more hours engineering on Echo than anyone
You likely even have more hours on echo then me
TEG
glad you liked the change, you can thank doc for recommending that to me. it makes a lot of sense
xeno RNG could be mitigated
this would be fairly easily to do actually. I would just need to make a new child of the random slime. please let me know what colours you think would be fun to start with.
Toxins storage
This surprised me, toxins itself being small makes sense but I would have thought the space in the storage would be plenty. please let me know what you think a better layout would be.
Mining
Thanks, I’m glad people like mining on echo so much, I’ve mined out the entire floors myself a few times and it is surprisingly nice and just goes to show how little you need to make it kina fun . As for the relay. I understand people use it as a DIY explo, but it would be very unorthodox to have a relay on a mining shuttle. I think all but the largest mining shuttle do not have one and the echo shuttle being as small as it is would make it quite challenging to add.
Botany
I’m a little sad to hear you are not enjoying the redesigned botany i made, it even has two extra trays then the previous and imo a better layout with them all next to each other. yes the maint botany was very large, but it didn’t quite sit right with me to have botanists hiding in maints away from other people. I would say that there is nothing stopping you from remaking it with a few tech boards from storage though!
Orange because it mutates into red which is used to make the slime mutator potions that allow you to acquire rainbows.
Black because it allows you to make modifications to your slimes that persist through generations. In fact, the only times I’ve used these mechanics is when I have a round start black slime on Echo
Yellow because it can help to solve power issues on low pop if there are no engineers.
Blue because they are fairly early into slime progression and give you good utility with slime stabilizers
Purple because they are also early into progression and mutate into various useful slimes.
Keeping it to these 5 slimes would make it a lot more predictable and allow people to make more consistent strategies for progressing xenobio.
Botany changes to the front are well done, I like them. But maints botany was a unique gem and I’ll miss it. Your reasons for getting rid of it are sound though.
Toxins Storage specifically feels cramped when trying to deal with the discarded containers. If the room was one tile wider it could give people a place to put their used canisters without feeling cluttered. Currently it just gets to the point where I’m having to really consciously decide where to put them so they don’t get in the way. And since I generally speed run toxins so I can get onto other science, getting jumbled up in a mess of canisters can be a real pain point.
Regarding the mining shuttle, maybe consider making it slightly larger and talk to Bacon, Ruko etc about if a comms console on there is appropriate. Another (half-baked) reason to make it slightly larger is that I’ve seen newer players softlock themselves on the shuttle a few times because they don’t know how to get around their ore box. You can just break it and rebuild it but they don’t know that.
I don’t think xenobio needs to be bigger, people just need to get used to using warping greys and reproductive extracts.
Also changing the RNG on the slime type that spawns like mentioned previously would somewhat mitigate the cons of having a smaller lab by making it so you can more consistently strategize to get rainbows. Once you have rainbows echo is very useable for xenobio.
Sorry, I only know that someone in OOC during game time last week was saying they had two crashed Echo rounds in a row, so was asking to know what to avoid.
It’s something to do with loading certain Z levels.
So far exploring unknown signals seems to work, but unidentified signals seem less stable.
Personally I’d ahelp before exploring signals on Echo just to be safe, but I’m not staff nor do I understand the intricacies of what causes the crashes.
For toxins storage, I would like the stairway to definitely be moved in the corner thats not right up against any door.
Since moving around while dragging canisters items can be annoying especially since we can’t walk on top of them as well as lovely lag tends to make moving things around more of a nightmare.
So if possible, maybe switching where the stairs and blue portable pumps would be lovely. As long as the front of the stairs aren’t directly facing the maintenance doors would be great, so you could maybe shift the maintenance doors instead to the right by 2 tiles.
Or you can try rearranging toxins storage like this. Should be slightly more elegant than what we have right now.
Also that door really has to move to be disjointed from the stairway entrance.
The problem with the fully random slime is that you can have a round where you start with a rainbow or red slime and are jumpstarted to the point where you barely have to put in any thought or effort to immediately unlock the full power of xenobio by like 8 minutes into the round.
Or you can have a round where you start with sepia and it’s nearly useless to your overall progression.
My suggestion was just to take that one fully random slime, and make it select from a smaller pool to mitigate this huge RNG gap slightly.
I at the very least don’t think you should be starting the round with rainbow slimes, ever.
They are insanely powerful, as blorbling (injecting with plasma) allows you to generate massive amounts of all colours of slimes extremely quickly, and blorble blorbling (injecting with slime jelly) is one of the most insane weapons in the game.
Wait what if we change the randomized slime to only choose between those 5 slimes instead of the everything pool of slimes?
or an adamantine slime for lovely crystals. (I just like crystals)
That’s exactly what I was trying to convey.
Shrink the pool of random slimes to those five to reduce the RNG to be more reasonable.
So you would have three greys, and then one slime randomly pulled from that pool of five slimes that I listed.
I think adamantine could also be an interesting one, except for the fact that it’s also sort of end-game and breaks cargo a little bit if you start with it, as adamantine can be sold for ridiculous profit.
. As for the relay. I understand people use it as a DIY explo, but it would be very unorthodox to have a relay on a mining shuttle. I think all but the largest mining shuttle do not have one and the echo shuttle being as small as it is would make it quite challenging to add.