About 20 hours in, one of the most engaging gameplay loops I've had in a while, but got a few QOL thoughts.

Hey all,

I picked this game up when the new update dropped, and am absolutely hooked! However, I've noticed a few pain points that I don't think were deliberate, and just wanted to list them here and solicit others.

Also, just to emphasize, I'm NOT complaining about the clearly intended awkwardness of some actions. I LOVE that we have to grab shit and drag it around and run hoses awkwardly from A to B; it really gives the feeling of just being a little guy taking on a task that we were not designed for.

Now, my gripes!

• When you swap lights, carry over the action bar keybind. I like that we're forced to choose a light based on the situation, but since there's only one light that can be bound at a time, this does nothing but add a second right click and select. Or, better yet, give the light a dedicated hotkey instead of putting it on the action bar, since it doesn't really function like any of the other items that have to be held and prepared.

• Put power/resource gen/drain stats in the tooltips, and more informative tooltips in general. I'm personally a fan of having a big juicy info block whenever I mouse over something, but I would also be fine with having a right-click option that shows detailed info instead.

• Let us pick up tiny corpses (That sounds really fucking dark out of context). Plenty of tiny enemies can either drop scrap or their whole corpse, and the corpse, despite being roughly the same size as the scrap with which we fill our pockets, can only be disassembled or lifted with both hands. I am totally on board with making it weigh more than the equivalent scrap, but if we're okay with the bulk malus let us grab it all. If we can hold containers the size of our torso in our inventory, there's no reason we can't do the same with a dead worm 1/10 of the size.

• Tweak power gen/draw, especially for lights. I said above that I'm fine with intentional friction, and obviously the high-tier lights are powerful enough to require a trade-off lest darkness just cease to be a factor, but as somebody who works with electrical power generation the numbers are a bit ridiculous. I can accept that they made a super solar panel (there's a log entry about it) but if they can squeeze 8kW out of something as small as the Lumimax, then there's no excuse for the Eclipse drawing ~8kW. Assuming it uses LEDs, the Eclipse should be producing upwards of 600,000 lumens, a number so absurdly high that there is not actually a point of comparison in everyday life. The most powerful flashlight I could find, reviewed here, draws 200,000 lumens and looks like this on a road at night. Does any of this really matter? Meh, only insofar as I think giving the lights multiple modes (and a dedicated hotkey, see above) would be a cool way to expand functionality, albeit at the cost of possibly messing with game balance. I haven't parsed the numbers across everything (see above about the lack of tooltips) but I do think off the top of my head that reducing all power draws by a factor of ~10 would give us somewhat less immersion-breaking values.

• Give text logs and guidance dialogue a verisimilitude pass. I am not going to accuse anyone of using an LLM, not just because the game shows clear love for the subject matter and clearly a lot of work has gone into it, but also because it is not flagged as such on Steam and that would be a big problem. However, there are a lot of text passages in the logs as well as comments from the voice guiding us (I assume she's an actual AI, but no spoilers please) that give me that niggling feeling. Again, I am not saying any of the text in the game was generated rather than written, but this is an incredibly simple fix that could do a lot to make these stories we're finding hit a lot harder.

• I'm ambivalent on this one, but maybe a slightly less finicky way to connect our backpack to us/a gun. I would be fine with that being a modification that has to be unlocked and installed, but using the same industrial cables/tubing that we use for everything else feels a bit silly. My concern is that it could make the backpacks comically overpowered, so I'd love to hear other opinions.

Again, all in all I'm loving the game, and since it's still EA I have no doubt plenty of this will get updated/fixed/changed in ways I haven't even considered!