That said, it's also given me a fair bit of time (currently about 50 hours) during which I've experienced some things that would be real quality-of-life changes, in my opinion. And no, I'm not talking about stuff that lets you just automate everything and turns the game mindless - I'm talking stuff that's a little more obscure. I've been a part of closed beta tests for some games before, and while this is hardly closed, it's helped hone me to give good feedback - so I hope you like detailed answers and rationales.
So without much further ado, I present a bunch of suggestions that have probably already been presented 5000 times already. (But I hope not.)
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1) Fire Slimes are frustrating to maintain, due to easily getting out, lack of reliable ash fill indicators, and very fast ash consumption.
- If you've got a trough that's full of ash, their basic movement can make them waltz right out of it - I've lost one due to it wandering out of the trough and me failing to notice it was missing.
- If you've got more than five or so in there, it's also incredibly hard to keep them "fed." I'm currently farming nine of them (it was ten, but as I just said...), and I find myself having to constantly check their area at least twice per day, because if the ash totally runs out, it's catastrophe - you lose them all in one shot, for no reason other than you didn't give them enough ash, and they tore through it like every day is "Ash-Eating Contest Day." The current champion is Sizzly "4Rizzly" S. Lime, who sucked up 25 kilos in a day. No wonder Hobson left.
- Combine this with that you have to manually refill the trough AND that you have to "eyeball" the level of the ash, and it quickly becomes a frustrating experience in a way that is more "pure frustration" than "fun frustration" (which is the stuff like getting burnt). While realistic, it also means that some people who are less observant may fail to notice their ash is low - and come back to a trough devoid of plorts and slimes when they go and get lost elsewhere for awhile.
- The trough also has a bug in that if you refill it with Ash while plorts are down there, the plorts won't get "bumped up" to the new level like the Fire Slimes will.
- The one lifesaver is that when the trough does empty out of ash (mostly) that fire slimes last a good long while - though the irony is that as soon as you put more ash in, they'll immediately crap out a plort, meaning if you have a good amount (like I do), dump ash, and split, they'll actually re-eat about half the ash you just put in.
- It kind of turns Fire Slimes into the slimes that must be "babied" most of all, and you can't do a thing about it except to watch them, and watch them, and watch them - or don't raise them at all, which is probably easier for most people.
- Rather than make it so that they don't "disappear" on different ground (as that'd be cheap and make them riskless essentially), use higher trough walls as an upgrade to keep them from accidentally getting out if the trough is nearly full of ash. This way it's also an extra money sink for the player - and realistically speaking, by the time you even want to buy an incinerator, the amount the upgrade costs would be newpennies. It also increases the amount of ash you could fit in there, reducing the amount of times you have to constantly refill it.
- Ease up on how much ash you eat, son. You're that inefficient that it takes one whole level out of a ten-level trough to produce one plort? Even the Water Slimes aren't that bad, AND they have more water than you can have ash!
- "Auto-burner" that will take items like an autofeeder would, but would turn them into ash, which then gets deposited at regular intervals to keep the ashes filled.
- Better indicator of how full of ash the trough is. (Some kind of monitor like the pens have, except it measures ash level - 4/8 "bars" worth for visibility, maybe? Maybe a percentage indicator?)
2) Ponds are atrociously bad at telling you how much water they have.
- These are even worse than the Incinerator troughs. You add water to the pond, and have to angle the camera very carefully so that the visual distortion effect gives does not block so much of your view that you can't see the water level going up out of the corners of your screen - especially since the increase is so minute that it takes careful viewing to tell the level of the pond in the first place!
- Same as the Incinerator trough, add an indicator telling you how full the pond is of water. No need to automate this; players generally have water on them all of the time at any rate. (Unless you're just starting out, in which case, why are you even buying a pond in the first place...)
3) Boom Slimes all but guarantee that any plorts in their vicinity get everywhere, along with themselves.
