Community, tell me your usability stories!

Started by Tynan, March 09, 2014, 10:20:30 PM

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ShadowTani

#15
Well, most of my issues have been mostly annoyances than usability issues... But I do remember I couldn't figure out how to stop fires when I played my first few games because I didn't realize it was related to home zones. I dunno if the new tutor will point that out now though whenever you have your first fire pop up (I turned it off now that I'm experienced with the game), but thought I'd mention it.

Though, while on the subject, firefighting is still an annoyance for me. The reason is that sometimes I want to put out fires in places I don't want to have a home zone in, such as a boomrat exploding outside the home area and me wanting to save its tasty morsel from burning up. The only solution seem to be to home zone and then removing the zone afterwards, which is a slight annoyance. An alternative way to put out fire manually in such situations would be nice - I believe that could also help those who can't figure out home zoning yet.

Also, there's that you can't manually declare things that are in a prison room for hauling, took me forever to figure that out, lol. Had a dead prisoner body laying there forever without anyone picking it up and me not being able to right click to get someone to do it. xD I figured it out first when I relocated the prison (I had a temporary setup inside the stonecrafting room - and yeah, the stoneblocks produced couldn't be manually set for hauling either, on the automatic side they did not haul them to the stockpile either, but I think they might have grabbed them directly when they needed them though - I can't remember for sure). However, I guess this is more of a bug than an usability issue.

Either way, these things are the closest I've been to usability issues myself as far as I can remember. With the exception that I'm experiencing the same thing with the food as everyone else, but I know that has already been fixed for A3 based on the development log. :3

Quote from: zurtri on March 10, 2014, 06:18:30 AM

  • The whole 'range' concept for crafting is a PITA. May I suggest removing it entirely and have it like all other activities - start at the closest and go from there.

Problem is that some of us actually don't want the colonists to go too far outside the camp due to the risk of them derping themselves to death by wanting to get that stone next to a group of raiders that just landed. I prefer to have a stone stockpile next to the crafting station and manually set stone debris for hauling.

Scanning the whole map for stones as opposed to a smaller area is also a bigger hit to the performance; not that it's a problem for me, but I'm sure that could matter for some.

But I agree with those that wants to have a more visual indication of the area that are being covered by the bill. Maybe also have a visual icon pop up over a bench when the last check for stuff to haul to it failed to find anything - along with a tip from the game tutor about increasing the range (for those that got that turned on).

Blitz

Cross posting my comments here from the reddit thread.

To me, I think the biggest issue with new players and new patches is that there is no real tutorial. I know your (Ty) new videos help that, but you had 15,000 views on the video with 25,000 copies of the game sold - we are still not getting information to 10,000 people. I get comments on my videos/IRC/Forums all the time asking me how to do things or saying they enjoyed my description of how I get things to work. The adaptive tutor is fine, but it serves more as an annoyance in telling me the obvious rather than actually having a brief walkthrough level to learn the basics. Honestly - Itchyflea did a better job of describing what happens in his custom scenarios than the vanilla game does all by using the popup messages. I'd say to expand his exploding ship custom game and make that a intro/tutorial. Learn how to turn skills on and off, how to build walls, and understand power/food.

My biggest usability complaint right now is that haulers will always take to the closest stockpile square when the task first gets queued instead of the closest by walking distance - this means they will walk through a huge maze to get to a spot that is 10 blocks away (they may walk over 100 blocks to get there) instead of going 11 blocks in direct line of site.

My second hangup is firefighting is still broken. It gets frustrating when a raider can ignite the middle square of a solar pannel but a colonist can not put the fire out.

I feel like the stone crafting system is over complicated. The billing system feels pointless. A rock cutting table cuts rocks - why should I need to tell the table that it needs to cut rocks? Just have someone with crafting enabled, they will know what to do as long as they have materials. This is where linked stockpiles in Dwarf Fortress is awesome. Also, why do we not have a slag refinery to break the slag into rock and metal?

