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suicidejunkie

44
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A member registered Dec 15, 2016

Recent community posts

That oxygen ratio is not bad.

Some quick googling and math says that 1L of water contains enough oxygen for about a day, if you can get rid of the hydrogen from it.  It should probably cost a lot of electricity to craft however.

Some notes:

1) Try a save and reload. If you've been running around a long time, the map and objects you've seen appear to build up.

2) I believe it is intentional that you will exhaust the local resources and need to explore ever further afield to keep going. Try packing yourself a portable base, and drive out for a few days to get lots more resources.

4) They do seem to happen a lot when you least want them. If you drive far enough away that the map tile unloads, your base won't spring any more leaks while you're gone ;)

6) Wind generator is a classic suggestion, and a good one. The RTG is in fact quite overpowered however. It is particularly OP in comparison to real life units. For the same metal cost, plus the 6 radioactive ore, you get a full half of the power output of a solar panel, but the power flows during the night and never needs cleaning. Other than the starting equipment, my bases run on 100% nuclear power :)

1) *** When exiting a buggy, pavement seems to count as "indoors", and your mewnaut will appear surprisingly far from the buggie in order to not be standing on a paved tile. In the screenshot below, I've left the front door clear so that wherever you park, you'll appear in front of the door for a quick entrance. (Also, you appear in the bottom left corner of the tile wedged between the airlock and the RTG; the middle of the tile would make much more sense IMO.)


Later on I was testing out the buggy health system, and managed to get it down to 10% health and two broken wheels (the front ones were locked to the right, but this didn't seem to affect how the vehicle mishandled; sometimes it went straight and sometimes even left).

This meant a long trek south to the fixit shop, pushing the front end back towards the road, and then driving a few tiles before having to straighten things out again.

So, when I finally got the buggie on top of the garage and started repairs, I was already in the red on O2. As soon as the wheels were straightened out, I floored it and took off for my base.

2) *** And the car trailed sparkly red +es the whole way :) Presumably because I left while the repairs were incomplete.

I held my breath long enough to take a quick screenshot, and then dove through the automatic airlock.

I've got some streets laid out, with the curbs cleared of any trash and rocks that might damage a speeding rover.

There's RTG powered lights strung up along the side of the road, and a tiny O2 tent by the intersection powered by the same RTG that runs the nearby streetlights.

Farm up north, and original base with hospital down south-east (you can see the parking lot at the edge of the map), and a buggy repair shop halfway up the north road.


My low oxygen isn't a problem since I can cruise at full speed up the highway without needing to refer to the map, and the farmhouse lights tell me when to turn in to the driveway. The automatic airlock helps too :)


+1 sale here as soon as it happens!

What about simply starting with 1 upgrade point, and no weapons? Choose sword, bow or hammer before the first level.

I had a smelter running, and I clicked to cancel the last item in the queue (3rd position), just as the smelter was finishing its current item.

I suspect it may have ended up trying to delete a null item from that queue slot, and thus crashed.

Heh. You don't want to vaporate what little water you have; you want to condense the vapor in the air and collect it in a trap :D

If an auto-airlock is leaking, and you walk into it, the automatic action will repair the leak rather than open/close the door.

This is handy, but probably not intended :D

The automatic airlock is a great upgrade, and I like that it takes a normal airlock as a crafting component.

I've already had the chance for it to save my life as I stumble back to base with the suit at zero O2 remaining.

I had what felt like a huge speedup when night fell and the vision range dropped.

Also when driving far enough away from the start location to unload the chunk.

I also got the impression that resource gathering was causing the slowdown, so between the two I'm wondering if it is proportional to the number of auto-collecting resource instances you've seen.

While logically, failures should be proportional to the size of the base, your ability to deal with them only scales with the number of players (or repair bots if implemented).

This makes it a realism vs gameplay tradeoff.

Personally, I think the armor/upgrades idea could solve this. In order to make a larger base, you must make more durable modules so you can maintain your bigger house without spending more time doing that maintenance.

Even if you don't waste resources doing it by hand, it is still quite inefficient since you're standing there clicking with water bottles instead of all the other things you could be doing like gathering resources, crafting, or maintaining the base.

And you'll lose time as well since you have to wait for the soil to go dry before you know to add more water, or if you do go out, then the plants will dry up and stop growing until you return.

