Unstable build feedback thread

[EvadableMoxie]

Just for fun, I decided to take a look at how many shots it took for my guys with excellent pulse rifles to down a single centipede.

41.  It took 41 shots, and that's only counting the ones that hit and weren't completely deflected.

Urgh.  I think I'm done bashing my head against this problem for now. I'm going to have to build a giant trap maze again.  Sigh...

[Orvelo]

the animal training stuff about masters is still there I posted about earlier, but I noticed something else quite... fascinating.

I had a scyther scything my dude (like they do) and noticed him go down. I look at his wounds and notice. His Waist has been cut off. He is still alive, still would be functional in all categories if not for accumulated pain. First time I've seen a hit to waist. and only ~10 hp there?
anyways I'd expect if somenone was cut at the waist they'd be dead or lose both legs or something similar and bleed extremely profusely since he was at max bleeding at a same rate as a cut off limb.

This ar 1967 version

[Polder]

I find the animal revenge chance changes heavily impact the usefulness of hunting as food source in the early game (in tropical swamps at least) and think this widens the gap between growing and hunting further, while the original intent was presumably to make hunting elephants less profitable (their value had a lot to do with selling the meat in additional to the leather and tusks).

[Grimelord82]

I'm not a huge fan of the "shoot centipede with survival rifle for 24 hrs to kill it" mini-game, either. Lancers take 2 hits with a rifle. Scyther's need some armor so they can tank shots to get in range/be dangerous, but 5-6 seems reasonable. Centipedes should be up to no more than 20 good hits.

As for hunting, it's really not bothering me. Even my tribals were mostly able to take out Rhino and Elephant using Recurves without aggro. As of build 1955 or so anyway. Crashlanders with survival rifle only have to be wary of Thrumbo.

[Starbug3D]

I recently became aware of the 1.0 unstable build and this discussion and I hope I can provide some constructive feedback.  I'm not a power-player.  I do tweak my starting crew to avoid anything seriously annoying like dumb labor or starting fires but I pretty much let it play out from there.

I've been fortunate in my current play thru that it's not been too difficult, or too easy or too random and also I'm glad I don't have any bugs to report.  I think you're heading in the right direction overall with the balance and quality of life improvements.

But since this is the internet, I believe I am required to give my opinions, so for my first post I will offer three things:

#1 I agree with those who would like at least the option to not see the stats of the pawns you don't control.

#2 My biggest pet peeve is when someone is out in the field harvesting some resource and then fails to bring anything back with then to the storage when they decide it's time to switch tasks.

#3 Speaking as someone who is color blind, please add some contrast to Research Progress meter.

Keep up the good work!

[erdrik]

I had a compacted steel meteorite land within 5 tiles of my colony.
Its a mountain base and it landed on an odd outcropping of Overhead Mountain being held up by a single granite stone wall. The wall became completely surrounded by the meteorite despite the Overhead Mountain it was holding up.
The meteorite did not replace the wall, shouldn't it have also not fallen on the tiles covered by Overhead Mountain?

[attachment deleted due to age]

[mcduff]

A minor thing that has occurred to me - shouldn't parkas have a negative impact on heat tolerance? If I'm wearing an alpaca wool parka that insulates me down to -50 degrees, it makes sense that this would make me too hot in a lot of situations, but quite often the heat range ends up being something like -48 to 24 degrees or something, which feels like a big ol range and means your colonists end up wearing parkas into the summer.

[EvadableMoxie]

Other observations unrelated to centipede bullet sponges and mechnoid death:

I got a brewery online once my pawns got into high expectations.  I set a rule of 1 beer per day, but I noticed their tolerances were building, so I bumped it to 1 beer every 2 days.  Still, my doctor managed to become addicted.  I checked the wiki and it turns out you can only have one beer every 2.13 days to have no chance at addiction.   This seems really, really silly to me. Smokeleaf is actually less addictive than beer! I feel like you should be able to have 1 beer a day without getting addicted.  With the new recreation system you really start to need chemicals late game and it's ridiculous my colonists can't have 1 beer a day without being drug addicts.

Things get weird when you have a lot of pawns in confined spaces. Sometimes enemy units can 'push' your units back.  What I think is happening is pawns can occupy the same space when moving, but not when they stop. So the enemy, let's say a herd of man-eating Emus targets someone behind your wall.  The emu's hit your melee standing in a doorway and they pile up.  Since they're blocked they then stop, which creates like 6 emus on the same tile.  The game adjust by moving them all to their own space, resulting in the melee holding the door being bumped back and Emu's flooding into your base. That sucks, because Emus are dicks.

It's also possible to have this push effect push one of your pawns onto a door and open it, and it can make melee pawns unresponsive and cause them to rubber band back and forth.

Sometimes when you order a pawn to shoot something and the target enters melee range, they just stand there and don't melee back until you specifically order them to.