I enjoy the new cooking concept, but I do not really like the implementaion. I feel like Nutrient Paste Dispensors were the lifeblood of the colony - now they are pointless because meals are created other ways. If your NPD died, you were screwed. Can we just make hoppers (refridgeration units) accept the foods and the NPDs make the meals? Get rid of cooking skill all together. If the NPD has 3 hoppers - create a lavish meal, 2 hoppers - fine meal, 1 hopper - mashed taters. If there is human meat in a hopper, then the eater will hate the created meal. Right now it feels like there is an additional unneeded step that over complicates.

My biggest issue with the defense system is the need to recruit everyone to defend or make them stop working. Watching Derpy McRepairer walk out through a line of raiders to repair a conduit is frustrating. If we had a squad and alert system, we could draft our military to defend an area while the civilains continued on their task in the base.

I also think housing should be overhauled. 5x6 rooms are way too large for comfortable living. Currently dorms are more efficient for space and walking distance than making individual rooms, but the penalty can be an issue. To me, a 3x3 room should be effective. It gives room for a bed, a plant and a light, that should be enough.

Now let's get to the things I really am enjoying. I love the new rock walls, and that they do not burn. I feel that this adds a good balance to the game. I like the new stockpiling and growing areas. The gun system is good and feels balanced. Blasting charges were OP, glad they are now an optional mod. The modding system is great, easy to use, and enjoyable.

Keep up the great work Ty, thanks for looking for feedback.

Tynan

Thanks everyone.

I deleted a few comments that were just unbacked suggestions, but in general, we've done well to stay on the topic, which is specific stories of broken usability that you have experienced.

The less you interpret your story and transmute it into a suggestion or generalized annoyance, the better. Pure stories are best.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Ozog

Because I often tunnel deep into mountains, I sometimes lose track of all of my pawns.  This is only an issue when the "Raiders are'a comin'" signal is triggered. 

Speaking of that signal, does anyone else think the font color should be something different, compared to all the other text?  (Like the envelopes.)

Benny the Icepick

I have to echo everyone that cooking is both incredibly welcome and the feature most in need of tweaking.  I agree with Blitzkriegsler that it has essentially superseded the importance of the Nutrient Paste Dispenser (especially at 1/4 the size).  It adds another layer of complexity to the game in that it requires greater care with selecting the stats of your initial colonists and requires that you manage yet another task for them to perform.  If the billing system is sufficiently improved I don't see any reason that the NPD shouldn't simply go away in the next version.

One of my struggles early on was understanding the dynamics between happiness, fear, and loyalty.  I just figured happiness and loyalty were desirable, and fear was not; it never occurred to me (even with the position and size of the bars) that happiness and fear both contributed to loyalty.  It might be clearer if the happiness bar were one color, the fear were another, and the loyalty bar was the two stacked together, so you could see visually that each contributed to loyalty and by how much.

Blitz

Quote from: Benny the Icepick on March 10, 2014, 02:29:25 PM
One of my struggles early on was understanding the dynamics between happiness, fear, and loyalty.  I just figured happiness and loyalty were desirable, and fear was not; it never occurred to me (even with the position and size of the bars) that happiness and fear both contributed to loyalty.  It might be clearer if the happiness bar were one color, the fear were another, and the loyalty bar was the two stacked together, so you could see visually that each contributed to loyalty and by how much.

Loyalty is the highest of either fear or happiness, not a combination. I agree with this too. It is very hard to track overall loyalty of the colony (although easier in the recent versions). This gets back to old debates though.

autohost

#21
I've had several instances of a colonist catching fire, I try to prioritize putting out the fire on him by clicking on several nearby colonists (right next to him) only to see the gray message that that job is being done by some other colonist who happens to be many spaces away.

Vaz yawned again as he set down the latest simple meal he had just made.  He'd been doing a lot of that lately--making meals and yawning.  It seemed strange to him that most other items seemed to stack together nicely in one space, but meals had to be laid out, one per square meter.  The other colonists didn't seem to mind picking their way carefully through the meal stockpile that lay between the stove and the dining table, but Vaz couldn't help but wince as some ran through at top speed on some important errand. 

