MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
I have run out of dirt on around cycle 550.
Stop gap solution is to boil off some poluted water, but that's not generating a lot, and it needs to be cooled before it's usable.
Though I guess I don't really need my glossy drekos anymore.
Meteors continue to be a problem. I have secured the center of the map, but the sides are being lost, and it's only a matter of time before there are to many breaches to plug.
Stop gap solution is to boil off some poluted water, but that's not generating a lot, and it needs to be cooled before it's usable.
Though I guess I don't really need my glossy drekos anymore.
Meteors continue to be a problem. I have secured the center of the map, but the sides are being lost, and it's only a matter of time before there are to many breaches to plug.
Compost Bins. Couple updates ago changed what they make from Fertilizer to Dirt, along with making so that seeds (which I'm guessing you probably have thousands of laying around at this point.) can be composted like P. Dirt and rotten food.
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited September 2018
I did not know about the seeds. This is going to take a while.
Is it a manual, 1-click per seed process? This might take a much longer while.
edit: oddly I feel bad if I let my Glossies die again. First batch died after I had a catastrophic air pressure loss, which casued the hydrogen to fill the room and suffocate (and heat) the mealwood farms.
In hindsight I could have just breached the roof and let the hydrogen leak out.
I did not know about the seeds. This is going to take a while.
Is it a manual, 1-click per seed process? This might take a much longer while.
edit: oddly I feel bad if I let my Glossies die again. First batch died after I had a catastrophic air pressure loss, which casued the hydrogen to fill the room and suffocate (and heat) the mealwood farms.
In hindsight I could have just breached the roof and let the hydrogen leak out.
Turns out if you just plop all the stuff you need for a stable out in the open, it all still works and shine bugs reproduce like nuts. Time to farm some lime!
Also this is actually really useful, because if you plop down a drop-off point you can set it to auto-wrangle and dupes can then wrangle anything in the area that's not selected in the drop-off menu. I've used it to move pufts and slicksters early in the game without needing plastics for traps and lures. The dupes just go up to the point, and call the critter over to them and wrangle them.
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
I usually still enclose mine in rooms (though much larger than the max room size for stables) because then I can keep them seperate (but equal)
I wonder if autowrangle works on morbs? They don't behave like normal critters.
And in this map, all my shine bugs died off before I got to making stables. Not sure what happened
Man, those meteor showers sure do drill through the map huh?
I keep coming into surface-adjacent biomes that have been partially or entirely destroyed by meteors, and the entire environment is stuck around 300c hot.
I've been addicted to Monster Hunter World since it released in February.
Finally, I have found a game that shifted that addiction, just got this on Saturday and I've managed to accumulate 20 hours, but hey I'm on my 5th or 6th colony and I've now managed to get everything in working order with 12 dupes and too much food lice.
I also learned that the water sieve doesn't filter out "food poisoning" so my main water tank is now all contaminated. I'm sorry guys, you'll be drinking water with a little pee in it until I know what can be done with that steam geyser we just found.
I almost gave up on my base, but it's cycle 126 and I've solved the rising temperature crisis with some wheezeworts and a lot of hydrogen that started pooling up in the top of my base (I suppose it's some spilling from the oxidizers). Of course I then uncover a hot steam vent right next to some of my duplicant's bedrooms, so now they get to sleep at 40ºC, though with some ventilation and double insulation there, it seems to be going down.
I am now facing a new problem: High pressure, gases are just everywhere and have nowhere to go, still not sure how to deal with that one. Question: Is there condensation? I keep finding pools of clean water in my base in random spots and I can't find the source.
I almost gave up on my base, but it's cycle 126 and I've solved the rising temperature crisis with some wheezeworts and a lot of hydrogen that started pooling up in the top of my base (I suppose it's some spilling from the oxidizers). Of course I then uncover a hot steam vent right next to some of my duplicant's bedrooms, so now they get to sleep at 40ºC, though with some ventilation and double insulation there, it seems to be going down.
I am now facing a new problem: High pressure, gases are just everywhere and have nowhere to go, still not sure how to deal with that one. Question: Is there condensation? I keep finding pools of clean water in my base in random spots and I can't find the source.
