Farming is incredibly janky

[Malidictus]

I was really excited to play around with farming aboard the airship. Finally, I had reason to make the interior space larger, which meant playing with multiple balloon cores and interior walls, etc. All good stuff... in theory. In practice, the entire system feels incredibly crude and unfinished. In fact, let me make a list:

• Large planters: Currently, large plants grow forever and cannot be removed from the planter. This means planters can't be reused (outside of recycling them). It also means that both seeds and fertiliser become irrelevant for those plants. Seeds build up with no use and no means of disposal, the planters can't have fertiliser added to them.
  
• Planter clickboxes: Planters have three distinct clickboxes (places to click them) - one for adding water, one for planting seeds, one (actually multiple) for interacting with the plant. There's no visual indication of which part of the actual 3D model is which, meaning I have to click around it blindly trying to plant seeds. Or worse - accidentally harvest plants when I meant to water them.
  
• Sprinklers irrigation boxes: Sprinklers don't irrigate planters they're place over. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The indication of whether a sprinkler will irrigate seems entirely arbitrary, especially for the Large Sprinkler. And even when the indication is there, sometimes the sprinklers still won't irrigate plants.
  
• Sprinkler balance: Sprinklers spray far too much water far too quickly. The available water tank holds something like 50 units of water and the Sprinklers can go through that in a couple of minutes. Sure, I can turn them on and off manually, but at that point I may as well just water the plants by hand and save myself the complexity.
  
• Pipes: Everything to do with pipes is an absolute ugly mess. Pipes don't snap to anything when being dragged, despite the UI saying "Right click to snap". Dragging straight pipes is practically impossible. The wall passthrough connectors look ugly when attaching near the floor or ceiling, and cause pipes to attach to them at an angle.
  
• Pipes (again): The pipe system itself is just bad. There's no way to split pipes - meaning no way to feed multiple machines (engines or sprinklers) from one output. Logically, this makes no sense. It forces me to rely on sprinkler passthrough, which looks ugly as sin.

Farming and pipes need serious, fundamental, structural changes. They need to be brought up to par with the legacy crafting and research systems, which do feel professional and refined. By contrast, anything I do with planters or pipes feels like I'm dealing with a low-effort asset flip. I know it's a work in progress, but there's A LOT of work left to do.

Since I started with the list format, here's a list of suggested improvements:

• Allow the player to use their knife on the plant, like we can on plants found around the various towers. This will both let us free up the planter and get some Biomass, at the cost of requiring a new seed.
  
• Allow the player to interact with the planter even when a plant is already growing. Allow us to place both Fertiliser and Water inside, like we can with the Electric Cooker. This will allow us to build up water rather than having to top up every 120 seconds, as well as allow plants to consume fertiliser (and water) at varying rates. It also unifies the clickboxes, meaning there's only one thing to click.
  
• Get rid of sprinklers altogether. Instead, introduce a planter upgrade which has a built-in sprinkler. This entirely removes the janky, broken interaction between sprinklers and the planters below. Upgraded engines already work this way - they can pull fuel from a tank or use fuel on-board.
  
• Have pipe ends snap to the player's chosen grid, as well as to the edges between floor/ceiling tiles and walls. Have pipes also snap to straight lines in the four cardinal directions. Have pipe ends also snap to distant pipe ends, such that pipes can be lined up before connecting them.
  
• Allow the player to connect multiple pipes to every pipe end. Those pipes would still be directional, but it would allow merging and splitting pipelines.

I understand that not everything I've suggested is trivial to implement, I understand this game is Early Access. Fair enough. I still think at least a few of those suggestions (or something along those lines) should be reasonable to implement.

[Ornery]

For a water-scarce high-contagion environment, hydroponic systems using targeted water on demand makes much more sense than crude overhead sprinkler systems. You wouldn't use a crude sprinkler spraying precious purified water everywhere just to get a little on the plant, and you wouldn't risk spraying contagion all over your ship either. </plant nerd>

This supports doing away with sprinklers for an upgraded plant container that requires piping to a tank for continual supply. I'd suggest it is no better than a basic planter if watered manually instead of plumbing in.

