checking out. I thought it would be helpful for the devs to get some detailed feedback from a brand new player to the game at this stage in its development. I have a background in game development myself (game designer & testing) which is why I feel compelled to give such a lot of feedback - it's a passion of mine - I really like this game and want to help make it better. I am playing on the latest patch (Occupational Update).

First a bit of background on my gaming habits - I like these kinds of games, being a fan of base building/survival/strategy titles. Back in the day I enjoyed stuff like Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park. More recently games like Prison Architect have tickled that itch, and I'm also fan of survival titles like Subnautica, The Long Dark, Minecraft and Terraria. This game then fits perfectly between the two genres for me. 

In future posts in this thread I'll give my overall impressions, and go into detail about various aspects of the game and problems/issues I had with them. But first - I thought it was a good idea to show you how my first playthrough went, and what progress I made.

My First Base - What did I do wrong?

I've played the game for about 10 hours so far. I started with zero knowledge about the game aside from watching Markiplier play from scratch in a recent video. That gave me an idea of some basics. During that 10 hours, I managed to keep my first base going for around 50 cycles. I learned as I went, using the tooltips and experimentation to figure out how everything worked. I only used online help a few times, mostly to learn why my piping wasn't working. In another post I will go into more detail about what I could figure out in the game and what was very obscure.

By the end of my 50 cycles, my base was a reasonable size, but everything was falling apart, to the point where my dupes were all starving and stressed. Food was by far the biggest issue, that ultimately led to the slow downward spiral of my base. It took me a while to figure out how important getting farming going was, by which time it was probably already too late. I had to pump out mush bars constantly to survive, which led to sickness, stress and fatigue. Although I had some mealworm plants, my dupes were so hungry they would immediately eat the mealworm, meaning I could never get enough ingredients to make better food. By the time I realised my food situation was slowly killing my base and had a decent sized mealworm farm going, the downward slide was already in effect.

But the writing was also on the walls for other reasons. I didn't research the right things early enough (by the end I had research in all the basics and a few to level 2). Oxygen was about to run out by the end, but nearby algae had been mined out (I was using both the algae-based oxygen buildings). Due to poor planning/lack of game knowledge I had only just researched and built alternatives (scrubbers etc). Nearby water sources had almost dried up. All further resources were just beyond my reach - but were all in nasty forms like gases, slime and so on. I had not researched the methods to extract them yet - and even if I had, my dupes were not in a state to carry out the work.

My base and expansions were always covered in debris and mopped up fluid bottles, with sweep tasks, dig tasks and so on left undone because other tasks were more vital. I used priorities to brute-force some of these tasks from time to time, but this had the downside of dupes basic needs being ignored. There was almost no decor and I didn't even get to the second level of decor - once my dupes had assigned jobs, I guess that lack of decor also added to their already stressed state.

Power was another big issue - I only had two hamster wheels but a biggish base. I realised towards the end that I should have been more proactive in researching further power solutions and heading towards coal on the map to get a power station going. Maybe my hamster wheels would have been enough if other things in the base were running smoothly? The power problems compounded other issues - like massage tables running out of power when dupes really needed them, food production stopping, and so on.

My base layout was, as you can imagine for a first base - completely random and haphazard. Only towards the end of my playthrough did I figure out how to build rooms, and how important it was to have a more structured layout to things. Now I have a better understanding of what buildings do, how rooms work and so on, I will be able to build a far more coherant base on my next attempt.

Thanks to the Markiplier video, I knew to stagger out recruiting new dupes - so I slowly added them when I felt that my base could support them. In the end I had 9 (bearing in mind this is over a 10 hour period), although clearly my food situation should have been sorted out much earlier in hindsight. They scraped by for the most part, but a lot of their time was being spent making food/generating power, ferrying water around and supplying the oxygen machines. Although I almost kept on top of their hunger, the mush bar reliance eventually led to food poisoning and stress - slowly having a knock on effect. A dupe would get sick or stressed, other things would start to get worse as a result - the cycle continues.

I only managed to build a shower and proper toilets towards the end. I puddled through figuring out the piping but got it working eventually. I'm sure the two basic toilets I had before that didn't help with my situation, though I did have a compost heap and had a wash basin nearby to them from the start.

