Friday facts #151 - The plans for 0.14

[Klonan]

For nuclear power I think you need to mine it and then send it to an ore washer thing and then a nuclear refinery and then it is ready to go in a reactor which would need cooling.
Also I think something to have by 1.0 is map version compatibility so we don't always have to start over every time the game updates to have the new content.

You don't have to start over when we update the game, some people are still playing maps from version 0.9.0

[cerebrum22]

Hello, here are my 2 cents. Hope the devs will read (and understand) it. Sorry for the bad english.

At first some technical hints:

• -the names of the trainstops are not saved in blueprints, maybe you implement this as an option when you create the blueprint

• -steam synchronization after quiting the game takes a very long time. Maybe this is a problem of steam

and now my ideas for the future:

• -train names: it would be nice to name trains in there interface and then show the name in the train overview. So you can find easily the train you search. (e.g. "personal taxi", "outpost support train", "concrete train"). With 20+ trains its hard to keep an overview. Additional to that it would be nice to have a list of all train stops in the train-overview at the left side. So you can klick on it and only see the trains wo stops there. Like a filter. Sorting the trains by drag and drop also would be nice.

• -Map exploring must be more interesting: maybe you implement some unique items which you can find in some old ruins on the map, the items are for modifing and improving your armor or your car/tank. Or some instruction-plans for research, like a science blueprint. You only can research the technologie when you find this plan. Of course it must be possible to start the rocket without finding such stuff. Maybe the items and the plans are only for improving yourself, to make you a better war machine ^^

• -programable alerts: my first idea was a sound modul, e.g. a small building you can connect to the circuit network. You can choose between diffrent sounds. For example you connect it to an oil storage tank and get an alert when the content falls under a certain value, or when the next rocket is ready. You can hear the alert worldwide. Next idea was a visible alert. Its again a small building connected to the curcuit network. But now it sends you an visible alert to the GUI. For this maybe you have to research a receiver (a mix of headset and google glass) and you have to put this in your armory. only then you can receive the alerts. This would be nice in big factories.

• -Colored armor: it would be nice to change the color of the armor, like the locomotives. So you can handle diffrent setups, eg one for base building and one for combat. So you only chance the armor.

[Machine Medic]

Agreeing with the previous post, map exploration should indeed contain some more elements of exploration and discovery. Something not unlike the temples and mineshafts that can be found in Minecraft, for example. Something that gives players a reason to discover the world they are playing in.

[Fortanono]

Here is my take on how a reactor should work.

• Uranium would be a new ore that would be mined and mixed with sulfuric acid to make uranium slurry.
• The reactor would take uranium slurry to heat liquids. However, it also produces nuclear waste. Any entity with nuclear waste inside it, minus a processing plant, will produce pollution.
• Nuclear waste processing plants turn nuclear waste into lead chunks, which can be smelted into lead plates. Lead chunks can also be made into molten lead by inserting the chunks into a crucible, a new machine used to make molten lead.
• Molten lead cannot be pumped into a steam engine; it must be made into steam in a heat exchanger with water. This will consume the molten lead, so you have to keep processing any waste you get. However, molten lead reactors produce much more steam than any reactor that makes the steam directly.
• Lead plates are also used in processing units, one plate per.

[ihumangetmeoutofhere]

Hi,

I really like the idea of nuclear power. I have a few ideas for it:
- It should be Modular. There are many different parts to a nuclear reactor. I think the modules should be:
- - The reactor itself:
- - - Crafting Recipe:
- - - - Carbon (Possibly smelted coal?) - As control rods
- - - - Lead Plate (As radiation blocking)
- - - - Concrete (As Containment Chamber)
- - - - Pipe (As internal piping for water and steam to pass through between fuel rods and turbines)
- - - - Turbine Blades (As the Turbine...)
- - - - Advanced Circuits (As control mechanisms)
- - A cooling tower:
- - - Crafting Recipe:
- - - - Concrete (For main structure)
- - - - Iron rods (As strengthening framework)
- - - - Pipe (To carry water)
- - A water intake (From a lake):
- - - You could honestly probably use an offshore pump, rather than making a new entity

- Seeing as this will be an end-game power source, (I'm assuming, as nuclear can produce a very large amount of power at relatively little cost) it needs to be hard to make, therefore it should:
- - Be a long way along the tech tree and require large amounts of science to research
- - Be expensive to make, requiring lots of materials
- - Cause large amounts of biter attacks
- - Be Hard to control/maintain
- - Have a high activation cost

