This mod aims to rebalance the game without adding any new buildings or features.
Goals:
- make rarely-used buildings, crops, critters, skills, etc... viable in more situations
- introduce new tradeoffs to strategies and builds that are so good that there's no reason to do anything else
- reduce the ability to cheese game mechanics
- when the primary usage of something is free, it should be reworked so that the primary usage has a cost
- make morale more difficult to obtain
Restrictions:
- Things which are currently rooted in reality should remain rooted in reality (e.g. the electrolyzer ratio is physically correct for the chemical makeup of water, the heat capacity of water is 4.184J/g, etc...)
- Changing the physical properties of elements and materials (e.g. thermal conductivity, melting point, etc...) is generally not allowed (but might be acceptable for a handful of elements)
- Conservation of mass should be retained for any process or recipe that already observes it.
- No new buildings, foods, crops, critters, elements, etc...
- Worldgen is out of scope
- Duplicant traits are out of scope
Throughout this document, I have put symbols next to each heading indicating my thoughts so far, as well as current changes.
- ❔ in a heading indicates that some rebalance is needed, but it's unclear what that should be.
- ✔️ in a heading indicates the rebalance has been implemented.
- 🌙 indicates that some of the rebalance has been implemented, but some elements that I want to add are not yet implemented.
- ❌ indicates that, after careful consideration, the building was deemed to be balanced or that "balancing" functionality should be left to other mods.
The primary use case of this building is to dispense its contents immediately. The problem is that this behavior is free when left unpowered, so the building remains unpowered in almost every use case.
Changes:
- Dispensing items now requires power, while holding onto them is now free
- Now only consumes power when dispensing
- Power consumption increased to 120W (from 60W)
Weight plates are almost always a better option since they do not require power. Requiring refined metal is excessive for what these do
Changes:
- no longer requires power
- now built with metal ore
Takes up 15 tiles, but only holds half as much gas as you would be able to in a room the same size with a high pressure vent and pump
Also holds waaaaaaaaayy less gas in it than rockets.
Changes:
- Capacity increased to 750kg
This is an interesting building that is held back primarily by its labor requirements and the fact that it never overpressurizes.
Solution: keep net water consumption rate, but massively reduce water pollution rate
- -300 g/s -> -50 g/s water
- +290 g/s -> +40 g/s pwater This change requires emptying every 9 cycles instead of needing a change every ~1.25 cycles, a 7.2x improvement in labor cost
The lighting efficiency bonus might be raised to 15%, but 10% is pretty ok
I'm considering making this produce algae under light and presence of CO2, but I suspect that is overpowered.
Electrolyzers are the main event when it comes to oxygen production.
There's no better option than electrolyzers for the long term sustainability (and scalability) of a colony. Since this is mostly due to only requiring water (which can be produced sustainably in a number of ways), This is acceptable as a whole.
All that said, they need a slight nerf in order to create more interesting engineering challenges.
Problems:
- SPOMs are so optimal that there is little reason to do more interesting electrolyzer builds.
- There aren't enough serious tradeoffs.
- The gases come out too hot to consider most other electrolyzer builds seriously. You have to have a serious cooling solution in place which you almost certainly want to pump through a block of metal tiles or something like that.
- Electrolyzer rooms overpressure too easily. It's very difficult to run a 100% uptime electrolyzer build, even in space.
- That is unless you do a hydra, which I don't particularly like because it's cheesy.
Changes:
- -120W -> -150W
- -1000g/s -> -750g/s water
- +888g/s -> +666g/s oxygen
- +112g/s -> +84g/s hydrogen
The funny thing is that this is STILL energy-positive despite reducing the conversion rate by 25% because it is equivalent to raising the power cost to 200W, and a 2-electrolyzer, 3-pump build has just over 360W of excess power. (that same build still has 200W excess after this change)
Additional functionality worth considering:
- electrolyzing saltwater outputs chlorine, hydrogen, and sand
- electrolyzing brine outputs more chlorine and sand, less hydrogen
This building needs further analysis, but I suspect it is fine as-is.
