*1) Need to be able to salvage the original escape pod you start off with.
2) Need a tablet screen showing the base's total energy, water, and O2 requirements, not just the single structure you're looking directly at.
*3) Storage tanks need to have some built-in indicator, or a tooltip like structures power/o2 usage in the bottom-right, showing capacity and current levels.
*4) Salvaging a structure should either A) drop contents to be salvaged or picked up or B) pick up the components of the interior parts as if salvaged (would be a great reward for upgrading the grinder)
***5) There REALLY needs to be an autosave every 10-15 minutes (or configurable), not just when sleeping. (***the main reason I'm stopping playing this game until future patches. Wasted hours of my life because of this***)
6) There needs to be directions or instructions on how to use the greenhouse and the plants that need different places for different stages along with how to use the composter (and get soil and such). I planted a bunch of pumpkins before I had ever unlocked the fields, tying up valuable space unless I just wasted the only seeds I'd found... which I did.
**7) When opening a storage box of any kind, it should also show the equipped items. It's incredibly annoying having to open and close windows a half dozen times just to move items around.
***8) Internal airlocks don't seem to do anything at all (not talking about double-airlocks leading outside). When I add a structure, my entire base loses all air and internal pressure, no matter how big it is or how much O2 I have feeding into it. It's killed all my crops multiple times. Airlocks should auto-seal and require manual opening if the pressure difference on either side is too great.
**9) Transformers should distribute units of power, not percentages of the total incoming power. It's a major headache to have to rebalance 20+ settings every time I add or modify incoming power to my base.
*10) Batteries need some text displaying, if it's 1000Kwh capacity, and it has 350Kwh incoming power and 100Kwh outgoing power, that the batteries will fully charge in 4 hours and deplete in 10 hours.
11) If a structure is damaged, say a corridor, and the floor panel is destroyed, it isn't replaced if you fully repair the corridor and, instead, you have to completely destroy and rebuild it.
*12) The greenhouse (you know, the building where you create and manage all your food) really needs a place for a refrigerator and a food processor. There’s two perfect spots they can go already, just need to be *able* to put them there.
13) The greenhouse also needs a trash can so you can easily dispose of the useless empty seed mags
*14) More (or custom) colors and tracking headers for the radar and HUD
15) Activating/reading a tablet to unlock a new tech needs to take you back to the inventory screen when the ‘back’ button is pressed on the tablet
16) After unlocking tech A, G, and M, opening the tech tree to that section should swing the display over to and highlight that for a second so we don’t have to go hunting through all the tech trees to find it.
17) A more easier-to-recognize color scheme for locked vs unlocked but not yet learned techs
18) Window heights in corridors need to be higher/larger so you can properly see out of them
19) After unlocking the night vision, the top-right corner “controls” area needs to be amended with “N” activating it. I didn’t even know it was a thing until they kept flashing on/off while typing all of this (take that as another suggested bug fix)
20) 3d printer should either let us toggle or just not display things we haven’t unlocked in the tech tree. Instead, just “dim” the items that there aren’t sufficient materials to make.
**21) There needs to be some sort of overhaul to the 3d printer’s interface. Having to jump back and forth in the screens between printing, inventory, and printed-items-inventory, it’s a lot more difficult than it needs to be.
***22) The “Main Hab” structure is a complete and utter disappointment and waste of valuable resources for being one of the last things in that tech tree you unlock. By the time you can build it, it’s obsolete. Its only advantage is having a window at the top that, if you can build it high enough, can overlock ¼ of your base (should have windows all around or be able to add them)
***23) The lobby and cantina are also disappointingly useless structures I was all too excited to unlock and build. There’s not really any upside to either of them over a workshop.
24) Corridor Joint structures should be listed under the Corridor section, not the airlock section. And unless you plan on introducing a single structure that has a double-airlock with a ramp, just put the airlocks and ramp into the corridor section and do away with the Airlock section altogether.