Yes steam will return to water. Just cover the steam vent back in and it will stop pumping. Use abysallite tiles to halt the heat transfer out. If you want to use the geyser though you will have to cool the steam enough to condense. A cooling loop could do this. Or a channel of conductive material to an anti entropy device.
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
I almost gave up on my base, but it's cycle 126 and I've solved the rising temperature crisis with some wheezeworts and a lot of hydrogen that started pooling up in the top of my base (I suppose it's some spilling from the oxidizers). Of course I then uncover a hot steam vent right next to some of my duplicant's bedrooms, so now they get to sleep at 40ºC, though with some ventilation and double insulation there, it seems to be going down.
I am now facing a new problem: High pressure, gases are just everywhere and have nowhere to go, still not sure how to deal with that one. Question: Is there condensation? I keep finding pools of clean water in my base in random spots and I can't find the source.
The random water problem could be steam turning back into water. It could also be your dupes carrying ice and then getting distracted and dropping the ice, which then eventually melts into a puddle.
They will also store ice unless you turn that off. Turn of liquifiables on the storage
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
High pressure can be solved in a few ways. Scrub the co2. Dig more. Pump has through a high pressure vent into a smaller area. Use various animal cycles to change gas into liquid or solid. Slicksters are good for turning co2 into oil.
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
I haven't used the CO2 scrubber at all, I know it removes CO2 but it doesn't transform it into anything else right?
I'm currently harvesting a natural gas geyser, a whole lot of CO2 in the immediate area. I haven't gone much into animal farming, I've wrangled some hatches (sp?) but they just run around in the room, not sure what I need to do there. Probably should read a small guide.
I haven't used the CO2 scrubber at all, I know it removes CO2 but it doesn't transform it into anything else right?
I'm currently harvesting a natural gas geyser, a whole lot of CO2 in the immediate area. I haven't gone much into animal farming, I've wrangled some hatches (sp?) but they just run around in the room, not sure what I need to do there. Probably should read a small guide.
I don't know if hatches have any gas to solid uses. You can feed the normal ones basically anything and they poop out coal.
Co2 scrubber makes Polluted water but you can run that directly through a water cleaner and loop it back.
In order to keep the natural gas going you will need to get a scrubber removing co2. You'll want to automate with smart batteries too so that the generator is only running when you need power
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
I've started pumping Co2 out into space, it's just been building up in my base and making everything hot. Just massive amounts of the stuff from industrial machines.
Also having trouble cooling my space section so I can actually build there (200° or more from meteors!). I started emptying the section, then cooling and pumping liquid O2 into the rooms hoping it would cool everything off. I might have to just skip the middle man and pump the -180° hydrogen around the area.
Also trying to work out a way to use the vacuum of space to work with a steam turbine. I noticed that liquids exposed to the vacuum begin to reach high temps and boil, I just need to get the steam a little hotter under the turbine.
It's been forever since I last fired this up and I was never any good when I did play (i.e. things would fall apart right around the time I broke into a new biome). Are there any good writeups or video guides out there anyone would recommend?
What really helped me was just to watch Cryptic Fox start a new base in his current stream series, it really showed me some things I was doing wrong and others that made a lot of sense once I saw him doing them.
Yeah, I've found a lot of Cryptic Fox's videos very helpful. Especially the one about setting up electrolyzers/hydrogen generation to be self-sufficient (except for the water) to be really helpful.
I started a new game yesterday, because I haven't played in awhile and my old base was going off a cliff, but I ran into a weird bug, I think? I just built a bottle emptier to get rid of polluted water from my wash basins, but the only option for emptying is water. Can't understand why that is.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Yeah, I've found a lot of Cryptic Fox's videos very helpful. Especially the one about setting up electrolyzers/hydrogen generation to be self-sufficient (except for the water) to be really helpful.
I started a new game yesterday, because I haven't played in awhile and my old base was going off a cliff, but I ran into a weird bug, I think? I just built a bottle emptier to get rid of polluted water from my wash basins, but the only option for emptying is water. Can't understand why that is.
You need to have some bottled polluted water first before it shows up as an option.
Maybe your wash basins aren't full yet, so they didn't bottle any?