- I keep my Boom Rad Largos in the Grotto, as far away as I can and basically kitty-corner from some Phosphor Crystal Largos. They still regularly blast plorts that far away. And yes, I've done everything I can to keep them happy - Music Box, High Walls, Air Net, Plort Collector, even having the Auto-feeder feed them fairly often. Despite that, every 2-3 times I go into the Grotto, I find plorts everywhere - occasionally with Oca Oca for some extra zest. I still have no idea if these plorts can blast into the Phosphor Crystal Largos' pen, but I'm just waiting for the time that blasts one with just the right direction, at just the right vicinity, and I come back to a Grotto with a dozen pissed-off and very hungry Ex-Phosphor Crystal Largo Tarr. (Of course, if this isn't possible, then that'd be wonderful to know.) And yes, I realize this is the Boom Slime's main downside. The mitigation is still basically more of a pain than anything; whether or not that's "fun frustration" or not is up for debate.
- Consider changing the Plort Collector - when it detects plorts, it activates, and it keeps on activating until they're all sucked up. If that's too cheap, then maybe it runs every <x> seconds whenever it detects a plort in the pen. Right now it seems to be timed intervals regardless of if plorts are around or not. If it collected more regularly and efficiently, that'd be less of a chance of plorts going everywhere.
- Some kind of "Blastproof Net" option - essentially, if something bounces off the net as a result of the explosion, it's not counted against the net's "hits" limit. (A slime manually hitting it through jumping or such still counts.) This way, it doesn't completely neuter the drawbacks of Boom Slimes (the explosions still hurt you), though if a bunch of them go off, an Air Net gets quickly vaporized, which is how most of the plorts get scattered - stuff keeps hitting net, net disappears, more explosions, PLORTS FOR EVERYONE! And fun for no one as Beatrix plays 52 Plort Pickup, because the damn collector didn't do its one job of collecting things.
- In the vein of the above, simply make it so plorts/food don't get affected by explosions. Probably neuters the point though, again like the suggestion above - and it'd be very weird considering the physics of everything else.
- More "radical" idea: Happy Boom Slimes don't give a huge explosion, but a more cute "happy" one - like it were a firework or something (pretty to look at, but harmless). This is already what the Dervish Slime does - happy = cute little spinning, angry/hungry = TORNADO OF DEATH THAT FLINGS STUFF EVERYWHERE, so why not reapply that logic here?
4) Some crops are very non-intuitive when they've reached "end-of-life" and need to be replanted.
- I've seen cases where it told me that a Pogofruit was growing... even though no tree was there. A tree will always be there if you are going to create a batch of Pogofruit, so clearly you're not going to be growing any more Pogofruit, are you...?
- While smart ranchers might catch stuff like this (or getting anything less than a full yield on any sort of garden that has Nutrient Soil and Sprinklers) and know it's time to rip the crop out and plant a new one, this is still something that can catch even the most diligent rancher off-guard from time to time - often at the worst possible time. Like when your corral is full of very hungry and very angry slimes.
- Potentially consider restoring the old timers underneath the "Growing" icon, like it used to be back before 0.3.5. This way, ranchers have a chance to see the planting is just about done, and it's time for a new one - if we need to know what we're growing, we can just look at it. The monitor currently is literally telling us nothing useful!
- Alternatively (and possibly a better solution all-around), since all plants have the same amount of "cycles" (4-5 I believe) before exhaustion, indicate how many more times it will bear produce. This is more intuitive than the growing timer, and obviously once you see 0, you're going to rip it out and put fresh produce in.
5) Phase Lemons are pure hit-and-miss (pun not intended); you must baby this plant like your life depends on it if you want a return on it at all.
- I get that they're supposed to be different from literally every other fruit. Thing is... if you don't notice them in time and they drop to the ground, you get NOTHING. Out exploring? Kiss that crop goodbye. Oh, and probably your Fire Slimes too, because if you were gone this long, they're probably just as dead. (See Point #1.)