"Munch, munch" came from the direction of the meal stockpile, and Vaz face-palmed.  Another animal had wandered into the colony and was making itself at home on their food.  He had shot several already that day, but was just too tired to handle it this time.  He hoped it was only a squirrel and not, God forbid, one of the boomrats!  The memory of what happened when the first boomrat he'd ever seen died still made him shudder. 

"I hope Lisa kills it this time," he said to himself as he trudged over a few spaces to get more ingredients.  The previous day, Shawn had been given the job of killing several annoying varmints in the colony.  As he started shooting, every colonist even remotely in the line of fire dove for cover under workbenches or behind walls as the shots hit almost everything except the target animal.  Vaz had had to repair his own stove after that incident and was glad he'd found a safe place behind a stone wall.  He remembered having targets to shoot at when he was a kid and wondered if the Navy scientist who had joined the colony couldn't figure out some way to make one so Shawn, and a few others, could improve their shooting skill safely.

A thought suddenly occurred to Vaz as he fixed the next meal, and he burst out laughing.  He wondered with whom he could share the thought, but seriously doubted any other colonist would find it funny.  The scientist might find it interesting, something to research perhaps, but not funny.  The thought was this: No matter the ingredients used in fixing any meal, if the meal was not eaten in exactly 4.0 days, it would go bad.  Vaz guessed it was something unique to the planet they had crashed on.  He was glad that meals with meat and berries lasted 4 days:  they certainly would not on any other planet he knew of, with the hot sun and rain that regularly assaulted the colony.  Vaz wistfully recalled the refrigeration units back home which could keep food fresh or even frozen for long periods of time.  He recalled a simple device used by tribesmen thousands of years ago, using just two large unglazed clay pots, one fit inside the other, sand between them, and water to soak the sand.  Food could be kept quite cool in the inner clay pot, with a cloth placed over the top of the jar.  He wondered what the scientist would think of the idea and snorted.  He probably wouldn't believe that anything without power and coolant would work.  Oh well, back to the grind, ours is not to question why...  He felt vaguely uneasy as his mind remembered how that quote ended, but people had to eat, so he fixed another meal before heading off to bed.

Monkfish

#22
    Some observations 'n' ideas. And some ramblings I guess. ;D

Useability

  • Interface - Unable to scroll view whilst cursor is over a menu. This gets quite annoying after a bit as you cannot scroll the view with the mouse cursor in the bottom corners due to the permanent menu. Viewing Colonist thoughts/needs etc. prevents scrolling the view to the left entirely.
  • Interface - Close cross 'hitboxes' on interface windows too small. The close interface window cross only works if the cursor is directly over the actual cross rather than being over a box drawn around the cross. This makes dismissing a window quickly quite difficult due to miss-clicking and can get frustrating if you've got raiders inbound and you don't much care who's doing what. Now that I've written that, I realised I haven't tried Escape (does that work?). Still, bigger hitbox on the cross would be nice.
  • *Interface/Priorities
- It would be nice to be able to select multiple items to interact/control them. For example, during my last session I built a lot of graves (about 6 in one go) and then had to set the priority of them all manually. Being able to shift-click to select multiple objects, or have an option to select all/select all on screen, would make life so much easier. Another use of this would be selecting all lights/doors/turrets to power them down during eclipses to conserve power for more important things.
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AI Priority

