LAST EDITED ON Jan-31-22 AT 00:41 AM (EST)
 
Old thread was old and over 50 posts, so figured it was time for a new one.

I picked it up over the holidays, finally played it tonight, in full on no time limit mode, and I’m dig the heck out of it.

It feels like the controls could use some tweaking in some way, but I’m also at a loss about how they *could* be improved, so it’s currently just a vague ‘this isn’t working the way I want it but I don’t know how to fix it’. Maybe the controls get better with a better suit/pack, I’m still early days.

I managed to get myself sucked into the furnace during the tutorial, that was fun! I got pulled in hard enough that even full thruster and reeling in my tether couldn’t get me free. Fun part, they had a bit in the tutorial for the guy telling me it was alright :3

Not sure what to do with the cockpit cabin, at least on the Mackerels. seems like whatever you do with it, you’re going to forfeit a bunch of money. Maybe the furnaceables aren’t as solid to the hulls as I think...

It’s still in early access, it says, incidentally.

EDIT: Started my first ship with proper engines, the Atlas, and I have no idea how to turn off the fuel before cutting into the pipes. I'm not sure if I'm just blind, or you need to cut in, force yourself through, and shut it down immediately. Hmmmmmm.

mouse and key board are faster then untweaked controllers, it's not always present but a lot of ships I've cut into have a fuel flush switch some where in the fuel system

LAST EDITED ON Jan-31-22 AT 02:49 PM (EST)
 
Yeah, trouble was, for the ship I was doing, the flush switches were *behind* the engines, and it wasn’t possible to squeeze in before cutting. Which is really something of a design flaw.

“I needed to cut the fuel line to reach the switch that removes fuel from the fuel line” is on some long ignored maintenance report somewhere.

Also, I’m playing mouse and keyboard, and it’s still feeling....lacking in some way I can’t put my finger on.

maybe use the linecutter setting to make a hole from the outside to the inside?

The Atlas is explicitly designed so that you have to squeeze yourself down the flaming tunnel of death to reach the cutoff switch.

I personally feel it's a *bad* decision -- it's blatantly an attempt to force a certain style of gameplay at the expense of any vestige of versimilitude -- but the dev post about it makes it clear that it's the intended One True Way.

I like Hardspace, and still play it from time to time, but the dev's attitudes and decisions are really starting to rub me the wrong way with the latest patches.

--sofaspud
--

>It feels like the controls could use some tweaking in some way, but
>I’m also at a loss about how they *could* be improved, so it’s
>currently just a vague ‘this isn’t working the way I want it but I
>don’t know how to fix it’. Maybe the controls get better with a
>better suit/pack, I’m still early days.

Yeah, I think movement is supposed to feel off until you can upgrade your equipment.

>Not sure what to do with the cockpit cabin, at least on the Mackerels.
>seems like whatever you do with it, you’re going to forfeit a bunch
>of money. Maybe the furnaceables aren’t as solid to the hulls as I
>think...

It's possible to cut a Mackerel's cockpit apart so that you can sort the materials for maximum return, but it takes such a lot of screwing around for so little return that I've only bothered seriously attempting it once. Certainly if you're in one of the modes where you have limited time and you have to pay for your oxygen and fuel, unless you're way better at the game than I am it's not going to be worth it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

wait, wait, what if... Mackerel, a common fish caught for sale, fish heads are too much trouble to use for much and are usually discarded, HAHA lol on the nose much

Dunno, don't think it's that difficult. Ok, sure, you lose 32 kilos of material, but you know... omelettes, eggs, etc.

Filleting a Mackerel head in quick order

It takes a couple minutes for the slicing apart, once the window is out.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

These days I usually just use the splitsaw to carve out most of the panels from the inner structure rather than vaporize the connecting beams, but the principle is the same, yeah.

If you're aiming for speed then either chucking the entire thing into the processor (and losing out on the furnace materials) or splitsawing is the way to go, if you're going for 100% salvage and those delicious mini-me stickers then the beam method you show here is superior.

--sofaspud
--I've also come to hate Mackerels towards endgame because there's no good way to vent them once the air regulators stop working, urrgh

Geckos are *The Worst* to try to vent, because every single version has a massive single space inside, which includes the crawlspaces, and are just as likely to simply explosively decompress as not. At least a Mackrel is too small to shatter like an egg, it’ll just get flung around the bay a bit. Which is still terrible and bullshit, but not catastrophic. Usually. Might send itself into the barge or furnace...

