Hatch meat is 533 kcal a cycle, omelets is 466. That's a little less and a little more than 2 hatches per dupe respectively at survival difficulty (which in my head is "normal", since that was the default difficulty for almost all of EA.)
24 hatches should only be enough for 12 dupes. Of course you're making surf&turf and pacus can be easily scaled up to whatever number you need (since even tame, starving and overcrowded pacus will lay an egg within 14ish days before dying) so if you also have 28+ pacus for the fillets you need that's totally believable.
Yeah, i make a point to get a passive pacu farm up as early as possible so i can supplement the inital bbq cookery with cooked fish, and once things are online, there comes the Surf'N'Turf train.
Re: Ethanol - do you really find it worth it? I poked around and the math on ethanol just didnt seem to make it worthwhile, compared to a petroleum boiler. The dirt's a pleasant bonus, but Ethanol for power ends up having a very low return on investment vs the effort to set it up. Honestly, it seems like something that's more useful if you want to mass produce polluted water (So much CO2) or dirt. For pure power generation you end up having to do a lot of shennagins involving dumping C02 into space to get anywhere near it being worth while.
(Though, i'd also argue that Petroleum Boilers are a bit broken, since they let you generate SO MUCH power for "Free" once you get em running)
I don't see ethanol and petroleum as an either/or thing; Rather, it's usually my step between wood burners and oil refinement (especially on Aboriea, which has no swamp biome and therefore no 100% guaranteed nat gas geyser) since a proper setup with domesticated trees typically needs only about 56kg of water per full-time generator pumped into it per cycle, which is usually less than one tenth of what your average cool steam vent outputs over its entire active/dormant cycle. Even then, unless I run into an actual no nat gas situation I try to keep my base power needs below 600 kJ/cycles until I find a geyser or strike oil so I only need half the distillers for a generator and therefore only two skimmers to keep the CO2 from building up. Then usually what happens is that the generator gets dismantled (because apparently once it takes ethanol it can only ever do ethanol, or visa versa) and that ethanol and its byproducts are instead used to make spicy tofu.
Fair enough - My bases tend to run off coal for a long time because they're pretty low power and i've got all those hatches anyway. Once i get my SPOM up that often sorts the base for power needs. In the mid game i tend to have bunch of dupes undergoing Mandatory Leg Day (read: stuck on hamster wheels) so they'll skill up to being able to wear exosuits. my attitude being i basically treat them as a drain on food, trading that for an increase in pWater + a massive amount of power, and eventually i get super fast dupes who are also skilled operators and can wear suits with no issue.
Which is hand,y because i build all my bases around the "You must wear an exosuit to leave" style designs and it really makes things simpler to just have dupes in exosuits whenever they're not resting/eating/doing other base things
I'll have natural gas in there but eh. I just never found the effort of Ethanol worth it to setup vs going a pretty steady Coal -> Coal + Nat Gas -> SPOM overflow + Nat Gas/Coal -> Petroleum boiler. If i'm lucky enough to find a steam vent, i'll turn that into power too.
I also build a massively overkill SPOM - the design i use outputs something ridiculous like 3kg/s of Oxygen, so i often either have the Oxgen Box (Do Not Open), or just have my asteroid constantly farting. Usually the latter, the infinitely compressed oxygen box always feels like a hazard waiting to happen. "And if you open this wall..." *The Golden Cantaloupe became a small sun!*
Great for a ton of free delicious power from all that hydrogen though (and useful to train up my early operators, though i'm increasingly convinced it's not really worth the dupe time/labor for the increased power output, except maybe for Petroleum generators). Also so i can pump a bunch of hydrogen wherever i need it for heat purposes (like the brick, or cooling the powerbank) Then again, what else is my scientist going to do once she's eaten the tech tree early?
I will note i tend to build a big ol' Smart battery powerbank at some point, usually around the point new dupes are undergoing Mandatory Leg Day. You can hold a ton of power overflow with very minimal wastage that way, and it really helps to smooth out any hiccups once i start to kick my industrial brick online (and before that's spooled up to the point it's recycling heat into power again). Often i'll build it as part of my first base cooling loop - easy to cool it with the same loop that cools the steam turbine itself that way.
Forest biome has no coal though, so at the start you're getting all your non-hamster power from wood, as it's going to be a while before your single starting hatch in those starts can multiply to a few ranches worth.
Main reason I do it on forest maps over just more wood burners (which are more power efficient per unit of lumber once you factor the power for upkeep/skimmers) comes down to scaling and material input. Ethanol using domesticated trees is actually crazy efficient in terms of water input if you reuse all the p water that the generators create compared to other water-consuming setups (if my napkin math is right, it's somewhere between "boiling oil from a well for petroleum" and "boiling oil from a well for natural gas" in terms of Watts per kg of water, although it is obviously closer to the petrol setup than the nat gas one) which gives it a very low water footprint, even if it takes up a shitload of extra space between the tree farms, distillers and the skimmers. Wood burners using domesticated trees though, are less efficient in terms of water than most power-positive SPOM setups, and you probably only have enough wild trees at the start to support one full time, so unless I'm setting up a "gym," and doing so super early, to me it's the natural way to expand my power output, at least until something less intensive like a nat gas vent or oil is found.
so I started a new base on the salty ocean asteroid, got a not-centered start. I seem to have a lot of pockets of fresh water around me, and a cool steam vent. And not a lot of other sources of power, so I figured I should get water from the vent and make hydrogen for generators
but I seem to be surrounded by warm biomes so I'm not sure how to cool the geyser output. Should I just keep digging until I find a cold biome?
so I started a new base on the salty ocean asteroid, got a not-centered start. I seem to have a lot of pockets of fresh water around me, and a cool steam vent. And not a lot of other sources of power, so I figured I should get water from the vent and make hydrogen for generators
but I seem to be surrounded by warm biomes so I'm not sure how to cool the geyser output. Should I just keep digging until I find a cold biome?
