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[Oxygen Not Included] Breath of Fresh Air! (DLC in Early Access)
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What difficulty is it going to be?
I'm thinking of restarting myself. Apparently, since my base had no slime biome, making enough insulation (the space resource, not insulated tiles) to finish building the production and transport for the liquid hydrogen and oxygen I needed for further space travel would mean I wouldn't just have to grow the thimble reeds I had gotten as a care package ages ago and planted to deal with excess polluted water, but do so on an industrial scale to keep up with how much isoresen I was bringing in, and I was already at the limits of what the Steam vent and p. Water geyser could provide (and Badlands doesn't really lend itself for making pip farms)
Plus the petroleum boiler was a bust, thought I could combo it with producing liquid hydrogen, but it turns out I'm not making enough hydrogen to liquefy to keep the boiler side running, and couldn't because the water limits mentioned above.
So, new map time! Thinking Aborea, it also lacks a slime biome, but perhaps with the foresight I could do better stockpiling thimble reed, either by sticking to regular dreckos and getting all my plastic from petroleum or setting aside a place for the pips to plant a wild thimble reed farm when some seeds show up in the printing pod. Haven't done Rime before, but I also can't help but feel having access to every single biome will come off as feeling too easy.
Speaking of, going to go harder than Survival on dupe morale, and possibly stress. I was able to keep morale high pretty easily with the last base, and I never had to build a recreation room to do it, and I want to say the only time someone got stressed enough to need a massage table was when I sent them to a neural vacillatator and forgot about them until I got a suffocation notice.
Raw ingrediants are stored in my legacy food storage (i.e. the fridges in the CO2)
Cooked food is sweeped up and carted off to the small pocket of Cl, and is dupe accessible
Makes handling my vast overproduction of food easier.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
First update later on today
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
IMO food is really the only thing that's actually more difficult to cope with vs. No Sweat, if you can solve that the rest should be business as usual.
So! Here's our starting team, in our new home The Intergalactic Cantaloupe
We have: @Bedlam @Jazz and Petra Oleum (Named for an offsite friend) as our starting crew. Bedlam will be our builder - i like to unlock a late game skill (Mechatronics Engineering) early, as it's very, very powerful. But that means we have to invest a lot skill points to get there, and that costs a LOT of morale. Which is a potential problem early - So we're taking interests that'll reduce the morale penalty. However, we still need to do a lot of digging early, so Bedlam also has the Mole Hands ability, which boosts digging and attacking.
Jazz is our dedicated earth-murderer. +7 digging and Mole Hands means he starts with a handsome +10 total, for a <bonus> amount of digging speed. Plus, it'll make it easy to skill him up to be able to dig through the harder substances in the game - something we're going to have to do a lot of due to the asteroid we're on.
Finally, Petra Oleum is our Researcher. +10 research in total thanks to also having Quick Learner means she will annihilate the tech tree in very short order - we could easily get through the entire tech tree before day 60, if we wanted. Petra will also be our first operator. A side effect of such high research is she skills up VERY fast - twice as fast as any other dupe when doing well, anything.
Our initial dupe recruitment goals beyond this are to get a +7 Rancher, a +7 cooking, and a +7 Athletics dupe respectively. These will in turn become our Rancher, our Cook/Decorator and our Dogsbody/general supplier (Athletics governs run speed, so a dupe who can run fast is quite helpful -it's easy to give them +1.2 tons of carrying capacity through learned skills anyway) . An annoyance here is that due to a bug in the game, Ranchers dont level up properly - meaning that for all intents and purposes, +11 ranching is about as high as you can reasonably get. (7 base, another +4 from learned skills). We'll talk about this later when we're actually setting up ranching and what the problem is.
Quick side note: Dupes have Attributes and Skills. Attributes govern how fast dupes do certain tasks, or how long certain effects last when performed by said dupe. Skills give bonuses to attributes, and some tasks are hard gated behind Skills - you cant cook on an Electric Grill without training the Grilling skill, for instance. In general, performing a task results in gaining attributes in that task. Also, learning a skill gets you a FANCY HAT, which let's be real, is the true reason to train skills.
Right, with that out of our way: Here's our starting position.
