Staff Lounge and Libations problems

[Wakazu]

EDIT: People, seriously, read the whole thing before you comment = = I know, it's a long read. But reading will save you the embarassment of commenting something like "there are alternative recipes at the gruel pot!". Yeah, I know. That's why I talk about them later in that big wall of text you just skipped over -_\

EDIT 2: NOTE THE DATES. Yes, NOW we have essence extractor. Back when I wrote this - we didn't.

...as you play your game you'll inevitably start accumulating resources you don't realy need, but that keep piling up anyway because they are either a byproduct of getting something you do need or they come in a packaged deal.

Such are tree seeds. You don't typically need many of those, but sometimes you need some emergency wood, and there you go - a handfull more seeds lands in your storage.

And this is kinda normal for any type of games that deal in resourses - you have your piles of cobblestone in minecraft, stacks of slime in terraria, proceduraly generated weapons in starbound, etc. Normaly you just get rid of them - you toss your cobble into lava, you toss unwanted junk into your trash slot, you to...

Hold on. There is no way of getting rid of something in your school, isn't it?

You can leave it outside when its about to get rainy, but then your quilted servants would just bring it right back. And even if not - rain is a pretty slow trash compactor...

Devs adding a use for otherwise unwanted storage clogger were news I very much welcomed... until I saw the actual implementation. You see, you don't just use the seeds as they are, you need to mix them into spices, then you mix the spices into drinks, and then you pick drinks based on weather.

Now, lets see why this is a needlessly convoluted and overcomplicated system:

Problem 1 - the ingredient list
While spices do require your typical storage cloggers like Sunshadow Nuts, they also require much more rare ingredients like Runewood Nuts. Which means either
A - you have to waste a ton of resourses to push back the fog, disrupt your daily operations to send your mages on a runewood haul and get a tonn of unneeded wood and runewood as a byproduct of this or
B - you just can't be bothered

Problem 2 - the planters
If for some reason you chose option A in the previous conundrum, well, congrats - now you have a question what the tree planters are for if you still have to take regular unautomatable trips to the woods

Problem 3 - the processing
You have a total of 3 processing stages each of which requires multiple ingredients, some use mutually required ingredients and all of them require at least a handfull of your mages precious time

Problem 4 - the recipes
The Balanced Coffee - aka the libation for the fair weather that is kinda supposed to be your pick-me-up on a daily basis - HAS THE MOST CONVOLUTED RECIPE OF THEM ALL WHILE ONLY GIVING +10 BUFF
I mean... that's bad. This is so unbalanced that... I have no words, honestly. For a recipe that calls for 5 ingredients which require 7 other rare ingredients +10 buff is laughable. Like, come on, who's willing to bother that much over a cup of coffee?
[also, gotta admit, as a professional barista - that kinda rubs me in all the wrong ways]

Problem 5 - the clog
...which hasn't gone literally anywhere because you either use alternative recipes for spices (from your regular produce accessed on the Gruel Pot) or you just don't bother with the whole system.

Now compare this to what we have in matters of recreation for students:
You just build House Commons. That's all.
Enchantophones don't require any special resourses, don't depend on weather, don't require mages to hover over them constantly, it's a simple "fire and forget" solution. That also has flat and reliable room bonus.
Again, I get it, the staff are kinda your team, there to stay while students come and go, so it makes sence you'd have to try a little harder for them. But come on, piling up processing chains is just frustrating.

So, my suggestions?

1) rework libation recipes to the "base + flavour" system similar to how actual cofee works: you only need a basic blend to create a basic cup of coffee that gives no bonuses on its own, you need a base + spice to make something better with better bonuses, etc.