Well, to a certain extent, you cool it by using it: water has a higher thermal capacity than oxygen and hydrogen, so water that's at 75°C will delete a lot of heat just by going through the electrolyzer (going over isn't bad, but the ratio of heat deleted doesn't change once the output temp matches the input temp.) And since hydrogen generators have no material output, you are effectively deleting all the heat the hydrogen is holding when it gets used.
That said, a SPOM isn't going to be heat-neutral, much less heat-deleting, without a steam turbine settup if you actually want power for the rest of your base from it. Mainly because there are few other things that are that cheap (terms of outside resource/power input) that could bring the temperature of the oxygen down to acceptable levels before using it in the base. If you only care about the room where you food comes from, an Ice maker and Ice-E would work and is cheap on power, but takes up a good chunk of your dupe's time. Otherwise you'd have to drop the SP on your SPOM and build thermo regulators to shunt heat from oxygen in pipes into hydrogen in a room that eventually gets pumped into the generator.
TL:DR, it looks scarier than it is, but without steam turbines or more power than a SPOM can give you it is likely still beyond your ability to manage.
So Im an advanced beginner and haven’t built a SPOM yet but I have a decent understanding of how it works (after some googling)
Is the geyser enough to produce some power and supply me with water for farming, etc?
Depends on the geyser. You won't know 100% until your scientist studies it, which will give you the numbers you need to figure out how much it gives through the entire active/dormany period.
I'm sure there is a calculator out there that would do it for you, but I usually just do the napkin math to justify all that algebra I took. But once you know that (keeping in mind that a single cycle is 600 seconds if you need to convert between g/s to g/cycle) then You'll know hown many electrolyzers and plants it can supply and what bit is left over you can collect for other things. However, wiki says the average for a cool steam vent is about 1.4-1.6kg/s, or about 1 1/2 electrolyzers, which is enough to keep most bases breathing, but IIRC not nearly enough to make a SPOM that gets a sizable net gain to power (though one that is effectively power-neutral is possible.)
So Im an advanced beginner and haven’t built a SPOM yet but I have a decent understanding of how it works (after some googling)
Is the geyser enough to produce some power and supply me with water for farming, etc?
Depends on the geyser. You won't know 100% until your scientist studies it, which will give you the numbers you need to figure out how much it gives through the entire active/dormany period.
I'm sure there is a calculator out there that would do it for you, but I usually just do the napkin math to justify all that algebra I took. But once you know that (keeping in mind that a single cycle is 600 seconds if you need to convert between g/s to g/cycle) then You'll know hown many electrolyzers and plants it can supply and what bit is left over you can collect for other things. However, wiki says the average for a cool steam vent is about 1.4-1.6kg/s, or about 1 1/2 electrolyzers, which is enough to keep most bases breathing, but IIRC not nearly enough to make a SPOM that gets a sizable net gain to power (though one that is effectively power-neutral is possible.)
got it! Well I did find a cold biome with those cold making machines so I may just pump in cold air to cool off the air from the electrolyzer for now. thanks!
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Why is it always nighttime in this game? Not like, dark, but every time I queue up something it's bedtime.
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Why is it always nighttime in this game? Not like, dark, but every time I queue up something it's bedtime.
Spread out your scheduling. I generally only have 2-3 dupes per shift, and then spread it out so only 2-3 dupes are off work at any given time.
I already do. I have 3 shifts with 4 dupes each. It just feels like every time I'm ready for them to do something, it's bedtime.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Sometimes the feature where it adds newly discovered items to storage filters messes with me. I could not figure out why my 3 hatch farms weren't producing meat, and didn't seem to be doing much for eggs beyond my unpowered incubators. My food was dropping faster than I was comfortable with.
Just realized I had a ton of eggs in storage.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Those refinery decor bombs are no joke. Just by using diamond window tiles for flooring and granite statues, the decor went from like -320 to +120.
Thought I had my rocketry automation worked out only to find my rockets crashing through my bunker doors on return. After much fiddling around and redoing it, I finally found the culprit.
I accidentally made some of the wires not of steel and they melted. To be fair it was way down near the actual scanner and not where I was fiddling with the automation.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
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CaptainPeacockBoard Game HoarderTop o' the LakeRegistered Userregular
What are some very basic things to automate? Like simple stuff you'd want in practically any biome?
Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man's a mushroom, etc.
My favoured SPOM design has something like a 3kg/s output, and I think it usually takes about 3 geysers to keep it running? It needs like 10kg/s of water.
It's pretty excessive! I usually have to ship the excess oxygen to space excessive!
But I usually have a bunch of water so even just finding two cool steam vents is enough to get going, and I'll find enough
What are some very basic things to automate? Like simple stuff you'd want in practically any biome?
The classic is hooking up each set of power providers to a smart battery. I posted in depth on this up in the thread a bit.
Saves you immense amounts of fuel (and heat production/c02) as a result.
Beyond that it depends a lot of your needs.
I often use pressure plates or motion sensors to turn lights on/off where my dupes are working (gives them a speed buff).
While you can make it fancy, just linking incubators to a clock that's only on for a couple of hours each day gives a big boost to hatching critters, without costing you power all the time
Less automation but the auto sweepers and to an extent the conveyers really cut down on dupe labour. Even just having the dupes carry whatever it is (coal for example) to a storage container next to the user (coal power generator for example) will help. Then the sweeper keeps topping up the generator and the dupes bring bigger loads cutting down on carry labour.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Less automation but the auto sweepers and to an extent the conveyers really cut down on dupe labour. Even just having the dupes carry whatever it is (coal for example) to a storage container next to the user (coal power generator for example) will help. Then the sweeper keeps topping up the generator and the dupes bring bigger loads cutting down on carry labour.
