Feedback: some thoughts, suggestions and ideas

[Yaridovich]

After playing through the game twice, I've noted down a few thoughts on some things that I think could be improved on in the game.

Goes without saying that, having played through the game twice while in early access, I'm absolutely loving it.

Now, onto my thoughts:

• Shields right now could be improved on. I end up spending the entire game just using the Plastic Shield. The Heater Shield is good in theory and I imagine there will be areas in the game later where it'll have some use, but it still comes with the issue where it'll cause the player to get too hot close to the Crafting Bench, if the Bench has the heating upgrade. The Charge Shield and the Kite Shield are WAY too bulky and occupy a large part of the screen even when not being actively used to defend, this makes them impractical to use. My suggestions: make it so that the Heater Shield does not cause overheating when close to the Crafting Bench when the Bench has the heating upgrade and move the Charge and the Kite Shields lower and/or more to the side, so that they don't block so much of the screen when not actively in use.
  
• Industrial and Carbon batteries... Not really worth making, IMO. An Industrial battery hold 100 battery charge and requires a Power Cell, which isn't really all that common in the game - you find some through the game and there are the 3 respawning ones in Flathill, but it's still not really a lot unless you're constantly farming Flathill. A Carbon battery holds 200 battery charge requires Jailbroken CPUs which, while it can be farmed later on with traps and teleporters, are still not really that common to obtain. For the amount of battery that they hold, I just end up favoring making Makeshift batteries since they're incredibly easy to use - why waste a Power Cell when I can just make 2 Makeshift batteries, or why waste a Jailbroken CPU when I can just make 4 Makeshift batteries? My suggestion here would be to severely ramp up the battery charge for the Industrial and Carbon batteries - something like 200 for Industrial and 400-500 for Carbon, to encourage players to spend rare resources into making those instead of just making tons of Makeshift batteries.
  
• Anomalies - they are too hard to obtain and decay too fast. There are items in the game requiring 3-4 anomalies and, right now, it seems near impossible to obtain that many before the ones you have end up fully decaying. Maybe there is something planned in the future to make obtaining Anomalies easier, but I thought I'd leave this here just in case. Maybe there could be some way to store Anomalies that severely reduces their decay rate.
  
• The oven is too silent right now, it's hard to know when something has finished baking because of it and sometimes food ends up burned because of it. Maybe it could make some sort of sound to let players know it's finished baking. (also, I believe devs might be aware of this already, but there are two bugs with oven right now, one is that you can sometimes stuff more than 1 item in the oven if you're holding a stack of them, causing the player to lose the extras, and also leaving the game while something is baking and then reentering causes that item in the oven to disappear)
  
• Ticking of Sneaking XP is inconsistent. I know there have been some buffs to Sneaking XP gain recently, but it doesn't seem to always tick. Sometimes I'm sneaking behind an enemy, being completely unseen, but for some reason the game just doesn't register any XP for me.
  
• The Lightning Spear's lighting effect when hitting an enemy makes it very hard to see after the attack connects, which sometimes makes it hard to follow up with more attacks against that enemy. I'd suggest reducing the number of lighting effects and/or spreading them around so that they don't block so much of the view of what is being hit by the spear.
  
• While I greatly support the idea of the game being more welcoming and more accessible to new players and I appreciate the devs' efforts in this direction, I think the recent update might have overdone it a bit. The game overall feels too easy now due to the reduced number of enemies. Many of the player's complaints from before wasn't about enemy density, but about the spawn rates. Even one later area in the game, in the Dark Lens portal, feels too easy now due to how few enemies there are - the 2 snipers are gone and so is the Breaker in the helicopter area. My suggestion here would be to keep the enemy density as it was before, but lower the spawn rates, so that it's easier for players to kill some enemies, go back to base, then go back to the area they were before to continue clearing the area, without enemy respawns getting in the way, and without costing the game's overall challenge level.
  
• Soup cooking time is still inconsistent. Sometimes it takes too long, sometimes it ends up being prepared instantly. I've had a few occurrences of ending up with Bad Soup because I placed one ingredient inside and it instantly finished cooking.
  
• Suggestion: allow players to view progress when cooking meat, baking food and making soup - possibly a Cooking perk that allows players to see it.
  
• Suggestion: allow players to view how much power is being provided through a chain of batteries vs how much power is required by the appliances connected to them - possibly with a perk that allows them to see it, maybe a Construction or a Crafting perk.

[MechWarden]

As soon as I made the two other tiers of batteries, I prefer much ripped into them in a post... somewhere around here.

Small Makeshift Battery 2x and 4x for the cost of (at the time of progressing) hard to get rare materials feels bad. I was expecting way more storage from them.

If we don't get more storage, at least add some extra functionality of some kind. The game design logic of 'build tier 2 stuff out of tier 2 parts' feels way too blatant.

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Ovens do thump when done, but it sounds more like a stove top thing.

But yeah, it could use some looking into. Either. a timer ding or something. Heck, I wouldn't mind if you successfully backed something once, it enabled a timer ding from then on!

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Currently you can see the process of cooking items.
...
Problem is, you have to pull it out and view the cooked status in the inventory. So it is there, but it isn't easy to get to.

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You can see how much of a load a given battery has (more or less, since the tick marks don't always line up), but with how simplistic the power system is, I'm not sure how you will get that to happen without revamping the power system.

Honestly, the chain of batteries can mostly be ignored if one fully charged Small Batteries (and their higher tier versions) cleanly kept a device (or devices) powered all night.

You need one device powered, one Makeshift Battery. Need 4, use a Carbon Battery.

[Yaridovich]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

Ovens do thump when done, but it sounds more like a stove top thing.

