Alpha 15 unstable branch testing feedback

[Mihsan]

I had a situation when my hunter (which is not chemical fascinated) was high on marryjay (which I was not expected at all because I did not understand how drug policy work) accidantly shot one muffalo and could not run away from his friends because he was high.

Next time I had tribal attack. Defeated it pretty easy, but when tribals started to run I had a problem chasing one old bad back granny because most of my (not chemical fascinated) colonists was high (which again I was not expecting).

Now I understand how drug policy work. And from that understanding comes my discontent. It is really not what I was expecting from it and it's useless. I was expecting from it to give me tools to ration drugs between my colonists. Instead it's just total chaos with all taking anything. Really dissapointed.

[Tynan]

There is a bug, I just discovered, which means random colonists will take any drugs just to fill their joy need.

I think I'll probably also add a restriction which allows the player to turn this on and off for different drugs.

People on binges will still take drugs off-schedule of course. Addicts too - maybe.

I appreciate the feedback, it does help me find these breakage cases.

I am also going to add a way to burn drugs.

[AWildman]

Not sure if these have been mentioned yet but I'm having some major issues with mental breaks and addictions/drug binges.

I've got two pawns that keep having mental breaks (sad wander) despite not being particularly stressed burdened. They'll literally snap out of one break and go straight into the next, the stacking of Catharsis in addition to the bonus from a party doesn't seem to help at all. This might be related to their addictions/withdrawal symptoms as both pawns are addicted to Cocaine or Alcohol, but they've never used those and I've not even seen any on the map yet.



Also I have one guy constantly going on Luciferium binges despite me not actually having any Luciferium at all. I haven't even had a chance to start making drugs or beer yet.

[Mihsan]

There is a bug, I just discovered, which means random colonists will take any drugs just to fill their joy need.

I think I'll probably also add a restriction which allows the player to turn this on and off for different drugs.

People on binges will still take drugs off-schedule of course. Addicts too - maybe.

I appreciate the feedback, it does help me find these breakage cases.

I am also going to add a way to burn drugs.

Oh, now it kinda makes sense. My colonists could use marryjay to refill joy and what you say sounds great. Thanks, Tynan!

[Tynan]

Not sure if these have been mentioned yet but I'm having some major issues with mental breaks and addictions/drug binges.

I've got two pawns that keep having mental breaks (sad wander) despite not being particularly stressed burdened. They'll literally snap out of one break and go straight into the next, the stacking of Catharsis in addition to the bonus from a party doesn't seem to help at all. This might be related to their addictions/withdrawal symptoms as both pawns are addicted to Cocaine or Alcohol, but they've never used those and I've not even seen any on the map yet.

Also I have one guy constantly going on Luciferium binges despite me not actually having any Luciferium at all. I haven't even had a chance to start making drugs or beer yet.

The binge thing is a bit weird, I'll have to look at it.

Luciferium thing is fixed, please update.

I'm pushing another update now. Give me 30 mins.

[Prettykrazy]

First off thanks for the great new set of features, I have been having a lot of fun trying out the new drug system, so far I have not touched the mining stuff yet, but here's my feedback so far. Bit of a warning as it may focus on the negatives, with love. Telling you my problem is better than giving you a solution you didn't ask for amiright

For the opening tutorial: it felt good overall, my only comment is that there should be some mention, upon world generation, of what the purpose of map size is ie: 200 x 150 vs 400 x 300 simply meaning more map variety, having no game play impact- seems to be a very common newbie question.

Grow speed and effort:
The increased work to sow fields and allow them to grow feels more appropriate given how much of a gain growing has always been, especially now with drugs added. The added grow time makes up for the increased work load so you're not spending more time harvesting than growing, which definitely feels better than before where you were practically racing your crops to get them harvested and hauled.

Beer:
The new fermentation process is really cool as it feels somehow more rewarding to wait for your wort to ferment, without being much more work overall. The Fermenting Barrel is absolutely beautiful, i can tell you spent time on making it graphically intuitive. Seriously its amazing man, this is the level of detail I love about this game.

A few criticisms now-Perhaps it's worth mentioning somewhere that they need to be refrigerated as this may not be obvious to non-brewer types, unless you want alot of angry people to ruin their first batch, that's ok if so lol

One main thing with that though is that I was unable to simply empty the barrels when the ruined wort was in there so I had to deconstruct then re-construct, was pretty sad to lose not only the hops but all the steel/wood.

Beer feels great now, but with that said I really have no clue where it's intended to fit into the joy meta, at least compared to Joints. PRE-POST EDIT-After doing some basic comparisons it feels like beer is in the right place, being a more addictive and productive mood booster, with Cannabis being the easier/cheaper version that costs move speed and consciousness.

Drugs:
The drug progression research has been scaled down and it feels good where it's at now I think. The actual "tech progression" of which drug does what could be a bit more clear, for example Flake's description might fit better as Yayo's current description.

-Flake states a "short but powerful euphoric state" but would be more accurate as "reducing the user's need for rest, and suppresses pain" Yayo's description should mention it is a less addictive and more "expensive" alternative that adds a speed boost as well. Also as of now there are no mouse-over descriptions of the "pain" "rest" and "tiredness" in the stats for drugs, the later two of which are a bit confusing/mistakable. Beer's stats also don't seem to be updated to a similar format as the new drugs, which makes comparing their effects quite difficult.