We're on a Rime type asteroid with Geoactive, Geodes, Metal Rich and Volcanos as modifiers. Which in turn means: The asteroid is incredibly cold - most water sources outside the starting area will either be frozen or hypothermia inducing. There's a lot of geysers and vents around (Never ending supplies of certain liquids or gasses which have periods of activity and dormancy). There are patches of very hard to mine terrain, but the insides of the geodes are packed with goodies - anything from massive quantities of oxygen or other gasses, to piles of diamond or useful metals. A big win here would be finding a Natural Gas or Wolframite Geode. Metal Rich just means the map is well, very rich in metals - good for us. Volcanoes means there are going to be some incredibly hot places on the map, and some real difficulty in building around said areas - 1000c+ temps are no joke. But volcanoes also mean we'll be gifted with plenty of delicious magma we can use. Volcano heat is a valuable resource later in the game!
Immediate note on what we can see: There's a bunch of plants that could be made into a nature reserve (A useful type of room that gives us a morale bonus, that requires wild growing plants). Lots of buried goods, which means lots of buried food and seeds.. .and Hatches. Which will give us food, (and eggshells, and coal). At a glance it looks like our starting zone is pretty hefty. We're probably going to rip it apart pretty early, partly to give us a nice stock of early resources... and also because when you mine stuff out, you destroy half it's mass. Which, given how cold most of this area is, means we'll destroy half of that cold. Useful for our purposes of not freezing to death!
Rather than talk about every single little detail though, let's just skip through time - to ONE WEEK LATER.
So immediate notes: Stuff's changed! We have a fourth dupe! No one has died! Nothing's on fire! That's pretty good!
Our fourth dupe is @Mugsley who comes with 7 ranching and the Twinkletoes bonus, making them be a speedy fellow right out of the gate. Newly printed dupes come with a free skill point, which we've immediately popped into farming - the prerequisite for unlocking Ranching. Obviously, we cant ACTUALLY do ranching yet, but given the spin up time on that (breeding critter subspecies takes time, let alone just filling up ranches), we want to start early. Until that point, Mugsley can handle our early mealwood farming and will act as a dogsbody for the colony, doing general supplying and cleaning tasks as they pop up.
Which mostly means emptying the toilets. Thanks, Mugsley!
We've got our basic research station up, some crude power generation (Muglsey running on hamster wheels. Thanks Mugsley!) and we've started to use building tiles to push that big water chunk below our printing pod along to a more useful position.
The next goal is expanding that a bit, and pouring that other big lump of liquid into it to form ourwater reservoir. You can also see how we've started to lay out the base - Toilets and wash basins for those above the entry to the the living quarters, sectioning things off so we'll actually have a nature reserve, and initial sleeping quarters and eating quarters for the dupes.
Part of the reason these are all sectioned off like that is they each count as Rooms. So right now we've got a Latrine, Barracks and Mess Hall. Latrine gives +1 morale to a dupe for using it, Barracks gives +1 for sleeping in it, and mess hall gives +3 Morale for eating in it. We also got lucky and printed off some Joya seeds. These are decorative plants, but the nice thing about them? They have a comfortable temp range from 0c to 100c. Which means we can stick one of these in a hanging pot in our a mess hall, score +20 decor... and upgrade the Mess Hall into a Great Hall once we dig it out a bit further. Which will give it a handsome +6 morale.
I'll explain about decor more later when we have a decorator and start making it work for us. Right now we're simply ignoring it, as the returns are not worth the effort, and completely unnecessary. Later on it, it'll be VERY useful though.
The other reason is that it lets us control dupe flow and movement a bit more - we want to make sure their living area is as well, liveable as possible.
Next goals beyond shifting the water are to keep exploring around us and figure out what we've got to work with. This will also let us (hopefully) dig up a bunch of food - our dupes need 1k each a day, so we're burning through 4k a day right now - which means we're really not that far from starvation. Or would be if we hadn't started setting up farms, but those might yet freeze, so this is going to be great fun tm. Then we want to get power setup that doesn't require Muglsey to run like a hamster (Thanks Mugsley!), burn through research so we can actually make a heating loop for the base... there's a lot to do!
We'll check back in with our base in about a week. Please let me know if you want more info on things!
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Also I’ve used hardly any water over the almost 200 cycles. I’m still barely 1 tile deep into my starting pool of water.