Yeah, I've been kind of adding things to each playthrough to not get overwhelmed and on this last one I started messing around with autosweepers. Just putting one next to your coal generators with a coal storage container is a big help. I also used them to pull refined materials away from the refineries to avoid heating everything up and that helped a lot. I'm also a big fan of the ranch>autosweeper>unpowered incubator>drowning chamber setup for hatches.
What are some very basic things to automate? Like simple stuff you'd want in practically any biome?
It's a little "hacky" but use a sweeper and conveyor to drop cooked food into a 1 tile CO2/Chlorine space with open diagonals (to allow dupes to grab the meals back out of it) for unlimited, electric free food storage.
Also if you plan on doing mass Pacu farming, you can set up a single automated "breeder" tank where a single Pacu is tamed and fed (via arms), to sweep out every 2 out of 3 eggs (leaving the last one in to hatch a new tamed Pacu to keep the cycle going), and drop them into a larger food tank with more arms to auto sweep their bodies to the kitchen when they die. I like this because it automates a large portion of the most tedious part of Pacu farming, egg management and feeding. You can also get really fancy and use a filter to disable feeding towards the breeder Pacu's end of life to conserve precious algae.
Less automation but the auto sweepers and to an extent the conveyers really cut down on dupe labour. Even just having the dupes carry whatever it is (coal for example) to a storage container next to the user (coal power generator for example) will help. Then the sweeper keeps topping up the generator and the dupes bring bigger loads cutting down on carry labour.
Yeah, Autosweeper and conveyor networks are HUGE for optizing. They're the secret behind suepr productive hatcheries, for instance.
See, Eggs count against the limit of critters in a room. For hatches, it's 8 critters in a 96 square room. So the moment a hatch lays an egg, boom, 9 critters, and egg production drops like a rock for the rest.
Which SUCKS because normally Hatches will make 16 eggs in a 100 cycle life span. That's a lot of cal!
But if you have an autosweeper set up, and the conveyor receptacles setup, you can literally grab eggs and get them out of the room the moment they're laid. Eggy profit! And you can get all that coal out, refill the feeder, etcera. Autosweepers are amazing. Like, another example:
Running a water filter? Set up an autosweeper, and a storage container. Set the storage container to be filled with filtration medium - it can hold twenty tons. Now instead ofyour dupes having to sort out the Water filter, your sweeper can grab sand and shove it in for you. And you can setup another thing to send the polluted dirt to wherever it'll be useful.
Pretty much any of my designs i post you'll see big auto-sweeper networks as part of them - They're in my kitchens to move food around, i build central storage dumps that things are setn to (and autosweepers can grab stuff from and send it to where it's needed)
@Mvrck The better version of that is to create a vacuum - As this counts ahs having a temp of below 0c, which will give the Refigerated Buff - which stacks ontop of the Sterile Atmosphere buff.
I tend to instead of creating a diagonal, use a splot of water or similar to create a one tile barrier. If you need to get really fancy you can "stack" various liquids to create waterlocks before you get acess to Visco gel, but eh, one tile is big enough to grab things through.
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
My Rime base had a ridiculous conveyor rail setup. I had a single drop point for all resources, save the extremely rare ones, and then multiple conveyor loaders there and a spiderweb of rails that distributed the goods.
I had a lot of stuff automatically being fed there, too. Between lumber, coal (from the hatch farms), igneous rock (from the geothermal plant) and other random bits, the input conveyor rail was very nearly at 100% capacity. It was nuts. They really are a dupe productivity multiplier.
My Rime base had a ridiculous conveyor rail setup. I had a single drop point for all resources, save the extremely rare ones, and then multiple conveyor loaders there and a spiderweb of rails that distributed the goods.
I had a lot of stuff automatically being fed there, too. Between lumber, coal (from the hatch farms), igneous rock (from the geothermal plant) and other random bits, the input conveyor rail was very nearly at 100% capacity. It was nuts. They really are a dupe productivity multiplier.
I absolutely love setting up central dumping and storage and then redistributing it all as needed back out through the colony to appropriate location specific storage bins. I've been really trying to hold off starting a new base until the multi-colony update comes but I'm really getting that itch again now. It's been about 8 months since I've really gone hard on a base.
What are some very basic things to automate? Like simple stuff you'd want in practically any biome?
Turning your power generators on and off with a smart battery is basically required if you don't want to waste tons of resources.
Another is atmo pressure sensors to make sure gas pumps only run when they can suck in the max of whatever it is they're suppose to pump (which is about 600-700g IIRC) otherwise you're going to waste power trying to pump mere mg's until it achieves a vacuum. Pretty much every asteroid is guaranteed to have at least one Natural Gas Vent, plus the natural gas "waste" that comes from pumping oil, so it's something that should eventually come into play once you get further along.
Pretty much any cooling setup is also going to need a temperature sensor or two to run smoothly, whether it's to make sure the liquid in the cooling loop doesn't boil or freeze or that too-hot air from the electrolyzer gets pumped into your base if the setup isn't cooling it enough in one trip through
Finally, there is a trick where a pipe element sensor followed immediately by an automated shutoff can work as a filter that takes less power than the normal one, *but* if there is a backup in either pipe it basically stops working, so it's something that should only be deployed if you can be certain that won't happen.
My Rime base had a ridiculous conveyor rail setup. I had a single drop point for all resources, save the extremely rare ones, and then multiple conveyor loaders there and a spiderweb of rails that distributed the goods.
