List of issues bugging me
Osydius
France Join Date: 2015-09-19 Member: 208031Members
France Join Date: 2015-09-19 Member: 208031Members
As I do everytime you release a new update, I started a new game this week-end to test it out. I have to say I love what you did with the Cyclops! The cameras are really cool and the fact that you can turn the lights off adds a lot to the general atmosphere. But as I progressed, I made notes of a few issues that still bugged me so I could share them with everybody and get your reactions. I know some of those have already been discussed but I'm still putting them in so as not to forget. Please feel free to add stuff to the list or comment it.
So here we go, in no particular order:
ok that's all I can think of for now!
Cheers,
Osy
So here we go, in no particular order:
- the scanner room and moonpool are very hard to place correctly on the terrain. It is very hard to properly connect those 2 rooms to the rest of the base.
- maybe it's just me but even after having played a bit with it, I still don't see the scanner room as being useful. Maybe it will in the future but right now, it feels pointless.
- speaking of scanner room, I haven't managed to upgrade it (upgrades won't go in the alloted slots). I assume that is a known issue.
- I feel we rely too much on silver. We use it in many recipes / upgrades through computer chip's but it is not that easy to come by, hidden in tall red grass, surrounded by predators, + you get a good chance of getting titanium or lead instead. Comparatively, it's much easier to find components which are supposed to be rarer. So for instance, Gold is everywhere after a certain depth, to the point that you stop picking it up after a while. Same with Lithium or even uranium which is everywhere in the kelp zone. So I don't know, maybe it's intended but it just feels weird to be able to find very rare components easily and struggle (to some extent) to find the component that we use the most after titanium and quartz.
- On the cyclops, I feel you see better with the cameras than out of the front of the Cyclops, so I ended up driving it from the camera view. The frontal light should maybe be a bit more powerful to fiw that.
- Cyclops still feels like it's consuming too much energy, although that will probably not be an issue after we get rechargeable power cells.
- getting out of the Seamoth in random directions (I know they are working on it, just want to mention it because it is, by far, the most annoying thing right now);
- there is often nothing in the wrecks that justify getting a laser cutter. If you go to the floating island for instance, you can find in the wreck, without the laser cutter, the flood lights, a plant pot, and the frame. Then there is a door you cut thought, but nothing behind. At best, you actually get the floodlight after getting though the door, which is something I guess, but not that exciting. It would be very cool if you actually had to do that in order to get some of the best tech or upgrades. After all, getting to deep wrecks (like Kelp zone or Island), is difficult: you need to upgrade your seamoth, need the laser cuter, may lose yourself in a labyrinth or corridors... it would make sense that you do all that to get something good. In fact, I think all our tech, or most of it, should be found in wrecks. Finding pieces of cyclops or seamoth on the seafloor is fine, but it would be cooler to find the rest (moonpool, filtration, etc) in wrecks IMO.
- speaking of wrecks, there are cargo boxes everywhere, but they're empty. It would make sense if some of them had components inside (not much, more for consistency than progression).
- Tied with the wrecks, is the O2 issue: I love the fact that we now have only one tank of O2. It makes the Seamoth and Cyclops much more relevant and makes wreck investigation more scary, which is perfect. 165 secs + rebreather is usually enough to wander around a bit, even to go explore a wreck, but it would be nice to get another tank upgrade at some point later to reach maybe 225 secs.
- I found I sometimes can't pick up certain logs/data downloads. Like for instance, in the ruin of the Degasi mushroom base, I couldn't pick up the last log which was in a locker. It's a shame because I love what you did there. Hunting the Degasi survivors and exploring the ruins of their bases is great.
- farming is too powerful. Of course, all of us who got early access now know the game pretty well so we don't play it like new players will, but I usually find myself going very early to the island to get the plant pots and the hanging tree fruits, after which I never need to fish ever again. They are so potent they even make the water filtration machine pointless. Once you have one or 2 trees, you dont need anything else to survive, amking water filtration only useful for one thing, preparing for exploration. But since you can put trees in your cyclops, and you can make water with salt and coral anyway, it makes the filtration machine more of an energy leech than anything. Maybe decrease the amount of water given by the fruits and reduce energy cost of filtration?
- I feel day/night cycles should be slightly altered. I would advocate for longer days and shorter nights, especially since night are now really dark (as they should be, that is fine) but if you play harcore for instance, going out at night is really dangerous. So you may have to wait for the night to pass to go hunt for ressources, which creates downtime. The best for me would be days that last maybe 50% longer, and nights either the same or 25% shorter.
- Some things are still not scannable (bone shark for instance).