  • Construction priorities - Last night I wanted to remove some stone walls I had constructed in the wrong place and set the job along with a load of other construction work that I wanted doing. After a while, I noticed that the walls had not been deconstructed yet (and they were in the way for what I had planned) so I checked my builders and they were all busy building stuff, including stuff that I had set for construction after the deconstruction job was set on the wall. So, are deconstruction jobs a lower priority than construction jobs and, if so, why? I feel that the construction jobs should be carried out in the order in which they're placed, pending all other requirements being met of course, as that way I can control what gets done and when. And on that note, are there plans to introduce a priority system within a given job? On a few occasions I've found myself desperately needing to get something important like a turret or two built and had to cancel all of those carpet jobs I had set because the Colonists can't be prioritised effectively. I know I can select a colonist and prioritise a job, but often they'll grab the resource, take it to the workplace and dump it there before wandering back off to make carpets or plantpots because, presumably, the job is actually split into two and they've only done the first one. It would be nice to be able to select a queued job and assign it a priority like you can with stockpiles so that you can make a load of construction orders and then give them a sensible priority. And on that note, assigning priority to a wall should assign the priority to all connected blocks in that wall rather than the single tile that was clicked on.
  • Cooking - This has been covered already for the most part, although I'll add on some comments and a suggestion I've already made elsewhere on the forum.
    With the current cooking system, it's not easy to control the rate at which meals are prepared without constantly creating and cancelling bills. If left unattended, you could find that your cook has made ALL OF THE MEALS out of your raw resources and scattered them throughout the building. As they perish, this may result in the scenario where your Colonists have eaten all of the meals and have no raw food left to eat. Not good. This sort of happened last night, except without the running out of raw resources leading to hunger, starvation, unhappiness and probably murder that usually occurs when the food runs out. Still, the cook had made about twenty meals (I had set the bill to infinite - derp) and they now littered the floor and corridors of my complex. To remedy this, I set a stockpile on the long table I had already constructed and set it to only allow meals. My haulers then promptly moved the meals to the table and when people wanted to eat, they grabbed the food from the table and sat down (often not where they grabbed the food from mind, but I'm getting to that). I quite liked the affect this produced whereby people came in from their jobs and sat down at the table to have a meal that was already prepared for them and hit upon the idea of a cooking mechanic that would be easy to use and visually, quite appealing. The idea is this; You set the meal type required at the cooker but don't set any quantities, all you do is check which meal type(s) you want to cook. The cook then makes the meals on demand as and when slots are available at a table and makes meals until the table is full, at which point they stop cooking. When Colonists come to eat, they shouldn't pick up the food as they would from a stockpile but rather just sit down on a chair adjacent a meal and begin eating. This would mean that meals can be set and left to run with little worry of overcooking. I had also thought that there could be a "had dinner at the table" happiness buff (something small, +1 or so) but that would require some way of making people eat sat on the floor. Perhaps an "eating area" in the same form as sleeping spots (or maybe a campfire) could be added as a starting point.

    As an addition to this, I've seen a few posts saying that the meals perishing is a bad move. I disagree and think it's an interesting dynamic to the game that prevents you from making all of the meals and storing them (although this is very space inefficient). I'd prefer for it to go the other way and have all items perishable, but introduce a new item to combat that; the walk in fridge. [Enthusiastic_Sales_Pitch] "With same footprint as our Nutrient Paste Dispenser, the Big Square Behemoth Fridge is sure to meet your every day Colonist survival needs. With a power draw of just 450W, the Big Square Behemoth will chill your perishable goods down to just 5 degrees Celcius, meaning it keeps for up to 50% longer before becoming mouldy and disgusting!" [/Enthusiastic_Sales_Pitch]. The power going off would mean that the food starts to warm up and they perish sooner. If a temperature system is included at some point, this would add a debuff to happiness due to coldness.

Clarity

  • Construction jobs don't indicate when they're blocked.
Often I find myself setting a construction job, going off to do something else and then returning to the job to find it hasn't been started. Specific jobs that are blocked for whatever reason are not highlighted to the player, either through the notifications in the upper right or by visual indication on the blueprint itself. I think the inclusion of a red cross or exclamation mark on a blocked job as well as an "n jobs blocked" notification would be very handy.
  • Hauling Priority -
I am unsure exactly how the priority of hauled items works and could make several assumptions based on what I've observed, but my best guess would be that items are hauled based on proximity to the stockpile, with stockpiles worked on based on their priority. To put this into some context, last night, after a four strong Raider attack, there were a few bodies laying about the place that needed moving to some graves I had already constructed. I allowed interaction with the bodies and guns and also set the grave priority to Critical to ensure they were moved promptly as they were in close proximity to my growing areas and I didn't want my gardeners getting all upset about seeing some dead people. After a short while, the bodies were still there, the gardeners weren't that impressed and the haulers were... moving stones and potatoes.