I had a lot of stuff automatically being fed there, too. Between lumber, coal (from the hatch farms), igneous rock (from the geothermal plant) and other random bits, the input conveyor rail was very nearly at 100% capacity. It was nuts. They really are a dupe productivity multiplier.
I absolutely love setting up central dumping and storage and then redistributing it all as needed back out through the colony to appropriate location specific storage bins. I've been really trying to hold off starting a new base until the multi-colony update comes but I'm really getting that itch again now. It's been about 8 months since I've really gone hard on a base.
I do the exact same with massive central dump systems.
Quick tip for anyone making those: make them 3 deep, and split them into an Organic and Non-organic piles. And make sure they've got a little space between them
Reason for this is that dumping everything on the ground creates a MASSIVe decor penalty, and due to the way dupes calculate decor, walking over it can fuck their decor for the day. (Basically, the 120 max decor thing is a fucking lie. Dupes care about their AVERAGE for the day, which is why decorbombing is so effective - you effectively give the dupes a huge "Buffer" of decor. But if they walk over a huge ol pile of junk... well, kiss your average goodbye).
But a 3 deep pit? That's deep enough that dupes can get stuff out without being hit by the decor penalty. Bing bang boom!
You want to split them between organic and non organic in case you end up mining volcanic stuff, or surface materials that are crazy hot - You can end up accidentally baking your precious algae or other organics into dirt. Which can even result in a solid tile forming. Whoopsie. I usually end up keeping some oil in my pits to act as an extra temp buffer + stopping offgassing. Obvs, if you're doing serious oxylite production, you'll want a better soloution so you dont loose material to offgassing in transit.
For those of you wondering how you set up dispenser pits, the trick is automaded dispeners - no need to power them or wire them up, just set them to sweep only. I usually b uild 6 all over the same pit (Because dupes will "Claim" one when they're moving stuff to drop to it).
Less automation but the auto sweepers and to an extent the conveyers really cut down on dupe labour. Even just having the dupes carry whatever it is (coal for example) to a storage container next to the user (coal power generator for example) will help. Then the sweeper keeps topping up the generator and the dupes bring bigger loads cutting down on carry labour.
Yeah, Autosweeper and conveyor networks are HUGE for optizing. They're the secret behind suepr productive hatcheries, for instance.
See, Eggs count against the limit of critters in a room. For hatches, it's 8 critters in a 96 square room. So the moment a hatch lays an egg, boom, 9 critters, and egg production drops like a rock for the rest.
Which SUCKS because normally Hatches will make 16 eggs in a 100 cycle life span. That's a lot of cal!
But if you have an autosweeper set up, and the conveyor receptacles setup, you can literally grab eggs and get them out of the room the moment they're laid. Eggy profit! And you can get all that coal out, refill the feeder, etcera. Autosweepers are amazing. Like, another example:
Running a water filter? Set up an autosweeper, and a storage container. Set the storage container to be filled with filtration medium - it can hold twenty tons. Now instead ofyour dupes having to sort out the Water filter, your sweeper can grab sand and shove it in for you. And you can setup another thing to send the polluted dirt to wherever it'll be useful.
Pretty much any of my designs i post you'll see big auto-sweeper networks as part of them - They're in my kitchens to move food around, i build central storage dumps that things are setn to (and autosweepers can grab stuff from and send it to where it's needed)
Mvrck The better version of that is to create a vacuum - As this counts ahs having a temp of below 0c, which will give the Refigerated Buff - which stacks ontop of the Sterile Atmosphere buff.
I tend to instead of creating a diagonal, use a splot of water or similar to create a one tile barrier. If you need to get really fancy you can "stack" various liquids to create waterlocks before you get acess to Visco gel, but eh, one tile is big enough to grab things through.
Does a vacuum kill germs? I do a tile of chlorine because then any germs that get on the food gets killed quickly.
Huh, I did try automating my coal power plants with smart batteries and it does cut down a ton on coal consumption
I also hooked up my smart batteries to a NOT gate so it will not allow my metal smelter to run if the batteries are too low. Very neat!
I also found my base was flooding a little randomly, which was pretty confusing. Then I realized my dupes were randomly storing ice in my storage things which melts and spills water everywhere! So instead I'm storing it in machines at the bottom of my clean water reservoir, so it gives me extra water and cools it down a little at the same time.
I'm just getting to my oil biome and it sounds like boiling oil is a pretty late game set up / pretty complicated. So I'll just set up some oil refineries so I can start making plastic!
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
I'm just getting to my oil biome and it sounds like boiling oil is a pretty late game set up / pretty complicated. So I'll just set up some oil refineries so I can start making plastic!
Huh, I did try automating my coal power plants with smart batteries and it does cut down a ton on coal consumption
I also hooked up my smart batteries to a NOT gate so it will not allow my metal smelter to run if the batteries are too low. Very neat!
I also found my base was flooding a little randomly, which was pretty confusing. Then I realized my dupes were randomly storing ice in my storage things which melts and spills water everywhere! So instead I'm storing it in machines at the bottom of my clean water reservoir, so it gives me extra water and cools it down a little at the same time.
I'm just getting to my oil biome and it sounds like boiling oil is a pretty late game set up / pretty complicated. So I'll just set up some oil refineries so I can start making plastic!
I vastly prefer derko farms for plastic production.
Doesn't use nearly as much power, generates practically no heat, can be done much earlier than oil. Also generates food and phosphorite.
Less automation but the auto sweepers and to an extent the conveyers really cut down on dupe labour. Even just having the dupes carry whatever it is (coal for example) to a storage container next to the user (coal power generator for example) will help. Then the sweeper keeps topping up the generator and the dupes bring bigger loads cutting down on carry labour.