2) rework the spices recipes (both on the Pot and those on the refining beasts) to only require 1 ingredient, the more rare the ingredient - the better will be the bonus. This way the alternative recipes would actualy help deal with the storage cloggers

3) either drop the weather thing entirely or make it detect the weather properly - I constantly get "the weather wasn't right for it" even tho my mages begin to drink the libation while the weather IS right, but since they stop after the weather ends - the game counts that as "outside of the right weather"

4) shorten the production line - make libation fountain function as a storage for spices instead of a production station and make mages mix their drinks on the spot instead of requiring libations to be brewn beforehand

That's all

[Nyxon]

FWIW, experienced endgame player here who 100% agrees. Was excited to hear that I might finally have a use for all those Sunshadow Nuts and Gutberry Seeds. But then when I saw the actual recipes and figured out what you'd have to do to make a staff lounge work, it was a big "Nope." The biggest problem, I think, is what you identified as Problems 1 and 2 - the recipes don't just require the seeds that we wanted to get rid of, they require large numbers of the seeds that just aren't worth the effort to get (beyond the first few for planters). And if we do go to that degree of micromanaging effort, our automated planters/greenhouses were a waste of time.

I built a staff lounge to see what it looked like and to finish my goal of having every possible room in my school. But I'll never use the libation fountain (or at least, never unless there are major changes to how it works).

[ExMachina14]

I haven't yet made it this far into the game, but I imagine everything OP says is probably true.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me wonder if the devs even play this game.

[Philtre]

For anyone who doesn't know yet, all of the spices needed for libations can also be made in the gruel pot using normal farmed food ingredients (after you unlock the relevant research, which is separate from the libations themselves).

I agree that the libation system doesn't work well as a sink for surplus seeds, but you can manage that problem by only allowing seeds in specified chests, and setting a limit of one stack of each seed type. It's a bit micromanage-y to set up but only needs to be done once per save. Once the storage settings are in place, your people will collect and store a single stack of each seed, then any surplus seeds get left in place to rot.

[Gerion]

well you have cheap recreation room for Staff as Conservatory and advanced room as Staff lounge so of cource it must be more difficult for maintenance it.
And you dont need create spices from seeds - its useless and wasting of time. Especially with recipes that need T3 seeds, like anemones or runewood. Just unlock libation recipes from planter resources.
And if you need destroy resources - build small room, drop here resources that you need destroy, set its priority to X and wait, until Gremlin spawn and destroy all dropped resources. Same for raining destroying - just set destroyed itesm priority to X.

I think too that libation system not perfect yet, but its main problem not in seed recipes

[Wakazu]

Originally posted by Gerion:

well you have cheap recreation room for Staff as Conservatory and advanced room as Staff lounge so of cource it must be more difficult for maintenance it.

I know. And that's the thing - why would anyone bother with multistep libation preparations that never even give the full bonuses if you can just use a room that doesn't require literally any resources to run, is always available to use and has 0 maintenance requirements?

Originally posted by Gerion:

And you dont need create spices from seeds - its useless and wasting of time. Especially with recipes that need T3 seeds, like anemones or runewood. Just unlock libation recipes from planter resources.

I know, read my text in full please.

Originally posted by Gerion:

And if you need destroy resources - build small room, drop here resources that you need destroy, set its priority to X and wait, until Gremlin spawn and destroy all dropped resources. Same for raining destroying - just set destroyed itesm priority to X.

Again, I know, and again, this is NOT how it should be. You don't have to build elaborate constructions to get rid of some trash, it should be as easy as one click to mark it as trash - and its gone.

[Soul4hdwn]

there's also non seed recipes in the slop pot cooking station =o not as cheap but still

[Wakazu]

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

there's also non seed recipes in the slop pot cooking station =o not as cheap but still

Peps, come on, read the whole thing before you comment = =

[Soul4hdwn]

Originally posted by Wakazu:

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

there's also non seed recipes in the slop pot cooking station =o not as cheap but still

Peps, come on, read the whole thing before you comment = =

my answer still stands. yes i too still use the enchantiphone only room for staff. my cooks are busy with other stuff but for the seeds? that was REQUESTED so most of the normal players can GET RID of the excessive seeds that built up.
instead for me, i'm still flooded with resources of the more normal variety and i have a solid material economy... because never needed the drinks till now, when i'm "endgame". i'm simply working on having two fire mages for cooking needs then whatever... cooking pot being moved back into the kitchen/fine kitchen is vast help from before already.

maybe i need to double check the actual cost but how about don't bother till ready? they're extra after all... as yourself pointed out sort of.

