Progression Lulls

[lukamundo]

When playing through the first 4 hours of play, I have to say, I am super-addicted to the game! And the story is actually intriguing.

However, I noticed something I felt could be better explained. The progression!

It seems to be solely linked to your depth. And this creates some moments where you don't think there is anything else to do. For instance, I was around 4000m depth and I had tons of resources and built everything I could. But I wanted to rearrange all my structures, so I spent time deleting and repositioning everything. So things started fresh at 1m. But I found out that the story line, progression and unlocks never came. and so I continued to grind for another 45 minutes without anything new or anything to do, really, until I hit around 6200m.

So, here is a tip: Don't delete all of your "drills".

Any one else noticed that lack of progress for long periods of time before seeing any new unlocks or anything?

I personally thought I hit the end of the early access content and was bummed so I let it just go in the background. I think there could maybe be a progression bar that shows when a next even will happen. Even as simple as a skinny yellow bar at the bottom the slowly grows across from left to right. Once it hits the end new things happen. Just so that others don't get too lost with it.

PS. can you have it zoomed out a bit more? The camera is just slightly too close at times. Maybe even a zoom in and out function with the scroll wheel instead of just moving the camera with scroll.

[Man's Best Friend]

There is a zoom out function, but it's weirdly slow. Hold Ctrl or Shift while scrolling to zoom in and out.

[Ziltoid]

Resource types unlocks are 1:1 tied to your depth with only two exceptions - and progression is closely linked to resource type unlocks and amounts. Destroying/rebuilding an extraction channel can actually sometimes be a good idea early, mid and late game, for example to reset to re-visit the beta-pylene, hell-gem or chromatit layers. A good idea though is to always keep one extraction channel digging at a depth where celestial foam is prevalent - this particular resource will be the main way to gain all other resources in the late game. Although you don't actually know this until you reach the late game... until then, the resource feels like a bad thing instead of a good thing. Same as hell gem annihilation: initially it feels like a horrible thing but then you figure out it is itself the basis of a totally new game mechanic. And then it all makes sense.

About the progression: there are some intervals where the game will feel slow (although it has to be said here: the developer is doing and has already done several changes to prevent a feeling of stalling). But a major part of why it feels like a lull is that the progression is quite tied into the assumption that you've constantly optimized everything and that you're always running at max speed, max efficiency and with as many extraction channels and converters as you can afford. A sub-optimal setup can easily take 10x as long as an optimized one to reach a certain resource type or amount. Even so, there are indeed times where you have 30 or so minutes of not much happening. But: this is exactly the time when you should be experimenting to optimize ;)

And part of the fun about the game (on first playthrough) is the absolute mystery that you just don't know what will happen next, which structures will be unlocked, what they actually do, and how best to use them. Therefore a progress indicator would be somewhat defeating the purpose of a "black box" type of experience where the next level/iteration doesn't come automatically and usually introduces a new challenge/puzzle that must be overcome. The gameplay is most definitely not linear. And that is precisely the point!

[lukamundo]

Hey thanks for that. I am super confused about the Celestial Foam. Can someone please explain. I have like 4m on hell gems, but can't keep celestial foam at all. What do I do?

[M@D HAtT€R]

Hell gems and celestial foam annihilate each other, to collect one of them, you will have to wait for the other pool to clear. So... you will have to wait for your hell gems to vanish entirely, then you will begin to store celestial foam.

For each X hell gems one foam is destroyed (I never figured the exact ammount of hell gems out... somewhere around 500 hell gems I assume. So your hell gems should vanish rather quickly, but expect it to take some time.)

It is worse the other way around by the way - waiting to gather enough hell gems to annihilate your foam takes forever - use up what you can manually would be my recommendation.

You can use storage tanks to "isolate" a certain ammount of resources from being annihilated, just as you can do for chromalite.
(This annihilation is called "fission", so whenever the game talks about "fission"... that is what it means.)

[M@D HAtT€R]

(celestial reactors are a great way to clear foam in large quantities)

[Ziltoid]

Originally posted by lukamundo:

Hey thanks for that. I am super confused about the Celestial Foam. Can someone please explain. I have like 4m on hell gems, but can't keep celestial foam at all. What do I do?

You wait until the hell gems are gone. Then the celestial foam will start to increase.