Yeah, Autosweeper and conveyor networks are HUGE for optizing. They're the secret behind suepr productive hatcheries, for instance.
See, Eggs count against the limit of critters in a room. For hatches, it's 8 critters in a 96 square room. So the moment a hatch lays an egg, boom, 9 critters, and egg production drops like a rock for the rest.
Which SUCKS because normally Hatches will make 16 eggs in a 100 cycle life span. That's a lot of cal!
But if you have an autosweeper set up, and the conveyor receptacles setup, you can literally grab eggs and get them out of the room the moment they're laid. Eggy profit! And you can get all that coal out, refill the feeder, etcera. Autosweepers are amazing. Like, another example:
Running a water filter? Set up an autosweeper, and a storage container. Set the storage container to be filled with filtration medium - it can hold twenty tons. Now instead ofyour dupes having to sort out the Water filter, your sweeper can grab sand and shove it in for you. And you can setup another thing to send the polluted dirt to wherever it'll be useful.
Pretty much any of my designs i post you'll see big auto-sweeper networks as part of them - They're in my kitchens to move food around, i build central storage dumps that things are setn to (and autosweepers can grab stuff from and send it to where it's needed)
Mvrck The better version of that is to create a vacuum - As this counts ahs having a temp of below 0c, which will give the Refigerated Buff - which stacks ontop of the Sterile Atmosphere buff.
I tend to instead of creating a diagonal, use a splot of water or similar to create a one tile barrier. If you need to get really fancy you can "stack" various liquids to create waterlocks before you get acess to Visco gel, but eh, one tile is big enough to grab things through.
Does a vacuum kill germs? I do a tile of chlorine because then any germs that get on the food gets killed quickly.
It dosent matter - Germs, with the exception of Zombie Spores, are toothless in the current game.
The point of the a vacuum is that it results in perfect food preservation - your food can never, ever decay. This is how i get those ridiculous amounts of calories stacked up.
Huh, I did try automating my coal power plants with smart batteries and it does cut down a ton on coal consumption
I also hooked up my smart batteries to a NOT gate so it will not allow my metal smelter to run if the batteries are too low. Very neat!
I also found my base was flooding a little randomly, which was pretty confusing. Then I realized my dupes were randomly storing ice in my storage things which melts and spills water everywhere! So instead I'm storing it in machines at the bottom of my clean water reservoir, so it gives me extra water and cools it down a little at the same time.
I'm just getting to my oil biome and it sounds like boiling oil is a pretty late game set up / pretty complicated. So I'll just set up some oil refineries so I can start making plastic!
I vastly prefer derko farms for plastic production.
Doesn't use nearly as much power, generates practically no heat, can be done much earlier than oil. Also generates food and phosphorite.
I find Glossy Drecko farms not worth it, honestly. They're a pain to setup, they eat up a lot of dupe labor time once they're setup, and the plastic production is real low. At least for my bases, i have way more trained operators than i have trained ranchers (Due to the way the skill system works out, Ranching dupes only get exp for hugging eggs, which makes getting them to be highly skilled a real pain)
Early on i just scavenge plastic from the environment, and once i need a certain amount, i'll sacrifice some oil to Oil refineries. Once i have a boiler setup, i just automate my plastic production. Heck, actually, before i have the boiler, i still use the setup below - I just conenct my refineries to an on/off switch and turn them off when i dont need plastic (Since it's not worth refining oil for power unless you make a boiler)
You can see my plastic production part of my brick here in middle level, on the left. It's hooked up such that system shuts down once i've got X tons of plastic in storage (tuneable via the storage bins). The water bath helps immediately cool the hot plastic when it's dropped in, and deal with any other heat issues.
So i played this game like 3 years ago and it was ehhhhhhhh. Was super bored and gave it another shot. First new map play through was meh. But then i got to thinking about what i could do better. So then i made a new map, did a ton of stuff that was rather enjoyable. This kind of steamrolled into plugging in like 75 hours in the last couple weeks. Its a lot better than it was. So far my only problem is running out of water on asteroids where its scarce. I may have a ton of ice, but i cant melt it fast enough to make any kind of difference.
So i played this game like 3 years ago and it was ehhhhhhhh. Was super bored and gave it another shot. First new map play through was meh. But then i got to thinking about what i could do better. So then i made a new map, did a ton of stuff that was rather enjoyable. This kind of steamrolled into plugging in like 75 hours in the last couple weeks. Its a lot better than it was. So far my only problem is running out of water on asteroids where its scarce. I may have a ton of ice, but i cant melt it fast enough to make any kind of difference.
The big thing I would say is if you feel water is scarce, then you want to prioritize Pacu and Hatch/Vole ranching. Then you're only really limited for oxygen generation when it comes to water.
So i played this game like 3 years ago and it was ehhhhhhhh. Was super bored and gave it another shot. First new map play through was meh. But then i got to thinking about what i could do better. So then i made a new map, did a ton of stuff that was rather enjoyable. This kind of steamrolled into plugging in like 75 hours in the last couple weeks. Its a lot better than it was. So far my only problem is running out of water on asteroids where its scarce. I may have a ton of ice, but i cant melt it fast enough to make any kind of difference.