Was your oxygen going down or just not going up?

That sounds very similar to what I found over here with oxygen levels getting stuck in certain situations (https://itch.io/post/94395)

Stepping outside for just a second should unstick things for you in the short term if it is related.

For reference, lag would be a delay between your commands and the actions. It sounds like you're describing a general slowdown. (also "spikes" are the opposite of "all the time")

Have you expanded your base much? Does it sprawl across many chunks of the map, or include a large number of something?

If you have been rovering around a large area, I've found that quitting and restarting can help a bit (I presume that flushes all the world chunks I'm not going to visit again.)

System stats would probably be useful to Cairn4.

Obviously, yes.

{Fatal Error: CrystalBall.dll not found} -- You'll need to be more vastly more specific about what is causing you trouble/slowdowns if you want a specific answer. :) Same goes if you wish to notify the developer about a problem.

Wind turbines were mentioned elsewhere, but I feel they should be included in this list.

* Inconsistent power generation, but operates at night.

* Recipe should probably include girders, gears, and metal plates.


Generators (fuel-fired)

* Huge power density, perhaps 25-50 per generator, but requires a scavenged and refined fuel resource to operate.

* Like a smelter in reverse, it could process fuel into "nothing", and consume negative amounts of energy while doing so.

* If there is not enough consumption or storage available, the generator should cease operation. To keep it simple, the generator could include an attached battery of 50 points, so consumption does not need to be considered, merely if storage is available on each tick. The generator should always be considered last, after solar panels/RTGs/wind turbines have had a go at charging the base.


Switches

* Like a conduit, but can be toggled to disconnect without having to tear up and replace them.

* Even better if the switches can be linked to an empty room module in your base for remote control.

This will allow you to keep an emergency reserve of batteries or O2 generators, and connect them to the main base only in an emergency.


Control Room Module

* A new base module. When clicked, it brings up a control panel screen with a set of toggle switches with user-specified labels.

* Each switch on the panel can be linked to various modules in the base and allow you to turn them on and off remotely.

Major uses currently be:

- Outdoor floodlights (turn them on before you leave, turn them all off when you return)

- Smelters (save power by shutting them all off when you don't need them)

- Emergency Power (Connect/disconnect a block of batteries)

- Greenhouse Toggle (Shut it down when there are no seeds or water available)

A HAL9000 eye? :)

A transparent scanning beam animation could work well too.

Oooh, for the sound of the door, rather than the ker-klunk, it should be more of a beep-whirr-klunk.

>I was also messing around with having the smelters not consume their full amount of power when not actively smelting something. (but held off on that update until I can test it out a bit more).

IMO, this sort of thing will have a big benefit, and will allow you to make the active state an even larger drain.

At the moment, you've only got two choices to help your power situation when you're in immediate trouble; cleaning solar panels, or destroying base modules. Adding the option to idle or shut down things will expand that significantly.


I'd prefer that running the entire system directly off the panels should be impractical, but a bit of management and rationing of your energy supplies and pre-planning your power system would go a long way.

The oxygen generators should also go into a low power mode when the base is full of oxygen. 1/10th production and power use perhaps? Some hysteresis should be included to prevent rapid toggles. Or perhaps just a fuzzy logic to smooth things out: 90% oxygen levels = full power mode, 95% = run at half output, 99% = idle.


For the smelter (and also most other things), I'd suggest an off/on toggle. When off, it would consume zero, but cool down and need a minute or so of full power use to become ready to smelt again when you switch it back on. Once warmed up, it would then go into the low power idle state. And when you put stuff in to be smelted, it goes to full power again while operating.


On/off for the airlock would be for the automatic part of it; manual/auto mode essentially.

MewnBase community · Created a new topic Powered airlocks
(1 edit)

Right now, airlocks are manually operated but still require power for no mechanical benefit. To make spending energy on them worthwhile, how about *automatic doors* :D


I'd be willing to spend a decent amount of power for the convenience of not having to stop to click and turn the handles, but just stride right in after a hard day of digging in the desert (or desperately holding my breath as I stagger towards salvation).

The new version (0.30) works much better, although I seem to have found some edge cases in the oxygen supply. I'll try to get a save that demonstrates it.

http://imagemodserver.duckdns.org/nick/tempstuff/M...