Wood Burners are inefficient and they produce a lot of CO2. The simple CO2 production is quite helpful.
Changes:
- -1200g/s -> -750g/s wood
- +170g/s -> +100g/s CO2 @
- +9kDTU -> +5kDTU
Still not as good as coal, but it's still kinda viable.
The ethanol distiller change makes domestic arbor trees water-positive. No bueno.
Changes:
- +750g/s -> +600g/s pwater
This incidentally also makes petroleum boilers no longer water positive (they now have 10% loss)
Generating 4kW is a little silly since conductive wire can only handle 2kW. But this is not unbalanced.
Still, there's a couple mods that deal with this ideosyncracy already and I'd rather that be an opt-in feature via those mods.
Dupes like it better and it handles twice as much wattage. Except I rarely find myself upgrading the wires because it doesn't feel like enough of an improvement to bother with refining the metal for it.
However, 2kW is sorta hard to work with at times. You generally can't combine two high-wattage buildings on the same circuit when using conductive wire, for instance one building requiring 1200W can't quite share a circuit with one requiring 960W.
Also consider that the heavy watt variant handles 2.5x as much wattage as its counterpart.
The question is whether this is actually unbalanced or just mildly annoying.
The only logical argument I can think of for why conductive should be buffed is that the refined metal is better spent on the power spine. I'm not sure that's convincing.
Changes:
- Increase wattage rating to 2.5kW
What's fun about this change is that it adds a tradeoff to conductive wire where you can choose to:
- under-provision the wire to 2kW using 2 small transformers, but you don't get the full wattage it's capable of carrying
- over-provision the wire to 4kW using a large transformer, but risking overloads unless you keep the potential load at or below 2.5kW
After trying this change for a while, it doesn't seem to be crazy impactful. All it really does is make 4-electrolyzer setups simpler to set up.
In most cases, you can easily trick ranchers into wrangling airborne critters via a Critter Drop-Off
Costing metal ore is excessive for what little value it provides.
This building now requires raw minerals instead.
Consuming plastic is absolutely insane since you'll have a rancher long before you'll ever have plastic.
Both buildings now require raw minerals instead.
Incubators are generally not worth powering unless you cheese the Lullabied buff with a timer sensor, making the tradeoff of powering the building less interesting.
Changes:
- Reduce power consumption to 60W
- The Lullabied buff is lost when the building is unpowered or disabled or the egg is removed from the incubator.
- as an interesting side effect, this can be used to grind up a rancher's Husbandry (neat!)
I just want to fix the Husbandry skill bug (if possible) because Klei can't be bothered to fix it themselves.
Uses way more power than the grill for some reason. Even though it's a zero-tech building.
Changes:
- Power Consumption reduced to 60W
Surprisingly light on power usage. Let's bump that up just a bit.
Changes:
- Power Consumption increased to 120W
These can be simulated less expensively with a shutoff valve and an element sensor, provided that the substance flows at full speed
Solution: reduce power to 20W. Bringing them down to 10W sounds reasonable at face value, but the convenience factor and better handling of edge cases is worth some power, just not 110W.
Gas pumps cost the same amount of power as liquid pumps but only fill gas vents halfway.
My first instinct was to buff this by halving its power consumption and I even tried it in early builds of this mod, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was actually very unbalanced to do so.
Gas pumping sees SO MUCH use as it is, so it doesn't really make sense to buff the building by making it cheaper to run. Mind the fact that pumping CO2 into space has the same cost per kg as carbon skimmers yet is still the preferred option for many players. (5 skimmers + 1 sieve = 720W, removing 1.5kg/s CO2 - same as 3 gas pumps) Cutting the cost of gas pumps would be an indirect nerf to carbon skimmers.
Pretty terrible heat exchange unless you use steel.