[Wakazu]

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

Originally posted by Wakazu:

Peps, come on, read the whole thing before you comment = =

my answer still stands. yes i too still use the enchantiphone only room for staff. my cooks are busy with other stuff but for the seeds? that was REQUESTED so most of the normal players can GET RID of the excessive seeds that built up.
instead for me, i'm still flooded with resources of the more normal variety and i have a solid material economy... because never needed the drinks till now, when i'm "endgame". i'm simply working on having two fire mages for cooking needs then whatever... cooking pot being moved back into the kitchen/fine kitchen is vast help from before already.

maybe i need to double check the actual cost but how about don't bother till ready? they're extra after all... as yourself pointed out sort of.

You realise your answer boils down to "it's not that bad, just brush it off"? I know it's not the end of the world. I know there are alternative recipes on the gruel pot.
But that is what feedback is for - to let the devs know what parts aren't working. These seed recipes are not working because, as you pointed out, they were specifically requested as a way to deal with abundance of unwanted resouces, but instead they require rare resources and don't do sh!t about the problem they were meant to solve. I'm pointing that out.
Then people like you come in and say "just deal with it".
Guess what - if people would "deal with" anything that isn't the end of the world, we wouldn't have anything nice. Why invent washing machines if you can wash your clothes by hands? It's not so bad, just deal with it! Why raise a stink when they butchered you childhood hero design for their live-action remake, just deal with it!
"Just deal with it" is how you get Disney. Raising a stink and demand they pull their act together is how you get "Sonic 3"

[Soul4hdwn]

Originally posted by Wakazu:

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

my answer still stands. yes i too still use the enchantiphone only room for staff. my cooks are busy with other stuff but for the seeds? that was REQUESTED so most of the normal players can GET RID of the excessive seeds that built up.
instead for me, i'm still flooded with resources of the more normal variety and i have a solid material economy... because never needed the drinks till now, when i'm "endgame". i'm simply working on having two fire mages for cooking needs then whatever... cooking pot being moved back into the kitchen/fine kitchen is vast help from before already.

maybe i need to double check the actual cost but how about don't bother till ready? they're extra after all... as yourself pointed out sort of.

You realise your answer boils down to "it's not that bad, just brush it off"? I know it's not the end of the world. I know there are alternative recipes on the gruel pot.

Sorry I came off that way. I'm appalled at myself for ending up like what I swore I wouldn't.

But it's only "not that bad" because alternative is ok? I have yet to be able to get back to game to double check numbers or types. I don't think the seed recipes were going to be ideal anyway... The new planter limits solves a lot of old issues. Only eyeballs and spoke pearl and maybe ectoplasm are still flooding thanks to invasions.

[DawnStar]

Have not encountered any issues with "the weather wasn't right for it" or "outside of the right weather". Is this something on the tool tips?

Though at first I thought that the weather has to match the libations that they will drink. But it seems regardless of any weather they could just drink Cheer Beer everyday which I think was the simplest among other libations. So at early game I only craft Cinnamint and Nutmage and maybe some Pixie Dust spices at gruel pot.

I would not depend on seeds for spices. But, yes, I welcome a rework of the libations. The extra conviction bonus for matching libations with the weather is not worth it.

[S i x t h]

what i really want atm is logistic
like i want "X" number of "A" in this box
alway send "B" to this box if not send to that box

[Philtre]

Originally posted by S i x t h:

what i really want atm is logistic
like i want "X" number of "A" in this box
alway send "B" to this box if not send to that box

You can do that by setting storage limits and priorities for individual boxes. For instance, I have a Pantry set up in my staff and student dining rooms set to hold 15 of each meal with Priority 4. I have other Pantries in the kitchen set to hold 100 of each meal with Priority 3. So the pantry in the dining rooms get filled first, and when there are 15 of a meal type already in each of them, the rest gets stored in the kitchen.

[Ivydoom]

Guess I'll just keep having 1 chest outdoors for seeds and empty it out regularly and have the seeds hauled right to the edge of the fog. Set the removed stack to 'no action' and then manually select 'move to' which should override the no-action. It won't be hauled back into storage.
Why bother with this new system if it doesn't really work...?

[Wakazu]

Originally posted by Ivydoom:

Why bother with this new system if it doesn't really work...?

For the same reason that if your faucet leaks - you call the repairman and don't just go haul water from nearby river by the bucket.
If something breaks - it needs to be repaired, not slept on.