- There's probably a sizable amount of players who avoid them because to raise them, you need to de facto use TWO gardens - since there's 20 Phase Lemons in a full crop, your only choice to not screw yourself out of getting a full crop is to grow a Pogofruit tree; everything else (except for Odd Onions) is 15 at max. Finding Pogofruit is no problem since it's right outside your ranch (or in it if you got the Overgrowth expansion), but needing to be the only thing for which you need to grow two plots worth of stuff for, and you've got no choice? Not cool.
- Between this and the difficulty in keeping Quantum Slimes around and happy considering they'll wander off out of their corral as soon as they get hungry, why would you even want to bother with raising either of them? Plort value means nothing when there's eventually other, easier or more rewarding slimes that can be raised and have their food grown with far less fuss.
- A Slime Science gadget that can directly harvest and "convert" Phase Lemons right off the tree - the handy-dandy Reality-Linking Light Metaphysical Nebulizer (AKA The RL-LMN). This way it's a considerable sink of both Newbucks (to get the lab) and a Slime Science sink (to get whatever's needed to make it). If the player's going to go that far for it, I think they deserve to be able to just pull Phase Lemons off the tree - you've only got so many plots on your ranch, and without being able to reduce it to the same footprint as the others in some way (i.e; one), most people will simply never grow them.
6) Odd Onions are way too unpredictable to give a crap about.
- It's literally a crapshoot. While you can FIND them easily enough, planting them is a roll of the dice in the worst possible way. It is literally possible to plant one and not get a single one in a given crop. To quote a certain other fine game, "Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded."
- While, admittedly, the chances of it doing this to you 4-5 times in a row are exceedingly slim, you are still basically getting 40+ carrots to maybe 6-10 Odd Onions. And then you have a slime who has this as its favorite food? Yeahhhhh... lemme get that one crossbred with something else with a favorite food that's MUCH more easy to obtain, immediately.
- My Crystals were immediately largoed because of how incredibly backwards this was - when they're pure RNG to get, and you have zero way of increasing the odds of them showing up whatsoever, why have Odd Onions on your ranch at all?
- Guarantee at least a percentage of the crop. Odd Onions are the only thing besides Pogofruit that can grow 20 at a time (although you'll never get more than 10 Odd Onions per crop - and I've never gotten that many out of it, highest I think was maybe 6), so make it, say, a 25% chance, as opposed to the current one's pure RNG. This way they're at least somewhat worth farming - a full yield gives you 15 Carrots and 5 Odd Onions.
- Increase the odds (or even guarantee them) but reduce the yield instead. You can guarantee Odd Onions, but maybe you only get, say, seven per harvest. That's still better than the 0-3 you usually get, even if it's not the 15 of every other fruit when you got a Nutrient Soil/Sprinkler garden.
7) There's honestly almost no point (or reward) for the Range Exchange.
- The number of times I've used this? Literally once or twice back in the early access days, and then never again. Every time I looked over there, there was simply nothing that was worthwhile to me... some fruits I already had, some livestock I didn't need. Not even Mochi Miles' sass and offer for lemonade persuaded me. Simply put, if they ain't offering something I'd want or need... why bother?
- I checked what was being offered at the time of making this post - Ogden needs 3 Cuberries, 4 Mint Mangos, and 3 Prickle Pears, and in exchange, I get... 4 Phosphor plorts and 1 Quantum plort, for a grand total of (28x4)+47 = 159 Newbucks worth of plorts. He thinks that's a good deal, but there's one little problem: If I've got a steady amount of Prickle Pears, I've almost certainly got Dervish Slimes, and thus, Dervish plorts, which currently go for 101 Newbucks. EACH.
- I can literally make more just by doing regular farming, because Ogden is a cheapskate or thinks I'm an idiot - he wants my three Prickle Pears when those same three Prickle Pears can get me a whopping 606 Newbucks worth of plorts just by feeding my Dervish Slimes those same three Prickle Pears, and make nearly four times the money as his so-called "deal" would get me - and that's not even counting the Cuberries or Mint Mangos!