Proposed:
- Allowed to be built with both metal ores and refined metals.
Held back by excessive heat generation (mostly due to the SHC of output being higher than that of the input) and slow output
The fix:
- -120W -> -240W
- -600g/s -> -3000g/s slime
- +200g/s -> +1000g/s algae
- +400g/s -> +2000g/s pwater
- +1.5kDTU/s -> +1kDTU/s
Produces too much heat and requires too much labor
Too much heat generation, power cost too high, emptying the salt takes too long.
It's a necessary evil when you have salt water or brine and few other water sources but just ends up being a huge hassle in practice.
It's interesting to note that IRL submarines filter saltwater for their electrolyzers using something more akin to the water sieve, so it's crazy that this machine costs so much more power than the sieve.
Changes:
- Power cost reduced from 480W to 240W
- Heat output reduced from 8kDTU/s to 4kDTU/s
- Empty chore time reduced from 90s to 30s
These simply aren't worth the effort for the ethanol. You probably "want" the polluted dirt or CO2.
They also generate far too much heat.
For power, they produce enough ethanol for a net 260J/kg, but wood burners produce 250J/kg. Considering how inefficient wood burners are to begin with, this is a terrible deal.
The fix:
- -240W -> -60W
- +500g/s @73.4+C -> +600g/s @50+C ethanol
- +333.333g/s @93.4+C -> +300g/s @50+C polluted dirt
- +166.667g/s @93.4+C -> +100g/s @70+C CO2
- +4.5kDTU/s -> +2kDTU/s
This increases the net power production from 260J/kg to 540J/kg, now 140J/kg more efficient than the buffed wood burners and only 10J/kg less efficient than coal.
Output more natural gas? Process more matter per second?
Maybe should require less power? Have a more efficient recipe?
The oil refinery has trouble being competitive with petroleum boilers for those who know the ways.
The labor requirements and poor product efficiency make it unappealing to use in late game builds.
Proposed:
- 5 kg/s -> 6 kg/s petroleum (this would compensate for the generator nerf in terms of water, but not in terms of power)
- 90 g/s -> 180 g/s natural gas
The question then is if this is really necessary.
At first glance, this building looks like it requires too much labor or something, but I think it's actually fine
Its use case is quite niche and mostly serves as a way to fuel research when starting on a swampy planet.
It serves its purpose well in the early game.
Germs and disease are kind of irrelevant. This is ok because the real engineering challenges are elsewhere.
There are mods and difficulty settings to address disease, so I will leave these buildings untouched.
Morale bonus is too low. Plants are better. Little reason to skill up artists.
Increase decor bonuses from 5/10/15 to 10/15/20
This makes level 2 artists on a basic sculpting block sufficient for the great hall bonus.
Bonus is too high, making it far too easy to get the great hall bonus.
Changes:
- Mirth Leaf, Bluff Briar, Mellow Mallow, and Bliss Burst decor reduced to +15, radius 4
- Jumping Joya decor reduced to +10, radius 3 (lower because the plant is easier to keep alive)
Tranquil Toes can stay at +25 because they require such a low temperature (which duplicants don't like very much)
Sporechids are interesting because they are high-risk-high-reward plants which are difficult to tame safely.
The +1 bonus is appropriate for its tech level, but the water cost is too high for this to make sense as a morale source. The nerfs to food and great hall morale are an indirect buff to the water cooler.
Also, nobody drinks a kilo of water all at once. That's insane. Considering duplicants on normal difficulty settings eat half as much as a human adult, it seems reasonable that they would be happy with 200g of water per use. (less than 1 cup)
Water consumption is tricky to mod because of how the chore calculation is implemented.
Grants a lot of morale for something that is relatively easy to produce as long as you can spare the water.
Changes:
- Decrease morale bonus to +2
The morale bonus seems appropriate for its complexity, but the power cost might be a bit high considering that it can only be used by one dupe at a time.
