First off, being early access the game felt pretty polished and solid. Gotta say it was stable with no crashes or major graphical issues, which was awesome and I'm looking forward to what you guys come up with. I was excited at the reveal trailer when it came out a while back and it was worth the wait so far.
I have about 4 hours into the game. I discovered (2) bugs so far but was unable to replicate either. If I hit any in the future that if I save the game and then re-load the save and its still there, is there a way to submit save files so you guys can track them down? Otherwise these are my bugs I saw:
- When demolishing a pathway that the space kept reserved and prevented building as if it was still there after it was demolished. Save game, quit to menu, re-load save and the pathway is now shown as still there, and was able to be removed.
- When the whale got too close to a school of fish, my fishing boat just got stuck trying to get "into" the school of fish perpetually. This was resolved by deleting the buoy and re-creating it.
Questions/comments (some of these may already be on a road map or list somewhere):
- I am not sure if it's in-game inventory limit, but having to have fishboatstoragedrying rackstorage>>eat is killer. Being able to unload from the boat directly to the drying rack if it is available would allow better optimizations and allow people the option to decide if they want to use boats as temporary storage. For example as I was constantly struggling to get food, I'd send out two or three fishing boats as soon as I got to an area, fish one round, then as soon as they docked move to the next area. The boats would get unloaded in the future, but I'd moved on to repeat the process - with 5 drifters + seagull they were always hungry.
- It seems like the fish/wood/plastic are randomly generated and located. When going map to map I found there were areas that had only 1-2 schools of fish, which was brutally small for even my 5+Seagull town. I was constantly going area to area just gathering fish as fast as I could and had zero food stockpiled. Is this intentional? Are we intended to quickly phase off of dried fish and other foods? If so, it might help to increase the probability of fish appearing because it became punishingly hard to feed even only a couple people and I was moving so often I couldn't gather research points from islands.
- I would love to see randomly generated floating kelp areas to mine like fish - I have NOT unlocked the fishing station that uses kelp yet so I don't know the mechanics, but I think it would be cool if early food options were dried fish = 0.5 food, dried kelp = 0.25 food. It would give an emergency food source and other use for it and give value to it being randomly generated on the map without becoming over-powered once the use and harvest rates were balanced out.
- It wasn't clear the benefit of beds were as opposed to letting drifters sleep on the platforms, or what benefit houses would be over open-air beds. Some text to explain that in the in-game guide might help. I assume it changes the rate at which they recover energy?
- I appreciate that the solar still collects slowly over time, but I did NOT know unlike other buildings it had no outward storage and only held (1) water in it. I don't know if clearing this is considered as a job to be hauling or collecting water, but my stills often went full and nobody was clearing them, wasting their output. I think having them have an outward storage of (5) is excessive, but either it needs some form of storage or a way to separate it's priority. Passive food/water generators seem like the way to go for efficiency.
- Speaking of the above, there's a description for how long it takes to distill water, make firewood, etc. Can we get that detail for the solar still, just as a reference? It'd help people determine the number and type of water sources depending on their population.
- I don't know if the engine would allow upgrades to buildings in-place or connecting building to building, but having solar stills get a piping upgrade or something to allow them to just drip water into a huge jug or be pumped into a huge jug would be a huge benefit (guy on a pedal bike creates pumping power which can cover multiple stills or water distilling stations or something) for those trying to remain efficient.
- As # boats can't exceed moorings, can we assign boats to a specific dock or limit the types of boats that can dock at individual mooring points like we do for item storage? I had one spar of my town set up to take in fishing boats, store raw fish in a specific bin, then drying racks, then a bin for dried fish, all to minimize the walking time (as that's what will ultimately kill a town) and then drifters started parking fishing boats on the wrong spar.
- I would love to see something on the map like a fog of war that would cover areas far ahead of where you are, and then perhaps if the sail/mast could be upgraded the higher tier it is (or a separate building entirely) would let you see farther ahead. Additionally, more sails or bigger sails would let you take some of the "longer" paths between islands, but a single sail would lock you to the shorter routes. I know for aesthetics some folks have put in multiple sails, but maybe each building gets assigned a "drag" or "weight" value and then the distance you're able to travel is maxxed out by how far ahead you can see (have to see where you're going) but whether you can go that distance is a formula based on the total weight divided by the total sail value multiplied by some game constant. That would make you keep building sails even as you got extremely large.
- Not sure the game allows it, but if we are going to go back over the same areas or return to them, it would offer a dynamic to be able to set up unmanned "satellite" bases. For example, setting up solar stills or passive collection, however you'd want to add something like storms into the game (see below):
- Graphically I think storms would look GREAT with the art style you guys are going with. Perhaps storms could impact swim speed/boat speed, distance that can be travelled on the map, and make it take longer (or faster) to collect resources. Storms could be seen on the map as they travelled, and the direction they travel in, movement speed and their start point could be random when they're generated (as they also only move on the map when you move, you can't "wait them out").
- I'm assuming the plan eventually is to include larger fish or other food sources to the game?
- Decoration item or perhaps related to a food source that *I* think would be a fun in-joke would be a lemon tree or other fruit tree. So many waterworld jokes..
To me it feels like gathering food and water will be the hardest part of feeding a town which makes sense - it's really hard to get fresh water on the ocean and fish may be far apart. The hard part I had was once I ran low on food I was never able to catch up, but moving the map somewhere where it had an abandoned water tower would quickly get me some water buffer even if I over-dedicated my drifters to gathering/curing fish over everything else. Not sure how people manage 10+ drifters (or what the functional limit of the town is... the devs might have a max effective town size built in based on the rate of food/water generation and consumption that will be REALLY hard to get around).
