Your comments
Yes, sorry, I posted about it, then I decided to delete it (temporarily?) as later on I was getting inconclusive/conflicting results, so I felt it would need more testing and observation to get a better picture.
Close to the center of the storm (when/where hab power was also heavily affected), the portable panel recharge rate was also low as expected. But earlier in another area, with very visible storm activity and a nearby (within a few hundred meters) WayStat reporting 20%-ish visibility, recharge rate seemed to be close to clear weather daytime levels. That's when I originally posted about it, but then it seemed to work once the stom had hit the hab where I was so I wasn't sure anymore.
Maybe it's just the rate not getting affected as heavily as the environment/WayStat reports would suggest when at a larger distance (non-linear function with too steep drop off at a very short distance threshold?), only when you are really close to the center.
I have found another occurrence of this issue. Right after starting a new game and before entering the Alpha Hab for the first time, opening the Manage Suit screen from the status consoles in the exterior airlock room will show 0 Oxygen and Power in the Hab reserves while the summay srceen shows non-zero values for them.
Having entered the Hab, the Manage Suit screen will show the correct values when opened from the inetrior consoles, and exiting back to the exterior version will also be correct afterwards.
I really don't agree with the save occurring before the sleep period is done. That would require you to "re-sleep" every time you continue from a previous save. What could work tho is that after the rest period calculations are done, but before the save file is updated, the game would first check if the player is/will be dead or in a situation where they would die shortly after having come out of sleep state, and would not overwrite the save file with this "you're already dead you just don't know it yet" state if that's the case.
The unexlpainable death situations around sleeping and entering a Hab, however, sound familiar. I think there was a similar issue reported (and in some way addressed) a while ago, so it might have reoccurred or not all possibilities of such failure have been covered.
Actually, #2 might be caused by the fact that the transition from exterior to interior has a "game time" period of about 20 in-game minutes. It's possible that since you've emptied the suit, the game will consider you being in a non-functional suit for those 20 minutes resulting in your death just as it would if you were outside. And it's not necessarily even an incorrect behaviour, given how atmosphere replacement and pressurization is not instant: even after you've sealed the external door, you'll still have to keep the suit closed and use its internal resources for quite a while before it becomes possible to remove it. (However, I think the way it actually works, on the ISS, for example, is that once the astronauts are inside the airlock, they connect their suit to the life support system of the station so that from then on it doesn't matter how much suit resources they still had; they'll draw everything from the station reserves from the beginnig to the end of the airlock cycle.)
Games are, to a differing degree, and need to be, abstractions to make them functioning and challenging within their own world and its rules and limits, even if based on reality. For games, this is part of the "suspension of disbelief" most works of fiction ask from the audience to be able to be entertaining: the rules may (and usually do) deviate from the "real world" but should be consistent and making sense within the boundaries of the fictional world. Finding the right level of this "suspension" needed is the tricky part, and I'd say Lacuna Passage in on the right track in general, with some adjustments needed here and there.
From what I've seen, with the current balance you die from about 40 hours of constant walking with sparse periods of running, with the main contributing factor being your calories count dropping to 0 (that's where organ integrity starts to drop rapidly from an until then relatively stable and high level, which I don't particularily agree with). It's obviously nowere near "realistic" and feels very off compared to your experiences even just as an average person who's not used to high levels of physical activity (like me :). But if the player character could go on, say, a week without food intake, then the lack of food wouldn't be much of a threatening condition. Likewise, if you could cover even just 20-30 kilometers (which, I believe, still would be much less than what a well trained long distance hiker can do in a day) before your vitals start getting really bad, that would again significantly lessen the need to periodically return to a hab to rest and eat, reducing the importance of hab discovery and manintenance. It would also mean that you could cover a fourth, maybe even a third of the map in a single trip, since the entire area is only about 5 by 5 kilometers, which in turn would make the world feel much smaller than intended (closer to the size it actually is, which needs to be artificially enlarged by limitations like this to feel big enough to get lost in, and threatened by, its perceived size; again, abstraction of a large world that needs to be made to fit within the constraints of software and hardware capabilities).