Grants a lot of morale for its cost, though the use of food instead of CO2 makes this worth a little extra morale.
Changes:
- Decrease morale bonus to +3
While it only really costs power, it costs A LOT of power. Hardly worth it for only +2 morale.
Changes:
- Increase morale bonus to +3
Same as Jukebot, but since its power cost is higher, the morale bonus should also be higher.
Changes:
- Increase morale bonus to +4
The building takes up very little space, and minimal power.
Dupes get a +1 from using it even if there is nobody on the other end (?), but its other benefits require dupes to be on different planets and share downtime. On top of this, only one dupe can use each phone whereas most other recreational buildings aren't tied up like this.
I might tone down the morale bonus, but I think this needs further analysis.
Costs too much metal per microchip to be worth the bother. Except with lead.
Proposed:
- Increase production yield to 3 units
- Lead recipe removed
- Power rooms max size increased to 120 to make this building easier to take advantage of.
The fertilizer buff isn't worth it in most cases due to both labor requirements and resource usage.
I've seen Francis John use it for mutating plants, but that's about it.
Proposed:
- Increase Farmer's Touch buff duration to 3 cycles
I don't know what to do with this building. All I know is that it's bad.
The main problem with this building is that it only applies to things that duplicants interact with manually
Turns out it applies to liquid bottles too, but this is impractical.
The fix: add a liquid input and output so you can use it instead of chlorine decontamination rooms from your bathroom.
Except that really doesn't matter.
This building doesn't transfer its heat to air fast enough and produces too little heat per Watt, so it is generally only good as a temporary quick and dirty heating solution... except that a kiln is more practical most of the time.
- Decrease Power consumption to 90W
- Increase heat output to 80 kDTU/s (incidentally, this is the opposite of the AETN)
- Increase overheat temperature to 175C
This building is half as power efficient as aquatuners per C, which is too large of a tradeoff for its ease of use.
Also, considering that Hydrogen is the most practical gas coolant (with a SHC of 2.4 vs water/steam's 4.179 or super coolant's 8.44) it just can't compete with the aquatuner in any sensible situation.
It would also be nice if it were practical to cool oxygen directly
Changes:
- Cooling factor increased to 38C
- this introduces some really interesting interactions where you can outperform aquatuners per watt for cooling very hot things with steam or supercoolant.
Provides A LOT of decor which can stack with other buildings
Proposed:
- Decrease decor to +5, radius 2
- Disallow building under blocks
Needs further analysis. Tweaks would be different in base game vs spaced out.
Has a hard time competing with Beetas since it both requires energy and has a lower yield. Its only benefit over beetas is the lack of radiation emission and there not being any risk of being stung.
This building has a pretty niche use case for mutating plants (where it still isn't that great), It is not a good option for radbolt generators early on. The manual radbolt generator is far more resource efficient at the cost of dupe labor.
5 Wheezeworts in a V-shape produce WAY more radiation without electricity, provided you have a safe way to feed them phosphorite or can plant them with pips.
This probably means nerfing the radiation output of Wheezeworts
Lead is abundant and highly useful for wires that run in comfortable temperatures. Its abundance totally takes from the cost/tradeoff of conductive wires (and automation to a lesser extent)
In most other instances, its low overheat temperature is a great tradeoff for buildings that are built with refined metal
It might be interesting if it also counted as a metal ore (similar to thermium and steel) since the -20 overheat temperature makes it impractical for many use cases.
This would be especially helpful for radiant gas pipes due to the thermal conductivity.
Proposed:
- Can no longer be used for wiring (maybe)
- Can no longer be used to build steam turbines
- Also counts as a metal ore
- Can be fed to plug slugs
There is a precedent for this change since mafic rock cannot be used for plumbing
Not really worth the effort unless you have mushrooms and a gas range.
It's not particularly difficult to domesticate, however it is still costly due to the bleach stone requirements. Squeaky pufts and a chlorine geyser are necessary to produce waterweed sustainably.