People in the steam forums saying it makes no sense for a single atmosphere regulator to be able to depressurize more than one room....but that’s exactly what happens when you vent into an internal airlock space.

If they MUST keep the breadboxes bluetacked to the walls, give us a fricking portable regulator item, like the demo charges or tethers, that’ll let us depressurize a space. Hell, make it slow, so we need to wait for it to finish depending on size of the thing being un-aired.

“It’s a puzzle, it’s too easy otherwise”, bull and shit, a *proper* puzzle won’t just up and decide that you lose because you weren’t lucky enough. That’s a game of chance, not skill.

(Also, the story is terribly written and intrusive, and doesn’t respect the players time, taking five unskippable minutes to go through sometimes, with you unable to have ANY actual interaction with it, at any point, except during tutorial bits. And that’s just Weaver saying good boy or try again, depending on how many limbs you lost.)

....that said, the core gameplay loop is zen and addicting, I just wish everything around it wasn’t so *bad*.

I usually don't have a problem with Geckos, since the cockpit method seems to be fairly effective on those beasts (as long as I remember to go through and evac all the air regulators and loose cargo bits first), but late-game Mackerels just give me the fits. If I try to vent via the cockpit, I usually wind up with it pirouetting around the bay and throwing itself into the furnace. If I go the airlock route, it lurches sideways into the processor.

Or the reactor cooks off after being nudged by a bit of random space trash that I can't grab and it blows itself to flinders.

Or the winglets (exolab variant) are overlapping each other and cause it to rotate like a prop as soon as one is torn free, causing random breakage inside that usually leads to either coolant superfreezes or fuel tank splosions.

Or something bumps a battery pack and OH GOD ALL THE SPARKS AND FIRE. Even when there's no air for the fires to, y'know, burn with.

Or the crawlspace between the hull and the interior spaces is sealed off and retains pressure even after I've managed to vacuum out the rest, and when I pop the seals at the back the entire thing rockets forward at mach 8 and bounces off the hab.

--sofaspud
--you can see it dwindle into the distance for a surprisingly long time before the game tells you it's gone

Ugh. Friggin damn AIs breaking the rules. *no vents* on the walls in the area at all, and guess what happens? *it decompresses and recompresses the ship, multiple times.*

What the hell.

>Ugh. Friggin damn AIs breaking the rules. *no vents* on the walls in
>the area at all, and guess what happens? *it decompresses and
>recompresses the ship, multiple times.*
>
>What the hell.

Yeah, I hate the AI BS. I can understand, and even appreciate, that the little murderbots want to EXTERMINATE. And if they're attached to something -- fuel tanks, the reactor, a power junction, air regulators, etc -- then I can understand and accept that whatever magic space voodoo they're using can cause those bits to malfunction in OSHA-violating ways -- as long as they're still functional bits. When you've removed all power sources or opened the ship like a sardine can then the attitude-problem roombas should not be fucking *able* to cause you grief.

You had your chance while I was carefully maneuvering around you, murderbots. The devs are just lazy and cheating on your behalf.

--sofaspud
--I don't even bother with infested ships any more, they irritate me so. damn. much.

Oh, the ghost ships don't bother me in themselves. It's only really annoying when they're attached to fuel tanks. And harrowing when attached to the *reactor*. My problem is with the pressurization system, which is just kookoo bananas bullshit.

And some asshat on the steam forums telling me that 'we're shipbreakers, we don't handle the complex stuff' when I complained about how if there's actually a central air system that just isn't modeled we should be able to access it is just infuriatingly insulting. Like anybody who takes apart something is just some monkey doing labor because the people with *skills* are too busy. Shithead.

I did my first tanker last night, and that is *wildly* profitable, but holy crap, I don't think it's worth it at all. *so* many little fiddly bits and barely accessible cut points

Well THAT'S fun. The training ship they gave me for the class 2 reactors had a pressurized reactor bay and nothing I did or had access to would DEpressurize it non-explosively. Multiple airlocks around it and the only vent in the reactor area was broken. And I guess the ECU's panel maybe didn't work? I had to pull the side off and manually yank the coolant pods off, which started the reactor to meltdown, with me still not having any way to depressurize the area. I ended up just force closing so I can try again with a hopefully different ship.