ETA: if you want to keep sprinklers, make them a greenhouse-like room chunk instead of a placeable object. This will allow you to control exactly where water falls and remove the jank that will otherwise be unavoidable with players being unpredictable. The floor of said room chunk could be marked up with clear "water zones".

[Wig Bang]

Yeah I'd prefer drip systems to these sprinklers.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Ornery:

For a water-scarce high-contagion environment, hydroponic systems using targeted water on demand makes much more sense than crude overhead sprinkler systems. You wouldn't use a crude sprinkler spraying precious purified water everywhere just to get a little on the plant, and you wouldn't risk spraying contagion all over your ship either. </plant nerd>

Yeah, there's also that - the sprinklers look ridiculous. They don't water the plants so much as watering the ship. The majority of the water ends up on the floor, which would either require a drain or start pooling inside. Also, why does water just... disappear? It comes out of the sprinklers, hits the floor then just ceases to exist. Water not going into the plants should go SOMEWHERE if they insist on doing sprinklers.

Originally posted by Ornery:

ETA: if you want to keep sprinklers, make them a greenhouse-like room chunk instead of a placeable object. This will allow you to control exactly where water falls and remove the jank that will otherwise be unavoidable with players being unpredictable. The floor of said room chunk could be marked up with clear "water zones".

That too, yeah. I remember suggesting something similar when we were first talking about farming, and I still think it's a good idea. Having different "types" of rooms would be a good idea, I think. A hydroponics room, where plants are automatically watered on demand would be quite nice. Especially if it comes with integrated piping and automated water reclamation.

Honestly, we can probably use a bunch of different dedicated rooms like that. I wouldn't mind an engineering room where I can slap down a generator to power all the stuff which otherwise needs batteries, or a living quarters room which helps with sleep and healing. Maybe a dedicated storage rooms with built-in chest racks, etc.

But yes - if the development team INSIST on using sprinklers rather than improved planters, then it has to be a dedicated room, rather than this ceiling-mounted jank.

[Gietmex]

I'm with OP. I hate how pipes currently work. They never seem to work in one flat plane surface parallel to wall/floor rooms. They all seem to want to go weird directions, and it's extra painful when you got rooms that clip through, like viewing corner and catwalk. For some reason placing posters and lamps seems to work 100x better, why do pipes have a different system?

Originally posted by Ornery:

For a water-scarce high-contagion environment, hydroponic systems using targeted water on demand makes much more sense than crude overhead sprinkler systems. You wouldn't use a crude sprinkler spraying precious purified water everywhere just to get a little on the plant, and you wouldn't risk spraying contagion all over your ship either. </plant nerd>

This supports doing away with sprinklers for an upgraded plant container that requires piping to a tank for continual supply. I'd suggest it is no better than a basic planter if watered manually instead of plumbing in.

ETA: if you want to keep sprinklers, make them a greenhouse-like room chunk instead of a placeable object. This will allow you to control exactly where water falls and remove the jank that will otherwise be unavoidable with players being unpredictable. The floor of said room chunk could be marked up with clear "water zones".

Support for allowing us to pipe directly to the plant container. The container already have a water tank in them, heck if you see the planter it resembles more planting over a fish tank instead of soil, so sprinkler doesn't make much sense.

[radix_s]

yes please, no to sprinklers. Honestly pipes, wires and things like that should just be integrated into walls...

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by radix_s:

yes please, no to sprinklers. Honestly pipes, wires and things like that should just be integrated into walls...

Pipes and wires wouldn't really be an issue if they snapped properly - if we could run them in straight lines, or at least with some semblance of order. The game has a grid system, it just doesn't work half the time.

With that said, though - I wouldn't be at all upset if pipes and wiring and all that were integrated into metal walls and floors and such.

[Gietmex]

Originally posted by Malidictus:

Originally posted by radix_s:

yes please, no to sprinklers. Honestly pipes, wires and things like that should just be integrated into walls...

Pipes and wires wouldn't really be an issue if they snapped properly - if we could run them in straight lines, or at least with some semblance of order. The game has a grid system, it just doesn't work half the time.

With that said, though - I wouldn't be at all upset if pipes and wiring and all that were integrated into metal walls and floors and such.

