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Topics - schizmo

#1
Ideas / Arms and Legs
December 20, 2016, 09:19:17 PM
This may or may not have been addressed before, but what do you all (the forum) think the likelihood is of eventually being able to see the arms (and hopefully the legs) of pawns? Nothing extravagant, something very minimal and fitting with the simple aesthetic of the game. tiny little nubs and stubs, if anything. This would include bionics and pegs, as well. (maybe even a visual cue for bionic eyes)

I think it would be nice to have visual feedback on the removal of limbs, and also it would be nice to see those limbs all bloody and gross on the battlefield. Plus sometimes my colonists walk around without pants on and I don't notice for quite some time.
#2
Ideas / Small Animal Trap
November 23, 2016, 01:22:38 AM
There's another topic in the suggestions board about capturing animals for trade, and it gave me an idea for something related but different regarding trapping small animals

The current hunting mechanics are notoriously inefficient for hunting small animals thanks to the aim penalty for target size and also the hunting AI keeping targets at the absolute maximum possible distance, and when left on their own even skilled hunters will often spend a ridiculous amount of time shooting at (and missing) small hunting targets. Combine this with the very small meat yield and it makes it almost pointless to hunt small animals unless you absolutely have to, but I'm of the opinion that game elements should not be ignored simply because they're poorly designed, quite the opposite in fact I believe bad elements should be redesigned or improved to make themselves viable.

For that I propose the Animal Trap, a small, non lethal cage made of steel that can be used to trap any animal that can fit inside of a wooden animal sleeping box. The player would build the trap from within the Furniture menu and wait until a small animal stumbles inside of it, and then a notification would alert the player to animals caged in traps. It would be up to the player to designate whether to slaughter or release the animal (mostly for releasing boomrats), at which point it would be a hunters responsibility to deal with the animal and re-arm the trap.

In order for this to be a viable but not overly reliable method of acquiring meat and fur, traps would have to be entirely passive and free from player influence. The only thing that would increase the chances of trapping an animal would be the number of traps on the map, as more traps mean more chances for animals to become trapped.

I think this would be a better use of small animals as a meat and fur resource, and it would also allow the player a secondary source of meat without having to stop and check the map every few minutes to see if any animals are worth hunting.

The one flaw I see for something like this is trapping an animal would have 0 influence from a colonists shooting skill, and also trapping an animal would not increase the relevant skills in any way, so its possible that animal trapping could be something completely unrelated to hunting all together. Either way I think a better option for trapping small animals is needed, most of the time they just end up being food for larger animals anyway.
#3
Since a vast amount of the interaction of the game is experienced through bills/storage buttons, it would be nice if there was a shortcut key to press or a modifier key to hold (or a menu option) to automatically open up the Bills or Storage menu on a selected workbench or stockpile. For example, maybe holding Left Alt while selecting a Butchering Table opens the info box for the stove with the Bills menu already expanded, so the player can quickly add to the "Butcher Creature" task without having to do extra work. (I chose this because it's one I manually interact with frequently)
#4
I found this issue on Mantis and it is said to have been fixed, however I am still experiencing the issue. It's very minor and borderline trivial.

To recreate the bug, enable dev mode, then enable god mode, then disable dev mode. I set several spaceship chunks to be deconstructed, and all 3 were deconstructed instantly because god mode was still active despite dev mode being disabled
#5
One of my biggest frustrations in this game with regards to storage is the scattered nature of the current stockpile mechanic, and how inefficient it starts to become when your stockpile warehouse is full of half empty stacks and resource groups scattered and peppered across the entire stockpile.

A suggestion/idea that I had would be an addition to the "cleaning" work task that includes organizing stockpiles. Essentially it would be the job of a pawn tasked with cleaning to prioritize the filling of item stacks by distributing items from the smallest incomplete stacks into the largest incomplete stacks, in an attempt to free up empty cells as quickly as possible.

Additionally, it's my belief that a task like this should also include reorganizing item placement, keeping the same/similar items together and compressing all the items together towards the "start" of the given stockpile (like an edge or a corner, perhaps chosen by the player depending on their needs)

Some of this can be done manually in the game if you severely micromanage your stockpiles, I find myself deleting individual cells out of a stockpile and forcing my pawns to haul incomplete stacks back into full stacks fairly frequently in order to save space. The AI already knows how to redistribute items across incomplete stacks, so that aspect of this suggestion would not be hard to add.

The second part, though, is trickier, and in many ways it could negate the need to create multiple stockpiles to stay organized. If that aspect is found to be too game breaking, then don't include it. But the sloppy item stacking is an issue that I feel needs to be addressed.

Just as a random throwaway example, my current main stockpile warehouse has a surplus of 867 plasteel across 19 incomplete stacks, averaging at around ~45 plasteel per incomplete stack. That number can be whittled down to 11 complete (and one incomplete) stacks if I force my pawns to redistribute the wealth, but it requires me to micromanage my pawns and pull them off of work they're already doing, not to mention it doesn't solve the problem as it will immediately become an issue again when someone adds/removes any plasteel into the stockpile.

A gain of 7 free cells doesn't sound like much if you only think of this single plasteel example, but think of all the high volume items frequently kept on hand, think of the wood, steel, beer, drugs, all varieties of stone bricks, precious metals, foods, those 7 cells start to look more like 70 cells, all wasted by sloppy stockpiles.

I'm not asking for the pawns to all be reprogrammed to be super efficient packers, I've helped enough people move to know that there are a lot of people out there who simply suck at keeping a garage organized. I just think this functionality could make cleaning a more interesting work order to give to pawns. Currently it's more efficient to activate manual priorities on all pawns and force them all to quickly clean a colony, what I'm hoping is that the improvement of the cleaning work category could give players an incentive to have someone take cleaning in a more dedicated capacity.