One thing as a new player I wouldn't mind knowing in a game like this: should I place the building next to each other, have a small gap, or a large gap.
I don't want to get screwed because the placement is terrible, but I don't want to know all the answers. Give me a hint, like telling me conected buildings can have storage advantages while saying my robots also need space to move.
It's great that you can drop an item into a production slot and start production (there's lots of Quality of Life features in this game). But the icon/frame for a slotted item and the icon/frame for the register of what's being produced are almost the same, except for the corner and the letter in front of the icon and the relative position.
When I dropped the fabricator into the Robot Factory register (the top register on the building) instead of the top M socket , it felt like I was slotting the item. I've played the game enough to think know this was wrong, but it also isn't obviously a mistake when I'm not paying attention, and I know this was a bit of a learning curve originally.
It might be a good idea to have a much more obviously different frame between sockets and registers. Decrease the register icon size slightly while increasing the border size and adding some shape and color around the entire border. This way a register and a socket will feel diffferent.
(Also, this feedback window has a problem with scrollbars appearing and disappearing sometimes when it is on the border between needing a scrollbar and not when the new line of text is past the length of the vertical scrollbar because it momemtarily decides to have a horizontal scrollbar. If it's a canned text widget you are using here, you might try to turn the vertical scrollbar to always on.
"Understood" is not a great word to use on something which is an OK/Continue button. A button usually either has a verb to take action (Save, Cancel) or the traditional "OK, which users are familiar with. "Understood" is past tense. It's usually only used on buttons for EULAs.
Additionally, there's a sentence below it which is "Click Understood to Continue", which is awkard, and it doesn't mean the user actually understand, just that they pressed the button.
There's also another issue/bug with the text. When you return to a page, it still stays "Click Understood to Continue" even though there is no button anymore. This one slightly confused me when I had forgotten I was going back through old pages.
I would recommend one of two little change to the text.
A) Change the button text from "Understood" to "OK", since it is very standard to say "Click OK to continue"
B) Change the button from "Understood" to "Continue" and get rid of the "Click to <whatever> to continue" text. It fixes the bug, and if a user sees "continue" they don't need another sentence telling them what to do.
Topic: Transporter Bot stuck trying to deliver item to out of reach Refinery
Bug:
A refinery that is completely walled off and not accessible by a Transporter Bot waits for the delivery of Blight Crystals from the assigned Transporter Bot that can pick up but not deliver the Blight Crystals since it is one squary way.
There is a Medium Item Transporter (range 3) that should be able to fully support the pick up and delivery from the storage bin to the refinery. It however is not doing it. There are also Shuttle flyers doing deliveries but the Transporter Bot is assigned the action and it gets stuck idling with the item in the inventory.
The Refinery gets stuck in a wait state and does not receive and continue to make assigned items (Blight Plasma in this case).
I've attached the save state and the situation is right on screen. There are currently 2x Transporter Bots stuck like this. Fixing it requires turning the Logistics Network off on the Transporter Bots, empty the inventory, and turn Logistics Network back on.
Recurrence rate is once every 10 mins or so.
Issue: A fully setup building has a lots of configuration details. Storing them all in a blueprint is nice, but the overall mechanic for deconstruction and reconstruction requires too much fuss. Deconstructed items are on the ground if not enough space in the deconstructor and the inventory is not fully availble for a rebuild unless you turn on Logistics Network but the draw back here is the bot will run off to deliver items to anything on the network and quickly zip away.
The result is lots of manual click of the deconstructor bot to the new build site and manually dragging items over.
Topic: Re-simulator Mechanic
Request:
Provide a way to track discovered and/or available recipes. The act of unlocking and experimentation to find a new recipe is nice but the UI needs to promote and support this mechanic.
Suggestions:
(1) Provide a way to put an item into an analyzer of some sort that then can provide hints and any recipe that can be discovered and solved for. This could be a minigame or a series of mini objectives and activities that unlock the recipe as a final reward.
(2) Provide a recipe tree similar to the research tree that provides a path to discovery. Certain recipes lead to new ones
Breaking Issue:
As I deliver different items to the mothership, any excess misdelivered items can not be recovered. The Mothership has only 6 slots inventory and and requires and open and available slot sto receive items from the satellite launch mechanism. When the satellite is in orbit it can not be viewed via the mothership selection. There's no way to right click discard items, drag items to another inventory, etc.
This can lead to situations where the mothership inventory is completely full but the items delivery are not completely. Any user would be stuck and completely blocked.
Issue: Sending items into orbit to the mothership is too convoluted and requires too much manual interenvtion. That I have to fish for the Mothership unit in the [F] menu just so I can see the current items acuired is not obvious and very unpolished. I then have to do the dame to access the oribitting satellite so I can access the LAND button.
Most of the game has been very smooth but this is clearly half baked and making it available in this state speaks poorly of QC on what's released in the Early Access.
Issue: Farming it is not practical at scale
Reason: Blight crystal storage at capacity
Recommendation: After initial use of anomaly particles, add in a method to directly farm it from blight crystals nodes (1)without needing to farm the blight crystal using a special miner or (2) factory that consumes the blight crystal in a total conversion.
Full text:
It's an initial interesting mechanic to have to obtain anomaly partical indirectly while farming blight crystals. After the initial accumulation and usage however - any sustainable farming of it at scale ends up being very obnoxious and unfun.
I have no use or need of blight crystals, my storage all reaches capacity - but I still want to gather and use anomaly particles. It taking x20 quantity for a single conversion is very steap and given that this is a random side product of an item I have maxed my storage on --- yuck! I've created extra excessive blight crystal storage but this is only a temp stop gap that I would have to constantly spamming my base and map with. I also tried increasing my usage of blight crystals but that's not near enough.
Great game btw!
When openning a running behavior, it should be a form of visualisation of the variables parts values (f.e. a box on the side that shows up what can be visualized). I am not very familliar with, and it would be very usefull to know if I have the good form of assignments (comparing a building with a number is not very accurate I guess), and how the behavior runs.
Thanks again for the work!
When I create a behavior, I can open it while running. But it is stopped if I open a subroutine.
It seems the behavior instructions that read inventory do not read component inventory (I mean blight inventory in my case), so when I read the blight amount collected in my transporter, it returns always 0 altough my inventory is full with it. See the behavior of the worker beneat the blight collectors.
Thx for the good work!
If this is a desired feasture the I suggest instead you could make it so that when the Loop Signal (Match) has some signal that it is supposedto check for, that if singal it will look through has a numarical value if infinity, then it will loop through all signal despite the numarical value attached to the signal.