sloodly_chicken 0 points1 point 5 months ago

Mmm... it's not bad, per se, especially if it's got limited range, which I seem to remember it having the one time I used it in Py. I would say, in fact, that it's probably much less cheaty than QuickStart, although still more cheaty than say SqueakThrough. (Incidentally, I don't consider FNEI cheaty at all -- tbh I think it ought to be part of the base game.)

My feeling on it is mostly that I noticed I wasn't automating stuff, because it was easier just to grab stuff at a distance and manually transport it. When my gameplay habits are made actively worse and/or different from the base game, that's probably my definition for cheaty.

That being said, in Py a little bit of cheaty (what a silly word now that I've typed it out a bunch. cheaty cheaty cheaty) is just necessary. It's like the opening hours of Seablock, except in Seablock the annoyance and the impossibility of fast bootstrapping is part of the experience -- here, it's just some annoying steps that seem to me to be masochism to do by hand (I mean, it literally takes hundreds of wood to make your first red science to unlock automated wood production -- how does chopping trees add anything to my experience?)

In short, most QOL mods I see as essentially up to the player. I'm usually against them, but I make an exception for Py -- all you're doing is cutting 5 or 10 of the most boring hours out of a 400 hour playthrough.