- Circuit Network Integration:
- - I propose that the reactor should be basically inoperable without the circuit network. There should be manual controls for the reactor, but some values will change based on power usage, making
- - it very hard to manually control without constantly being present and monitoring the reactor.
- - Outputs:
- - - Core Temperature (Too high of a heat will cause a meltdown, too low of a heat will cause the reaction to stop, meaning the reactor needs reactivating, requiring a high cost)
- - - Percentage insertion of control rods (The greater the insertion percentage, the less reactions take place, and therefore the lower the heat of the core and power produced)
- - Inputs:
- - - Percentage insertion of control rods (so the circuit network can control the core temperature/power produced)

- Pollution and Biters:
- - Reactors should produce a different type of pollution that has greater effects than regular pollution * (i.e Nuclear Radiation) and should also cause gradual damage to the player (and possibly
- - biters?) at high concentrations, unless they are wearing a radiation suit (New type of armor, possibly a module for modular armors?).
- - It should be a high priority for biter attacks (Because it is so damaging)

- Nuclear Waste:
- - In storage, nuclear waste should constantly produce radiation.
- - Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Plant:
- - - Nuclear waste should be able to be reprocessed into plutonium, which can then be made into plutonium fuel rods and used to fuel the reactor again.
- - Final Disposal:
- - - The only way to completely get rid of the radioactive waste should be to send it into space in a rocket. rather than carrying a satellite, rockets should be able to replace that with a small
- - - amount of nuclear waste, which will be sent to space and will be gone forever.

* I stole this idea from someone else in the comments, but its a really cool idea

Please bear in mind these are only suggestions that I have and I am not trying to impose myself onto the devs, they will make the final choices,but i have listed what - in my opinion - would be cool and fun to play.

Thanks Devs for an awesome game!

[RobertTerwilliger]

going direct to a pool type molten sodium reactors isn't a little bit overkill? starting with a simpler BWR or PWR is a little easier don't you think?

Indeed. I had quite little time, so I simply forgot to suggest modular upgrading from basic to genIV. Simple suggestion would be using water directly as primary and the only one coolant, and gate sodium and heat exchanger by techs.
HOWEVER it will probably result in not-using nuclear before full tech is reached, because no reason to build something temporary while you already have solar and steam to fullfill your needs.
Also I don't know really much about nuclear power. Well, I know basic things to have an idea how does it work at all, but many deep features remain mystery for me ; )
As one guy have said, "in fact, nuclear reactor is a super-high-tech boiler" ; D

[mattj256]

This is how I interpret this: the top-left tile of each chunk is labeled 1. The tile immediately to the right is labeled two. The next tile is labeled three. The next tile is labeled one. And so on.

Chunks are numbered, not tiles.

That makes a lot more sense. The blog post said you want to divide the chunks into 3x3 grids so it's kind of confusing...

Thanks HanziQ for the clarification. (I do think that part of the FFF was ambiguous/confusing. Oh well. No reason to waste more time on this.)

[MeduSalem]

Also I think something to have by 1.0 is map version compatibility so we don't always have to start over every time the game updates to have the new content.

You don't have to start over when we update the game, some people are still playing maps from version 0.9.0

Well if he really restarted everytime I cant help myself but...

facepalm.jpg (12.77 KiB) Viewed 8426 times

But that out of the way... upgrading from 0.12.x to 0.13 back when 0.13 came out basically broke my Oil wells. Now I need double the amount of Oil Wells compared to before due to how the Oil Well change is affecting older savegames and probably there is not going to be a fix for that. Wouldn't help now anyways since the damage is done and I've overwritten the autosaves a few hundred times ever since. xD

That and the Stacksize bonus change of 0.13... but the later is an entirely different story and has more to do with my personal playstyle.

[ketil]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a nuclear reactor explode in the game. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had multiple hydrogen/air explosions. While the explosions were not fission explosions, they were still explosions. I'd say include explosions if they benefit game play, or exclude them if they don't. Both can be justified from the real world.

[fod]

I just created a proposal about Nuclear Energy on the Electric Energy thread in the Development Proposals:

I think it is ok for now. Please feel free to review it on the next link:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5&p=196808#p196808

[Proxy]

For nuclear power I think you need to mine it and then send it to an ore washer thing and then a nuclear refinery and then it is ready to go in a reactor which would need cooling.
Also I think something to have by 1.0 is map version compatibility so we don't always have to start over every time the game updates to have the new content.

You don't have to start over when we update the game, some people are still playing maps from version 0.9.0

wow, really?
what about Map Corruption when Updating?
or the fact that for new stuff you need to Expolore Further and Further...
or the Change of the map Generator

[MeduSalem]

You don't have to start over when we update the game, some people are still playing maps from version 0.9.0

wow, really?
what about Map Corruption when Updating?
or the fact that for new stuff you need to Expolore Further and Further...
or the Change of the map Generator

Savegame corruption never happened to me personally in the past 3 years, but I have seen some people report that so yeah, it's possible.

