This has been bothering me for quite a while and since I don't see any difficulty with changing this, here I'm bringing up my suggestion regarding the consumption mechanics of oxygen, water and food consumption by the base crew.
According to the Player Base Guide, the base crew consumes 1 oxygen, water and food per head every 10 hours, and my own observations have suggested as well that this takes place in big 10 hour steps, as opposed to the gradual consumption rate of Basic alloy every 16 seconds.
Suggestion:Calculate the consumption of oxygen, food and water in short 16 second steps like basic alloy, rather than in huge 10 hour steps.
Why? The 10 hour steps bring problems that may not be noticeable right away, but still makes the job of supplying a base unnecessarily complicated.
Players without base admin access, including most of our supplying employees, don't have the shop window as a reference for supply levels. They only way the base would make a shortage noticable to them is when the crew already starts dying. To counter this problem, we wrote an external base calculation spreadsheet that predicts the amount of essential commodities on the base, based on the crew's consumption rates. Suppliers can write down their deliveries and the spreadsheet will keep track of that in it's calculation. Obviously, this approach has some of its own problems and can be outdated, but the factor that's contributing most at making this work frustrating is - by far - the 10 hour rate.
Even as a base admin, I don't know when the crew decides to go on their next porkfest, so if i read "Food x2100" from the shop window, I can't tell if this will stay the same for the next nine hours or if our crew of 800 eats 1920 units of food in the next 10 minutes. And in practice, this can easily be differences of around 5 hours on average. Since our sheet updates the commodity levels every second, the numbers will often be off by +- 1000 units.
This isn't a problem to the suppliers using the sheet, but to the one updating it according to the storage values - I don't know if I'm at the start or at the end of the "10 hour period", so the numbers I punch into the sheet could be off by as much as almost 2000 units for a level 4 base.
I'll admit, this isn't a problem that ruins anyone's life. But it would be very much more convenient to have the crew consuming these commodities gradually, without it really being a big deal to implement. I don't like the idea of having this unknown ominous moment where suddenly, a big part of your essential supplies goes poof, rather than just having an honest feedback from the shop window on how long the remaining amount will actually last.
How? You may bring up the difficulties at subtracting 1/2250 commodity units (= 0.0004444...) per crew member every 16 seconds, since the commodity levels work with whole numbers rather than decimals. This could easily be solved by a representative float variable for the essential commodity to which the base adds [amount of crew]*(1/2250) every 16 seconds, and after subtracts the biggest whole number possible from it as well as from the oxygen/water/food levels, leaving only the decimal rest.
Example: (800 crew, variable x = 0)
0 seconds -- x = x + 800*(1/2250) -> x = 0.3555....
16 seconds -- x = x + 800*(1/2259) -> x = 0.71111....
32 seconds -- x = x + 800*(1/2259) -> x = 1.066666....
-> Base subtracts 1 unit of oxygen, water and food each, and sets x to 0.06666...
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