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MewnBase

Space-cat crafting/survival game with base building. · By Cairn4

Some Suggestions after a successful run 0.55

A topic by SilverfishJH created May 29, 2023 Views: 312 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+1)

I've just completed a successful run on version 0.55. I enjoyed it, but I have some suggestions, which might improve the game.

I think there could be more information given about how much power is being used by the different buildings, and how much is being generated by the different energy generation buildings. You can see the total at any one moment, but it would be useful to get a daily report for the last few days, or a graph, so you could see how much is being generated and stored over a day-night cycle.

It would be useful to have more information about how much food is being generated, and the meals being consumed. It would make it clearer how much progress you are making towards the base becoming self sufficient, (rather than relying on foraging), which seems to be the first major milestone. It also isn't made clear what the benefit of greenhouses is, and whether there is a benefit other than automating watering.

The autocrafter seems to be a bit fiddly to use. It seems that the plus and minus buttons should be set to increase by 1, rather than 10. Also, it seems that it could do with its own tutorial, and there are a few settings that I think would make it feel more straightforward to you. A keep-producing-indefinitely setting would be useful for intermediate products, such as plate, and it seems that it could be useful to be able to say "produce n additional items then stop", for if you are producing building, tools, etc (where you only want to produce a limited number, even if you take the ones produced), and make that a separate setting from ensuring the stockpile was kept at a certain level, as currently.

The location of Crystals seems a bit unclear. From the wiki, it seems they occur in the Volcanic Biome, but there doesn't seem to be a way of finding these Biomes, beyond just randomly exploring, and not having Crystals blocks your progress to getting purple ore. It seems that it would be nice to get a hint about where they are, perhaps being able to send down probes that reveal the biomasses/resources in the area, or pointing in roughly the direction of different Biomasses. It seems that the focus should be more on the Volcanic Biome being hostile, and having to explore carefully, perhaps needing more heat protection, rather than find the Biome. It seems this could make a good extended end-game/post-game, as it seems that exploring a more hostile region is a natural progression, once you have got the base running well on the resources found in the more friendly areas.

Finally, I'm not sure if the surviving for 30ish days target is a useful objective of Normal mode, as it seems that by the time you have the resources to build a rocket you have probably already made your base self-sufficient, and being able to launch early could be a nice thing to speedrun. It seem that a separate Survival/Endless mode, with some escalating threat or resource requirements, could be a nice alternative mode. 

 

(+1)

1. Energy - part of this is already there. You can click any power generating building to see the details. The biofuel generator is "special" because it needs to be full and clicked with a fuel item.

You can't easily see how much any single building uses though, only by isolating it with a dedicated power source.

For the total generation/usage stats just add a battery to your base. If it doesn't run out, you're doing well.

2. Garden patches have to be manually watered, and will dry up when you're away. They can be watered by the rain directly, so you can absolutely play this way. Upgrading them to a greenhouse simply removes this issue.

Greenhouses are also base modules providing oxygen and shelter, are automatically watered if you have a water tank. One of the tech upgrades also makes them use 25% less water.

Both can be automatically replanted by the auto-crafter, making the greenhouse a fully automatic farm.

3. Unfortunately, the auto-crafter needs a bit of fixing before any new features are added.. Not sure what is the state on that atm.

4. You can actually use the dozer to gather purple rocks. Other than that, just explore the map. The buggy makes it really easy to find multiple volcano biomes. Just remember to pack a meal and a garage setup for air.

5. There already is an endless mode - nothing stops you from loading the save after launching the rocket and completing the mission. You can play on a single save for as long as you want.