But yeah, it could use some looking into. Either. a timer ding or something. Heck, I wouldn't mind if you successfully backed something once, it enabled a timer ding from then on!

They do, but it's still pretty quiet and hard to notice, also it's only once, so if you're not close to hear it, you might miss it. In comparison, when meat is done cooking, it makes a constant noise that you can hear constantly.

Something like a constant ding would be better.

Originally posted by MechWarden:

Currently you can see the process of cooking items.
...
Problem is, you have to pull it out and view the cooked status in the inventory. So it is there, but it isn't easy to get to.

Yeah, I meant being able to see it without having to pull it out of the stove/oven.

Originally posted by MechWarden:

You can see how much of a load a given battery has (more or less, since the tick marks don't always line up), but with how simplistic the power system is, I'm not sure how you will get that to happen without revamping the power system.

Honestly, the chain of batteries can mostly be ignored if one fully charged Small Batteries (and their higher tier versions) cleanly kept a device (or devices) powered all night.

You need one device powered, one Makeshift Battery. Need 4, use a Carbon Battery.

One Makeshift Battery isn't enough for a full night, appliances use more power than that. It's something like 3 Makeshift Batteries for 2 appliances or 5 for 3.

And yeah, I know there are the blue and yellow bars, but they're kinda hard to read (except the yellow bar, but the yellow bar just shows total battery left, not input or output). I mean an easy way to see how much output there is total and how much input there are from connected appliances.

Like if you have 5 appliances connected to the same chain and their required input to go through a night is X and your chained batteries are providing Y, and X > Y, then you know you need more batteries.

[MechWarden]

Yeah, I know about small batteries not lasting the night. I was able to recover my thread where I did some research back when the demo was out and made a 'quick' guide based on it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3255972657
Some parts are kind of crap, incomplete, and maybe too wordy, but does give the best setup for using the least amount of (small) batteries for a given amount of devices.

It all boils down to clean whole number math just not syncing up, not unlike the 8 bun pack and 10 hot dog pack issue.

Edit: Now that I think about it (and a bit disappointed in my self for not catching this sooner ), by the time you get access to the oven, the dang thing should just ding when it is done. You have how many skills in Cooking by the time the oven unlocks? Would think by know you'd know enough to use a timer.

[Meta Vakama]

Originally posted by Yaridovich:

• Suggestion: allow players to view progress when cooking meat, baking food and making soup - possibly a Cooking perk that allows players to see it.
  
• Suggestion: allow players to view how much power is being provided through a chain of batteries vs how much power is required by the appliances connected to them - possibly with a perk that allows them to see it, maybe a Construction or a Crafting perk.

Hard agree on these two.
More info, made more easily accessible, is almost never a bad game design decision. Almost.

[Monokuma]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

As soon as I made the two other tiers of batteries, I prefer much ripped into them in a post... somewhere around here.

Small Makeshift Battery 2x and 4x for the cost of (at the time of progressing) hard to get rare materials feels bad. I was expecting way more storage from them.

If we don't get more storage, at least add some extra functionality of some kind. The game design logic of 'build tier 2 stuff out of tier 2 parts' feels way too blatant.

I think a good start is to let the larger batteries charge faster, and potentially down the line have an option to "overcharge" some item functionality to work faster at the cost of taking more power draw than an outlet can provide by itself.

[Flak Monkey]

The fact that you need a power cell to craft a battery that is not nearly as efficient as said power cell is plain odd. I mean you need only one cell to power up a forklift and it will work FOREVER. Why not let us use cells to power our devices directly? Power cell are already rare so it shouldn't be an imbalanced feature. But if you want something to work forever why not just use power cells that are chilling in you storage.

[Yaridovich]

Originally posted by Flak Monkey:

The fact that you need a power cell to craft a battery that is not nearly as efficient as said power cell is plain odd. I mean you need only one cell to power up a forklift and it will work FOREVER. Why not let us use cells to power our devices directly? Power cell are already rare so it shouldn't be an imbalanced feature. But if you want something to work forever why not just use power cells that are chilling in you storage.

I think that a CPU requirement for Industrial batteries would make more sense than using Power Cells. Using Power Cells for batteries would probably make more sense for the Carbon batteries.

[MechWarden]

(btw, this really should be a different thread if we are going to focus on batteries)

It feels like much of the Medium and Large size batteries needs to be redone. The formulaic 'use higher tier parts for higher tier stuff for a purely incremental gain' feels way too blatant, especially when stretching the logic on those parts.

You get a Power Cell for your Coil guns and those last forever (power wise), but when made it into a battery, along with an air compressor (because why not?!) and you get... a 2x sized makeshift battery. Bruh, really? Same thing that powers a forklift for who knows how long can barely run two work lights on two work benches (Crafting and Repair) for most of the night?!

And the large battery, where's the power source?! It's massive brick of expensive electronics, a ball of dense carbon and scrap metal! I can't even point at what is storing the power. And if you say 'It is in the carbon', that's not how electricity works! Is the carbon now a capacitor? If that's the case, then why not use the hefty people and robot frying capacitors you get from the zappy potato things?

It just feels partly done and/or a place holder, which I guess is to be expected at this stage.

[Vuur]

Wow, you just posted everything I thought was weird but never thought to post XD I agree with everything. I defs think we need better scaled and more powerful power supplies.

[Glass3ffect]

hey dev
i have a monster idea, a shapshifter the idea was taken from prey, the creature can camo like objects around it and when play goes near it will attack it will move randomly to make it so you can tell its thare. it wont always be in the right sot so you can find a lamp on the ground (witch would be the shapeshifter). you are doing great keep up the good work but this would make the game so much more fun and funnier to play. thanks for you consideration.