Raw lettuce isn't very good and the only recipes requiring it are made in the Gas Range.
Huge hassle to domesticate for minimal benefit. You would only ever do it to flex.
The ethanol requirements must be supported by an arbor tree farm, you need to keep the farm cool, and for all that hassle, you still have to combine it with pincha peppernut to get a decent morale.
Arbor trees do not need to change, as the petroleum generator's reduced pwater output compensates for the ethanol distiller's ethanol output.
Slicksters don't eat CO2 fast enough to remove your typical hydrocarbon CO2 output, requiring ridiculous scale to put a dent on anything. It's usually more practical to pump it into space
You also get ungodly amounts of meat as a side effect.
Proposed:
- +100% CO2 consumption and conversion rate for normal and molten slicksters (longhair slicksters to be left as-is)
- -75% meat output on death (or maybe they drop coal when they die instead of meat?)
Vents don't output enough to feed more than one or two pufts, so pufts end up starving to death and output hardly any of their goodies.
I'm not sure what to do here.
They're a decent power source, but they depend on a resource that is only sustainable via space mining.
It is probably fine for them to be an early-mid game power source since most late-game options are way better anyway.
Proposed:
- Can eat lead (except this doesn't solve the problem because lead is not renewable)
Niche use case. They are more efficient at producing coal and can eat polluted dirt (and dupe food), but they can't eat rocks.
They seem to be starvation-ranchable because they don't die of hunger all that readily.
More analysis needed
I am uncertain whether I want to make starvation ranching unviable as a food source, particularly for shove voles.
Too efficient compared to the Uranium Centrifuge
Might be worth adding an efficiency bonus for well-fed hives and reducing the base efficiency to 15%.
They should also have mass loss to mining like dupes do, though perhaps only 40%
There are a lot of no-brainer sources of easy morale that make it far too easy to skill up your dupes
Meanwhile, a handful of what should be great sources of morale just aren't worth it.
The Great Hall bonus is far too easy to obtain for its incredible +6 morale bonus. The simplest way to get it is to add a disabled water cooler and a decorative plant to a mess hall.
Changes:
- Art buff / plant nerf fixes the Decor 20+ item constraint being too easy to satisfy
- Now requires light source
- Reduce morale bonus of Great Hall to +3 and Mess Hall to +1
Proposed: (if possible)
- Recreational building must be active for the requirement to be met (if possible)
- Now requires ration box or fridge
For double the space requirement, bedrooms aren't really worth it for the 1 additional morale you get from it. While the nerfs to other sources are an indirect buff to bedrooms, this room bonus still needs an extra boost.
Changes:
- Increased morale bonus to +3
The conditions are fine, but the bonus is too big considering some of the clever ways you can get these bonuses and trick dupes into walking through them. (e.g. put one in the kitchen, put one next to bedrooms/bathrooms, put one in the main shaft, etc...)
Morale buff reduced to +2 and +4, respectively (from +3/+6)
If it weren't for pips and funky ways to create natural tiles, this bonus would have been about right.
Barbecue provides +8 morale as a byproduct of ranching (which has other substantial benefits that justify ranching on their own.)
Baby critters provide the same amount of meat as adults, making drowning chambers the most straightforward way to produce meat.
Changed:
- Barbecue food quality reduced from 3 to 2 (same as omelette, but more calorie efficient)
- The food morale tweaks below
Proposed:
- Baby critters (first 5 cycles of life) produce 1/4 the amount of meat as adults.
Fish has a similar problem to barbecue if you properly cheese their reproduction mechanics, though they pretty much only get you food, lime, and radiation resistance.
Changes:
- Food quality of raw fish reduced to 1 (from 2)
Food morale is out of control. The morale curve is just crazy and needs to be toned down:
- -1: -1
- 0: 0
- 1: 1
- 2: 2 (from 4)
- 3: 4 (from 8)
- 4: 7 (from 12)
- 5+: 10 (from 16)