Oxygen Not Included

Tuco said:

This spoiler is untrue and also inadvisable. A base produces heat on its own and it's much better to use the surrounding area as a heatsink, especially for a new player that won't realize the threat of heat until it might be too late, and wrapping their base in insulation would accelerate that.

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Tuco said:

So now that I think I'm done playing I'll give you a real answer.

There are two big (totally moddable) features that would really elevate this game for me personally:

1. An expensive infinite research option
2. More capable dupes

For #1, this could be a research tier that consumed highly valuable ingredients like niobium, brackene, steel, tungsten, some challenging plant produce, tons of power, water, etc. Maybe uranium and graphite (and added renewable resources if they didn't have it) while using significant amounts of duplicant labor. It doesn't really matter what it contributes but something like permanent but small geyser boosts (Like geotuner but infinitely stacking) or possibly something that improves dupes permanently like the neural vacillator. It kind of doesn't matter what the benefit is, as long as there's a science per hour metric to drive the creation of a megabase. I think fully automating spaceships are possible? So if they aren't, then add that as a feature too.

For #2, I'm thinking something that enables dupes to navigate across larger than 1 or 2 distances, build from further away, build through walls, be able to clean up world-space gas and liquid. These could be a deep tree of per-dupe unlocks from #1, or just be part of the base game, idc.

My reasoning for wanting #1 is that I crave an endgame and don't see an endgame for Oni. In these games I typically have a single playthrough and end the game with a megabase worth being proud of. For me there are two phases of these games, climbing the tech tree and then building the megabase. With the usage of thermium to create a sour gas boiler I feel like I've just finished the first phase and ended with this gross accumulation of broken, unoptimized or unused factories with a base occupied by unemployed dupes who have nothing to do but sit around, eat and sleep. There's no reason to bother with the second phase to make a megabase because all I would do is delete 70% of my base and then just have my dupes scheduled to spend the majority of the time partying or something. So I'm left kinda dissatisfied because my base is a shithole and there's no reason to make it better.

Conversely, you can see a vid of my Rimworld base for



which was designed after finishing the "first phase" where I climbed the "tech tree" and understood the mechanics. I built it by designing a concept that took advantage of the mechanics and ended up producing something beautiful, unique (or at least I haven't seen anything like it...) and effective that produced a stupid amount of gold per hour. My Factorio Space Exploration playthrough is similar, and has an absurdly vast factory that was able to continue to run flawlessly overnight and produce stupid amounts of research.

A lot of people enjoy starting a new save, with some different preconditions or different early game goals. This has never been appealing to me personally, but I get why people enjoy it.

My reasoning for wanting #2 is that the game starts with simple mechanics where the duplicants make the game lighthearted and fun as they engage in hijinx for basic builds. Then the game motivates the player to create increasingly complex factories to either deal with more complex challenges like heat or to acquire off-world resources or to simply take advantage of game mechanics like being able to boil crude oil into sour gas and then condense it into methane / sulfur. As the player advances the previously fun limitations and stupidity of duplicants transforms into frustration. The player is highly advised to perform experimentation, tuning and testing in a sandbox save and then only after the build has been fully vetted should the player switch to their real game and build the actual structure (I got a blueprint mod to help...) . Even with a fully tested factory, the building, gas/liquid filling and starting process has to be done meticulously. A screw up that causes state change damage, leaked gas, etc can require a huge effort to take apart, clean up and rebuild. Unlike other games, I felt less and less in control of the game as I played because the details of building the increasingly complex systems required increasing efforts to coordinate dupes at all levels.

So if I could utilize dupes to build through walls, change liquid/gas in a room, while not worrying about them getting trapped, I think I'd enjoy the game in the later stages more.

I've search for mods for both #1 and #2 and was surprised I didn't see anything. #1 is a key part of Factorio and other factory games, and not having it seems crazy. #2 is really just QOL and that's an extremely popular mod option. I think if there was a mod for #1 and #2 I'd play this game for like 100-200 more hours and probably enjoy it even more than the previous time spent.

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