This reminded me of no man's sky. they got rid of cables in certain location, and in others cables are just a click origin and click destination kind of type, no need to figure out planes and orientation and such. A lot easier

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Gietmex:

This reminded me of no man's sky. they got rid of cables in certain location, and in others cables are just a click origin and click destination kind of type, no need to figure out planes and orientation and such. A lot easier

That's... actually exactly what laying pipe in this game reminded me of :) The first time I tried building really anything in No Man's Sky, it was horrifyingly ugly and difficult to work with. Eventually, I solved this by... giving up and using the large prefab modules. Those share power with each other, meaning no cables of any kind.

A bit less complexity, a lot less jank.

[Prolbo]

Yesterday I had a good laugh at expense of my friend. He was attempting to build a semi-automated farm -- just to remove need to run back and forth each minute or two to water the plants, like absolute moron -- and he was failing spectacularly with all those tubes snapping to wrong flats or not snapping at all. Or simply refusing to connect. But now, reading this post, I understand why.

Yeah, I agree, all this junkdance around water tanks (which also accept exclusively dirtwater), junktubes, tube forks (non existent) and jerkjoints is absolute shatshow and must be awoided at any costs. Players already have a wonderful game of pixelhunting and perfect-fitting/aligning items on the ship. They didnt need more of it. If you want to insist on tubing system just make it ship-wide instant upgrade, maybe add some deco textures with "tubes" on inner flats.

Also, I can not not notice that there is something junky with planter's hitboxes. They seems to be wildly off target and very inconvenient to use.


Anyway, my friend tried to convince me to buy this game to play together, but after everything what I've seen, I said that I'll buy it only when devs pathched the hell out of it and made it much less junky. If he still has interest.

[Gietmex]

Originally posted by Prolbo:

Yesterday I had a good laugh at expense of my friend. He was attempting to build a semi-automated farm -- just to remove need to run back and forth each minute or two to water the plants, like absolute moron -- and he was failing spectacularly with all those tubes snapping to wrong flats or not snapping at all. Or simply refusing to connect. But now, reading this post, I understand why.

Yeah, I agree, all this junkdance around water tanks (which also accept exclusively dirtwater), junktubes, tube forks (non existent) and jerkjoints is absolute shatshow and must be awoided at any costs. Players already have a wonderful game of pixelhunting and perfect-fitting/aligning items on the ship. They didnt need more of it. If you want to insist on tubing system just make it ship-wide instant upgrade, maybe add some deco textures with "tubes" on inner flats.

Also, I can not not notice that there is something junky with planter's hitboxes. They seems to be wildly off target and very inconvenient to use.


Anyway, my friend tried to convince me to buy this game to play together, but after everything what I've seen, I said that I'll buy it only when devs pathched the hell out of it and made it much less junky. If he still has interest.

This is a good game aside from the bad performance and jankyness, which all should get solve on the EA stage of the game. If you aren't the type to go back to play games you already play in the past, I def recommend waiting.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Prolbo:

Yeah, I agree, all this junkdance around water tanks (which also accept exclusively dirtwater), junktubes, tube forks (non existent) and jerkjoints is absolute shatshow and must be awoided at any costs. Players already have a wonderful game of pixelhunting and perfect-fitting/aligning items on the ship. They didnt need more of it. If you want to insist on tubing system just make it ship-wide instant upgrade, maybe add some deco textures with "tubes" on inner flats.

Thing is, we already have an explicit snapping system with a fixed grid, and it works perfectly fine. The problem is that pipes don't even attempt to snap to it. Not only does this make it impossible to run straight pipes, it also means that pipe placement is subject to ship roll.

There's something fundamentally broken with how this game handles snapping. It works fine with most items, but only sometimes. Items placed on walls will snap to the grid sometimes and not snap to it at other times. I have no idea what determines it. The Metal Collector will snap to the grid in terms of position, but not rotation. Its rotation is always relative to the player. Catwalks will snap to each other if you're close enough, but there's a range at which they'll constantly jitter between two positions.

I'm all for getting rid of pipes entirely, and just running water along the walls automatically. At the very minimum, however, pipes and pipe components need to snap to the grid all of the time.