[Solved] Suggestions after nearly completing the game

Hello there,

First of all, hats off for what has been done since Demo, and the current playable & enjoyable state of even the earliest 0.1 version. Thanks a lot! In return, I wanted to maybe contribute by pointing out some constructive feedback.

After progressing all the way to the "only % upgrades from now on" (as the game told me) stage, also having previously spent thousands of hours in Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Factory, I wanted to summarize my views on game improvement ideas for the future. Some may be in repetition, I didn't check every topic for every bullet, sorry in advance.

• For a 3D factory game, multi-floor seems a bit useless and non-optimized for now.
  • There are no ramps, although floors act like ramps if placed in increments of 1 in the correct direction, it feels a bit clunky and non-aestethic.
  • There are no logistic multi-floor solutions like conveyor lifts, which makes lifting supply lines look like a "Lets Game It Out" Satisfactory episode honestly.
  • Lifting them is also a bit of a buggy-clunky mixture, you can't do whatever you imagine in every direction, you need to manually bend every angle and sometimes work backwards because it doesn't always snap properly.
  • There is no option to raise power floors upwards while tiling, which makes you double-click n-times while trying not to lose aim, which is a little bit tedious.
• For conveyor belts, there is no option to keep them raised as you wish.They rise and fall automatically. If you want them to travel in an orderly-elevated fashion, you have to first obstruct the entire line they will be passing. This again leads to a lot of spaghetti lines or a lot of no-fun rebuilds.
• Mergers and splitters could be implemented as separate items, because;
  • a) It is not conveniently possible to load-balance, you just have to go the "manifold way" all the time.
  • b) Sometimes the auto-split-merge logic doesn't go your way and you have no way to fix it without changing a big part of the line.
  • c) It would also lay the foundations of logic items like filter-splitters for future versions.
• Definitely feels like we need 2 more tiers of Filter Inserter and at least 1 more tier of Long Hand Inserter. Upgrades only happen in the regular Inserter department, which causes a lot of stalls or shortages especially in the later stages. Maybe the stack inserter can be configured to function as the other two, if the Groundbreaker prefers so.
• Ratios don't seem to play a fundamental part in the game as of now, or they seem rather like "random" instead of being able to calculate by using highest common factor or similar. Therefore, overflows or shortages seem to happen way too often.
  • Minor upgrades like "%10 efficiency increase" makes this even worse after some point. You just figured out some bizarre ratio of perfecting a line, then one of your machines gets a x% upgrade, another x+3% and another x+10%, and boom, you need to redo the whole floor with totally different number of machines and a different factory size allocation.
  • This made me feel like I just build things by a rough calculation, observe for some time, then look for fixes all the time. I would personally prefer to calculate once and precisely, then build, and never look back until I get a major upgrade that calls for an overhaul.
  • Yes, factory games require you to readjust or even rebuild from time to time, but this felt too much on the rebuild-every-line-all-the-time side of the coin.
• Related to the topic above, the game needs a mechanic to get rid of waste, like thresher shredding everything (even if no output in return) or the ability to drop items on the ground combined with a garbage collection mechanic. Some of the abundant output materials only get enough uses in the very late stages and requires a lot of manual handling to prevent stalls. (Only possible problem with this could be losing your seeds, which is a limited and very necessary resource. May be can be countered by making some of the flora regrow, or making the player able to multiply the amount of the seeds in planters.)
• Power lines could be very useful for long distance remote base situations. Having to lay power floors in an ugly-ish diagonal fashion breaks the beauty of the game. Could be more easily resolved by making monorail tracks also carry electricity to the next station and the power floors it is built on.
• Research cube mechanics could be greatly improved. Right now, from what I've had to juggle around, my comments would be;
  • Since we don't have the means to excavate a gigantic portion of the map, maybe apart from drilling several times longer than we build, they take up way too much room.
  • After some point, it really ruins the beautiful landscape and color scheme of the game. Mechanical blues and purples everywhere in the sky.
  • Their capacity seems to be variable depending on the available space above, and you can dismantle the composer itself once you run out of room. The cubes are still there and still counted as valid. You could complete the entire game with just one composer.
  • To combat these both, some of my suggestions can be;
    • a) To make them encapsulated with a reasonable fixed height, also decreasing the sizes of the cubes a bit. When you dismantle the composer, you have to get all cubes back and replace them. Cube sizes (therefore composer capacity) could be further reduced with several upgrade tiers, either to the composer or the cubes themselves.
    • b) Cubes could be used up instead of stored, like in some other games. This would also free the game from 5000+ unnecessary glow animation renders.

That's all I can think of in a nutshell, regarding the core mechanics of the game. Some more on the more cosmetic or QoL side could be;

• A bit more of a personal comment, but I believe a bit too much of research is based on items found around the world. I understand, respect and enjoy the decision to force the player to go explore and hear the entire story, but it could be a bit more balanced. I've almost finished the entire progress of 0.1 but don't have the first ever toolbelt upgrade yet.
• Ability to name (and maybe colorize) beacons and toggle them on/off on the HUD like scenario missions from the log.
• Clear input/output/speed data on every item, also in "per minute" and somewhat truncated values, rather than the endless decimals we have right now.
• Some sign items with text and arrow possibilities (and maybe changeable colors) would be very nice for navigation. We dig a lot of nonsense tunnels with no way to refill them.
• Bigger storage options, pretty please!
• Maybe 1-2 more ports on the smelters, especially for the early game.
• A better homing mechanic. "Respawn" seems to just teleport you instantly to the base, which forces like tens of thousands of items to render at once and the game performance apparently never recovers properly if you do it a few times in a session.

I will not get into the bugs in this, as they would be fixed eventually anyway. This is just the very first version of Early Access and I personally haven't encountered any major, game-breaking bug.

Keep up the great work guys!

Best,