As I said, I have no idea how the hauling priorities work, but here's how I think it should work; The stockpiles retain the priority system so that the player can control where the items go first, whereas the items get an interface similar to the stockpile controls but where the priority of individual items (and maybe even the radius around the stockpile they're going to) can be adjusted to control which items arrive first and from where. Items with the same priorities should be moved in equal volume. This would probably require a check on the last item dropped into the stockpile and compare its priority to that of other items the stockpile still has space for, then assigning out a job based on what items are due next that isn't the last one. With this method, it should be possible to both properly prioritise items and control where they're coming from. This is handy because a Colonist going for a wander into the wilderness to collect some metal when they should probably bury that body they've just fallen over leads to undesirable situations, mostly featuring Colonists upset and dead. This could have numerous possibilities and allow for a proper and granular control of resources and their locations.
  • Launchpad - What the shit?
- I build a launchpad, delivery beacon and comm station last night, figuring the 500+ potatoes I had was probably excessive and someone might exchange them for some guns. I'm not really sure what triggered it, but at some point my haulers started taking stuff from my stockpile (which is tucked away inside) to the launchpad (which is outside of the base). I... don't even. I clicked on the launchpad and it told me it was a launchpad. I clicked on the delivery beacon and it told me it was a cactus, but I told it to stop being silly. I then clicked on the comms station and it also told me nothing. I have no idea why my haulers were moving stuff to the launch pad but I'm guessing it was something to do with a trade ship being in the area as they seemed to move it all back inside when it left. Not a clue what happened there and there was no obvious indication of what was going on.
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/walloftext

EDIT: New items marked *
<insert witty signature here>

dd0029

    Quote from: Monkfish on March 10, 2014, 06:58:12 PM
    • Launchpad - What the shit?
    - I build a launchpad, delivery beacon and comm station last night, figuring the 500+ potatoes I had was probably excessive and someone might exchange them for some guns. I'm not really sure what triggered it, but at some point my haulers started taking stuff from my stockpile (which is tucked away inside) to the launchpad (which is outside of the base). I... don't even. I clicked on the launchpad and it told me it was a launchpad. I clicked on the delivery beacon and it told me it was a cactus, but I told it to stop being silly. I then clicked on the comms station and it also told me nothing. I have no idea why my haulers were moving stuff to the launch pad but I'm guessing it was something to do with a trade ship being in the area as they seemed to move it all back inside when it left. Not a clue what happened there and there was no obvious indication of what was going on.
    [/list]

    /walloftext

    Launchpads actually have an automagic storage zone under them set to priority I believe. So if you in house storage was set to normal, things would get moved to the launch pad as that has a higher priority. Click twice on the launch pad to select the storage zone under it.

    Alandil

    - Building a wall in a tight spot or in a 1 tile wide corridor usually requires to command each block of wall one after another, since otherwise closer wall blocks will be build first, blocking the way to the unbuild walls and often even trapping colonists inside.

    - Trying to replace a dirt wall with a metal wall in the beginning often caused my buildings to collapse, as you have to wait until the wall is mined, before it is possible to give the command to build a metal wall in its place.

    - My biggest issue with the new cooking system was that the meals got hauled to launchpads, blocking those and of course no option to sell them (I would not expect that; the colony is not a restaurant.) and the missing prioritization of high quality food.

    I worked around the missing prioritization by putting a cooking table for lavish meals closest to the living area, a fine meal cooking table behind that, then a simple meal cooking table and a nutrient paste dispenser at the end of the line to make sure high quality food would be consumed first. I also deactivated meals-storing on all storage areas, which leads to floor-storage of meals around the cooking tables(When the room is full, the meals magically get dropped through walls outsite of the facility). Thats efficient enough to play with, but pretty bad for immersion.

    Maybe storage areas will not have meals-storing activated by default, instead tables could become storing areas for food, enhancing social chat and avoiding that colonists eat at a butchering table or so alone instead at the nice eating table.


    - I usually build 4 launchpads as close as possible to a drop beacon to make sure the wares (especially silver) I receive land right on the launchpad or at least in close hauling distance.