Upon load, you'll have exactly 200 oxygen (50%), and the unpowered base has zero. You can stand there all day without your suit levels dropping.

If an air leak starts or stops, or you put down a solar panel and then remove it, the suit will tend to start consuming O2 again normally.

Placing and removing the solar panel a few times can get the O2 to lock up again seemingly randomly.



One other thing I noted this go around, is that suit power will refuse to recharge off of batteries.

If you place a solar panel and a battery, it will charge up during the day.

If you then stand on the solar panel at night, your suit won't charge and the power consumption popup shows 0.0 use with 600/600 storage.

Only once dawn arrives does the suit recharge.

> Having suit oxygen and having a hunger of "normal" or "full" will slowly replenish your health.

This is either not quite working, or the health +ve/-ve indicator isn't. I currently have a status of "Healthy +" combined with "Very Hungry"

It may be that the + doesn't vanish after you reach full HP.


>Placeholder: health status text now shows a "-" or "+" next to it to indicate if your health is improving or declining.

I'll be interested to see where you go with this. "Wounded +" tends to imply "more than wounded", when it is actually meaning healing.


> Fixed a habitat oxygen consumption / player suit refill inconsistency.

This is definitely much improved, although there is an edge case (perhaps rounding error when the O2 available is less than one point) where the oxygen levels can get stuck.

In one case, you can sit in your base overnight and not use up any oxygen even though the base shows zero and the power is off.

In another case, after powering up in the morning and refilling the suit, the base locked at 0/50 oxygen and would not climb above that until I opened and closed the airlock.


PS: I noticed the extra decimal point of precision on the power systems. Smells like future features ;)

Nifty! I think these changes will save at least a few distracted youtuber's lives :)

The only other big thing I can think of is to use something like the eating animation for choking when the air is out.

Nobody can help without details...

What's your system, and what's the exact messages you got back? (copy paste!)

MewnBase community · Created a new topic Medical facility
(1 edit)

Right now, you regenerate health over time crazy fast to the point that health is meaningless, like in today's silly fps games.


How about adding a medical base module where you need to go and rest to heal up (and/or build consumable first aid kits)?

As a survival game, health should be an important mechanic!

Growing plants manually with the water bottles takes twice as much ice compared to when you use the water tank.

Each water bottle needs two ice to craft, rather than just one which is likely the cause of the mismatch.

Additionally, if you pour water bottles on a seed which is being fed from the water tanks, the water is simply lost. The tanks continue draining, and the soil goes dry as soon as the tank runs out.


Related suggestions:

- You should be able to pour water bottles into the tank for 60 units of water.

- If an ice usage would put a tank over capacity, see if there is another tank in the base which can take the overflow instead of allowing it to go to waste.

- If the ice cannot fit then the action should fail. Right now you are able to add ice to a full tank, and the only effect is losing your ice.

MewnBase community · Created a new topic Oxygen deprivation

Death from oxygen deprivation seems to occur with a sliver left on the bar, and instantly.

Instead, once the bar reaches its last pixel and empties, it would be good if your character turned blue and lost health quickly while the bar is completely clear. A few seconds grace to close the airlock or swig a can of air for those who have otherwise remained in good shape.

The fact that the blue would be "in your face" could only help make it more obvious you're dying ;)

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Linking problems to external factors is best, IMO.

Random failure is a result of shoddy engineering, but meteorites popping your bubble every now and then is a natural hazard.

Similarly, solar panels could stay clean by default, but get dirty faster than now when the dust storms are blowing.

Falling rocks should be visible when missing your modules too, and perhaps you can dig them up for a little ore after the fact, so they're not merely problems, but opportunities :D

Edit:

Oh, and dust storms could blow seeds in from off-map to spawn new native plants. (with much slower growth than your greenhouses?)

With the release of the new version, I have taken on a 6-day scientific marathon foot trek across over 60 chunks to collect plants in the hopes of gathering a statistically significant sample.

I achieved 154 plants and 30 seeds. This looks very much like the ideal 5:1 ratio holds up.

According to the resource_tiles.json, there could be up to an average of 3 seeds per 10 plant tiles dug up. A little less than 1 seed per 5 plants harvested in that case.

