Your comments

The simple answer is that yes, the standard mode with randomized dust storms is still more dangerous than none at all. Basically every day there is a chance that a dust storm will spawn and that chance increases every day up to a 100% chance by Sol 50. So you will be guaranteed to have a dust storm by Sol 50, but likely sooner than that. It gives you a chance to get your habitats in order hopefully in time before the first storm hits.

The big storm mode is just a slightly larger storm that hits within the first few sols, so you don't have as much time to prepare.

I've converted this into its own suggestion topic for further consideration. Thanks.

This is certainly a possibility in the future. Right now the models used for the scout rovers and the downed satellites are placeholders, so I would probably wait until I have the final art for them in order to decide what the different pieces could be used to salvage for.

That is certainly something I would love to do with the smaller scout rovers that you can find. I'll be experimenting with different possibilities when I get to working on the driveable rovers as well.

Could you expand on this a bit? Do you mean that the datapad did not zoom in as expected when standing still and instead stayed zoomed out as it normally would while walking? This is a known bug that is very difficult for me to reliably replicate, but I'm aware of it.

Agreed. See if you can get a photo of a dust devil if you encounter any :)

You can opt in to the dust storm update in the beta tab of the Steam game preferences. I'm putting out another beta in just a minute. If there are no major issues then the build will go live to everyone tomorrow.

I made a change and wrote about it in a related post, here reposted:


"The electrical module no longer requires 100% power to charge the reserve battery. It will simply charge at a rate relative to the total solar power connected to it, but with a max charge rate of 100%. So during dawn/dusk you can still charge the reserve battery at a slower rate. It will still show as "offline" when there is literally no sunlight to produce a charge. This effectively extends the daylight hours in which the unit is operational."


Not really a fix since it wasn't really a bug, but I'm marking it Fixed since I think it mostly satisfies your original objection. Though I may still change the status display slightly to be even more informative.

I really liked this idea along and implemented it along with a change to the electrical module that you alluded to in your other report about it being "offline" at night.


So two things:


1) The electrical module no longer requires 100% power to charge the reserve battery. It will simply charge at a rate relative to the total solar power connected to it, but with a max charge rate of 100%. So during dawn/dusk you can still charge the reserve battery at a slower rate. It will still show as "offline" when there is literally no sunlight to produce a charge. This effectively extends the daylight hours in which the unit is operational.


2) During a dust storm the minimum charge rate is now 15% of total. So, in your scenario of 5 large solar panels connected to the electrical module, it would provide 37.5% (normally 100% + 150% "overcharge") power at the worst point of the storm (which is basically just providing charge to your reserve battery at 1/3rd the normal rate during the day). Same goes for portable solar panels deployed during an EVA. They will charge your suit battery reduced to a minimum of 15% of their normal rate during the worst of a dust storm.

Well, after a ton of messing around I finally found the issue. Your save file allowed me to replicate the particles disappearing and so I started just fiddling with all the particle settings. Somewhere along the line particle collisions were turned on, which is completely unnecessary for the large visibility-obstructing dust clouds. There must have been some kind of collision with the view renderer that was causing computational errors with the render order. After disabling particle collisions the issue seems to have been resolved. At least for now. That was the biggest thing holding me from pushing this update live, so after a few more smaller fixes I should have the dust storm update live by tomorrow.