    - Saving burning colonists used to make me panic, for example trying to make the whole area around them a home zone to make sure someone will treat the fire. Now I just let them burn, knowing they usually fend off the flames themselves before dying.

    Monkfish

    Quote from: dd0029 on March 10, 2014, 07:17:37 PMLaunchpads actually have an automagic storage zone under them set to priority I believe. So if you in house storage was set to normal, things would get moved to the launch pad as that has a higher priority. Click twice on the launch pad to select the storage zone under it.
    Aha! I see. That's... not particularly intuitive. The launchpad should just have a built in stockpile, although I assume this is temporary anyway.

    Quote from: Alandil on March 10, 2014, 08:05:59 PM
    - Building a wall in a tight spot or in a 1 tile wide corridor usually requires to command each block of wall one after another, since otherwise closer wall blocks will be build first, blocking the way to the unbuild walls and often even trapping colonists inside.

    - Trying to replace a dirt wall with a metal wall in the beginning often caused my buildings to collapse, as you have to wait until the wall is mined, before it is possible to give the command to build a metal wall in its place.
    How did I forget about posting these?! The corner/line building thing is a pain, it would be nice if the jobs were prioritised in order of accessibility although I have no idea how that might be implemented technically, unless the individual wall sections are just queued in the order the line is dragged, so to build into a corner or a single square width corridor, one would drag from the blocked and towards the open end.

    For the second point, I haven't had the same issues with roofs collapsing, but it would be nice to be able to stack jobs on single squares. So, for example, if I wanted to replace a metal wall with a stone one, I'd deconstruct the first and then order the second, which would only be queued once the deconstruction has happened. It would be really nice if the Colonist were to bring the materials needed for the construction job with them, rather than walking to the deconstruction job, completing it and then walking back to a stockpile for the resource before walking back to the construction job. ;)

    Either that or the placement of an item to be constructed automatically issues mining/deconstruction jobs on anything that's in the way, with those specific mining jobs having a higher priority than regular mining jobs (i.e. ones set using Orders).
    <insert witty signature here>

    dd0029

    Quote from: ShadowTani on March 10, 2014, 10:34:22 AM
    Also, there's that you can't manually declare things that are in a prison room for hauling, took me forever to figure that out, lol. Had a dead prisoner body laying there forever without anyone picking it up and me not being able to right click to get someone to do it. xD I figured it out first when I relocated the prison (I had a temporary setup inside the stonecrafting room - and yeah, the stoneblocks produced couldn't be manually set for hauling either, on the automatic side they did not haul them to the stockpile either, but I think they might have grabbed them directly when they needed them though - I can't remember for sure). However, I guess this is more of a bug than an usability issue.

    I had something similar happen during a game this morning. I was just started and was digging out my base. The only "building" I had was my growing building. So, I decided to just throw two beds in there as prison beds until I could get the actual prison dug out.

    I was slack in building my paste dispenser and didn't get it up until after my first prisoner. After the first raider wave, I noticed that people were still eating raw food. So I checked that there wasn't a flare or that the dispenser wasn't unpowered. The hoppers were attached. I was puzzled. So I tried to manually set someone to haul. The right click menu wouldn't show up. I thought something was off as I'd just un recruited my people after the attack. So I let them go start a task and tried again. Still no dice. The right click on an item should come up with some sort of message even when nothing can happen.

    Another example is my table in the empty prison room phenomena. Why don't they do the same thing at the non prison table with the flowers? Why only the prison gathering?

    RadGH

    #27
    I've been a pretty avid dwarf fortress / city builder / RTS type of gamer, so I've probably had a lot less trouble than most people have when starting out in this game.

    However, I still did have trouble on a few things. Most of these have probably been covered or are already known, but I'm going to go through them in full anyway.

    1) Graves should not bury animals by default.

    2) Maximum range of workstations should start much higher, if not maxed. From Dwarf Fortress, I understand the benefit of limiting search range for performance reasons, but it only makes sense when you are a well-established town.