Screenshot of my base at the end is below, when I gave up. Note I accidentally left the game idle at this point and all the dupes died which is why it's on cycle 80ish rather than 50 where I basically stopped). There was coal to the bottom of the screen - I dunno if enough to power a coal generator. The polluted water on the left was being filtered and used for showers/toilets - water at the bottom of the screen was used for everyday supply. I was about to start extracting the water at the top of the screen before I gave up - but that was the last remaining lake nearby and my water was already being used fast. The undug square area to the right of the dupe cloning device is full of carbon monoxide, which is why I never dug it out. As you can see, by the lategame I had figured out to build a big farm, and had a few rooms created. I struggled creating enough space to expand the base as large as I wanted - as usually digging out new hollows created oxygen problems.

 

[Kasuha]

It seems to me you had pretty standard new player experience with the game. I think ONI is not meant to be "won" on first attempt, the idea is that if you come to it with no prior knowledge, you're going to literally crash into its individual obstacles (oxygen, food, stress, germs, population, heat) and will have to start over to have the right things done at the right time.

Remembering how I was struggling with Don't Starve (dozens of restarts even with heavy use of the wiki), ONI is actually easier on new player than DS despite its complexity.

[Jigsawn]

Agreed, I struggled a lot with Don't Starve and had to use online a lot just to make any progress. So far this game has done a better job than Don't Starve of giving you info, even in this early access stage. I realise that like Don't Starve, this is a game about dying, learning, and improving, and I'm fine with that. I began with a description of my first base, in order to set the stage for the rest of the feedback:

Overall Impressions : It's Good!

Based on those first 10 hours of play. Despite Oxygen Not Included having many minor issues, and a few major ones, it's really fun. I like that the game revolves around systems for you to learn and optimise, being quite similar to Prison Architect in that regard. Even if your base is small, there's plenty of challenge to be had in just keeping things running. I like the amount of depth in the systems, and the way the systems expand and become more complex over time as you are introduced to new resources, dwindling supplies, and new buildings. I also really like the challenge and survival aspect of the game.

I really like the way that at least in my experience, it's hard to become self sufficent without continually worrying about digging outwards. Your resources will eventually run out, at least in the early game, and the further you head out to procure more, the more challenges you run into, like gases, aliens, etc. This in turn forces you to advance your research and learn about new buildings and figure out techniques to deal with those challenges. It reminded me a bit of The Long Dark, where you're forced ever onwards as resources dry up. It's a compelling gameplay loop where you have to balance day to day survival, expansion and planning for the future. I like the style of the game, the graphics, the audio, and the attention to detail. It feels like a Klei game. It also runs great even at minimum spec on my old crappy PC - to the developer's massive credit - in an era where minimum specs usually mean a nearly unplayable experience.

The Learning Experience

I don't mind that there is a lot of complexity to this game, and that you are kind of thrown in at the deep end. For me that's half the fun of these kind of games. Learning all the systems, the buildings, how it all fits together. However, the game could still use some work in terms of tutorials and explanations. Part of this is just to improve accessibility but the other part is to respect the player's time. It's quite frustrating to fail from mistakes made early on, that are unavoidable for new players. The reason it's frustrating is simply because it takes so long for mistakes to translate into failure. You can effectively fail very early on, without realising it for hours and hours. In games like Minecraft, The Long Dark, etc - you die quickly and its obvious where you went wrong - in this, its a slow, choking death which can be annoying. "Oh, I should have started farming as soon as possible". But as a new player, there's no way to know that until you've spent 5 hours running a doomed base - there's so much to take in.

I think it's quite easy to fix this. The player just needs a little more direction in terms of the essentials to build first, and better explanations for some of the key mechanics of the game. At the moment the little pop-up tutorials are quite useful, but I think there need to be a few more, and some, like food/farming, need to come up earlier in the game and be a little more helpful in giving you guidelines. There's lots of areas this applies to - another example is new dupes - the game should probably warn you that if you take on new dupes then you should be able to support them first.  Most new players will bring in dupes as soon as they arrive, with no additional support for them, and immediately set themselves on the path to ruin. It's things like this that I think are a bit too punishing for first time players. Yes, it's a survival game, but with so many things to consider I think the player needs a bit more guidance at the start.