So I'm in the middle of moving all my power generation over to the area I built the steam cooling loop so I that I can do all my base cooling through it without having to run pipes everywhere. I'm building it in a cold biome (Only because it was the most convenient place) and now I'm having trouble dealing with all the ice I'm moving out. My water reservoir is near full so I'm holding off on some of the expansion to figure out if I should build a second reservoir, and put the remaining ice there, or seal it off and finish the expansion later.
given how impossible it would be to fix the problem in my actual game though, i will still probably have to restart, especially since the 20 cycles it'll take to reconstruct it will run me out of power.
It was powered by my dupes chucking a bunch of space debris into a pool of water. Recycling!
I need to do a deep look into how to space launches actually work before my rocket comes back though. Everything I've seen so far is overly complex meant to do more than just open the doors/gantry which is what I'm after.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Top plug on the command console is the output, which gives a green signal when the rocket is ready, bottom plug in the input which launches the rocket when it gets a green signal, the rocket is ready, and all obstructions above it are out of the way.
IMO you shouldn't use the input to launch your rockets at first, unless you're planning on repeat trips to the same body. The alert you get when one is returning isn't particularly attention grabbing, and a last second distraction might pull you away and next thing you know the rocket was sent back out before you can unassaign the astronaut if you aren't ready for another trip and/or set a new destination.
Green signals are also what draw back the gantry and open the bunker doors. Space Scanners give out green signals when they detect whatever it is you've set them to look out for.
The real trick to getting all the automation correct is to use OR gates to make sure the only things activated by a specific green signal are the things you want activated. For example, any surface base, no matter how simple or complex, is going to want an outer set of bunker doors set to close when there is an incoming meteor shower with a scanner set to detect meteors and a NOT gate, to protect scanners, solar panels*, your telescope* and anything else on the surface that doesn't like a direct impact from a meteor (scanners will continue to detect whatever it is they are suppose to be detecting if they are blocked by something, so you don't have to worry about flipping signals, though blocking all your scanners does reduce the advanced warning to when an object is approaching to "already here,") Obviously you don't need it also messing with the gantry or any doors specific to the rocket silo, but you still need the scanner set to detect the rocket on return to pull back the gantry and open any outer doors that are directly above the silo, even during a meteor storm (cause while a wayward meteor "might" damage something in the silo, a rocket *will* break any gantries or bunker doors not out of the way when it comes back, even though it leaves the rocket and your dupe unharmed) so you want an use an OR gate to connect the scanners to the outer doors above the silo, so a signal from the rocket scanner doesn't leave your entire base exposed and the signal from the meteor scanner doesn't mess with the gantry or silo doors. You might also use a second OR gate for the command console and rocket scanner to connect to the silo doors and gantry, so the rocket doesn't open the outer doors during a meteor shower (as mentioned before, a rocket with the green signal to launch will still wait for all the bunker doors above it to open before launching.)
...Or you can just put a few atmo scanners in vacuum and flip them above or below max pressure (space esposure doesn't instantly delete gas and liquid, and depending on where you you place them they might come into contact with rocket exhaust) to turn every you need on and off. Even if you figure out the scanner automation, it will still be a good idea to put one on the same subcircuit as the rocket scanner to act as an override in case of the rocket trying to land during a meteor shower and the doors closed before the scanner was able to track it.
*solar panels and non-space material telescopes don't like any contact will regolith tiles either. Window tiles with are the simplist (in terms of automation) way to protect solar panels, as long as they get bunker protection and you have vacuum between the two, but telescopes are even blocked by that; those you need a pit and have it sit on set of automated airlocks (yes you can build buildings on top of closed airlocks) with a buffer gate to keep them open lock enough after the meteor shower is done for the bunker doors to open and drop the regolith past the telescope.
This has at least been a learning experience. I've got useful resources, but making sure that my gas pump only picks up natural gas is pretty tricky when the vent is one of my main access routes to the outside.
So I used a filter to make sure that everything else got dumped out on the way.
That just moved the mess of gasses, so I tried to set up some holding tanks, but that many filters is too power hungry for one network, so I switched to gas sensors and shutoffs.
Then I learned the trick with bridges and 1g valve loops.