Yeah, I've found a lot of Cryptic Fox's videos very helpful. Especially the one about setting up electrolyzers/hydrogen generation to be self-sufficient (except for the water) to be really helpful.
I started a new game yesterday, because I haven't played in awhile and my old base was going off a cliff, but I ran into a weird bug, I think? I just built a bottle emptier to get rid of polluted water from my wash basins, but the only option for emptying is water. Can't understand why that is.
You need to have some bottled polluted water first before it shows up as an option.
Maybe your wash basins aren't full yet, so they didn't bottle any?
Ah, yup, that was the issue. Thanks.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
Info for next update is available, and you can test it in beta.
Space Industry!
Includes jetpacks, different rocket boosters, a Robo-Miner and a new creature called a Shove Vole.
Robo-miner mines everything in a given radius in a 180 degree arc around it. Robo-miner seems like it can solve some issues with regolith piling up over your solar panels, but it also produces heat and has a low base overheat temperature (75), which means it can't be entirely left on it's own in the vacuum. My answer to overheat in a vacuum so far has been running cooling pipes behind structures and releasing little 200g pufts of oxygen next to them so that there's some heat transfer.
Shove Voles eat regolith (thank god!).
Jetpacks run on oxygen and petroleum, and have the same basic setup (docks, checkpoints, ect) as exosuits.
New rocket boosters are Solid (oxilite and copper mix), Hydrogen, and Steam
I figured I'd post some of my suggestions here since people were asking about starting out in the game.
I like to set goals for building my base. This is entirely optional, but I also find that they're also good general guidelines for a base
By the end of cycle 1, I want to have the latrines set up (2 latrines first, in an enclosed room, with a wash basin even if there's no current water access, because it passively reduces stress by a lot).
By cycle 3 I want the research station and water access set up.
By cycle 6 I want the bunkroom and starting mealwood farm set up.
By cycle 30 I want an exterior wall around the base separating it from the natural rock, with access through a set of three consecutive manual air locks (upgraded to automatic airlocks once the power is sorted out).
By cycle 40 that wall should be made of insulated tiles
By cycle 60 the plumbing should be started and most of the heat generating machines (including batteries) should be re-setup outside of the base with anything pumped in from outside in insulated or abyssalite pipes (you don't need to make abyssalite insulated stuff, abyssalite normal pipe is totally insulated on it's own)
By cycle 70 the exosuits should be made and set up so that no one leaves the base without one. That also means setting up a Rock Granulator to make refined metals and an exosuit forge before that, as well as having power worked out and a steady supply of oxygen.
As a general rule I stick with 3 Dupes until I get the farm set up, then I go to 4 or 5, then I go to about 7-8 over the course of the first 60 cycles, gradually increasing the size of the farm as I go and ensuring that there's one Dupe who has farming as their highest priority task.
This is an example of the work in progress base I'm building in my new game on the beta server. It's not optimized yet*, but you can see some of the basic ideas.
*(The battery needs to move outside, the farm can be dropped to the bottom, overall it's actually larger than necessary, ect)
General tips:
Pressure management
Too much pressure? Pump some of that gas elsewhere. Nowhere else to put it? Dig a lot more.
Look through the research page
Exosuits are fully kitted out environmental suits with their own oxygen supply, gas and liquid filtration are necessary, high pressure gas vents are excellent, the new liquid and gas storage tanks are amazing at keeping everything contained in a closed loop. If you don't know what's out there to do you aren't going to know what to do.
Water = Oxygen
I like to search out Water Geysers and Steam Vents first and foremost. Water Geysers preferably, but Steam Vents will do in a pinch. Look for Neutronium blocks placed horizontally on the map, that indicates a type of geyser or vent is on there. I dig out the layer of blocks just above the neutronium to check on which kind of vent it is before digging the whole thing out. Once found, I don't dig them out entirely yet, I close them off in their own room, usually about 8x9 with space underneath the neutronium left open and a door at the top of one of the walls. The idea is to harvest the sporadic, but near-infinite supply of water. That gets pumped into a SPOM (Self-Powering Oxygen Module).
