[0.17.0] Unwinnable situation in tutorial

[corgski]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Harvest all accessible trees for wood
2. Shift-click wooden chest in character inventory to handcraft all wood into chests

Result: Tutorial is now softlocked at "build electric poles" phase as there is no available wood.

Expected behavior: Trees should respawn during tutorial or there should be gated access to additional trees unlocked at the "build electric poles" step. Perhaps shift-click shortcut should be disabled early on to prevent autocrafting large amounts of single-ingredient items.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/jNLTCbR

[ETK03]

I would not say this is a bug, there are lots of ways to fail the tutorial, and if you fail then you can load from an autosave.

[BlueTemplar]

Come on, not *that* early though !

Have Compilatron break one of your chests and leave wood behind if that happens ?

[DaemosDaen]

That early you can just restart, that's more of a user error than anything else.
I do thing that a notification should come up the first time you shift-click or CTRL-click a recipe in the menu explaining how to clear the crafting queue and just leave it to the player at that point.

[corgski]

Ive found lots of lose conditions however I reported this particular setup because the relatively few trees on the starting map relative to other starting resources (it took me only a few minutes to harvest all of them,) the availability of the shift-click shortcut, and the fact that cancelling handcrafts is never introduced makes it possible to accidentally and non-intuitively put yourself in a failure condition as soon as you are introduced to chests, well before you are made aware that you can’t progress without additional wood.

I subscribe to the design principle that puzzles should fail fast, obviously.

[Loewchen]

That is an obvious "don't do that" situation.

[CDarklock]

That is an obvious "don't do that" situation.

There was also a tentative plan around 0.17.3 or so to guarantee in the level design that harvesting all wood gave the player an odd number of wood bits, so it's not possible to use all your wood on chests that cost two wood without leaving one for power poles. I haven't tested this.

[BlueTemplar]

Wait, don't trees give either 2 or 4 wood ?
Or is it because you start with an odd number of logs ?
Great workaround if designed as such !

[CDarklock]

Wait, don't trees give either 2 or 4 wood ?

The initial plan was for the first tree you harvested to only give you 1 wood. There are other ways... like give you 3, or make a special kind of tree that gives 3 (or 1) and make sure there are an odd number of them placed on the level. Or just regrow trees behind the player's back, like have one specific tree somewhere that if you chop it down it will respawn in five minutes. I don't know if anything was ever actually done, though.

[Foreros]

Why not, adding a message IG that tell something like"This is a very useful resource. Better keep some for future use I actually cant figure on.".
This way you "suggest" to players to keep some wood for later game step without giving them a bad situation of "I've used all my wood unintentionally and now I dont know what to do." without warning, but not removing them the experience of not block himself your progression.
They *KNOW* that the game suggest them to keep some wood, but they can use it all and see what happen next without preventing them to act foolish, if this is what they want to do...

[corgski]

That is an obvious "don't do that" situation.

There was also a tentative plan around 0.17.3 or so to guarantee in the level design that harvesting all wood gave the player an odd number of wood bits, so it's not possible to use all your wood on chests that cost two wood without leaving one for power poles. I haven't tested this.

That's actually a really good plan that would make this sort of softlock impossible without having to handfeed the player. Whether it's a "don't do that" situation or not, there's no indication that you shouldn't until you get stuck.

[steinio]

Why not, adding a message IG that tell something like"This is a very useful resource. Better keep some for future use I actually cant figure on.".
This way you "suggest" to players to keep some wood for later game step without giving them a bad situation of "I've used all my wood unintentionally and now I dont know what to do." without warning, but not removing them the experience of not block himself your progression.
They *KNOW* that the game suggest them to keep some wood, but they can use it all and see what happen next without preventing them to act foolish, if this is what they want to do...

Haha very good. And if the Player uses up all wood no matter what compilatron says 'i told you so.'

[Foreros]

Why not, adding a message IG that tell something like"This is a very useful resource. Better keep some for future use I actually cant figure on.".
This way you "suggest" to players to keep some wood for later game step without giving them a bad situation of "I've used all my wood unintentionally and now I dont know what to do." without warning, but not removing them the experience of not block himself your progression.
They *KNOW* that the game suggest them to keep some wood, but they can use it all and see what happen next without preventing them to act foolish, if this is what they want to do...

Haha very good. And if the Player uses up all wood no matter what compilatron says 'i told you so.'

Not really. If a player use up all his wood, he know his only solution is to get the latest "step autosave" and continue from here, or, if he has done the "wood depletion" before the first save, start again.
After all he has got a warning, but he has chosen to ignore it...