I gave this as feedback before but I'll say it again: Make healing mech serums more common, or give other ways to heal brain damage and scars.  Maybe something that uses glitterworld meds?

I like that the long range mineral scanner now requires someone with intellect to man it.  Finally a use for intellect pawns and a way to train intellect after you've done all your research. Great change.  What I dislike is there doesn't appear to be any feedback to the player that manning it is doing anything.  Some type of progress bar, even something without perfect information like "Wideband scans -> Triangulating Signatures -> Narrowing down location -> Pin-pointing location" would make it more obvious and give the player a clue how close they are to the next lump.  Oh, and uh, it looks like the interaction spot is behind it instead of in front of it.

Also, I think you should be allowed to have multiple scanners running. If you want to devote multiple people to running them, why not? You still need to travel out to the lumps, mine them, and transport the ore back, I don't think it would be that overpowered.  Maybe a stacking penalty so 2 aren't twice as good, but 2 is still better than 1.

Is there any good reason why a ground penetrating mineral scanner can't tell you what type of minerals are there?  Previously drills couldn't be reinstalled so there was a cost associated with discovering that information.  Now that you can move them, there doesn't seem to be any reason for that information not to be available.  It just forces you to waste time relocating the drill everywhere until you find what you want.

Every single playthrough I get at least one pawn who gets a plague while on a caravan, and I noticed there is a dev button to plague a caravan member.  So this is a specific event, not related to normal disease chance? If so, it feels like kind of a dick move, and heavily discourages caravaning in the early game because plague is deadly enough while in your base early on, while on the road it's often just going to be a death sentence for that pawn. It's already incredibly dangerous to the point where I rarely do it for anything but trade requests until I have drop pods which allow me to quickly support my caravans when needed.

I'd really like to be able to set up a camp and generate a small map, similar to the 'set up camp' mod. This would allow me to micromanage my pawns better, as well as let me drop pod in materials for the pawn to build a drop pod launcher and launch themselves back home. You can already do this, but you need to create a permanent settlement and then abandon it afterward which feels really clunky.

I often don't notice when a caravan has reached a friendly settlement. Could that be an actual note that pops up instead of just a message? And maybe add a "Caravan Paused" notice in the bottom right like the tattered apparel or low food notices when you have a caravan not moving.

Floors are boring.  If you have natural stone, you smooth it because natural stone is better in every way to every other type of flooring. If it's a kitchen/hospital/lab you use sterile. Concrete on anything you just want to avoid dirty with and don't care about beauty. Otherwise, you do stone tile once you can afford it, wood until then.  It's never an interesting choice.  Carpet is worthless because it's equal to stone with the downside of being flammable and locked behind a research. And does anyone use flagstone, ever?

Packaged survival meals just seem inferior to pemmican.  They take a long time to produce and are very inefficient in terms of nutrition, both due to the extra materials required and the fact that pemmican breaks down into smaller units, which prevents waste. Considering survival meals are higher in tech I feel like they should be objectively superior to pemmican and they really aren't.

It would be nice if packaged survival meals and pemmican were not eaten when you have other perishable meals available.  You can forbid them but I use the unforbid all tools frequently and have to keep remembering to reforbid them, which is annoying. I even caught a pawn feeding a packaged survival meal to a muffalo.

It would be nice if animals defaulted to not following the tamer around after obedience training.  Unless it's a combat animal, that's not something you want, and it's really annoying to have to constantly shoo away my muffalo and boomalopes from battles.

The random high -36 psychic drones feel really unfair.  In practice it's just a 'Half your colony mental breaks!" event, but it can create some stuff that really feels awful and like you had no control over it.  Short of having psychic helmets on hand for half your colony at all times, but I'm not sure that's something that should be required.

I like that more weapons are viable in different situations. The problem is that knowing which weapons are good in which situation doesn't do you any good when you get drop podded or an attack immediately raid and you only have enough time to barely get your pawns into position, if you're lucky.  If different things are useful in different situations but the player isn't given a chance to react to the situation and change their weapons accordingly, then you're just playing rock/paper/scissors now.

In the late game it becomes hard to manage multiple work benches that use the same work priority.  For example, I really want my colonists to melt slag into metal, but since it's the same skill as cutting stone from chunk, there is no way to prioritize one over the other.  The best I can do is assign one specific colonist to each bill, but I don't really want to do that. I want any available pawn to smelt first and only cut chunks if the smelter is occupied. There's actually no way to create this behavior that I'm aware of.

I'd really like some better late-game power management options.  Batteries are awful.  50% efficiency and they self discharge? Why are there no better batteries? And there really aren't any better researchable power options, just different researchable power options.  They're all side grades with their own advantages and disadvantages.  I feel like by the time I'm building a space ship I should be able to build a power plant that is reliable and conduits that don't regularly explode.