Generally, it's recommended to leave the habitat powered up which you use as your current base of operations; the other two is better left offline even when you visit/use them for extra storage space or anything. When properly maintained, a Hab can be left running without any supervision for at least 30-40 hours (about the maximum amount of time you can spend with exploring in one trip anyway) and nothing will break (with the rates I've observed so far, a properly maintained Hab should stay operational for at least a week before slots start to break).
If the Heater can be turned on and does maintain a stable Hab temperature even without any Heating Element installed, then it's a bug that needs to be fixed. (If the Heater is turned off, the Hab internal temperature will slowly drop towards external temperature. In itself it's not critical, since you can wear the suit inside and then its internal heater will maintain your body temperature, but it will draw its internal power reserves so you need to recharge the suit manually from the Hab reseves, or you might freeze to death while sleeping if suit power runs out.)
I don't think it ever does, nor that it should be. Even factoring the lower gravity in, carrying the EVA suit, whatever you have with you, plus the difficulties associated with doing physical activity in a fully enclosed suit which only can do so much in terms of managing internal temperature, humidity and atmospheric conditions, even standing still isn't really effortless so you don't get much rest.
10-12k per trip is about as far as you can get anyway, at that point you are very low / ran out of calories already, and from there organ integrity starts dropping like a rock and you'll die in another 6-8 hours tops if you can't get back to a habitat in that time.
In a short, 7-8 sols session I haven't noticed any change in component deterioration rate. Did you, by any chance try to insert fuses while the unit was powered up? That tends to immediately break the slot and also destroy the component you tried to install. It's intended behaviour, as noted in the unit operation manuals; any electrical component needs to be replaced with the unit powered off.
In the previous version (0.57) there were some drill rover locations that worked and some that did not. I got the achievement when I found a drill rover that actually worked. In the current version they should be fixed so any and all of them should trigger the achievement correctly when discovered for the first time.
There are two kinds of "outposts", the remote and the temporary. Remote Outpost is the one with the pop tent, light stand and possibly some storage crates, and seems to be the more common of the two (I found at least 4 in my latest playthrough). I think I did find a Temporary Outpost in a pre-achievement game, but not yet since then so I'm not sure what that one looks like.
I'd guess what you actually found was a Remote Outpost (for which the achievemenet works, at least did for me) but not any temporary ones yet, just like me.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Although I only lived through a few storms so far, so my exposure to them is somewhat limited, I don't feel them being particularily difficult aside of the initial surprise and the following adaptation to the first one you ever encounter. If anything, they should have a much larger area of effect, one that corresponds to their current visible effect range (as it is in version 0.58.1) instead of reducing their visible size to match the area where they affect recharge rate, which currently appears to be very small, especially compared to the size reported by the Weather app of the datapad. The initial 7500m storm in the Big Storm scenario seemed to have an effective radius of maybe 1500 meters at best, at least according to WayStat readings, but the area where it in fact impacted recharge rate seemed to have at most a few hundred meters radius, about maybe the innermost third/fourth of the area you could esitmate by looking at the WayStat readings, which is way too small in my opinion.
Instead of the current very dense, spot like area of effect with a well defined and sharp edge (not currently matching the visual size), they should have a larger area where the effect ramps up slowly towards the really bad conditions close to the center. That way even a storm that's not passing directly through a Hab area would have some effect on gameplay by reducing solar panel output. Something like, the outer 50% of the storm radius would represent 35% of the effect, and the inner 50% would represent the other 65%.
If I may use The Maritan as an example, while travelling to the MAV, Watney did not notice being in a storm for days at first at all, only that there's something off with the harvest rate of the solar panels, as the storm was already impacting their recharge capacity well before it had any visible effect. Something more along those lines, only scaled down to fit the size of the game world here, would work better in terms of making the storms having a bigger impact on gameplay.
I'm planning to eventually make a larger feedback/suggestion post regarding the storms and how could (should?) they be iterated upon to provide a larger set of difficulties/threats to manage, but I'd like to experience a few more of them first to have a more consistent picture of how they feel now.