If I was just willing to strip everything out and start over, I could get this looking pretty damn tidy. The problem there is what I'd do for the dozen cycles rebuilding all of this would take.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Radiant pipes would definitely make things cold very fast but you do not need them, regular pipes will buffer temperatures nicely in regular living area where you don't need to cool a piece of equipment right away, all the time.
You're welcome!
Also, @Foefaller - after doing some research, i found out that you literally only need 4 hatches to keep 16 dupes (on normal difficulty, with no bottomless stomachs) fed on BBQ. Which is caaahraaazy. Bit of spin up time on that, obviously, but utterly crazy that it's that easy to keep dupes fed.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
You mean hatch ranches, right?
Four hatch ranches would feed 16 dupes eating 1000kcal/cycle, but not even four shove voles, who drop 5 times as much meat, can feed 16 dupes by themselves.
I had built up quite a calorie store on my way to 10 dupes, and I think it's slowly decreasing. So double that and one hatch ranch would feed 4 or 5? Lines up with Foefaller's post above.
A single waterweed is more than enough to provide lettuce to turn those barbequed meats into frost burgers. The amount of sleetwheet I'm pulling from the cold biomes is way, way more than I need.
I will say, though, I'm really taking my time. I'm past cycle 600 at this point and I haven't gone high enough in the asteroid to hit space yet.
Now that I know the cooling loop, though, I imagine my next playthrough will be much faster. I have a massive amount of wasted space and construction from before. It could definitely have been planned more efficiently.
Also, I have so much igneous rock sitting around, it's ridic.
This may bite me once I get into the harder asteroids where you need to rush food production or something, but it's not that big of a gap.
IMO it's the last two asteroids that make food a serious issue. On top of both being forest biome starts, second hardest starts with the entire map outside of a couple pockets already too hot for mealwood, with no frozen biomes and the rust ones being a unique version that's the same temp, and Oasae has you starting cool enough at first, but surrounded by scalding hot sand you need to insulate against if you want it to stay that way (also without both a frozen or rust biome.)
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Well that's egg on my face. My apologies - i got bad data. Though, checking things - shouldnt it be 3 ranches, assuming BBQ (why you'd ever feed your dupes just raw meat i dont know).
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Little over three I think. I believe BBQ averages out to 640kcal per cycle over their lifespan, so you would need 25 hatches to be absolutely sure. I also prefer keep my ranches at 7 per rather than 8, since I don't usually automate the collection of eggs and tend to leave that to dupe labor.
Might also have been thinking about a 20 dupe base, which would require a fourth ranch whether you are doing 7 or 8 per.
16 might actually be doable with just two ranches and sleet wheat forage from good-sizable and well-preserved frozen biome. Though personally I'd use my excess water to raise some bristle blossoms just to be sure.
This map has a natural gas geyser right at the edge of the starting biome. That's amazing.
It also has a cool steam vent right at the edge of the starting biome, which was less awesome. It caused a bit of a panic until I could seal it off with insulated tile, but a bunch of heat got in. Should be okay. I'm currently getting set up to start clearing a couple slime biomes so I can take advantage of that geyser, and set up my industrial zone.
I usually use steam geyser water for electrolyzers and oil wells. Even if it's somehow hotter than the normal output, it's still heat deletion thanks to water's substantially higher thermal capacity.
Yeah, I'll probably use it eventually, but right now it's just a source of heat during the time when I don't have effective heat neutralization. :P
If you really need the heating, the best way is to setup a tepidizer, then run radiant pipes around it and create a heating loop from there. Best bit of you can eventually switch this to a cooling loop with no real issues. Just remember to use a Thermo sensor to help control temps.
Though this is part of why I like ranching so much for food, it's easy to do and not temp reliant. One rancher can hold down something like 24+ critters with enough skill. And still have spare time afterwards. Ranchers be crazy
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Yes, I could use heavi-watt wire, but then why have the transformer at all?
I know I need them so I can run my power-thirsty things, but the 4kw output doesn't make sense to me.
I have a metal refinery and aquatuner working together, but I have to have a separate large transformer for each? That seems cumbersome.