If the listed drop chances are sequential and independent rather than cumulative, it could also be a 1 : 18.9 ratio which is close to your number there.


A crafting reaction to turn one plant into one (or more) seeds could be good.

That would let you maintain the farms by saving half your production to use as seed stock for the next harvest.

The main problem would then be the finite supply of water/ice.

Are the JSON files like resource_tiles.json and items.json read at runtime?

I tried setting the nuclear fuel to require 9 rad ore, and tried changing the plant biomes to make the terrain more diverse, but that didn't seem to have any effect even on a new game.

If your inventory is full, and you are trying to gather more of something you already have from the storage locker, the action will fail.

For example, if you have 2 plants in hand with all the other inventory slots filled, and try to collect one more plant from your storage, it will fail.

You can still push the two plants into the locker (because the locker isn't full?), combining it to 3 plants total, and then take them back into your personal inventory.

If you're using something like Perlin Noise for the terrain generator, there are a number of ways for converting a basic noise field into a tiling noise field.

The simplest IMO would be to blend the value for the current coordinates with a copy shifted over by one and work using modulo math.

F'(0) = 1 * F(0) + 0 * F(-1)

F'(0.25) = 0.75 * F(0.25) + 0.25 * F(-0.75)

F'(0.66) = 0.34 * F(0.66) + 0.66 * F(-0.34)

F'(1) = 0 * F(1) + 1 * F(0) // Matches with F'(0) = tileable!


That will keep the planet from having seams at the poles, and you just have to take care with the math when the player is near the pole and looking over.


If the worlds are reasonably large, that shouldn't be a problem for gameplay since even 16 bit coordinates would make a circumnavigation in the buggy an epic week long RL marathon if you don't stop for anything and have more gigs of ram than you can shake a stick at.

Smaller worlds would need the plants to regrow at least, and probably a new drilling rig setup to get more water.

Place a power generator, and then quickly open the base power report by clicking on a different power generator.

If you then wait for the placed generator to finish building itself, the power report will start blinking random numbers instead of the true GEN/USE values. Closing and reopening the report fixes it.

Whenever you are in a base with at least one power generator and at least one operational oxygen generator, your suit seems to fill at a constant rate.


The refill rate doesn't seem to care if your base is at 50 oxygen and dropping rapidly as you suck it in, or if your base is at 0 oxygen and the generator is severely overloaded. Notably, once your suit does fill up, the base's oxygen rises very slowly; quite inconsistent with how fast it was dropping to fill your suit and how fast the suit filled when the base was dry.

(Roughly, it looks like you need around 200 stored oxygen to refill completely from an unpowered base, but only about 25 generated oxygen if you start from an empty base you've just cleaned the panels at)


Suit power is the same way but more obvious; a fixed recharge rate regardless of whether your base has severe blackouts at 5 gen / 35 use, a small surplus, or large and charged battery supplies.

You need to put ice into the water tank to fill it up. Each ice will give you 30 water, and it takes 60-90 water in the tank to grow a plant (It looks to me like the greenhouse gets built with about 30 water already inside).

Just in case it wasn't clear:

https://itch.io/t/52281/expedition-to-origin-adven...

The notable event in that story is: if you travel far enough to reach the negative chunks (or zero coordinates even) then the terrain generation spazzes out.

What gave you the impression that it was already being implemented? Or even planned to be done?

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Air leaks sound like they could be a pure time sink, and an annoyance if they pop up randomly. Depends on how the mechanics work.

I already avoid solar panels to go with an pure RTG setup so I don't have to maintain my power systems all the time.

I'd be all over an armored base module upgrade to make them immune to leaks short of crashing the buggy or possible future critter attacks.

After a couple of rocks for a smelter and greenhouse, they really start piling up by the hundreds, and need some end uses.

1) Bake the rocks in the smelter to get a small amount of water out, as in real life plans.

2) Form into road tiles to make your buggy move faster along resource gathering routes.

3) Base walls to secure it from future native creatures.

For semi-passive aliens, how about nocturnal gribblies?

They would sneak up and nibble on your stuff (a cause for the air leaks in the next version?), but could be kept at bay using your flashlight or by building floodlights around your base.

This could give an important use to the floodlights, batteries and power management.