And when was the last update where we actually had to expand to get new stuff? (Though we probably might have to with an upcoming update due to Nuclear stuff)

The change of the map generator is only merely cosmetic and if you don't really give much about map aesthetics and some jagged edge where the old generator and the new generator meet then it doesn't really force you to restart.

[dasiro]

You don't have to start over when we update the game, some people are still playing maps from version 0.9.0

wow, really?
what about Map Corruption when Updating?
or the fact that for new stuff you need to Expolore Further and Further...
or the Change of the map Generator

Savegame corruption never happened to me personally in the past 3 years, but I have seen some people report that so yeah, it's possible.

And when was the last update where we actually had to expand to get new stuff? (Though we probably might have to with an upcoming update due to Nuclear stuff)

The change of the map generator is only merely cosmetic and if you don't really give much about map aesthetics and some jagged edge where the old generator and the new generator meet then it doesn't really force you to restart.

doesn't it take longer and longer just to haul in resources from further and further away? copper, iron, coal and oil get depleted rather fast and don't regenerate like trees nor are they infinite as water.

[MeduSalem]

doesn't it take longer and longer just to haul in resources from further and further away? copper, iron, coal and oil get depleted rather fast and don't regenerate like trees nor are they infinite as water.

It does take longer and longer... but that doesn't really force you to restart a map unless you get tired of having to travel that far to the edge of the map.

[iamwyza]

doesn't it take longer and longer just to haul in resources from further and further away? copper, iron, coal and oil get depleted rather fast and don't regenerate like trees nor are they infinite as water.

It does take longer and longer... but that doesn't really force you to restart a map unless you get tired of having to travel that far to the edge of the map.

Just add more trains

[hitzu]

doesn't it take longer and longer just to haul in resources from further and further away? copper, iron, coal and oil get depleted rather fast and don't regenerate like trees nor are they infinite as water.

It does take longer and longer... but that doesn't really force you to restart a map unless you get tired of having to travel that far to the edge of the map.

And the save becomes bigger and bigger.

[chew]

First off what an amazing game you have here. Now my opinion on nuclear power. We need good a reason to use nuclear over solar. One thing I found glaringly obvious while playing, was the reliability of solar. It's 100% during the day I think a simple added game mechanic would make it more realistic and make nuclear a better option or at least a different one. You add a random modifier for the day to simulate cloud cover .1 to 1 multiplied by the output of your solar panels. You would have to have a reliable backup or substantially more accumulator capacity.

Now on to nuclear I think in some ways people are going overboard on it. The point of the game is to make/run a factory not maintain a nuclear plant. That being said nuclear should be more involved and hands-on. The initial set up should be involved, Finding the raw ore, processing it, then finally making nuclear fuel. Once running however it's hands off and you can stockpile fuel say one fuel core per box space, Then the fuel core could be loaded into a reactor and provide 100MW of power for quite some time. The waste stream should be the ongoing focus of nuclear. The reactor could run for a long time on one core but slowly and constantly be producing waste that has to be dealt with. Leave it in one place and that area will become Hot, starting to damage Items and players in the immediate area. If bugs are exposed to it they will mutate and become super bugs, bloody tough to kill, and perhaps then seeking out more Nuclear fuel.

I like the idea of using Nuclear to power far off mining operations. Another aspect of the waste stream could be when a rail line is used constantly to move the waste, the ground along the route would also become hot, increasing the likelihood of bugs mutating as well as damaging the track beyond repair if left unchecked. Better perhaps to stockpile, and then move a lot at once, but if a bug destroys the waste container major spill with a ton of radiation.

[Enginarius]

Nuclear Power sounds realy funny!

I confirm to the thinking about puttig in a boiler is to simple but I also think the usage of it should't releas the circuit of steampowered energy (at first).
Here is my Idea to use uranium:

• At first, the buildings could need to be powered electrical cause of theire usage next to steam and so on.
  
  Mine ore grind Ore/Fields/Spots (Uranium):
  There are raely much more then one way to realise it, so I mereg some existing ideas (without reading them all) and put the following three possible ways Into my concept.
  
  1. There could be a special miner to mine uranium. This miner could be more efficiantly or faster than a regular miner on regular fields but can as the only one grind Uranium-ore/filds
  
  2. There could be a "Drilling Mine" to put it on spots like the usage of drilling oil. The implementation of such a Mine could bring a compact way to put new Materials into game without a totaly blown map. Only new smart types of drillspots would be needed.
  
  3. There could be a unit to refine it out of existing ore's or combine existing materials to get the stuff u need. Maybe there could be more than one way to get uranium by a swichable production. These way could be usefull to implement other next-level-materials in futur and could bring a whole brench like the oilproduction with the swichable chemestry-production.
  
