Day/Night Cycle is Brutal

It just feels like it's 4 times longer. Once you get into space, it stops being a real issue but planetside, it's pretty brutal (but realistic). It wouldn't be as bad if these bodies included orbits, so that some nights you'd have moonlight providing higher illumination.

i agree, have night be slightly shorter, 1 hour night 2 hours day (to avoid messing with the current timing) and then maybe slowly switch the balance back to simulate summer-winter daylight times if they ever want to put seaosns into the game

I'm playing Survival (Welcome to Verdure). I'm trying to get enough Ice and build a ship to fly to Vallation Station and continue the Contract Missions.

I actually think the times (approximately 90 minutes for each) are pretty good. It's just that, when Solar Power is the only power source you have, every minute of Night is spent waiting for it to be over. Simply sleeping through it would be ideal.

Since batteries start with 30 percent charge and theres no penalty for grinding them down at the moment you can use that to cheese through a night. It also doesn't take that long to unlock wind turbines. In fact it gives you a base with a wind turbine, the barn. Put a battery there, it already has over head lights. You can happily ship build through the night.

I'm not sure how much "immersion" means to you, but it's the main reason I play games like this. Nonsensical things like grinding down a dead battery to rebuild it as a 30% battery is the kind of thing that destroys immersion for me.

I don't doubt that it "doesn't take long to unlock wind turbines" if you know what you're doing. As a new player who's not looking for spoilers and is just following the natural progression of Contract Missions, I haven't unlocked Wind Turbines and I've already completed two missions in space.

I appreciate the adivce, though. I built my base close to the Barn (actually took over the Free Scrap area because it looked cool), and I've regretted it frequently. I think I got confused when I couldn't build a ship at the Barn by starting with a Landing Gear on the Barn's floor. That made me think it was off limits to me. I realize now the Barn shows Owner = Player, and I can't start with the Landing Gear on the base I built, either.

i aggree with you about the "immersion" i dont like the idea of grinding down a battery and replacing it with a new one thats got enough power to last me the night.

though because the game is still in development, that capability (i would say) is likely to change. but right now, its more valuable to not be so.... strict.

THE IDEA! that this thread brings though... SEASONS.

ive already traced the sun across the sky and watched as its light interacted with verdure's rings.... and SEASONS! ontop of THAT! and weather, and all the good stuff that changes with it... yeah.. solar/wind/reactor.... multiple sources of power are a legit must.

Matt Knowles. The Barn gets transferred to you as grid owner, the free scrap place does not.

The barn comes with a wind turbine and some lighting, you can easily install more. it's clearly the intended solution for getting through the first couple of nights until you unlock wind turbines.

> Nonsensical things like grinding down a dead battery to rebuild it as a 30% battery is the kind of thing that destroys immersion for me.

Yeah I don't like this mechanic. I would rather the game have you build the battery cell and battery unit as separate pieces so I don't end up with an inventory full of cells at different charges that I can't do anything with.

The batteries should be built as a full charge, and then if they are deconstructed return the power material relative to the charge remaining. Right now, you can't deconstruct the power module/cells at all unless they are in a battery unit.

Or have different grades of batteries be possible, eg "iron battery cell" which provides 10%, "nickel" which provides 20%, "copper" 30%, "lead" 40%, Silicon "50%" that affect their maximum capacity as well. If you then deconstruct a 0% charge battery cell, the "power" material is lost anyway, so you can't just keep rebuilding it to recharge it, and building it with abundant materials like nickel (which is seemingly infinite while planetside) shouldn't allow for making batteries charged enough to only need one.

On top of this, I think multiple energy sources are needed to account for day/night. The H2O2 generator should work in reverse for power generation. If you put Ice in it, it should split it into H2 and O2 tanks. If on a planet with an O2 atmosphere, it only needs the H2 tank. At night if there is insufficient power to power whatever is on, it should then have a "generate power" manual/auto option where it then takes stored hydrogen/oxygen and turns it back into ice/water while generating the power.