- Increase the incentive to trade. Right now you sometimes get some rare Slime Science resources, but usually not the good stuff - or enough to make the cost investment worth it. When you're hurting for the stuff that's hard to get, like those, Phase Lemons, Odd Onions, Silver Parsnips, Prickle Pears... those are much more worthy to trade for.
- While it's nonsensical to make every NPC an idiot who always gives something worth more to the player than themselves, the trade should at least be of relatively equal value - if I can gain (28*6) + (26*8) + (101*6) = 982 Newbucks worth of plorts just by feeding my slimes their favorite foods that Ogden is requesting in exchange for the 159 Newbucks worth of reward he's offering, Ogden can, and will, kiss my slimy brown butt. If he can't give me something in the 800-1200 Newbucks worth range, there is literally zero reason to even consider the offer unless it's something I don't have, or something I'm chronically short on.
- Add some Newbucks as well to the reward. Thanks to the 7Zee Rewards Club, you're never, ever short up for money.
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And while that ends my complaints for now, knowing what's coming ahead, I'd like to give a few thoughts on those as well.
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8) Some sort of Slime Science gadget that lets us "find" those Gordos.
- No, not "Here's the Gordo's location on the map." You don't like that sort of stuff, and admittedly, it would take some of the fun out of exploring. What I'm thinking is more of a proximity sensor. I can picture a cute little "Slime Sensor" which begins wriggling more and more intensely (and cutely) the closer you get to a Gordo, until it's practically trying to bounce out of Beatrix's hand when you can visually confirm it. This removes some of the frustration out of having to hunt and keep a mental list of every Gordo you've popped - and it's a quick way to entice the player to explore. Frankly speaking, if the player can unlock Slime Science but still can't find the Gordos they NEED to defeat to progress further and unlock new areas, playing hide-and-seek with the Gordos (especially since not all Gordos even give a Slime Key) quickly goes from fun little thing to reward observant players to "Screw this, I'm looking up a FAQ." This gives them a way to get some help in-game without being led by the nose.
9) Now that we will have a map... a compass? Please?
- I see a lot of people using very obtuse and frequently confusing directions for how to get to a certain region, often using visual landmarks to go from place to place. Thing is, "Go through this tunnel, then around the second bend, then up the wood ramp, then jetpack across to EXACTLY the third island, into the fourth cave you pass by, and there you'll find Jimmy Hoffa" is just the definition of frustration. At least with a compass, we can give better directions. And for bonus cuteness, you could even combine that with the Slime Sensor, because then you've got both immediate functionality (in the compass) and that occasional "Something important's nearby!" functionality of sensing the Gordo.
10) Last but not least... while we're on the map... let's have some point-of-interest markers the player can place.
- This would actually solve the issue of the player having to memorize all sorts of locations to get specific items (or to tag Gordos). Let them plop down an icon (of a slime, of a fruit, etc.) at their own leisure, so that if they find something important, but need to go somewhere, they can head to it later. Ideally a little text label or a small description box would be quite nice too.
Apologies for the long wall of text, but I hope this was a good read! I love what you guys have done with this game, I love seeing it grow, and I love seeing all the new things getting added to and coming up.
But I also see some of the finicky, or even downright ugly, things that makes some things simply better than others. Why raise Fire Slimes when they need that much babying? Why grow Odd Onions or Phase Lemons, and thereby necessitate largoing or ignoring two kinds of slimes entirely? Why put up with a slime that can Tarr your penned slimes immediately if they're Largos simply by doing its usual drawback? The list goes on and on.
Again, I apologize if some of these have already been suggested by others. But hopefully in this long ramble of a post, someone, somewhere, found something useful and something worth debating if it'd be good for the game or not.
Thank you very much for your time! I've gotta get back to the ranch now. Those bins are probably all filled up with plorts... and I don't have the 7Zee ranks to get the upgrade yet. (God, that's going to take awhile... but it'll get easier once the Refinery all full of plorts!)