Food

I know there is a big debate about food balance in the community right now. In my playthrough it certainly felt way too hard - but a lot of that was because I didn't know about farming and its importance until it was too late. If the game emphasises the importance of farming and explains how it works more clearly, it won't be such a big issue. Even if the game was to suggest to you as soon as hunger starts to become an issue, that you will need a large farm, I think that's ok. I had a few planter boxes of mealwood thinking it would be fine - hours later I realised I needed to times that by at least ten. I also had a lot of trouble even understanding about seeds and how the planting process worked, it's not that well explained.

Notable Issues/Positives

I will go into plenty of specific feedback in later posts, but I just want to highlight a few other things that I immediately noticed in the first few hours.

• The general interface is fairly straightforward and easy to understand. However, it's full of inconsistencies and lots of little usability issues.
• Prioritisation is extremely fiddly and cumbersome to use, and also riddled with annoyances. I know it's being looked at by the devs though - I think it needs a lot of work. Also understanding where your dupes priorities lie and why they are doing what they are currently doing is currently way too much of a mystery.
• It seems very easy to get dupes stuck in behaviour loops - where they will try to do a task, stop mid-way through (or on the way to do it) and go elsewhere. Then the process repeats.
• It's difficult to select dupes. The game could also really benefit from a dupe status tab at the top of the screen where you can simply view a list of your dupes, see their statuses, and click on them to view/select the dupe.
• The hover-over tooltips are extremely useful for teaching the player as they go and I applaud this. Some don't work though.
• An in-game encyclopedia would be very useful, containing info currently hidden in submenus and tooltips, as well as being a way to view tutorials again. More on this in a later post.
• It wasn't obvious in the crucial early game that I needed to build a super computer in order to complete certain research tasks. This can be fixed by adjusting the research screen to make it more clear you must complete both the basic and advanced research before the node will unlock. What I did was waste time pouring basic reseach early in the game into nodes I couldnt complete yet because I had yet to build or research a super computer.
• Numbers. The game overwhelms you with numbers and statistics right from the start - i.e. oxygen levels, densities, weights. It is bewildering and confusing. Many of these quantities, even after 10 hours of play, mean nothing to me. I like the attention to detail, but I think that they should be displayed in a more user friendly way and relagated to be viewed in other view modes. The use of colour to differentiate good and bad numbers through the game is handy, but under-used. The reliance on all of these numbers makes planning extremely hard as it's so hard to visualise what you are getting from resources - how much things cost in comparison, and so on. 
• Rooms - the concept of rooms is very poorly explained and hidden as is the use of tile blocks. Rooms should be explained right at the start of the game so you can start planning accordingly - and it should note that walls etc do not have to be made of tiles (at least I don't think you do?). By the time you have laid down your first basic infrastructure, if you haven't taken rooms into account your base can be going seriously wrong in the long run. 
• There doesn't seem to be an end-goal yet, but that's fine. I know it's on the dev pipeline anyway.
• The left hand alerts list is very helpful and helps massively at the start of the game when you are learning the ropes - letting you know about most of the major issues with your colony.

In later posts, I'll go into a bunch of feedback on specific issues, especially with the interface. But in general, yes, I think this is a great game that just needs some overall refinement and a lot of usability improvement. I also want to outline that I don't have any issues with the game's difficulty overall - I think it's a great, entertaining challenge with lots of compelling problems for the player to solve and work creatively around. I just think some of the more punishing aspects can be smoothed out especially for introducing new players.

It's a testament to the quality of the game that despite everything going wrong in my first 10 hours, half of the game not making any sense to me, it was still enjoyable. It would have been more enjoyable if some things had been easier to use, and better explained, and once that's in place it will be a really great experience for a new player. I'm quite happy to fail and learn from those mistakes, but I think at the moment a bit too much of the emphasis relies on prior knowledge especially in the very early game where simple mistakes and lack of explanation can really destroy your chances, yet you won't find that out until hours later. 

[Vim Razz]

1 hour ago, Jigsawn said:

• It's difficult to select dupes. The game could also really benefit from a dupe status tab at the top of the screen where you can simply view a list of your dupes, see their statuses, and click on them to view/select the dupe.

As a quick note, you can currently do this from the Vitals or Consumables tabs.  Vitals is the one I tend use, because it provides a more general overview of dupe conditions.

The stress and immune system overview indicators in the upper left are also very useful for locating particular dupes quickly for particular reasons.  Left clicking them will cycle through dupes in order of stress or the condition of their immune system, while right clicking will reset the cycling process so that you start back at the top again.