The big thing I would say is if you feel water is scarce, then you want to prioritize Pacu and Hatch/Vole ranching. Then you're only really limited for oxygen generation when it comes to water.
ranching is something i havent really delved into yet. on this same waterless map i ended up having to sheer them lumpy things that breathe hydrogen so i could make atmo suites. But even then i was lucky enough to have a ton spawn in a void full of chlorine and hydrogen, so all i had to do was plop down the shaver and grooming station. And by this map being waterless, i mean its super scarce. I had 4 small pockets of fresh around my base. I was lucky enough to find a cool steam geyser eventually, but its the only one on the map and the output is abysmal. Not nearly enough to keep up with oxygen production. There is a ton of ice, but melting it down a a fast enough pace is proving problematic.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
So i played this game like 3 years ago and it was ehhhhhhhh. Was super bored and gave it another shot. First new map play through was meh. But then i got to thinking about what i could do better. So then i made a new map, did a ton of stuff that was rather enjoyable. This kind of steamrolled into plugging in like 75 hours in the last couple weeks. Its a lot better than it was. So far my only problem is running out of water on asteroids where its scarce. I may have a ton of ice, but i cant melt it fast enough to make any kind of difference.
The big thing I would say is if you feel water is scarce, then you want to prioritize Pacu and Hatch/Vole ranching. Then you're only really limited for oxygen generation when it comes to water.
ranching is something i havent really delved into yet.
Yeah, Ranching is the light when it comes to food generation. I've basically never run out of water since i did dedicated ranching as my food approach. It's honestly one of my issues with the game, the cost/reward for a lot of stuff feels... off. a past a certain point you're doing things for the lols.
huh... the dumping of eggs into a water chamber to drown them as soon as they hatch is pretty dark! and efficient!
Personally, I dump mine next to a chamber that locks and floods when a critter walls in. Makes it simple to sort eggs based on needs, but does take a bit more automation.
I honestly think they should change it so that you need to wait for a critter to grow up to get the full harvest, or at least make it so that eggs can't hatch under water (unless they're species that makes sense for - like maybe you should have to keep your pacu and crab eggs immersed)
Just so there's slightly more interesting building challenges
You can also filter polluted water to make clean water - the swamp biomes have large pockets of them
For ice, have your dupes mine out a bunch of it and store it in machines in your clean water area - they will gradually melt and deposit their water there
Don’t use algae terrariums to make O2 - they use a lot of water. Bristle blossoms also take water to grow, meal lice don’t but are labor inefficient. You can use polluted water to irrigate mushrooms as well.
huh... the dumping of eggs into a water chamber to drown them as soon as they hatch is pretty dark! and efficient!
Personally, I dump mine next to a chamber that locks and floods when a critter walls in. Makes it simple to sort eggs based on needs, but does take a bit more automation.
I honestly think they should change it so that you need to wait for a critter to grow up to get the full harvest, or at least make it so that eggs can't hatch under water (unless they're species that makes sense for - like maybe you should have to keep your pacu and crab eggs immersed)
Just so there's slightly more interesting building challenges
yeah, it's a little weird that babies provide full calories. I assumed they didn't so I never killed them. Also I'm not a monster who drowns baby animals to eat them!
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
huh... the dumping of eggs into a water chamber to drown them as soon as they hatch is pretty dark! and efficient!
Personally, I dump mine next to a chamber that locks and floods when a critter walls in. Makes it simple to sort eggs based on needs, but does take a bit more automation.
I honestly think they should change it so that you need to wait for a critter to grow up to get the full harvest, or at least make it so that eggs can't hatch under water (unless they're species that makes sense for - like maybe you should have to keep your pacu and crab eggs immersed)
Just so there's slightly more interesting building challenges
yeah, it's a little weird that babies provide full calories. I assumed they didn't so I never killed them. Also I'm not a monster who drowns baby animals to eat them!
We prefer to call it evolving them to their meat form. It's not a drowning chamber, it's an evolution chamber!
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You're shitting me.
Forest biome has no coal though, so at the start you're getting all your non-hamster power from wood, as it's going to be a while before your single starting hatch in those starts can multiply to a few ranches worth.
Main reason I do it on forest maps over just more wood burners (which are more power efficient per unit of lumber once you factor the power for upkeep/skimmers) comes down to scaling and material input. Ethanol using domesticated trees is actually crazy efficient in terms of water input if you reuse all the p water that the generators create compared to other water-consuming setups (if my napkin math is right, it's somewhere between "boiling oil from a well for petroleum" and "boiling oil from a well for natural gas" in terms of Watts per kg of water, although it is obviously closer to the petrol setup than the nat gas one) which gives it a very low water footprint, even if it takes up a shitload of extra space between the tree farms, distillers and the skimmers. Wood burners using domesticated trees though, are less efficient in terms of water than most power-positive SPOM setups, and you probably only have enough wild trees at the start to support one full time, so unless I'm setting up a "gym," and doing so super early, to me it's the natural way to expand my power output, at least until something less intensive like a nat gas vent or oil is found.
but I seem to be surrounded by warm biomes so I'm not sure how to cool the geyser output. Should I just keep digging until I find a cold biome?
Well, to a certain extent, you cool it by using it: water has a higher thermal capacity than oxygen and hydrogen, so water that's at 75°C will delete a lot of heat just by going through the electrolyzer (going over isn't bad, but the ratio of heat deleted doesn't change once the output temp matches the input temp.) And since hydrogen generators have no material output, you are effectively deleting all the heat the hydrogen is holding when it gets used.
That said, a SPOM isn't going to be heat-neutral, much less heat-deleting, without a steam turbine settup if you actually want power for the rest of your base from it. Mainly because there are few other things that are that cheap (terms of outside resource/power input) that could bring the temperature of the oxygen down to acceptable levels before using it in the base. If you only care about the room where you food comes from, an Ice maker and Ice-E would work and is cheap on power, but takes up a good chunk of your dupe's time. Otherwise you'd have to drop the SP on your SPOM and build thermo regulators to shunt heat from oxygen in pipes into hydrogen in a room that eventually gets pumped into the generator.