SPOM (Self-Powering Oxygen Module)
There are a lot of variations on the SPOM, but as its most basic it's an insulated room containing several wheezewarts, and electrolyzer, two gas pumps, a gas filter and a hydrogen generator. Water is pumped into an electrolyzer (or multiple) and the oxygen is pumped out to be used in the base or in an exosuit system and the hydrogen is pumped into a hydrogen generator, thereby powering itself (more or less).
This is one example of a SPOM
Gas is heavy
Use gas weight to your advantage. Carbon Dioxide is the most dense normal gas and will sink to the bottom, hydrogen will rise to the top, oxygen and polluted oxygen stay be right below hydrogen. When building a base, plan for there to be CO2 at the bottom of the inside of the base. This is actually a really great thing! CO2 is sterile, which means that if you place a food container where it is completely immersed in CO2, then the food doesn't rot. Most of the plants you want for early and mid-game food staples can grow easily in CO2 environments as well. So when planning out a base, have an open area at the bottom of the base where you can place a farm and food storage, and put the living spaces (Bedroom/Bathroom/mess hall/ect) near the top.
Hot Stuff
Pumping liquid over your heat producers cools them down a bit. Say you have a battery that keeps overheating, if you place a mesh tile and a solid tile underneath it, and then pump a liquid over it, it cools down to the temperature of the liquid. Over time the liquid can heat up, so liquids like Polluted Water are good for this purpose because they increase in temperature slowly due to having a higher Specific Heat Capacity. Don't do this in a place where your dupes will be working in oxygen environments. Polluted water + Oxygen = Polluted Oxygen, so either have the whole thing set off outside or in a place where your dupes are going to be in exosuits.
(Note: There used to be a bug that would cause heat to be removed from liquids when they dripped over the side of a solid tile. This led to a lot of really wonky cooling schemes that involved little more than pumping liquids over a stair-step structure. This "Drip" or "Heat Deletion" bug got fixed in the Rocketry update. A lot of guides still out there may refer to it, but it doesn't work anymore.
Water Cooling in my above example works by conducting heat into the liquid, not through a bug.)
That's what I could come up with off the top of my head. A lot of the rest of the stuff comes up later in the game, and some really late game stuff like dealing with space.
MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited October 2018
Also lately I've been replacing mealwood with mushrooms as my early food option.
A lot easier to manage since its temp range goes higher, you need less of it, and dirt is more valuable than slime.
edit: also re: cooling. One of the good things about using polluted water foor cooling, is that the water filtration thing, puts out clean water at a balmy 40ºC, so using polluted water at a cooler temperature is just wasting cooling. Heat that up that water, run it through the water filter to reset the temp.
There are other systems that work like that, electrolyser ouput temp is independent of input temp, so don't use cold water. Natural gas/Hydrogen just gets detroyed by the power generator, so run that vent past something hot etc.
Ceramic does a pretty good job of insulating and it's a lot more abundant, so you may want to start dedicating clay and some coal to that.
The voles have already been fixed from what I heard. A programmer had a little whoops and added a zero to the voles' output percentage.
+2
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Ah, good to know.
Wonder what they're going to be used for then? Just eggs?
And they need a way to turn sand into dirt. Sand+water+crusher? Because I'm pretty sure you can turn regolith into sand, since it melts into igneous rock.
Wonder what they're going to be used for then? Just eggs?
And they need a way to turn sand into dirt. Sand+water+crusher? Because I'm pretty sure you can turn regolith into sand, since it melts into igneous rock.
Honestly late game it'd be simpler to pipe polluted water onto the surface in vacuum rather than take it through a sieve. Once it steams off, you get a decent amount of dirt from it.
Also looking at Shove Vole's information, they produce 50% of the consumed mass, so they do reduce the amount of whatever they're fed over time.
Shove Voles are getting everywhere since I discovered the surface. Impossible to train since they "disappear" from the room when they burrow, making any dupe going to brush them go do something else.
Only way to even keep them in one spot is dumping them on a floating unconnected platform.
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Auto-digger to make sure they don't have anywhere to burrow?
I'm a little hesitant to start a new map with the changes. Not sure how I will manage without my early-game abysalite crutch.