I understand it would be open to abuse if we were allowed to select the exact location friendly traders go to.  But that said, it's so incredibly annoying when a trader shows up, parks their muffalo on top of my crops and then starts walking in and out of my rooms over and over dragging in dirt.  Could we at least get better AI for traders so they don't constantly make messes and disturb sleeping pawns? And tell their muffalos not to eat our crops, while they're at it?

[BlackSmokeDMax]

A minor thing that has occurred to me - shouldn't parkas have a negative impact on heat tolerance? If I'm wearing an alpaca wool parka that insulates me down to -50 degrees, it makes sense that this would make me too hot in a lot of situations, but quite often the heat range ends up being something like -48 to 24 degrees or something, which feels like a big ol range and means your colonists end up wearing parkas into the summer.

They used to have a heat penalty. Not sure if it is a bug or working as intended in 1.0unstable.

[Madman666]

Oh, you get -36 drones at some point of gathering enough wealth now, how cute. Didn't quite make it to those yet. Why not -80? It d be fun to watch a colony screw itself over couple days if you didn't have enough foil helmets for all your people. Although... that was high drone level right? That means you probably can get enough wealth to get to extreme level (at least psychip ships used to have extreme level).

A subtle nudge with a baseball bat to the guts, that you might wanna stay poor if you wanna stay alive.

[ChJees]

Can the suicidal raiders be fixed at some point? Why would they choose to attack the insects on the map instead of me during a raid? They are not even near me!

Picture of a suicidal raider

[dearmad]

I too have noticed the pawn gets plague event is common in caravan too, and i agree it's a dick move. AI using a cheese tactic.

[Emulsion]

The highest drone I got was extreme with -48, that kicks ass! But I bought foil helmets beforehand because they don't start at this level so you can get prepared for that.. I definitely did after having my first psychic ship in 1.0 and wanted to prepare for a view days which wasn't quite the best idea in terms of general mood.

But I was also lucky that 3 of my women were in happy relationships and I had every drug available to soften the moods which I prescribed everybody in need ;-)
I'm playing phoebe hard btw.

I guess this is one of the things that shall add some weight to internal threats and I don't see it that negatively..probably it makes it mandatory to produce drugs for not having your people going insane, which isn't a good thing if course..
In my run the moods are relatively high constantly and I haven't much to worry in that regard so I quite like this event for spicing things up a little..

[Lanilor]

2 of 3 times a trade caravan gatheres near my freezer and they always walk in an out and the temperature get too hot. Now again during a heat wave and half of my meat will rot if they don't go away. It is *really* annoying to a point where I want to attack or just devmode them away. I can't forbid the doors (they ignore it) and I can't even build a wall in front of it because they always walk over it can canvel building (which is btw the other really annoying thing visitors do). Earler when they weren't next to my freezer, they gathered right on a new house I started to build, so it was a forced construction freeze until they went away.
They should just stay a bit further away from my building. Like right outside the home area. If I want to trade, I wouldn't care that my colonist need to walk 5-10 more cells to talk to them.

--

- About half of the raids in my current game were melee only, which are really easy to fight against. Could just be random and a too small sample size, but I would like more diversity. Even a almost only melee raid with 2 or 3 shooters would be way more challenging.

- I'm a day 71 and so far I only got 3 item stashes (and not sure if the 1 prisoner resque quest was early this game or last). No trade offers so far. And the stash rewards are not very tempting. It's also badly guarded, the main problem is just the time I need for my pawns to get there and back. Being 3 days away with 1 or 2 colonists looses a lot of potentional value and that for an infinite chemful reactor. Still not sure if I want to take on that quest.

- I had quite a few refugee chases (4 I think). Although I only did the first and even there the raid was really strong since it got changed. For the other chases I didn't want to take the risk for a potential bad pawn. And I don't mean bad in stats, but bad in not fitting into the colony. I like having more mediocre pawn and not everyone being perfect. I even have a potato-girl who only can medic a plant, but it's fine. It would just be nice to get some more information on the refugee chase letter. It's a bit weird that they have time to tell me their backstory, name and age, but a simple "My best skill is construction and my favorite passion is social" to even advertise themselves is too much. That way I could at least get a hint on whether they are my long-needed grower and fit into my colony or if I take the risk anyway too see their complete stats. (Or maybe they say their best and worst skill, whatever fits and is not too much.)

[EvadableMoxie]

Oh, you get -36 drones at some point of gathering enough wealth now, how cute. Didn't quite make it to those yet. Why not -80? It d be fun to watch a colony screw itself over couple days if you didn't have enough foil helmets for all your people. Although... that was high drone level right? That means you probably can get enough wealth to get to extreme level (at least psychip ships used to have extreme level).

A subtle nudge with a baseball bat to the guts, that you might wanna stay poor if you wanna stay alive.

Just happened to me again.  Fun times are ahead. I only have one foil helmet, so uh, the boys are going to have to share.



I popped a pulse soother, it's +15 so now this is 'only' -16, but I the soother is only 25 hours so I don't think it'll outlast the drone.