Goonhub
10-08-2014, 03:58 PM
It's quite easy to grab enough artifacts with telesci to last the entire round. But I must admit, art-research needs some more variety.
Since the alien seed have gotten the seed sprite I have only ever seen one kind of tiny artifact, the art-battery.
Handheld artifacts are basically never a bad thing. Though they are mostly art-beakers and always with the same boring water-saltpetre mix (they should come with some random chems/cocktails, especially stuff used in recipes that is otherwise very hard to get in large quantities). The non-beakers are easy enough to identify and while activating them can be a pain you always get a good thing. I've never seen the mining or activator artifacts, the former probably because I don't have any rocks to test them. Never seen a handheld noisemaker either.
The big artifacts are basically useless once you've found the first healing one. Most of the time you just get annoying stuff, sometimes an artbomb you might have a use for, mabye a fun injector or an
owlbomb. But you always risk getting borged while dealing with them.
More variety in the smaller artifacts would be nice, especially some things that are actually dangerous to you. More variety for the bigger ones would be appreciated as well of course.
For getting artifacts quicker the separate trading option seems fine, another idea would be to make a mini-mining magnet that would only grab ~4x4 asteroids with at least one artifact inside. That way research could also get some ores, make the cooldown longer than the regular mining magnet and it should be fine.
I also think the instruments should have more tells as to what an artifact does. Xray is fine, the heater has it's moments but should really control at a higher temperature range. Why is it worse than a chem heater? The elec_box very rarely shows something but it's good when it does, still you'd expect some more response from it. The pitcher&impactpad are still completely useless while being the most work of all the instruments. I'd probably replace them with an oscillation device that vibrates the artifact at a certain frequency and measures the response. Perfect for recognizing noisemakers.
Finally, some alterations to how artifacts work would be neat. How about giving the artifacts a series of trigger conditions, similar to pulsing different wires with hacking, that will get different respones. Artifacts could have a deactivation trigger so you could shut down bombs, forcefields and noisemakers. Another trigger could be similar to shocking a door, making the artifact do bad stuff for a limited amount of time. Or maybe it could toggle between a helpful/harmful state. With multiple triggers though they would have to be less lenient about when they activate and thus the instruments would need to give some indication how close you are to a signal. They could also do with an actual interface instead of console commands.
Since the alien seed have gotten the seed sprite I have only ever seen one kind of tiny artifact, the art-battery.
Handheld artifacts are basically never a bad thing. Though they are mostly art-beakers and always with the same boring water-saltpetre mix (they should come with some random chems/cocktails, especially stuff used in recipes that is otherwise very hard to get in large quantities). The non-beakers are easy enough to identify and while activating them can be a pain you always get a good thing. I've never seen the mining or activator artifacts, the former probably because I don't have any rocks to test them. Never seen a handheld noisemaker either.
The big artifacts are basically useless once you've found the first healing one. Most of the time you just get annoying stuff, sometimes an artbomb you might have a use for, mabye a fun injector or an
owlbomb. But you always risk getting borged while dealing with them.
More variety in the smaller artifacts would be nice, especially some things that are actually dangerous to you. More variety for the bigger ones would be appreciated as well of course.
For getting artifacts quicker the separate trading option seems fine, another idea would be to make a mini-mining magnet that would only grab ~4x4 asteroids with at least one artifact inside. That way research could also get some ores, make the cooldown longer than the regular mining magnet and it should be fine.
I also think the instruments should have more tells as to what an artifact does. Xray is fine, the heater has it's moments but should really control at a higher temperature range. Why is it worse than a chem heater? The elec_box very rarely shows something but it's good when it does, still you'd expect some more response from it. The pitcher&impactpad are still completely useless while being the most work of all the instruments. I'd probably replace them with an oscillation device that vibrates the artifact at a certain frequency and measures the response. Perfect for recognizing noisemakers.
Finally, some alterations to how artifacts work would be neat. How about giving the artifacts a series of trigger conditions, similar to pulsing different wires with hacking, that will get different respones. Artifacts could have a deactivation trigger so you could shut down bombs, forcefields and noisemakers. Another trigger could be similar to shocking a door, making the artifact do bad stuff for a limited amount of time. Or maybe it could toggle between a helpful/harmful state. With multiple triggers though they would have to be less lenient about when they activate and thus the instruments would need to give some indication how close you are to a signal. They could also do with an actual interface instead of console commands.