[Master Miner]

One possibility to partially compensate for failures is to make a save after each significant achievement. It hurts less if one can load a save, even if many cycles back and the re-do what was good, and change what was bad. I'd recommend that to new players.

The end goal? I thought the "end goal" is to have a sustainable life. A stable base which has some reserves and can survive upcoming changes and bugs

 

[Jigsawn]

Now I've outlined my main thoughts on the game, here is detailed feedback of specific things I had issues with:

Interface Issues/Suggestions

Resources List - The list at the top right. This is very intrusive and to be honest it's not that useful, at least not in the early game. Suggest having it as a separate toggle that you can change at the top menu bar. Or just displaying it in a less intrusive way.

Buildings List - In the buildings menu (bottom left), when you click on an item, a pop-up menu appears with lots of useful info. However there is no way to highlight the coloured keywords and click on them to learn more about them. Could do with a revamp as this is one of the most useful ways to learn. Also I like that you can see the potential buildings you have yet to unlock. But it would be really useful that if you highlight one of the items that are locked, then rather than showing you the resources required to build it, it should show you what research is required to unlock it (maybe even with a clickable link to take you to the research screen).

General Inconsistencies - There's quite a lot of inconsistency in stuff like right clicking, closing pop-up windows, use of the scroll wheel.

Jobs Board - The jobs board screen needs some work in particular, it's quite annoying to navigate, scroll wheel doesn't work on it, etc. It also causes the game to stall out for a time before it loads, a weird behaviour that I have seen other players reporting as well. Also, some of the jobs are not descriptive enough. For groundsman, for example, I have no idea what he'll actually do - sweeping, carrying? The job board also doesn't explain how it influences dupe priorities. I don't know as a player whether if I assign someone to Scientist, whether they are going to spend more time doing that (on top of the bonus stats). Do jobs actually influence the dupes tasks? I need to know whether I need to pull dupes off jobs if essential tasks are being dropped in favour of the jobs I've assigned them to. 

Toggling Dupe Tasks They are Allowed to Do - This menu is kind of fiddly and due to the way it's displayed, it's hard to see all your dupes at once to get a good overview of who is doing what. Additionally, I think when a dupe has been forbidden from doing a task, it should be more transparent - maybe an update on the main dupe screen. The reason I suggest this is it's easy to play around with these options early on and then forget about it - and then having no idea why dupes aren't doing the tasks you expect. 

Cancel and Dismantle Behaviour - These buttons (left hand side) are not very intuitive, as their roles are fulfilled in other places in the game. Because you can click on objects or tasks and dismantle them/cancel them manually, it took me ages to even spot the usefulness of the cancel/dismantle functions. Perhaps right click or a trash icon could provide uniform consistency for these things? 

Selecting Dupes/Layered Tiles - The layering system is displayed in a cluttered way. Half my screen is taken up by a list of things sitting on each tile when hovered/clicked on. Clicking multiple times to cycle through the layers is not very intuitive. Also, unless I've missed something, actually selecting dupes is very tricky, especially if they are moving. If the layering system stays as it is, I would reiterate my earlier request to have a Dupes tab at the top menu where you can easily select dupes.

Show Dupe Intentions - I'm not sure if this is already in - but when you click on a dupe, it should show you the task it's currently wanting to do. Perhaps this could be a visual toggle that you could have appear onscreen as text under the dupe, letting you get a feel for where you have task issues/bottlenecks. Additionally, it would be good if the navigation line shows where a dupe heading next when the dupe is selected (not sure if it already does this).

Immunity/Stress Indicators - This is pretty confusing for a new player - as both are out of 100%. Yet stress is worst at 100%, and Immunity is best at 100%. Suggest switching one of them - i.e rather than stress, call it mental health and then have it fall to 0% - then you know that low numbers always mean bad. Also a colour switch to red/exclamation marks to alert you to critical levels for these icons would help players realise when they really need addressing.

Germs/Disease Dupe Window - This submenu when you click on a dupe is quite well hidden. I would suggest pulling some of the critical info for this into the main dupe status. If my dupe has food poisoning then I want to know that from the main status without having to go into the germs submenu for each dupe. The info in the disease menu is handy so I think it should stay, but as extra info you can dig for when you need it.