- and final issue is that the game is too easy as it is
in the new game I started on survivor mode this week-end, I went from nothing to a base with moonpool + scanner + bioreactor + solar panels + farming + upgrade seamoth + upgraded cyclops in about 6 hours (the only prints I am missing are nuclear reactor and thermal reactor), and I was not trying to go fast. That was just going at a normal speed I would say. Of course, as stated above, I know the game and where to find what, but still, I feel 6 hours to get the best and most expensive vehicle the game has to offer is a bit short. I know things will be added of course so that for instance, creatures attacking base will impact progression, but I still feel some material should be harder to find (gold, uranium, etc), which would make exploration more important.
ok that's all I can think of for now!
Cheers,
Osy
Comments
I've made most of the items and upgrades that require silver for wiring kits or computer chips and still have half a wall locker of silver left over. So all I can suggest is "explore more"!
The point is not that I can't find silver, but that it's harder to find compared to other rarer components like lithium, gold or uranium which is not logical.
The only two components in the game which are a hassle to find (and please keep in mind when I use the term hassle that I say in my post that overall the game is too easy, so its only a hassle compared to the rest), are silver and stalker teeth. When I started my new game this WE, I played normally, picking up any components as I go along. After 6 hours of play, the only component I had to go out to get multiple times over is silver (aside from titanium and quartz of course).
For gold, when I needed it, I went out once and found like 20 in less than 10 min. Same for lithium which was everywhere near the mushrooms. Silver is the only one I kept going back to for several reasons (i) more stuff now needs silver (such as the fabricator, upgrades, etc), and (ii) it takes more time to get it than other components so you may have to come back to base for food, water or health between supply runs.
Now, here is the important part: what I am saying is not that it should be easier to get silver, but that rarer components should be harder to find than silver. What I want is for the game to actually be consistent and for rare components to be actually rare.
Sorry if that wasn't clear in my initial post.
Question: how do you know those elements are rare? This is not Earth. Elements that are rare on Earth might be plentiful on other planets (which would make a strong argument for why we might go to those planets in the first place).
Also, if you're finding titanium and uranium when you're looking for silver, then you're looking in the wrong places. Limestone chunks contain titanium, copper, and (with the Machinery Update) lead. Basalt chunks contain uranium and diamond. What you want to look for are sandstone chunks, which contain silver and gold.
To answer your first question, based on the depth at which you find them. On average, Copper is in shallow waters, silver around 100 meters deep, and gold under 200 meters. Others are even further down. Since the way this game works is that depth acts as a hurdle, it means that as far as components go, the deeper the better.
Also, you could argue that the "best stuff" requires the best components. The wiring kit requires silver whereas the advanced wiring kit requires gold. Just like the Seamoth requires titanium ingots where the Cyclops requires Plasteel Ingots, which are Titanium Ingots + Lithium. Hence, Lithium is more precious than Titanium.
And that's my point, those components are more precious than the base components we use all the time (titanium, quartz), but at the same time, they are incredibly easy to find in large quantities. It's weird.
Also I didn't say I found uranium when looking for silver but titanium and lead. Now I am aware that those 2 are found in Limestone and not sandstone, but when hidden in the tall grass, Limestone and Sandstone look very much alike, and with sharks around, its easier to break and take whatever there is, than to check the label and go "ok, that's a limestone, better not take it". I believe most of us don't even stop and just break/grab as we swim.
But that doesn't change the fact that you tend to need more time to get silver than to get other more precious components. So said "rarer" components should be harder to find than silver.
You make some valid points regarding balance and player progression. As an amateur game designer myself, I would agree that there should probably be a slightly higher ratio of silver to gold when harvesting sandstone chunks than there currently is, given the recipes we have available. On the other hand, some of your statements fail to account for other recipes that use those resources, or seem to be improperly applying those game design principles in a fundamental way. You appear to be getting "precious" materials, which implies that they should be more rare and harder to find, confused with "late-game" or "end-game" materials, which can be difficult to find, but can also only be plentiful in areas that have an expected prerequisite amount of advancement. In game design, this is known as gating, and the depth at which you can find a resource is an example of a gating mechanism. For instance, yes, Plasteel Ingots require lithium, but so do reinforcement panels for your base, so although it's debatable at which point lithium should become available, it should definitely be plentiful when it does.
In addition, keep in mind that this is still an Early Access game, and they might not have gotten around to implementing all the planned recipes that require Gold, Mercury, Magnetite, Blood Oil/Benzene, Diamond, and so on. The reason Gold is more annoying than the other resources I listed is because it's the only one you routinely encounter when looking for resources that have a greater number of recipes (i.e. silver). I guarantee that you'll feel the same way about lead very soon.
Also, from my personal experience, depth has more of an influence on which kind of stone chunk you will find than it has on what the chunk contains. Your impression of gold being more common than silver below 200 meters is probably related to the fact that there isn't any sandstone that deep that I've ever found, only basalt (which can contain gold, but not silver). Sandstone can be found in more places than the Grassy Plateau and the Kelp Forest too. I've found plenty of sandstone in the caves of the Safe Shallows (just watch out for Crashes), and it is in places like that which you can take your time in distinguishing limestone from sandstone. My rule-of-thumb for finding sandstone in higher elevations (0-100 meters) is that it's always in caves or tunnels (or inside volcanic vents), and never out in the open.