  Burning-T2/High-Preasur:
  The simplest way to use it is to heat a boiler with it, but a regular boiler would be too easy. The smart solution would be a boiler-T2. Greater (1x2 or 2x2), clearly hotter with a range between 0-200C°and more eficiantly than the regular once (for examle by using fuleblocks) but inefficient by burning simply coal (4exmpl.: 50% eff.). Additional the new heat could bring more points to dock "Tube-Tech's" based on steam to hold these brench allive in the lategame.
  
  Turbine-T2/High-Preasur-Turbine:
  Deliver a new Turbin. 150-200% output insteat the T1. As counterpart to simple "bigger,better,smater" it should need a temperatur between 100-200 C°. The building itself could hold the size from the T1.
  
  Pollution:
  Burning is dirty, refining is dirty. Maybe the expensiv Production of the needed units could be enough. That means, T2's shoulden't be realy more dirty then the T1's are i think.

Greatings to all!
Enginarius

[Drakosha]

Hello.
I would like to talk about their proposals.
Excuse me for my English Google.
1. Manipulators.
1.1. Blue and yellow cranes would like that they took one piece with in belt track, as it was before. This increases the complexity of the game.
1.2. Make a manipulator who works in 2 directions. Take from the trunk thing, moves into a factory, if there is already a finished product, then takes it back into the trunk.
1.3. A small offering. make angled paddles 90 degrees.
2. Chests. It is necessary to leave only 2 chests. The first storage chest (yellow), leave as is. A second working the chest will be very similar to the character inventory. There will be a query window, the window storage and disposal of the window. It will combine the functions of all 3 chests. It is easier to understand.
3. Drawings.
3.1. I believe that the drawings should be maintained for the user and made available in all the games that I play. Why should I be the same drawing in every game?
3.2. Just I think that it is convenient to move to the left side of the screen. The entire left lane will be studded with drawings in a column. This panel can slide in and out.
3.3. Let's say I have drawn the base of a plan on paper. I want to build all the buildings in accordance with this plan. Now I have to manually count the cells. I would like to see the ghost of a plan on the board. Either I hand-build their own or build drones, when they become available.
4. Assault.
4.1. I created a map 9999x9999. I was left 5,000 cells. 100+ hours of game time. I learned to fight. 2000 cells was a little interesting. Then slalom boring. I am doing one and same action. I put the drawing on the front line. The last I collect turret. I bet, pick, put, pick, put, I collect. Boring. It would be desirable to come up with something.
4.2. Very uncomfortable attack down. It lacks scope. I do not see what there (at the bottom) worms. I can not come closer. Otherwise, it can die building drones.
4.3. I would like to see improvement: increased attack range laser turret 1, which would be worth 5000/5000/5000/5000 or anything like that. I would give anything for this improvement.
5. General.
5.1. Charge the internal batteries of the hero from the fixed network.
5.2. Enter difficulty levels: easy, medium, difficult, user. As in Minesweeper. Some achievements tied to levels of complexity. As in Minesweeper. It is one thing to beat the game in 8 hours in a peaceful location, and another thing in a battle.
6. My observations.
6.1. I do not use module efficiency (Pink modules).
6.2. I do not use a car (it quickly breaks down).
6.3. I do not use (all) modules 2 and 3 levels. I think easier to put the second factory.
6.4. I do not use military robots. a lot of problems. The result is very small. I find it easier to use the laser turret.
6.5. I do not use the building, which is 50% of the modules transmits factories. I think easier to put the second factory.
6.6. I do not use grenades. I find it easier to use the laser turret.
6.7. I do not use missiles. I find it easier to use the laser turret.

[malecord]

Nice ideas. But what about a military rework/rebalance before the last release? It would be nice to have more variety in the enemies, their evolution steps and their attack strategies. And also a more neat separation between defensive and aggressive weapons would be nice so that purple science becomes a product of a true and dedicated research / production line effort instead of just being an early game gun turrets reuse. As it is now with turret creeps purple science is even cheaper than green science.

An enemies/military rework could also give you the chance to give a clear use case to both nuclear and armed wagons.

For instance there could be "electricity lechers" enemies that seek to destroy or disrupt electric lines. Nearby the main base they could be kept always with some sort of microwave emitter that acts as a repellent for lechers but a magnet for regular biters. But for very distant outposts with very long power lines you would either need to protect the whole power line with turrets or use a local nuclear reactor. Of course the hard part (nuclear fuel production) would still require large space and most likely be handled at home. But in the outpost there would only be a "reasonably compact" reactor running for a long time with a single fuel bar.

Then flying enemies could also be used to chase and attack locomotives giving armed wagons a purpose that is missing right now.

I'm glad that you're finally see the final release on the horizon. But at the same time I also hope you find the time to polish that branch of the game too because in my opinion it is still incomplete.