Encyclopedia - As already mentioned, I think a basic in-game encyclopedia would be very handy. When you click on links such as*Food Poisoning*, instead of having a pop-up window, just boot up a pop-up encyclopedia where you can browse various buildings/items/diseases/game concepts/tutorials - organised into simple tabs.Also have it accessible as a menu item at the top of the screen. This would allow players to have all the relevant knowledge at their disposal at any time. The encyclopedia doesn't have to have wiki-level info inside, just enough to teach you the fundamentals and descriptions that are already in the game. Say you are confused about piping, when you click on pipes in the menu, you can just include a link in the pop-up window which takes you to a plumbing tutorial in the encyclopedia. No more randomly coming across vital info, tips etc. This would also let more confident players read up on advanced stuff and plan ahead right from the start.

Overlays Bug - If you have plenty of red icons around indicating low power, etc - most of them vanish when selecting an overlay, except, strangely, for a few of the red icon types (I forget which ones). By the way, the Overlays are a great feature and very easy to understand and use. There is visual clutter though when you select things - the pop-up menu messily overlaps the overlay information on the right of the screen.

Dupe Status - In the Dupe Status screen which appears when you click on a Dupe, if you are scrolled to the bottom of the window in the Condition section, it will pop up to the top whenever a status is added/removed - which is very annoying if you're trying to look at their health/stress/etc. Also - instead of having an item carried section at the bottom- just have a line in the main status saying "carrying: *item name*" - much easier to see at a glance. As already mentioned I think the dupes current task should be listed in this window, as well as maybe a separate tab showing a list of tasks they are queued up to do. This would make their behaviour much more transparent and easier to spot production line issues (or bugs). A final graphical annoyance is the blue bars which separate sub-lists within the window - it's ugly and just fills more space than necessary. One more thing I would like to see in the Dupe window, is when you go to their assigned equipment tab - let the player click on the bit of equipment to move the camera to that position in the base, or even highlight it - letting them easily hop in to adjust permissions....

Equipment Permissions - ...and on that subject: It's not clear how your dupes behave with equipment permissions. Take the medical bed. When I had it as public, sick dupes would then occupy it when needed but only when very ill. Does assigning it manually to a dupe prevent other dupes from using it? Presumably so - but then the behaviour of mess hall benches and massage beds seemed to operate differently with permissions. With massage beds I sometimes had to manually assign dupes to beds to get them to take rests. With mess hall benches I had to assign them to dupes or they wouldn't use them. What happens if I have 6 dupes and only 5 benches? If I assign 4 benches to a specific dupe, will the remaining two dupes share the public bench? If a dupe is assigned a damaged, or out of power piece of equipment, can they use a public piece of equipment instead if they discover their own piece is out of order? None of this is very clear and could do with consistency plus a tutorial to explain.

Minerals/Materials -  When the game starts, it's not very clear what kinds of terrain give you different resources - this could be better explained - like raw materials and metals especially - as they are vital for building. Additionally, an overlay which allows you to toggle highlights between different terrain types would be very handy. This would be used for spotting stuff like copper, algae etc which can be hard to spot when found in small veins. Yes, you can pause the game and hunt around poring over every tile, but an overlay would be a nice feature.

Attack - It's very much overkill that when you choose to attack a creature, every dupe rushes to the task. In my situation where everyone was starving and the base was falling apart, half my dupes came off critical tasks to attack a lone Hatch which one dupe could have easily handled. Maybe there's not an intuitive way to only have the closest dupe attack the creature, but perhaps a toggle on the attack button between all dupes and nearest dupe could be one solution?

That's It for Interface! - I realise this is a long, nitpicky sounding list. But little things all add up to make a better overall play experience. Prison Architect was notorious for never fixing up its interface for the final release, with all sorts of awkwardness and inconsistencies - the problem, of course, being that alpha players and the devs had got so used to how things were at the start, that they hadn't realised what a roadblock that would be for new players. The reviews picked up on that. Hope this was of some use, and as I play more I'll note anything else which really stands out. Next post will be a few random other issues I had with gameplay.

[Jigsawn]

Random Bits and Bobs

Storage Containers -  As a new player, it's annoying that these start off "locked" by default, until you manually toggle what they can hold. It isn't very intuitive. Also in the later game once you start queuing up multiple tasks, it's really easy to forget to go and toggle their permissions once they've been built at some random point in time. Suggest starting them as accepting all loads by default, players can go in and customise afterwards if they see fit. Another issue with containers is it's not clear what happens when you dismantle them. Do the contents get dropped on the floor or destroyed, or what? Maybe a pop-up when you go to demolish a container would be handy to provide this info. 