TL:DR, it looks scarier than it is, but without steam turbines or more power than a SPOM can give you it is likely still beyond your ability to manage.
Is the geyser enough to produce some power and supply me with water for farming, etc?
Depends on the geyser. You won't know 100% until your scientist studies it, which will give you the numbers you need to figure out how much it gives through the entire active/dormany period.
I'm sure there is a calculator out there that would do it for you, but I usually just do the napkin math to justify all that algebra I took. But once you know that (keeping in mind that a single cycle is 600 seconds if you need to convert between g/s to g/cycle) then You'll know hown many electrolyzers and plants it can supply and what bit is left over you can collect for other things. However, wiki says the average for a cool steam vent is about 1.4-1.6kg/s, or about 1 1/2 electrolyzers, which is enough to keep most bases breathing, but IIRC not nearly enough to make a SPOM that gets a sizable net gain to power (though one that is effectively power-neutral is possible.)
got it! Well I did find a cold biome with those cold making machines so I may just pump in cold air to cool off the air from the electrolyzer for now. thanks!
Spread out your scheduling. I generally only have 2-3 dupes per shift, and then spread it out so only 2-3 dupes are off work at any given time.
I already do. I have 3 shifts with 4 dupes each. It just feels like every time I'm ready for them to do something, it's bedtime.
Just realized I had a ton of eggs in storage.
I accidentally made some of the wires not of steel and they melted. To be fair it was way down near the actual scanner and not where I was fiddling with the automation.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
It's pretty excessive! I usually have to ship the excess oxygen to space excessive!
But I usually have a bunch of water so even just finding two cool steam vents is enough to get going, and I'll find enough
The classic is hooking up each set of power providers to a smart battery. I posted in depth on this up in the thread a bit.
Saves you immense amounts of fuel (and heat production/c02) as a result.
Beyond that it depends a lot of your needs.
I often use pressure plates or motion sensors to turn lights on/off where my dupes are working (gives them a speed buff).
While you can make it fancy, just linking incubators to a clock that's only on for a couple of hours each day gives a big boost to hatching critters, without costing you power all the time
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Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Yeah, I've been kind of adding things to each playthrough to not get overwhelmed and on this last one I started messing around with autosweepers. Just putting one next to your coal generators with a coal storage container is a big help. I also used them to pull refined materials away from the refineries to avoid heating everything up and that helped a lot. I'm also a big fan of the ranch>autosweeper>unpowered incubator>drowning chamber setup for hatches.
It's a little "hacky" but use a sweeper and conveyor to drop cooked food into a 1 tile CO2/Chlorine space with open diagonals (to allow dupes to grab the meals back out of it) for unlimited, electric free food storage.
Also if you plan on doing mass Pacu farming, you can set up a single automated "breeder" tank where a single Pacu is tamed and fed (via arms), to sweep out every 2 out of 3 eggs (leaving the last one in to hatch a new tamed Pacu to keep the cycle going), and drop them into a larger food tank with more arms to auto sweep their bodies to the kitchen when they die. I like this because it automates a large portion of the most tedious part of Pacu farming, egg management and feeding. You can also get really fancy and use a filter to disable feeding towards the breeder Pacu's end of life to conserve precious algae.
Yeah, Autosweeper and conveyor networks are HUGE for optizing. They're the secret behind suepr productive hatcheries, for instance.
See, Eggs count against the limit of critters in a room. For hatches, it's 8 critters in a 96 square room. So the moment a hatch lays an egg, boom, 9 critters, and egg production drops like a rock for the rest.
Which SUCKS because normally Hatches will make 16 eggs in a 100 cycle life span. That's a lot of cal!
But if you have an autosweeper set up, and the conveyor receptacles setup, you can literally grab eggs and get them out of the room the moment they're laid. Eggy profit! And you can get all that coal out, refill the feeder, etcera. Autosweepers are amazing. Like, another example:
Running a water filter? Set up an autosweeper, and a storage container. Set the storage container to be filled with filtration medium - it can hold twenty tons. Now instead ofyour dupes having to sort out the Water filter, your sweeper can grab sand and shove it in for you. And you can setup another thing to send the polluted dirt to wherever it'll be useful.
Pretty much any of my designs i post you'll see big auto-sweeper networks as part of them - They're in my kitchens to move food around, i build central storage dumps that things are setn to (and autosweepers can grab stuff from and send it to where it's needed)
@Mvrck The better version of that is to create a vacuum - As this counts ahs having a temp of below 0c, which will give the Refigerated Buff - which stacks ontop of the Sterile Atmosphere buff.
I tend to instead of creating a diagonal, use a splot of water or similar to create a one tile barrier. If you need to get really fancy you can "stack" various liquids to create waterlocks before you get acess to Visco gel, but eh, one tile is big enough to grab things through.
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Switch: 0293 6817 9891
I had a lot of stuff automatically being fed there, too. Between lumber, coal (from the hatch farms), igneous rock (from the geothermal plant) and other random bits, the input conveyor rail was very nearly at 100% capacity. It was nuts. They really are a dupe productivity multiplier.
I absolutely love setting up central dumping and storage and then redistributing it all as needed back out through the colony to appropriate location specific storage bins. I've been really trying to hold off starting a new base until the multi-colony update comes but I'm really getting that itch again now. It's been about 8 months since I've really gone hard on a base.
Turning your power generators on and off with a smart battery is basically required if you don't want to waste tons of resources.
Another is atmo pressure sensors to make sure gas pumps only run when they can suck in the max of whatever it is they're suppose to pump (which is about 600-700g IIRC) otherwise you're going to waste power trying to pump mere mg's until it achieves a vacuum. Pretty much every asteroid is guaranteed to have at least one Natural Gas Vent, plus the natural gas "waste" that comes from pumping oil, so it's something that should eventually come into play once you get further along.
