I've put hundreds of hours into Rimworld and tried to get back into it recently. The DLC are pretty good and the mod community is just superb. But after putting a few hours into any colony, what ends up killing the vibe for me is the inevitable realization that the game is basically just a random challenge generator — e.g. as your colony becomes prosperous, a bunch of seeming arbitrary disasters are thrown your way. I wish there were a way to have the game be more like an emergent simulation, but maybe it requires the complexity of DF for it to feel right.
I know I shouldn't recommend it because it is extremely addictive, but try Oxygen Not Included. To me it is like Rimworld, but without the feeling of arbitrary nonsense sometimes literally falling on your colonists' head. There is a lot of challenges, and all of them are natural consequences of the simulation. It's much more "emergent simulation" although since the simulation is much more focused on physics than humans, it might feel a bit too technical.
Oxygen Not Included is a ton of fun, the thing that makes me abandon my playthroughs is that, after learning so much of fake-plumbing, fake-hvac and fake-electrical installation mechanics, embarking on ever more ambitious projects that demand more planning and player-labor (harnessing that natural gas vent!) feels like a bit of a waste of time. It's so much of a job that I feel like I could be preparing to be an actual HVAC technician in real life with the amount of time and effort spent into keeping gases flowing through pipes at the right temperature in a simulation.
And debugging when something goes wrong can be really tedious if you're currently focused on another project.
That's what gets me ultimately. I get a good colony going, but end up trying to do something just a little bit ambitious, but there's something that starts breaking and requires so much effort to fix, after a while I just give up.
Adding one new station machine can result in you having to redesign the whole plan of your power distribution network.
Want to make those cool atmo suits? The noob trap is refining metal with the crusher and running out of easily accessible copper and iron.
The more long-term sustainable way is using the electric refinery.
It wasn't the only piece of infrastructure that led to it, but in my last base I had to redesign the whole power grid to have segregated electric networks of high-voltage wire leading to various power regulators that acted as substations delivering power to separate lower-voltage networks.
It was a cute puzzle but I didn't feel like I accomplished something from all that work, damn. I guess it's an analogue as to how it works in the real world, but I don't know enough about how it works in the real world as to tell how simplified and fake the game version is, what did I learn really?
And now you have to deal with all the heat dissipation from all this, time to learn the mock version of another infrastructure-related profession.
I’d agree with this one. On one hand, small tasks like wiring up a new volcano tamer can be a good bite-sized puzzle for a session. But last run I played I just ran out of steam at the prospect of building a petroleum boiler again. It's fiddly, error-prone, and to do it optimally you really need to prototype in debug mode. Sounds too much like a chore!
That said I got many, many hours of fun mastering the simulation up to that point, so it’s still a strong recommend for me.
No, I said that ONI crosses a threshold for me where I feel like I'm investing too much time into learning a simulation of a real-world trade to be worth it, it feels a bit hollow after a while that I'm devoting so much time to it and not learning the real thing.
I guess that Guitar Hero and Farm Simulator wouldn't be games for me either, I feel some guilt of not learning the actual thing after a while.
Edit: But to the credit of ONI, that's after ten hours of fun, and I go back to it once a year or so. My bases won't extend to the hundreds of hours and explore all the game mechanics, but I've still gotten a lot of enjoyment from the game.
My heartburn with ONI is that it seems to fall into that category of game that is all about "it's all about the journey, and discovery!11" which makes debugging anything incredibly hard. Why is water not flowing? Who knows, the computer won't help me
Life also doesn't come with an instruction manual nor any handy mouse-overs, but in life I can use my existing years of experience and non-2D view of the world to deduce what's wrong. In a game, I only have access to the information the game chooses to share with me
I feel you, but unless you really want to experience the game without any outside resource (in which case, good luck, and I understand being turned off), I really encourage you to try again while using guides, the wiki, and asking questions on forums/discord.
The community is overall very welcoming, and it's an old game by now, with most things figured out.
> I really encourage you to try again while using guides, the wiki, and asking questions on forums/discord.
Some people talk about hating Shenzen I/O and TIS-100 for being "too close to my day job," but for me having to troll through wikis, forums, and (heavenforbid) chat channels in order to debug a computer problem caused by someone not caring about my experience is too close to my day job. I got an adrenaline jolt just reading your sentence because my experience with those things is so incredibly enraging
I just chalk it up to "yet another game that's not for me," similar to my prior contact with Dwarf Fortress. I had actually considered buying the graphical version if it was a "reasonable price" but I'm not paying $25 for masochism
Oxygen Not Included has also much gaminess to it, like gating things behind having to build a Science Workbench Grade 1, Science Workbench Grade 2 etc which seem rather arbitrary.
Thanks for the suggestion! ONI has been in my backlog — absolutely love Klei, the developer — but haven’t found time or energy to try it out, but hadn’t known it was more emergent in style.
It definitely is more emergent than most games once you get past the early stage.
A few examples to make that clear:
- to get petroleum, you have to refine crude oil. There is a building that does that, but you only get 50% of the mass out. On the other hand, if you boil it yourself (raise its temperature to 402°C), you get 100% of the mass. Cue furious designing of an efficient boiler. Then you gotta figure how to efficiently burn it to get water out to produce more crude oil.
- if you think that's cute, you can instead continue the boiling to 510°C and get Sour Gas. Then you freeze it to -162°C (not an easy task) and get Methane. Heat it up again and you get Natural Gas that you can burn for power. That comes out to 6X the power of the previous petroleum boiling.
- you have some salt water provided by a geyser (an infinite source at a fixed output). You can use a building to get water out. But that means Dupes have to operate it. What if instead you boil that salt water to get steam, then cool that steam back to get water in a fully automated setup? Turns out it can be more power-efficient too!
Oxygen Not Included is filled with unexpected behaviors, way more than meet the eye (there is a dedicated wiki page, which is lengthy but still far from complete) that enables to make all sort of crazy contraptions.
I prefer to consider Oxygen Not Included as 2 separate games : the survival game you get at the beginning, and the engineering game you get once you overcome the survival issues. Unfortunately, many people drop off before reaching the engineering stage, or don't expect it and drop off because they only wanted the survival part.
I have only ever played casually, but have dozens of hours into ONI. The thing that kills my enjoyment is how long it can take to get some tasks completed. Like I have a goal to get a natural gas generator going. Except, I only have one smurf who can drill through the ultra hard rock, and he is busy on the other side of the map. Then it turns out we are short on igneous, so I’m stuck waiting for a fetcher to deliver some, so on and so forth. Maybe at the end game you can automate more tasks and free up more workers (instead of losing so many to maintenance activities like food production), but getting there is a slog. Coupled with how big the map can be, it feels like you lose a huge amount of time just getting the right guys into position.
There are mods that make map smaller, make dupes move faster or add tiles that allow them to move faster. You can also train the dupes' athletics skill by forcing them to use the manual generators.
The Spaced Out DLC also has smaller asteroids, it changed the game so it now requires more "inter-planetary" automation. I highly recommend trying the game with the DLC, but I'm not sure if Steam allows refunds for DLCs.
It's blananced to a point it always feels incredibly fair, and there are sliders and fine-tuned adjustments you can do if you wan to make it "just a little more chaotic", or "a slower start", etc.
I agree with everything you said. Except the DLCs - while they add content, they feel like somebody is copying from a Game Design book. Here is a cool new thing, but we will make it miserable and hard to use in these ways. Have fun.
Also in general Rimworld is pretty linear somehow. I play a few colonies, I get bored, then take a break for half an year. And repeat.
