ALPHA 50D ALPHA 50D UP: OUR MOST EXPERIMENTAL BUILD YET

Daniel mentioned a while back that they're going to make sure night isn't boring, it's just waiting on some back-end structure I think. I'm really looking forward to seeing cults again.


In the meantime, I'm furiously mining everything in sight hoping to trigger this new fishy idol event.

 

For a while (before they made changing job schedules stressful for characters), I'd set every crew to work different hours so there'd always be someone work. Sadly, that didn't work out that great for me because this was before food production was fixed and I'd run out of food crazy fast.

 

There are water aurochs staring at me...

 

In any case, do your characters still stop working once shift 8 ends, regardless? I remember noticing that if you started them on say #7 they would just quit once the day ended.

 

I'm attempting to upgrade my carpentry workshop. So, first the tooltip said I needed a chair, so I built that and put in the workshop. Next, it said I needed 4 stone and 8 wood. Had that available, so I clicked the upgrade button and a red slash went through it. People brought a bunch of wood and stone, placed it next to the workshop, but nothing seems to be happening. Is it upgraded?

Meanwhile, the kitchen doesn't seem to need anything to upgrade.

 

Yay! Either way I would be entirely happy. Like I said in my original post...it what sold me...granted I did a lot of research before I bought it...but those little things...campy, twisted, odd...is what sold me. The thing that confused me the most was the lack of queue for the building goods...but upon reading the notes it made sense. It's good to hear it will be very likely coming back, even if it's just flavour...actually having them tied into the game play would be fantastic!

 

My NCO got killed just now so I got a chance to check if promotions were still bugged, and... they are. But on the plus side, I saved and reloaded and the game didn't crash when I clicked the work crew button, so that's a definite improvement.

 

We can't seem to make glass anymore, at least not with the standard stone ceramics kiln or ceramics workbench. The "make glass" recipe is nowhere to be found.

EDIT: Ah, now you need a brick ceramics kiln to make glass and bottles. Not sure if that's intentional.

 

Love the UI changes. Just got the Fishy Idol event and the event director system is fantastic, very informative.

I definitely see the potential in the new workshop changes, it's just that right now it feels like not enough is working quite right to get a feel for it. At first, like Alephred said, I had a twinge of fear that we'd be having to micromanage a lot now -- since you have to manually switch orders once something gets done. It will just take a little getting used to. There is a lot more to manage now... which I suppose makes it more of a game, and that's fine.

Once I can manage to get upgraded buildings, have the power saw going full blast, the pieces will start to fit together. And Snoots. Really excited for snoots.

 

I think the UI changes are pretty neat. I also got the fishy idol event last night (and chose .... wrong? I guess?) The only thing that threw me off was the "zoom" button put me towards a person, who was currently farming, and I didn't actually see the idol as a physical object in the game. Which would have been nice.

I think the Workshop change is great in the late game, when you have a lot of materials and you want to start getting things out the door for trade or fast building, etc.
I think it makes the early game a bit more a chore. Let's say you want to build a bunkhouse and a kitchen, from the carpentry workshop you need cots, decor, a work bench, a spice rack, and the requisite planks and bricabrac. That's six things from a shop that has max 5 people able to work in it (and, at least in my playstyle, it's more like 1 or 2 people in that work group while my spare labourers are farming or gathering in the first weeks).
One solution I'm fiddling with is building more workbenches than I have people to run them, just for the sake of easing up on the micromanagement. That works okay but is more materials when things like logs are more precious to me in the early game.

I'll keep my tentacles crossed for that, then!

 

So as my earlier comment indicated, I'm a bit torn about the UI changes. Both positive and negative reactions:

I really like the new Work Crew UI that shows an Overseer's best skill without hunting them down, that's very useful. I also like the changes to the Workshop / Production UI, it's much easier to directly relate what you're producing to the modules you have available.

Conversely, changes to the way workshops produce goods have made producing goods slower. This slows the pace of production (especially with respect to complex modules) significantly. Each order is tied to specific module, so it's no longer possible to queue up a moderate number of orders and let your Overseer sort it out on their own.

Examples:

1.) I've just built a Carpentry Workshop with two Carpentry Workbenches. Assuming I permanently tie up one of the workbenches maintaining a quantity of 5 planks in the stockpile, only one workbench is available to make the various doors, chairs, and other workbenches I'll need. I can't queue them up all at once, I'll have to revisit the Workshop each time an order is completed.

2.) I have a kitchen with two stone ovens. I set one of them to maintain a level of 10 basic food in the stockpile, but I have a spare oven. Is this more or less efficient than assigning TWO stone ovens to maintain 10 basic food?

I'm a little conflicted. I like the UI polish, I like assigning specific modules, but I don't like losing the ability to queue up more orders. The overall effect on the player is to have to check on workshop a lot more frequently, and a byproduct of that is the slowing of production, unless players construct a lot more functional modules (and assign more workers to staff them all).

 

One thing I like about the new workshop system is that I can tell a kitchen to make basic food and middle-class food, and I will actually get some middle-class food made! Before I basically had to put the middle-class food up top and hope that the workers decided that they wanted to make it.

 

Well, is the second one being used at all? If not, then you have your answer.

 

It looks like another job-lock has come up in the form of cooking sausages.
Interestingly, it seems like the stuck person will actually engage in gossip while he otherwise stands there holding a steak and starving to death. And another person isn't stuck, but instead of walking 10 steps to the oven to cook, she's taking the steaks 2 screenlengths away and laying them on the grass.

 

Also missing the ability to queue up more standing orders than modules to service them. Previously I set almost all my production using low quantity standing orders so there would be a buffer of modules/planks/etc that would get restocked as they were used. I either need to build much larger workshops to accommodate all the modules to keep up this approach, which affects walk time as well as initial construction costs, or fall back on micromanaging modules. It's this an intended side effect?

 

You could also build more than one of a type of building, which I do with kitchens so I can have both food and booze.

 

How feasable would it be to have workshops togglable between "module-based" and "order-based"?

Previous to this update, I'd sometimes have my workshop orders look like this:
Standing order: plank x5
Cot 0/2
Wall shrine 0/1
Cot 0/2
Wall shrine 0/1
Cot 0/2
Wall shrine 0/1
Bookshelf 0/1
etc... And then add things to the bottom as I needed them and use the priority arrows to change things (e.g. if I needed a spice rack or work bench to get some other workshop going asap / I get new colonists and add their beds to the bottom of the list)

This playstyle is kind of, idk how you would call it, "set and forget" maybe? There's a lot of planning/micromanaging the specific orders to get the things you want set up when you want them, but after that you can assume the workshop will follow your plan, even if I add 1 or 2 more workers to the work crew. (again, important in the early game, where it doesn't matter how many workbenches you have if you only have 2 people using them).

But now, every time I change the number of people in the work crew, or build a new building, I basically have to "forget" something I was planning to do (e.g. a bookshelf). So I find myself constantly going back and counting how many cots I have built/stocked compare to how many I need, forgetting that I meant this building to have a bookshelf, not having a trade good when the traders come because I forgot to rebuild it.

However, I do really like the new system in the later game when you've already got 4 people + overseer in the crew. All my benches can be dedicated to maintaining plank/bricabrac/trade stock, with the last one left over for incidental stuff I need. It works effectively the same as before but has the added bonus of keeping things a little more even (e.g. I don't have 5 people making planks THEN bricabrac, but two people making both).

I want to like the new system more than I do, but I just find it frustrating right now early one, even after giving it what I think is a fair shake. However, it's not really game-breaking enough, and if it's here to stay I can get used to it.