    3) I didn't figure out how to interact with travellers/passersby until my third game. Would be nice to have a right-click option when in citizen mode that is grayed out that says "Arrest BillyBob (Required Military)". It would also be nice to have some diplomacy options and avoid arresting them; or even trade/chat with these people, but I know that is a lot more implementation than just a quick usability fix.

    4) There's a bit of a problem with roofs when building in caves (again, dwarf style). I have un-removable regions that cannot be cleared by the no-roof zone (or even by adding roofs again, then removing). It would be nice to have an order to "Remove Roof".

    See the solar panels on the left, and the empty room on the top right:
    http://radleygh.com/images/RimWorld363Win_2014-069-19-56-16-48.png

    It seems to work fine until you have part of the roof collapse. From there, I can't find any workaround to get rid of them. The roof tiles that aren't being removed are "Rock Roof (Thin)"

    5) Some of the descriptions for furniture/buildings are not very helpful.

    Example A: The grave - What does burying people actually do outside of roleplay?I assume it gives a happy thought for burying people, or at least gets rid of the negative thought of seeing a corpse. That should be explained in the description

    Example B: The sandbags - It's great that they provide cover, but how does that work? From Reddit it appears you can shoot over them if you are adjacent. I am not sure if there is any accuracy falloff over distance, or if they even stop grenades.

    Example C: Flowers - It's hard to find out what they are for. I've got roses. I can't figure out what to do with them. I can't find any tooltip that explains them. Maybe they just aren't finished yet. I noticed the flower pots grow daylily on their own, so that's not what they are for.

    6) I still do not understand what a nutrient paste generator is for. Nobody seems to be able to use it. My people seem to be quite content with a kitchen and even eating raw food, as long as they have a prepared meal once in awhile.

    7) The hoppers and equipment benches do not seem to have any benefit. Maybe they do, or maybe they are just cosmetic mini-stockpiles. If they do anything aside from providing a mini-stockpile, they should explain it (I'd imagine the hopper lets you stack more items on one tile, but it doesn't seem to be the case).

    eight) Does slag debris do anything? I would assume this can (or in the future will be able to) melt down into metal, and the tooltip should explain that.

    9) The launch pad needs a different name, like "Cargo Area", "Landing Zone", or "Loading Zone". It's quite misleading, I didn't bother reading the description for awhile since I had no plans on building rockets until I had a flourishing base. Then I realized what it was really for, and was just like, "what?". I assume that's what the double quotes are for, though.

    10) If you give someone an order to dig an area, they immediately lose interest when they are done and go to do something else. It would be nice to give them a "Mine Minerals in the area" command, which could either requeue the job until they are bored/hungry/angry, or they finish the area.

    ---

    I would like to point out that most of the other features in the game were very well done. I didn't expect the turrets to be so simple to set up, and I love that I can directly control people to do specific tasks. I was incredibly surprised at how well this has already turned out.

    Jet Jaguar

    One of my colonies didn't quite understand how Fear technology worked or what it would be used for, so they build a dozen gibbets at the entrance to their fort. "Anyone attacking us will be terrified by our grim entrance and run away," they thought. Only instead, they all freaked out every time they went in and out of the camp and any attackers saw it but were nonplussed.

    Another colony couldn't tell whether or not their damaged geothermal unit was producing any power, so they blew it up and demolished the power line leading to the base. They eventually built a second one at a different location.

    Yet a third colony discovered the hard way that mining can only produce rooms of a certain size before the roof collapses. Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

    Ethalias

    Quote from: RadGH on March 10, 2014, 10:53:28 PM
    6) I still do not understand what a nutrient paste generator is for. Nobody seems to be able to use it. My people seem to be quite content with a kitchen and even eating raw food, as long as they have a prepared meal once in awhile.

    7) The hoppers and equipment benches do not seem to have any benefit. Maybe they do, or maybe they are just cosmetic mini-stockpiles. If they do anything aside from providing a mini-stockpile, they should explain it (I'd imagine the hopper lets you stack more items on one tile, but it doesn't seem to be the case).


    If you place hoppers adjacent to the nutrient paste dispenser, colonists can retrieve nutrient paste meals from it. This issue has caused a fair amount of confusion in the past, so greater clarity may be in order.  :)