Pretty much any cooling setup is also going to need a temperature sensor or two to run smoothly, whether it's to make sure the liquid in the cooling loop doesn't boil or freeze or that too-hot air from the electrolyzer gets pumped into your base if the setup isn't cooling it enough in one trip through
Finally, there is a trick where a pipe element sensor followed immediately by an automated shutoff can work as a filter that takes less power than the normal one, *but* if there is a backup in either pipe it basically stops working, so it's something that should only be deployed if you can be certain that won't happen.
I do the exact same with massive central dump systems.
Quick tip for anyone making those: make them 3 deep, and split them into an Organic and Non-organic piles. And make sure they've got a little space between them
Reason for this is that dumping everything on the ground creates a MASSIVe decor penalty, and due to the way dupes calculate decor, walking over it can fuck their decor for the day. (Basically, the 120 max decor thing is a fucking lie. Dupes care about their AVERAGE for the day, which is why decorbombing is so effective - you effectively give the dupes a huge "Buffer" of decor. But if they walk over a huge ol pile of junk... well, kiss your average goodbye).
But a 3 deep pit? That's deep enough that dupes can get stuff out without being hit by the decor penalty. Bing bang boom!
You want to split them between organic and non organic in case you end up mining volcanic stuff, or surface materials that are crazy hot - You can end up accidentally baking your precious algae or other organics into dirt. Which can even result in a solid tile forming. Whoopsie. I usually end up keeping some oil in my pits to act as an extra temp buffer + stopping offgassing. Obvs, if you're doing serious oxylite production, you'll want a better soloution so you dont loose material to offgassing in transit.
For those of you wondering how you set up dispenser pits, the trick is automaded dispeners - no need to power them or wire them up, just set them to sweep only. I usually b uild 6 all over the same pit (Because dupes will "Claim" one when they're moving stuff to drop to it).
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Does a vacuum kill germs? I do a tile of chlorine because then any germs that get on the food gets killed quickly.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I also hooked up my smart batteries to a NOT gate so it will not allow my metal smelter to run if the batteries are too low. Very neat!
I also found my base was flooding a little randomly, which was pretty confusing. Then I realized my dupes were randomly storing ice in my storage things which melts and spills water everywhere! So instead I'm storing it in machines at the bottom of my clean water reservoir, so it gives me extra water and cools it down a little at the same time.
I'm just getting to my oil biome and it sounds like boiling oil is a pretty late game set up / pretty complicated. So I'll just set up some oil refineries so I can start making plastic!
This should help:
This is his tutorial playlist. It's full of all kinds of good info.
I vastly prefer derko farms for plastic production.
Doesn't use nearly as much power, generates practically no heat, can be done much earlier than oil. Also generates food and phosphorite.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
It dosent matter - Germs, with the exception of Zombie Spores, are toothless in the current game.
The point of the a vacuum is that it results in perfect food preservation - your food can never, ever decay. This is how i get those ridiculous amounts of calories stacked up.
I find Glossy Drecko farms not worth it, honestly. They're a pain to setup, they eat up a lot of dupe labor time once they're setup, and the plastic production is real low. At least for my bases, i have way more trained operators than i have trained ranchers (Due to the way the skill system works out, Ranching dupes only get exp for hugging eggs, which makes getting them to be highly skilled a real pain)
Early on i just scavenge plastic from the environment, and once i need a certain amount, i'll sacrifice some oil to Oil refineries. Once i have a boiler setup, i just automate my plastic production. Heck, actually, before i have the boiler, i still use the setup below - I just conenct my refineries to an on/off switch and turn them off when i dont need plastic (Since it's not worth refining oil for power unless you make a boiler)
You can see my plastic production part of my brick here in middle level, on the left. It's hooked up such that system shuts down once i've got X tons of plastic in storage (tuneable via the storage bins). The water bath helps immediately cool the hot plastic when it's dropped in, and deal with any other heat issues.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
The big thing I would say is if you feel water is scarce, then you want to prioritize Pacu and Hatch/Vole ranching. Then you're only really limited for oxygen generation when it comes to water.
ranching is something i havent really delved into yet. on this same waterless map i ended up having to sheer them lumpy things that breathe hydrogen so i could make atmo suites. But even then i was lucky enough to have a ton spawn in a void full of chlorine and hydrogen, so all i had to do was plop down the shaver and grooming station. And by this map being waterless, i mean its super scarce. I had 4 small pockets of fresh around my base. I was lucky enough to find a cool steam geyser eventually, but its the only one on the map and the output is abysmal. Not nearly enough to keep up with oxygen production. There is a ton of ice, but melting it down a a fast enough pace is proving problematic.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Personally, I dump mine next to a chamber that locks and floods when a critter walls in. Makes it simple to sort eggs based on needs, but does take a bit more automation.
I honestly think they should change it so that you need to wait for a critter to grow up to get the full harvest, or at least make it so that eggs can't hatch under water (unless they're species that makes sense for - like maybe you should have to keep your pacu and crab eggs immersed)
Just so there's slightly more interesting building challenges
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
For ice, have your dupes mine out a bunch of it and store it in machines in your clean water area - they will gradually melt and deposit their water there
Don’t use algae terrariums to make O2 - they use a lot of water. Bristle blossoms also take water to grow, meal lice don’t but are labor inefficient. You can use polluted water to irrigate mushrooms as well.
yeah, it's a little weird that babies provide full calories. I assumed they didn't so I never killed them. Also I'm not a monster who drowns baby animals to eat them!
We prefer to call it evolving them to their meat form. It's not a drowning chamber, it's an evolution chamber!