Most of the economy tricks (rather than "Automation came before smart batteries and I want to automate my generators like a hypothetical smart battery would" tricks) rely on the fact that transformers don't get power until any buildings on their input grid (other than batteries) are powered. So if you have a pair of transformers and a building between them, the only power that will get pass the second transformer is the excess power after everything prior to the first transformer + the building (again, except batteries) have sufficient juice. This could be used to make sure your tuned-up ethanol-powered petroleum generator is powering its ethanol distillers and carbon skimmers before anything else by setting them all on their own heavy watt grid with a transformer feeding into the main grid, or to shut off a non-critical 4kw part of the base when you're not generating enough power to keep everything prior to that transformer pair running.
Also, the higher output is, at least for me, useful for emergencies. For example, despite their massive wattage requirements, you can usually go well beyond the limits of what a conductive wire can take and put a lot stuff for your surface base and rocket silo on just 2-3 transformers, because 95% of the time they are not drawing any power, and with smart automation 80% of the 5% of the time not they do draw power it isn't enough at once to overload the wires, but that 1% of the time when everything has to go off at once, a couple of burnt wires is usually less of a hassle to fix or replace than the damage that could occur if the bunker doors can't close in time for an incoming meteor storm or the gantries can't get out of the way from a returning rocket.
This map has more geysers near the starting area than I've ever seen. There is a second cool steam vent and a chlorine vent nearby. I've sealed off the two steam vents. I'll leave the chlorine vent alone for the time being, it's pretty well contained.
I have harnessed the natural gas geyser. The proximity to the starting area means it is pretty much right below my powerplant. That's convenient.
What I've done is I have an autosweeper collect eggs, they go to a room and are dropped off. There is a critter dropoff there with a critter count of 0. The hatches hatch and then spend some time as a baby. Once they mature, they are auto-wrangled and taken to the kill room where they are drowned automatically (Good thing this is just a game!). It definitely reduces the amount of involvement my dupes need to have, and I'm running no incubators.
I know you can drop the eggs in water directly to remove the wrangling part, but that means I have to make sure ranches aren't depopulating. This way the wrangled hatches are taken to ranches if there's room, to the kill room if there isn't.
Maybe your ranch drop-off points don't include babies as options? You have to set them separately from the adults.
edit: I use the drop-eggs in water method and just keep an eye on my critter numbers, but you could probably use critter sensors to automatically pull eggs for incubation as they die off.
One thing you can do is use incubators, and leave them unpowered - Dupes will drop off eggs into them, and eggs will mature, but only at the default rate. Personally, i prefer using some fancy dancy automation that ensues my incubators are turned on for a brief period, enough for my rancher to run up and hug em, and then are turned back off by the rancher leaving the room. Saves a ton of power and heat generation, while giving you all the benefits of incubating eggs. @Me if you want me to post a screenie of the automation for that!
Also, from my let's play (Which i need to update), i got this crazy geyser spawn:
Not yet unearthed? There's a frigging cold slush geyser. Which once i have atmo suits, i'm planning to run it's output up through the water chamber to give me easy chilling of the output of all of that.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
I use unpowered incubators that will draw from the eggs while in the water. 2 per hatch ranch. It’s not fully automated but no wrangle commands to deal with when dupes deliver the babies. And if the room does get crowded, it’s not more than just a few cycles before an old one dies off if I don’t notice it. Working well so far even with manually wrangling eggs because the incubators are a slightly higher priority than the egg cracker. I’ll move to bbq once I get the super sustainable achievement since I’m only running on hydrogen and a little steam right now.
Babies will be dropped off, yes, but not auto-wrangled. So the egg room is basically a chute and drop-off and nothing else. The drop-off is set to 0 critters. Babies are not wrangled, only adults, even though the drop-off says there's 1 or 2 critters in there, the ranchers will not wrangle them until they're adults.
I've done the timed automation with the incubators - that's not a problem to set up, but this way, no power is being drawn, and after the initial delay, the rate at which hatches hatch is the same.
EDIT: It's also space efficient.
It's no problem, I just find it weird they won't wrangle babies. It doesn't affect the process negatively at all.
I've got polluted water as a coolant, but apparently that breaks insulated pipes at 84 degrees, then breaks out and turns into steam (again, with everything I can find well below the temperature I had down as creating steam).
Which then spreads out, cools down, and scalds my dupes as they try to mop it up.
I'm really not sure why my pipes are breaking, or how I'm supposed to get my coolant to a cooling loop if it breaks pipes before it can get there.