Plumbing - A very confusing part of the game for new players. Firstly, the tutorial is very unhelpful, showing equipment you probably haven't even built yet. When you do build plumbable structures, the input and output icons look way too similar, and the arrows are confusing as its hard to tell if they show a direction you should be connecting pipes from. Additionally, it's not clear where exactly you need to place your pipes in order to connect with the inputs and outputs. In the early game, you can build pipes but the early buildings like wash basins and early toilets don't require them. However I just assumed that I could add pipes to them in order to optimise them (i.e. self-clean, self-refill) - I think the game should make this more clear. Maybe make pipes only available until later in the research tree? Regardless, I think the plumbing tutorial and interface needs reworking as its very confusing at the moment for new players. One final thing is blocked pipes. No idea what causes this and how to solve it - the game could do a better job of explaining.

Research - As mentioned in my first post, I completely barked up the wrong tree with research in my first game thus screwing myself over. A lot of the early research is much more important than others, and the game should probably steer you in their direction first. More information about the buildings and the categories when you hover over the nodes could also help in this regard. When you have never built any of the buildings before, it's very hard to know what you should be going for, and it's really frustrating to research something only to find out it has dependencies you don't have yet, or it's not really as useful as what you were expecting. Also note my complaint about advanced research and super computers in the first post - those dependencies are not communicated clearly enough right now. A side note about super computers is that when you are told about them in tooltips or whatever, it should be made abundantly clear you need a Researcher job type to work it - its a huge bottleneck for a new player to build the computer and then have to build a jobs board and train up a Researcher - during which time your base is usually going to crap.

All Done

Hope these posts were useful. I'm sure the devs are already aware of all of this, after all, the game is still in early access. These are all the main things that stood out to me in my first 10 hours of play. I'll dive back in for attempt number 2 at a base now, and report back with anything amiss. Armed with the knowledge from my first failure hopefully I can make a better, efficient base and start pushing outwards and get beyond research level 2! Love the game and looking forward to what future upgrades bring. My advice would be to polish up all of these little issues, interface, food, jobs, priorities and so on before adding more features. I beg the devs not to release the game in a shonky state like Prison Architect did, have it be a nice user-friendly experience now and put the groundwork in before these issues become so deep-rooted and accepted by the community that it's too hard to change it at the end of development. Cheers.

 

 

1 hour ago, Vim Razz said:

As a quick note, you can currently do this from the Vitals or Consumables tabs.  Vitals is the one I tend use, because it provides a more general overview of dupe conditions.

The stress and immune system overview indicators in the upper left are also very useful for locating particular dupes quickly for particular reasons.  Left clicking them will cycle through dupes in order of stress or the condition of their immune system, while right clicking will reset the cycling process so that you start back at the top again.

Thanks for that. I'd suggest rolling Vitals and Status into the same screens so you can get a nice overview of everything about your dupes from just one screen.

The second tip is handy, the game should probably tell you that somewhere - little useability things like that are great, but only if you know about them

1 hour ago, Master Miner said:

One possibility to partially compensate for failures is to make a save after each significant achievement. It hurts less if one can load a save, even if many cycles back and the re-do what was good, and change what was bad. I'd recommend that to new players.

The end goal? I thought the "end goal" is to have a sustainable life. A stable base which has some reserves and can survive upcoming changes and bugs

 

Good point. I would actually suggest changing the autosave system. Currently it autosaves every 10 minutes or something. Why not have it also autosave at milestones like you said? Take my current game from the screenshot above. I left the game idle, but couldn't even go back if I wanted to cycle 50 - because the game had autosaved so frequently I couldn't go back that far. If the game autosaved at major milestones this could be a big help for new players who have screwed things up but don't want to start from scratch. They could just roll back to when they built their first super computer, or researched filtration, or whatever. A new player doesn't really know when is best to save, and to be honest its easy to forget to save manually when you know the game autosaves anyway.

Yeah the end-goal isn't a big deal - would just be nice to have it outlined - even if it's "how long can you survive". Could just be mentioned in the mode select screen on the main menu, like Minecraft does. I just need a smidgen of direction, so I know what I'm working towards.