I really want to like this game, but more and more I'm thinking its not for me. Its fun in the beginning when I'm digging out a little home and keeping my dupes happy, but sooner or later I'm having to balance a million different things to keep the little buggers alive and happy and it just gets so stressful. Its weird because in RimWorld for example I couldn't give a damn if I get raided and lose two people, but Oxygen not Included seems to go very quickly from "Everyone is happy" to "Everyone is miserable" to "Everyone is dead" and once you get into a death spiral its very difficult to recover.
I really want to like this game, but more and more I'm thinking its not for me. Its fun in the beginning when I'm digging out a little home and keeping my dupes happy, but sooner or later I'm having to balance a million different things to keep the little buggers alive and happy and it just gets so stressful. Its weird because in RimWorld for example I couldn't give a damn if I get raided and lose two people, but Oxygen not Included seems to go very quickly from "Everyone is happy" to "Everyone is miserable" to "Everyone is dead" and once you get into a death spiral its very difficult to recover.
How fast are you expanding your population? It kinda sounds like you might be adding too many dupes too quickly.
Posts
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Stop gap solution is to boil off some poluted water, but that's not generating a lot, and it needs to be cooled before it's usable.
Though I guess I don't really need my glossy drekos anymore.
Meteors continue to be a problem. I have secured the center of the map, but the sides are being lost, and it's only a matter of time before there are to many breaches to plug.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Compost Bins. Couple updates ago changed what they make from Fertilizer to Dirt, along with making so that seeds (which I'm guessing you probably have thousands of laying around at this point.) can be composted like P. Dirt and rotten food.
Is it a manual, 1-click per seed process? This might take a much longer while.
edit: oddly I feel bad if I let my Glossies die again. First batch died after I had a catastrophic air pressure loss, which casued the hydrogen to fill the room and suffocate (and heat) the mealwood farms.
In hindsight I could have just breached the roof and let the hydrogen leak out.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
You can do seeds in bulk if they're stored IIRC.
Who needs stables?
Turns out if you just plop all the stuff you need for a stable out in the open, it all still works and shine bugs reproduce like nuts. Time to farm some lime!
Also this is actually really useful, because if you plop down a drop-off point you can set it to auto-wrangle and dupes can then wrangle anything in the area that's not selected in the drop-off menu. I've used it to move pufts and slicksters early in the game without needing plastics for traps and lures. The dupes just go up to the point, and call the critter over to them and wrangle them.
I wonder if autowrangle works on morbs? They don't behave like normal critters.
And in this map, all my shine bugs died off before I got to making stables. Not sure what happened
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I think the wild reproduction rate is low enough that all the critters will die off if not tamed.
I keep coming into surface-adjacent biomes that have been partially or entirely destroyed by meteors, and the entire environment is stuck around 300c hot.
There's now 20 new bugs every cycle!!
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Finally, I have found a game that shifted that addiction, just got this on Saturday and I've managed to accumulate 20 hours, but hey I'm on my 5th or 6th colony and I've now managed to get everything in working order with 12 dupes and too much food lice.
I also learned that the water sieve doesn't filter out "food poisoning" so my main water tank is now all contaminated. I'm sorry guys, you'll be drinking water with a little pee in it until I know what can be done with that steam geyser we just found.
I am now facing a new problem: High pressure, gases are just everywhere and have nowhere to go, still not sure how to deal with that one. Question: Is there condensation? I keep finding pools of clean water in my base in random spots and I can't find the source.
Yes steam will return to water. Just cover the steam vent back in and it will stop pumping. Use abysallite tiles to halt the heat transfer out. If you want to use the geyser though you will have to cool the steam enough to condense. A cooling loop could do this. Or a channel of conductive material to an anti entropy device.
but they're listening to every word I say
They will also store ice unless you turn that off. Turn of liquifiables on the storage
but they're listening to every word I say
but they're listening to every word I say
I'm currently harvesting a natural gas geyser, a whole lot of CO2 in the immediate area. I haven't gone much into animal farming, I've wrangled some hatches (sp?) but they just run around in the room, not sure what I need to do there. Probably should read a small guide.
I don't know if hatches have any gas to solid uses. You can feed the normal ones basically anything and they poop out coal.
Co2 scrubber makes Polluted water but you can run that directly through a water cleaner and loop it back.