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As an aside, the scanner room would have been perfect for to look for silver in the grassy plateaus. Hopefully silver will be scannable in the near future.
Give this man a gold star. Having lead be a found (instead of crafted) resource was a welcome surprise for me when I downloaded the Machine Update. Having it replace gold in the sandstone drops would be awesome.
I don't think this is possible because I believe the game only decides what ore you receive when you actually crack open the limestone node or sandstone node etc. That is, nodes are not pre-assigned or tagged to drop a specific ore (of the ones it normally can contain) and therefore the scanner cannot search for it.
While testing the scanner room in the Safe Shallows I noticed some odd behavior. At first it only listed three items it could scan for -- scrap metal, quartz, and salt. But I went out and cracked a few limestone nodes and when I returned, the list now included copper and titanium, the things I had picked up while cracking limestone. But selecting either of those items from the list did not cause any locations to be identified by the scanner.
As mentioned above, I don't think the scanner can actually pick up those things, so they shouldn't appear on the list.
How about we compromise with a morningstar?
Agreed.
But you're right with the too heavy dependancy on chips and therefore silver. We need other key tech put into advanced materials/electronics. Maybe some tech like accelerators (magnetite as key element) or tesla gravity lens or sort of micromachinery components based on mercury, lithium and synthetic fibers, ... or those kind of things. Not only chip, chip and chip.
It can pick up stalker teeth, metal salvage and resource nodes, why not the resources themselves?
You could always alter the code to determine what spawns inside the node.
What Zetachron said.
Also, does the scanner actually find and display resource nodes? That is, the limestone, sandstone, shale, and basalt nodes? I haven't noticed any of those listed yet, but I've only been experimenting with it for a short time.
@Enderguy059 You can't determine the outcome of a randomization before it gets called. If you could, it's no randomization.
The devs could change it to work that way but it might provide less flexibility in determining how the game functions. For example, the recent addition of lead resources to limestone nodes.
With the resource type determined when the node is cracked open, adding the lead resource is a relatively simple matter of changing the code in one place and -bang- all of the world's limestone nodes now work in the new fashion.
If the resource type was predetermined for each limestone node, the devs would either need to create and run a script to update each node individually in order to set lead as the predetermined resource for a certain percentage of them or >shudder< actually have somebody change a percentage of them manually. And what happens when a player wants to carry forward an old save game? Run the special script at that point to update the world's limestone nodes? More work and more chances for error.
Scan the limestone but do not scan the sandstone. (Scan = use your handheld scanner on it)
This way everytime you swim towards a sandstone (I hope its right, I mean the one with silver in it) the scanner icon will pop up next to you. That way the game will tell you: Yes, this node is "interesting".
I would like to see the supply crates take out and replaced with the cargo boxes that you have pry open. They could contain the items normally found in supply crates, or schematic pieces.
I was able to retrieve it using the Propulsion cannon, however it is not retrievable by hand.
I'm hoping that the farming is a stepping stone into using the raw materials to make nutrient blocks. You add plant material, similar to the bio-reactor, and it's generates nutrient blocks for food. I agree that it is way to OP at the moment. Honestly currently all you need is a small pot and a single melon seed. Plant the seed, use your knife to break into four more seed. From there let those four grow and at 20% food you can eat three melon and get near filled hunger. You cut the last melon and get four seed to replant. Just cycle from there. For the bio-reactor a single pot with hanging fruit tree in the room and you can keep it running.
As for the location of resources, I suggested long ago that there should be mining equipment in the wreckage. The Aurora is a mining and exploration vessel, yet even with the latest update there is a lack of mining equipment. The only mining type of tools you get access to is the terraformer, and that doesn't provide minerals, just allows you to carve out soil and place it elsewhere.
Cool, I thought it might work that way but I hadn't crafted to Propulsion Cannon yet and had not had time to test it yet. Glad to know there's a way to get it.
Summary: The scanner room could be very, very useful. But as right now there are no buried resources and it can't scan ores inside stones, the use is limited to being a cam monitor rather then a help for resource scanning. Quite a gimmick, but not really practical.
Suggestions:
Even if it means moving slowly through an area or dropping some form of scanning beacon.
keep current duration,
-> but be able to pass time by going to sleep.
With the new bed furniture, it should be possible to lay down and sleep until sunrise, or even set an alarm (if we were to get a general wrist watch). That way you have control over how much time you want to spend exploring/working at night (which has some advantages over daytime, depending on what you are looking for).
Maybe the game could even go one step further by having your health slowly decrease, as you stay awake and are active, making it necessary for you to come back to base and take a rest from time to time.