As you progress you'll run into fewer and fewer working pressure regulators, until you'll never see any more at all. Part of the mid- and late-game is figuring out how to depressurize safely.

Personally I like (ab)using airlocks and cockpits. Because of how the physics work, if you can safely depressurize a small area (or at least non-explosively), you can then use the doors between it and other areas to depressurize them.

Even if the area on the other side of the door is far larger than the one you're in, it'll still 'eat' all the air pressure. I don't pretend to understand how. :)

Another trick is to vaporize (not just cut) the small structural beams surrounding a wall panel, which creates a narrow gap that air can vent through without shattering everything.

Usually.

--sofaspud
--sometimes you'll run into load-bearing cockpit glass and trigger a reactor meltdown, but that's just a shipbreaker's lot I guess

Seriously, the physics system is insane in this. Exploding a tanker’s fuel tanks just shatters the structure around it, but opening a door into a small room will send the entire ship, which even more than a dozen tethers couldn’t budge, careening around the bay.

About class 2 reactors, is it better to just slice the coolant pipe off while it’s in its controlled meltdown and dump the whole thing into the barge, or try to pick it out of the shielding? I’ve been doing the latter, but it leaves a lot of junk floating around while the reactor sparks off.

LAST EDITED ON Feb-07-22 AT 01:24 PM (EST)
 
So class 2's are (IMO) kind of stupidly non-obvious about 'proper' removal methods. The trick is to flush the fuel and clear a path for the reactor to the barge. Don't touch the reactor itself or the coolant pipes just yet, but it's a good idea to yank the panels around the reactor and move anything that's in your way (except the aforementioned pipes).

Finally, flush the coolant. Flushing the coolant is handled at the ECU. If you pry the service panel off the ECU you'll find some coolant cylinders inside. Grab those and the reactor will enter controlled meltdown mode with a full health bar, giving you plenty of time to get back there and yank it free and tether/shove it into the barge.

The ship class really affects how you approach it, too. Geckos are harder than Javelins, generally -- the exception being I forget which one exactly but it has the reactor along one side rather than at the back. For that one you can get the reactor out safely in less than 5 minutes elapsed, assuming you win the depresssurization lottery (vent cockpit with sealed doors, open doors one-by-one back through ship).

Javelins are easy-peasy. Get back to the engine module, vent (the airlock method or the small-gap methods work best, depending on specific variant you're facing; I've found the rear cockpit method is bad on Javelins), flush fuel (not coolant), then cut the hull connectors and tether the entire back end back to the back wall. Barge the thruster. Cut the next section of hull connectors and tether the hull segment back to the back wall as well, then yank the panels from the reactor. Go flush the coolant and toss the reactor straight down into the barge. Again, less than 5 minutes.

I should note that the speed bit only matters if you're concerned with it; if you're going for maximum salvage, then take your time, salvage everything else first. Until you disconnect the coolant the reactor's going to wait patiently for you.

--sofaspud
--

Ohhh, so it *is* safe to yank the panels off the reactor first? Cool. I should screw around in free play mode to see what's safe to do later.

Yep! Just be careful to not bump the reactor or the pipes around it with the panels. Sometimes they can take a surprising amount of abuse, other times they nope on out of there at the slightest scratch.

I should really dig up and post a screenshot I was particularly proud of. I salvaged everything, literally everything, except the reactor and the ECU and the coolant pipes connecting them. Just a glowy reactor sitting there with a big ol' ECU connected to it by a long snake of coolant pipe. Fun times :D

--sofaspud
--

LAST EDITED ON May-24-22 AT 03:21 PM (EDT)
 
So....the game went "live" and out of Early Access today. And there's a whole STACK of "quality of life" improvements, all the parts of the story are now playable, and the New Hotness is both Hot and New.

And I hate it. All the rub, buff and shine is all well and good? But, they replaced the voice actors with "professionals"...and it's utterly jarring and the voices sound, honestly, bland and boring.
Do NOT like, in any way shape form or fashion. Hope to holy poop they at least give you the choice of having the original voices or the new ones.
Of course, HIGHLY unlikely, but one can hope.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

At first, I couldn’t hear a mew voice for Weaver, but now, yeah.