25) It’s unclear that supplying one of your buildings with, hypothetically, 500kwh power, 50 l/h of water and o2, that it’ll distribute that through all connected buildings. I’ve been spending way too much time and resources trying to pipe power, water, and o2 directly to each building. Alternatively, if you plan to have us pipe things directly to every building, don’t have them share the resources.
*26) A full-wall-section storage piece should be available that has twice the storage as the rover
**27) A brief description noting that the Circuit Box is it’s own container to store circuit boards in would be extremely welcome. I played the first 45 hours of this game without realizing that and it would have saved me huge headaches. Maybe a note saying that it can be opened from the inventory to store boards inside.
28) In the Rover, the compartment where you find a spare helmet and medkit and such, you should be able to put the helmet back into it’s cubby and put a couple medkits and some water/o2 bottles up there. Would be thematic and look like it’s a useful cabinet. As it stands, you pull the stuff out of there and then wish you could put it back as it’s just wasted space.
29) The rover should be able to detach the back half (not just unload the tipper/tanks) to obtain higher speeds
30) The rover should have an optional attachment that either A) has solar panels that can fully charge the vehicle in a day, B) have a large battery that would let you take it for days on the road at a time or C) both
**31) The big rock crusher console being able to see the structure pieces in the 3d printer interface is very nice… but if it’s only going to print the materials to build the structure, and not the structure itself, the workshop’s 3d printer should be able to have the same option (though in a “structures” tab or something separate)
32) The crusher’s should have easier access to get to the top console from the sides of the structure, since it’s unlikely the ramps will be pointing at the base since the rovers have such an abysmal turn radius
33) The ramps should be able to be build anywhere and any height, not solely attach to airlocks. Would be nice to be able to make a bridge over a building or corridor to access internal base spaces otherwise unreachable
**34) Corridor and structure interior lights should illuminate if I’m in or going through an adjacent corridor/structure instead of coming on when I enter them. Would make the base seem much more “always on” (since the base is consuming the power anyways)
**35) Once internal base airlocks actually work like you’d expect, the greenhouse needs a built-in CO2 scrubber to maintain O2 and CO2 levels in that building. It would just make sense.
**36) A compass or access to the radar/map while in 3rd person view while driving is a must-have. Having to stop the vehicle, get out, go to 1st person view, then pull up the map is muuuch more work than it needs to be.
37) When salvaging the damaged ATV we find first (since we can make our own) there needs to be a warning as soon as you START salvaging it that it’ll explode. I was unaware it would do that and the warning sounded AS it exploded in my face and damaged a bunch of battery banks and a few structures as well…. The warning was kind of pointless like that.
*38) The consoles that control water/light/soil/etc should be a (cheaply) constructed component inside structures, that way something like a workshop, that may or may not have any plants in it, doesn’t have it sticking up in the middle of the room for no reason.
**39) Circuit boards should be craftable, even if difficult/expensive. And since there’s already something of a “minigame” for repairing them, that could be used to craft them as well. Maybe print the PCB at the 3d printer and generic “circuit components” to stock the workbench to make our own. Needing the tablets to unlock the tech tree would still be plenty incentive to explore Mars.
I’ve logged over 60 hours in Occupy Mars so far and have, overall, enjoyed myself very much… but there’s a hand full of of absolute must-have improvements that HAVE to be made (see *’s) and a plethora of QoL improvements that would make this an absolute top-notch game that I’d recommend to everyone. Until the must-haves are implemented, I honestly don’t see myself spending another minute in this game. I’ve wasted ****hours**** of my life doing this or that only for the game to lock up my entire laptop (requiring a hard reset) or some random accident happen and I realize the last auto-save was when I slept 4 sols ago… (which is why I’ve now stayed up until 6:30am putting this extensive list together)
And it goes without saying some optimization would be nice as I frequently have times while driving vehicles where my fps will drop to 1-5fps on my i9, 32gb RAM, 1tb m.2, 16gb RTX 3080ti Alienware running 1440p @ 60hz with high graphic settings…. And I mean *very frequently*... but I do understand the game is still beta.
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