At any rate, short of adding hydro-electric dams to rivers when they add water, or adding pyroelectric generators for thermal vents/magma or geothermal for water/lava, there's no guarantee that other types of power generation are possible yet. Sure a biomass burner (see Satisfactory) should be a conceivable option if we could harvest the trees and plants, but that should be really hard to generate enough power with (eg enough to charge a battery for lights/radio beacon, not engines). Coal, Oil and Natural gas would only work on a planet that has a biosphere and an ocean. No ocean, no reason for oil/gas/coal to exist.

And if we can build water platforms on an ocean then tidal power should be an option. Clearly a space ship can't make use of any fuel other than hydrogen for purely logical reasons rooted in reality. Natural gas is theoretically something that could be used instead of hydrogen as a fuel, but the process requirements to capture it would be far higher than just using ice/water to generate hydrogen from. Storing an oil-based fuel for a rocket just wouldn't work since it requires oxygen to combust.

For me the night is brutal because the lights are so limited. I feel like I'm grounded for the night as I cannot fly safely in the pitch black dark of the night. I have installed spotlights and interior lights all around my ship but they are useless within what feels like 20m. I have a pocket-size AA battery LED flashlight IRL that has ~200m throw, so it feels really really bad that our huge ship mounted spotlights have such a short throw.

Could take the approach Subnautica uses and require that the battery/power cell be made first, and that is a required part that you can't backpack build automatically. In Subnautica 1, there are two types of batteries and power cells, the latter ones require an exotic material that doesn't respawn.

So you have two possible build processes:

a) build the power cell first, out of whatever material you can make it from, and then make the battery unit for the ship/base that consumes the battery

or

b) build the battery unit first, that does not populate a power cell, and then build the power cell out of whatever is available.

The latter option is a bit more correct engineering-wise I feel. To dispose of a power cell/battery it has to be deconstructed with something other than the grinding tool or it explodes. Thus disincentive the "deconstruct-reconstruct" the battery indefinitely. When recycled, whatever the charge remaining returns the material. So if it's an iron battery, at 50% it returns 50% of the iron ore used. Same with anything else. The charge capacity is different for certain materials, but not the load.

I largely feel the backpack building in SE2 largely mirrors subnautica and no man's sky way it's done where the materials are pulled out of the suit inventory, ship inventory or structure/megaship inventory if there is an appropriate upgrade that supports it. So it would make sense to also just make spare batteries/power cells and swap them out into charging systems. If a ship is damaged, you could still potentially pull the battery/power cell out of it and build a new one if it was an expensive (in materials) battery to make.

thats sort of like how se1 does it, just in se2 the power cells are modular and we can swap them between batteries. i hope that is what the future plan is for batteries.

its just a matter of adding the battery modules to the build list. probably from gear forge. then the batteries are built without the module.

I disagree. I think night should be shorter actually. Believe me, I LOVE night time. But, day and night aren’t 1:1 on Earth or a lot of other planets, and universally every game with a day cycle has shorter nights, it’s just good game development. Instead, I would shorten it by just about 20~ minutes, and have some sort of bonus and disincentive to nighttime. Think Minecraft, you can sleep through the night to regain some health, or you can go out and fight extra mobs for bonus loot. Night lasts just long enough that it presents a challenge and a change in scenery, but not long enough that it becomes a chore or, even worse, a softlock for an early game/new player.

Edit: Forgot to mention something relevant to other replies in this thread. Learning to navigate at night is a fundamental challenge that you must learn (in my opinion) no matter what. Going up into space presents crazy, ethereal and strange lighting opportunities. Of course it does, its space. So if you haven’t learned to navigate at night, going up into space simply shifts the locales of where you crash, not the chances of it. Hitting a dark mountain peak means you failed to use caution where you should have. Making nights brighter or shorter or whatever else is just training wheels on the actual problem which will always be present later on.

This would be the most sensible solution, it literally solves every problem in the most interesting way possible, and I would love to watch large MP servers develop infrastructure around the equators of planets and still feel like I’m an explorer at the poles. Unfortunately I think this would be a major implementation, or at least very resource intensive.