Stack size?!
Why can i stack 300+ joints on one tile? it seems unreasonable for drugs to stack any higher than beer does. If/when damage occurs on that one tile i'm gonna lose ALOT of manhours/resources, which may be intentional, like gold/silver but just seems a bit odd to stack 100 yayo when a large colony might only use 20/30 a day.

Drug policy has nothing to do with telling pawns what drugs *not* to take. It's in the Assign tab, not the Restrict tab

I can understand that fitting into the big picture, but let's be honest, you go into the drug policy menu and see the option "no drugs" and it's blank. So it feels like it SHOULD prevent pawns from using at all. Perhaps just rename it to "No Policy" or something to clarify the difference.

Now for some bugs!
I haven't had the time to get acquainted with debug mode so I haven't tested much at all but here's my observations as-is:
Pet zoning/hunting bug
step 1 pet is trained by a hunter.
2 pet is assigned a zone away from the hunting area.
3 hunter hunts.
4 hunter either finished prematurely, or is interrupted, not exactly sure here.
5 pets assigned to hunter will be stuck "wandering" wherever they were when the hunter finished/was interrupted
6 only way to unstuck them is to draft the hunter/trainer and move him to the allowed zone so they either follow there or just reset their pathfinding to that location
7 in A14 pets would just go between where the hunter was hunting and their zone seamlessly

Second issue, not sure if this is a bug or what.
I use windowed borderless mode via the shortcut trick on one monitor and browser/etc on the other screen. When i move my mouse on my second monitor the little bottom left area of the gamescreen where it says the items/terrain/light etc will actively change as if my mouse were moving across the game screen, but it's on the other monitor, alt tabbed.
it's only a minor gripe, one I can live with but I thought i'd mention it as it's been bugging me and it never happened in A14

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the drug system but overall it feels like a nice addition that will add flavour for alot of people. Hopefully I can spend some more time writing out some feedback later this week.

Cheers, PK

[MikeLemmer]

...Wait, you need to refrigerate beer while it's fermenting? I set up mine in my kitchen and it seemed to be fine.

Also, I agree with the default Drug assignment name from "No Drugs" to "No Policy". Less confusion that way.

[MikeLemmer]

Also, will animals/hunting be modified next patch to make up for the increase growing difficulty? I was having some issues getting enough food in a jungle colony to start.

[Tynan]

AWildMan - that sounds like broken behavior. They can go on binges from an addiction, I think but only for the drug they're addicted to - not sad wander. If you could post your log file that'd be very useful!

Thank you a ton PrettyKrazy for the feedback! This sort of thing is very useful and I appreciate the effort.

Here's my current plan for the drug policy redesign which will allow you to turn various drugs on and off for joy purposes.

---

Refactor drug policies:
Every drug gets a record.
The left is a group of radio buttons for "usage" with these options: Deny, Joy only, Addict use, Scheduled
If scheduled is active, the current controls appear.
JoyGiver_SocialRelax: Generalize it to use any kind of 'joy use' allowed drug.

[ReZpawner]

There seems to be a bug where a colonist dies. The weird part is that it's not a colonist that you have. I just have some colonist called Eriksen die of a heart-attack. I never had said colonist. Same thing happened in the game before this one, also with a colonist that I had never heard of. Each time, the arrow points to the bottom left of the map. If I load the most recent save, it does not happen again.

It doesn't affect the gameplay much, but it does add a +1 dead colonist to the statistics.

[MikeLemmer]

I'm having a bug(?) in this new save where my menus say I have 1184 raw resources, but individual resources only add up to 666. It's been a very weird game; I swear I started with less wood & components than usual, too.

[Tynan]

I'm having a bug(?) in this new save where my menus say I have 1184 raw resources, but individual resources only add up to 666. It's been a very weird game; I swear I started with less wood & components than usual, too.

Any chance you could post that savegame? Zip it to make the file small.

[MikeLemmer]

Here you go:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9sz65piw1hv3jc/Lutin03.zip?dl=0
(Had to put it on a 3rd-party site because the ZIP size is 700kb and the forums only allow 600kb files.)

I've also been archiving my entire time playing that colony on Twitch. It starts on this video:
https://www.twitch.tv/mikelemmer/v/84892116

And goes up through every video after that. I noticed this bug during this video:
https://www.twitch.tv/mikelemmer/v/84947850
at around the 1:30:00 mark.

Hope that helps.

[mumblemumble]

i find it odd that neolithic coolers need research, while freezers DONT. heaters I understand, since heaters are pretty much just coils heated up with electricity, but coolers are a bit much, when the neolithic one needs research.

By the way, any details on this cooling device in real life, if it actually exists?

[MikeLemmer]

i find it odd that neolithic coolers need research, while freezers DONT. heaters I understand, since heaters are pretty much just coils heated up with electricity, but coolers are a bit much, when the neolithic one needs research.

By the way, any details on this cooling device in real life, if it actually exists?

From the wikipedia article: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler)
"Before the advent of refrigeration, evaporative cooling was used for millennia. A porous earthenware vessel would cool water by evaporation through its walls; frescoes from about 2500 BC show slaves fanning jars of water to cool rooms. A vessel could also be placed in a bowl of water, covered with a wet cloth dipping into the water, to keep milk or butter as fresh as possible."

Skimming through the article, such evaporative coolers were heavily used by ancient Egyptians and Persians, so tribalists knowing how to make one is feasible.