In order to keep the natural gas going you will need to get a scrubber removing co2. You'll want to automate with smart batteries too so that the generator is only running when you need power
but they're listening to every word I say
Really enjoying everything, never realized I had an itch for a game just like this.
Also having trouble cooling my space section so I can actually build there (200° or more from meteors!). I started emptying the section, then cooling and pumping liquid O2 into the rooms hoping it would cool everything off. I might have to just skip the middle man and pump the -180° hydrogen around the area.
Also trying to work out a way to use the vacuum of space to work with a steam turbine. I noticed that liquids exposed to the vacuum begin to reach high temps and boil, I just need to get the steam a little hotter under the turbine.
I started a new game yesterday, because I haven't played in awhile and my old base was going off a cliff, but I ran into a weird bug, I think? I just built a bottle emptier to get rid of polluted water from my wash basins, but the only option for emptying is water. Can't understand why that is.
You need to have some bottled polluted water first before it shows up as an option.
Maybe your wash basins aren't full yet, so they didn't bottle any?
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Ah, yup, that was the issue. Thanks.
Space Industry!
Includes jetpacks, different rocket boosters, a Robo-Miner and a new creature called a Shove Vole.
Robo-miner mines everything in a given radius in a 180 degree arc around it. Robo-miner seems like it can solve some issues with regolith piling up over your solar panels, but it also produces heat and has a low base overheat temperature (75), which means it can't be entirely left on it's own in the vacuum. My answer to overheat in a vacuum so far has been running cooling pipes behind structures and releasing little 200g pufts of oxygen next to them so that there's some heat transfer.
Shove Voles eat regolith (thank god!).
Jetpacks run on oxygen and petroleum, and have the same basic setup (docks, checkpoints, ect) as exosuits.
New rocket boosters are Solid (oxilite and copper mix), Hydrogen, and Steam
I like to set goals for building my base. This is entirely optional, but I also find that they're also good general guidelines for a base
By cycle 3 I want the research station and water access set up.
By cycle 6 I want the bunkroom and starting mealwood farm set up.
By cycle 30 I want an exterior wall around the base separating it from the natural rock, with access through a set of three consecutive manual air locks (upgraded to automatic airlocks once the power is sorted out).
By cycle 40 that wall should be made of insulated tiles
By cycle 60 the plumbing should be started and most of the heat generating machines (including batteries) should be re-setup outside of the base with anything pumped in from outside in insulated or abyssalite pipes (you don't need to make abyssalite insulated stuff, abyssalite normal pipe is totally insulated on it's own)
By cycle 70 the exosuits should be made and set up so that no one leaves the base without one. That also means setting up a Rock Granulator to make refined metals and an exosuit forge before that, as well as having power worked out and a steady supply of oxygen.
As a general rule I stick with 3 Dupes until I get the farm set up, then I go to 4 or 5, then I go to about 7-8 over the course of the first 60 cycles, gradually increasing the size of the farm as I go and ensuring that there's one Dupe who has farming as their highest priority task.
This is an example of the work in progress base I'm building in my new game on the beta server. It's not optimized yet*, but you can see some of the basic ideas.
*(The battery needs to move outside, the farm can be dropped to the bottom, overall it's actually larger than necessary, ect)
General tips:
Pressure management
Too much pressure? Pump some of that gas elsewhere. Nowhere else to put it? Dig a lot more.
Look through the research page
Exosuits are fully kitted out environmental suits with their own oxygen supply, gas and liquid filtration are necessary, high pressure gas vents are excellent, the new liquid and gas storage tanks are amazing at keeping everything contained in a closed loop. If you don't know what's out there to do you aren't going to know what to do.
Water = Oxygen
I like to search out Water Geysers and Steam Vents first and foremost. Water Geysers preferably, but Steam Vents will do in a pinch. Look for Neutronium blocks placed horizontally on the map, that indicates a type of geyser or vent is on there. I dig out the layer of blocks just above the neutronium to check on which kind of vent it is before digging the whole thing out. Once found, I don't dig them out entirely yet, I close them off in their own room, usually about 8x9 with space underneath the neutronium left open and a door at the top of one of the walls. The idea is to harvest the sporadic, but near-infinite supply of water. That gets pumped into a SPOM (Self-Powering Oxygen Module).
