Post #817482

Playing more Oxygen Not Included, and I'm really enjoying playing it somewhat realistically, without exploit-adjacent mechanics. Stuff like liquid locks that can somehow hold back multiple atmospheres of pressure differential or hold a perfect vacuum without the liquid boiling. Or contraptions that rely on the specific details of the physics simulation to magically sort gasses or teleport objects. It makes things messier, which I find fun because it forces you to compensate for things like gasses getting where they shouldn't be and generally try to engineer resilient things. It also means you can't just play on autopilot copy-pasting the min-maxed optimal designs, because pretty much all of them rely on exploit-y behavior. No shade on folks who prefer to play with those mechanics, to be clear. It's just a game, there's no wrong way to play, and it's not unreasonable to take the view that if the mechanic wasn't patched out in the many years the game's been around, they're intended mechanics to some degree. I just found that I wasn't enjoying having a whole bunch of magic things that only work because of incidental quirks of the implementation.