[Suggestion] Minor Automation

[t0rchic]

A lot of the complaints I'm seeing in the steam reviews - positive or not - is that the game gets tedious and to an extent I agree. I'm not sure what's planned in terms of upgrades, but my only real issue with the game is that even once you've upgraded your corrals to collect plorts for you and feed your slimes, you still have to do the same few actions over and over multiplied by your number of coops/farms/corrals, it's just instead of firing food through the barrier you shoot it into a container and instead of vacuuming plorts inside of a corral you do it outside. Part of the charm is in the relative simplicity of using the game's systems of course, and I'm not asking to remove that. Instead, I'd like to suggest making one of these two suggested changes.

Unless there's a better idea already in the works, of course.

1. Faster vacuum speed from plort collectors and silos and faster fire rate when holding down.

As an example, I have 15 Honey Tabby Largos in a corral that produce 60 plorts each time they all feed on their favorite food. I have to sit there for almost a minute to vacuum the plorts out of the collector and then another minute to sell them all. Same situation when putting food into the autofeeder; I have to sit there slowly shooting one at a time. The fire rate when holding down the mouse just feels too slow. I wouldn't mind having to run through my ranch like a proper farmer and fill up all my auto feeders/sell all my plorts manually if it just didn't take so much sitting there holding down a single button, especially with more than a couple corrals to deal with. The best way to implement this in my opinion would be to allow players to set a speed themselves on a slider or drop down for fire rate, because I'm sure there are people who are perfectly happy with the current speed or those who might have trouble controlling how many of something they want to shoot out at higher speeds.

2. Some form of automation past collection and feeding.

I come to Slime Rancher with a lot of experience in automating systems Minecraft modpacks, and I think this game could gain a lot from looking at how that sort of automation works on a simple scale. We already have automatic plort collection and feeding. It would be nice if it were possible (and expensive) to, as a few examples to cut down the tedium of the most repetitive tasks:

* upgrade a farm and set it to automatically harvest and deposit in a specific autofeeder

* upgrade a plort collector to have an "Sell All Plorts" type of button so you don't have to run back and forth between the sell point and the corral, but still have to provide player input

* upgrade a coop to automatically collect a percentage of hens and put them in a linked autofeeder, so the player still has to replace Roostros but doesn't have to carefully vacuum hens or throw chicks back in afterwards

[clmurphy74]

I agree with option 2. This sounds like a good solution to the tedious (and boring) problem of collecting plorts from multiple corrals (and making several trips if the plorts are more than the vac pac can handle) and then going around harvesting crops and hen hens and putting them where they belong. I already have a coop in my grotto, and a carrot garden in my overgrown area so that it cuts down on transporting the stony hens and carrots to those pens.

[Heather]

Welcome to our community t0rchic!
Some good suggestions for sure.

[Tatzelwyrm]

Adding to the suggestion, being able to set how often auto feeders drop food would be nice. If you don't have a full corral for one reason or another, often times you can come back to your ranch to see rotted food in the corrals that slime didn't eat because food pumps out faster than the slime eat it. I don't want to be forced to fill a corral right away just to make the auto feeder not waste the food I put in it. Food rotting in gardens because you were gone too long to pick it up? Fine, I don't care about that. Food rotting in corrals because I can't adjust the auto feeders in any way? Kind of annoying

[t0rchic]

Adding to the suggestion, being able to set how often auto feeders drop food would be nice. If you don't have a full corral for one reason or another, often times you can come back to your ranch to see rotted food in the corrals that slime didn't eat because food pumps out faster than the slime eat it.

I've had the opposite problem, where my slimes aren't getting enough food from the auto feeder and getting hungry. I'm not sure what to think of this one because there's obviously a balance point where your slimes are fed 1:1 that just has to be found, and that's just one of the many challenges of being a rancher right now. I guess with farms automatically depositing in autofeeders it would make sense to have some form of control over them, but my stance on this is a bit of a neutral one.

[nawg]

I came here to make an almost identical suggestion after playing the heck out of this game yesterday. Storing plorts in a silo for later sale is doubly bad because of the extra store/retrieve you have to do. My idea was to stand in front of the collector/silo etc. and press the interact button to plug the nozzle into the port and turbo-blow things in or out. Or it could just open up a menu for more varied interactions like "sell all," "link to silo" or "fill/empty vacpack."

I also fully endorse the notion of connecting the output of a plot to the input of another in whatever form it takes.

Resource management is a fun and engaging decision-making process; inventory management is a mindless chore.