SPOM (Self-Powering Oxygen Module)
There are a lot of variations on the SPOM, but as its most basic it's an insulated room containing several wheezewarts, and electrolyzer, two gas pumps, a gas filter and a hydrogen generator. Water is pumped into an electrolyzer (or multiple) and the oxygen is pumped out to be used in the base or in an exosuit system and the hydrogen is pumped into a hydrogen generator, thereby powering itself (more or less).
This is one example of a SPOM
Gas is heavy
Use gas weight to your advantage. Carbon Dioxide is the most dense normal gas and will sink to the bottom, hydrogen will rise to the top, oxygen and polluted oxygen stay be right below hydrogen. When building a base, plan for there to be CO2 at the bottom of the inside of the base. This is actually a really great thing! CO2 is sterile, which means that if you place a food container where it is completely immersed in CO2, then the food doesn't rot. Most of the plants you want for early and mid-game food staples can grow easily in CO2 environments as well. So when planning out a base, have an open area at the bottom of the base where you can place a farm and food storage, and put the living spaces (Bedroom/Bathroom/mess hall/ect) near the top.
Hot Stuff
Pumping liquid over your heat producers cools them down a bit. Say you have a battery that keeps overheating, if you place a mesh tile and a solid tile underneath it, and then pump a liquid over it, it cools down to the temperature of the liquid. Over time the liquid can heat up, so liquids like Polluted Water are good for this purpose because they increase in temperature slowly due to having a higher Specific Heat Capacity. Don't do this in a place where your dupes will be working in oxygen environments. Polluted water + Oxygen = Polluted Oxygen, so either have the whole thing set off outside or in a place where your dupes are going to be in exosuits.
(Note: There used to be a bug that would cause heat to be removed from liquids when they dripped over the side of a solid tile. This led to a lot of really wonky cooling schemes that involved little more than pumping liquids over a stair-step structure. This "Drip" or "Heat Deletion" bug got fixed in the Rocketry update. A lot of guides still out there may refer to it, but it doesn't work anymore.
Water Cooling in my above example works by conducting heat into the liquid, not through a bug.)
That's what I could come up with off the top of my head. A lot of the rest of the stuff comes up later in the game, and some really late game stuff like dealing with space.
A 3 tile wide area around the base, a vacuum in between 2 times. The only heat entry points would be the base exits.
but they're listening to every word I say
Which presents a problem, because I have been relying on that piece of impossible for a lot of my builds.
Also, don't the Voles produce more of what they eat? So feeing them regolith will just produce more regolith.
No need, because Abyssalite.
A plan for the future maybe, but it's going to make building pipes/powerlines/vents difficult.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
A lot easier to manage since its temp range goes higher, you need less of it, and dirt is more valuable than slime.
edit: also re: cooling. One of the good things about using polluted water foor cooling, is that the water filtration thing, puts out clean water at a balmy 40ºC, so using polluted water at a cooler temperature is just wasting cooling. Heat that up that water, run it through the water filter to reset the temp.
There are other systems that work like that, electrolyser ouput temp is independent of input temp, so don't use cold water. Natural gas/Hydrogen just gets detroyed by the power generator, so run that vent past something hot etc.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
The voles have already been fixed from what I heard. A programmer had a little whoops and added a zero to the voles' output percentage.
Wonder what they're going to be used for then? Just eggs?
And they need a way to turn sand into dirt. Sand+water+crusher? Because I'm pretty sure you can turn regolith into sand, since it melts into igneous rock.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Sand -> Water Sieve -> Polluted Dirt -> Compost -> Dirt.
Also looking at Shove Vole's information, they produce 50% of the consumed mass, so they do reduce the amount of whatever they're fed over time.
Only way to even keep them in one spot is dumping them on a floating unconnected platform.
I'm a little hesitant to start a new map with the changes. Not sure how I will manage without my early-game abysalite crutch.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
You can make insulated things out of other materials and they still work really well. It's just not ya know, perfect.
How fast are you expanding your population? It kinda sounds like you might be adding too many dupes too quickly.