Now I'm scared of making a big base in case the next update screws it all up, haha!  

[Vim Razz]

4 hours ago, Jigsawn said:

Thanks for that. I'd suggest rolling Vitals and Status into the same screens so you can get a nice overview of everything about your dupes from just one screen.

Selecting any dupe from the vitals menu already brings up their complete status information in the lower right-hand corner.  If you mean a full-screen presentation like the new Jobs menu... then tbh, I'd be inclined to cringe at the idea. 

(Changing the Jobs menu already took away our ability to tweak task assignments while actively observing the colony, as well as our ability to directly compare the stats of potential new dupes from the printer with those of the existing population.  Losing even more on-the-fly management tools would kind of sting.)

I don't want to bury you with my own preferences or anything, though.  I have mixed feelings about some of the things you've suggested, but I certainly appreciate the thought and effort that went into articulating them.

[Jigsawn]

 

Just failed my third run, I have spent a lot of time playing this game now! The last two runs have been a mixture of pleasure and frustration at the obscurity of some of the mechanics and communication issues within the game. I will link you to some general comments I made in this thread:

Where you can also learn about issues I had with my other runs. I have been collating a list of major confusion points, bugs and balancing thoughts which I will put in this thread over the next few days. I was frustrated enough with the game to give up entirely after this latest run. Once again coming across things which felt completely outside my control - or that I didn't feel I was given enough knowledge about to tackle. The second run was a lot better fun than the first because I knew some of the core mechanics which had not been taught to me in the first run. The third run was enjoyable until I ran into a lot more complex issues and mechanics I did not really understand. Thanks to the forum here though, they have answered my questions in Discussion and inspired me to try another time with the more obscure things explained to me.

Overall I think like the devs say, the foundation of the systems is in a good place, it just needs to be balanced better (or at least balanced in a separate default difficulty for new players) - and fix interface issues and communication issues within the game. The core and concept is solid though, and compelling.

[Tobruk]

Wow, @Jigsawn, that was a loong wall of text. But a lot of good points nevertheless. Some things that you allude to have already been implemented in the way you wanted, like navigation or dupe vitals.

[TehPlayer14]

Well to stand even more basic ground if you hadn't had a contact with actual difficult games that relies on economy management or proper survival game it will be very hard for you to manage

I didn't had this issue because I play RTSes and such

[Jigsawn]

I am currently on my 4th base and have made further progress, mostly thanks to the forum's response to my questions in the thread I linked above.

Now I understand wiring systems, that has mostly worked out, seperating my power generators from the base to avoid heat, using transformers to stop overloads, and a variety of power supplies to meet demand.

Now the biggest issues I have run into are base overheating, cooling down water, germ-filled water, and perhaps biggest of all - algae running out.

Electrolizers seem the way to go but they overheat your base so much I can only build a few.

I finally reached some ice biomes and wheezeworts have helped a bit. I insulated my whole base and seperated heat creating rooms as well. I  would never have known about these techniques if it wasn't for the forum.

Now I think my water is heating up my base, but I can't find a way to cool it well.

You can see my current issues in this thread:

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/88398-algae-shortage-and-heat-issues-am-i-doomed/

I just want to quote some of my overarching feelings from that thread about the game once you reach this stage:

I have seen on here lots of advanced cooling systems, talk of immersing things in water to cool them (doesn't that just flood the machines?), pumping cold gas, and so on. This is all way beyond me, and is where the simulation vs game comes into question. Am I expected to start experimenting with complex ideas like this as a new player? Before I saw all the stuff on this forum, I wouldn't have even thought about actually having to come up with my own manipulation of the game's systems. In normal base management type bases, you find the appropriate building/resource and use that to solve your problem.

Am I missing simpler solutions to my cooling/oxygen problems? If not, maybe the game needs to do a better job of introducing players with only basic scientific knowledge like myself to these concepts - and also guiding us in the right direction about the type of game it evolves into. I load up my game at the moment and stare at my base, with no clue about how to proceed in dealing with my heating and oxygen problems, or even how to avoid them in another run. It's hard enough keeping my base running and dupes alive as it is, I haven't even reached a self-sustaining level where I can sit back and think about longer term issues or more creative solutions to them. Even finding time for my dupes just to construct a room or mine out some precious algae is it hard right now. This may sound like a whinge but more it's an appeal for help and other people's thoughts on the matter. Cheers.