If it was a union thing, they could have at least gotten new people who could do a *similar* quality job.

And of course, still no skip button for the story dialogues. I’ve taken to just tabbing out and tuning it out while they drone on. I don’t *care*. Stop interrupting gameplay to TRY to make me care about these people, your writing isn’t good enough. I’m a rank amateur and I could get a better story out of this while keeping the same themes of plucky underdogs exploited by a cartoonishly evil corporation.

I don't hate the new voice acting, myself. I also can't tell (or remember, rather) a difference between the original VAs and the new crew. Most of the dialogue... seems fine? Not horrible? However, it suffers from one of the most common problems I've seen in games, in that there are jarring transitions between actors at times. Especially when someone is being interrupted, it *never* goes smoothly; you don't get the sense they were actually interrupted by the second speaker. Instead, they... stop talking mid-word, there's a definite pause, and only then does the 'interruption' occur as the second person starts talking.

It's maddening to me and yet I can't ding them too much for it because it happens in damn near every game I've ever played that has voiced dialogue. Frustrating!

Voice issues aside, I... am deeply unsatisfied with how the story played out. Without going into spoilers, I'm just going to say that the Act 2 buildup (where they left us hanging for months while working on the final release) felt like it was leading to an exciting climax, like you were going to do something new and exciting to resolve the conflict.

And then... *wet fart noises*

I mean, seriously, that's it? THAT is what you, the developers, think is a satisfactory way to end this story you've laid out for us? The weakness of the story aside -- and it's certainly not gripping, let's be honest -- I was still interested in seeing what happened. And now... this has got to be in my top five list of the most dud wet firecrackers of a climax that I've seen. The impression I got was that the devs were tired of working on the game and just wanted to ship and be done with it.

Guess I should be glad it dropped at all instead of becoming abandonware?

Regardless... the bugfixes are nice -- and welcome! I'm not sure if I agree with the decision to ensure (for example) that there's at least one working air regulator on every ship even into top-tier stuff, but I can live with it.
Figuring out how to safely depressurize was part of the challenge and I enjoyed it. Salvage Geckos no longer spontaneously dismantling themselves is a plus. I wish they'd fixed the 'reverse airflow' bug, which is still there (pop a pressurized compartment, air rushes out towards you, and the ship moves in the same direction instead of opposite the thrust). And the physics is still stupidly wonky in places: a 1000kg thin spindly chunk of armor plate can cause the entire rest of the ship, 100x the mass, to start spinning wildly if you accidentally brush the two together. It's dumb (though having watched a few R.A.C.E. videos, it's apparently an accepted exploit to get the high scores).

I dunno. Overall I like the gameplay, still? I really wish there were bigger ships to break apart. But the story conclusion -- or rather, the way it was handled -- has actively pissed me off and it'll be a while before I launch another runthrough.

--sofaspud
--

I found all of the characters except Weaver to be profoundly unlikeable, especially Lou and Hal, who are supposed to be the two main people, a kind of angel and devil figures for you who like..are supposed to be the pro and anti union, but the Corporation is far too cartoonishly evil, and Lou is pushy, naive and seemingly uncaring about others safety (By signing you up to receive union related material without your approval)...

And of course, the lack of a skip button, which disrespects the players time with pointless, poorly written interruptions, some of which are five to ten minutes long, leaving you unable to do *anything* except sit through it, being Storied At and trying to force you to care. Meanwhile, I'm just here wanting to get back to actually playing the damn game.

If the writing was good, I wouldn't want to skip it, but it's not, so I do.

New Weaver is close in voice, but the cadence and tone and even accent is *off*.

Apparently, the physics of depressurization actually causing a body do move *towards* the depressuized section is a real thing, because of how vacuum works? But also, that would require the ships to be pressurized to like 50 atmospheres in order to move the rest of the ship anyway

Every ship having at least *one* working regulator is a damn godsend. You shouldn't be forced to explosively decompress part of a ship to get the rest of it vented unless you've done something wrong in the first place. And the changed ways power is delivered through a ship makes that more annoying, so, that should be at least part of the puzzle. Making sure there's still power to use doors and airlocks. And manual controls *for some reason*. (Seriously, they're manual because you're supposed to be able to do it no matter what, why is power needed to unhook a reactor from thrusters?)