From the makers of the critically and commercially successful Don’t Starve, Oxygen Not Included is arguably the best base management game. I’ve never been into base building and management games but this one is great.
Fallout Shelter’s problem seems to have been that it was only aimed at generating buzz for the upcoming Fallout 4. It was shallow. ONI has much more depth in its gameplay mechanics. At higher levels, you even have to do some visual scripting in a way that’s reminiscent of SpaceChem. Don’t worry though, it’s accessible even to someone like me who has little to no programming experience. It’s one of those games where you enjoy even failures because you learn from them and imagine how you’ll do better next time, much like KSP.
Like Kerbal Space Program, it can be daunting at first but it’s quite rewarding. I’m 10 hours in and I’m only starting to get my footing. In KSP terms, I’m starting to make it to orbit and yet the game has so much more ahead. It hooks you with pretty graphics and animation but there’s a lot of substance behind those cute looks.
Oxygen Not Included is amazing. I couldn’t agree more more that it is one of the best base management games out there. The game is so good, it is hard to believe it is still in Early Access. There are AAA games that cannot shine a candle to the level of quality that ONI has at this point in time. One of the things I really like is that the danger comes mainly from the environment. There’s no space aliens with laser blasters attacking your base. It is all about managing gases, resources, heat, etc. This is a rarity in base builders and is very welcome. I like too that every disadvantage can be turned to your advantage in some way. Chlorine gas is unbreathable, but it kills germs dead. It is all about how you use it.
Yes, one of the ways in which ONI has depth is in how you can use multiple drawbacks to gain a benefit. I started this thread partly because I recently took a chance on it and was surprised by how good it was and partly because I figured we could help each other out to get started, much like we did with KSP. It’s the kind of unassuming game that really hits it right.
As you mention, it’s a head above what big studios have been able to do. It is to AAA base building games what Cities: Skylines was to SimCity 2013; 10 times fewer resources behind it but 10 times better. This is one of those games where you don’t have to be afraid of getting ripped off if you buy it in early access. It’s amply worth the price in its current form and will only improve with time. You’re getting a deal.
I got it about a week ago on sale, and am completely obsessed with it. This, my seventh or eighth colony, has made it into the triple-digit days (almost entirely because I stopped accepting every dupe /worker that was offered to me). When I leave the game and go turn on the dehumidifier in my house, I find myself wondering whether I should build a pipe to pump the wastewater to my cistern where my recycler unit will clean it and return it to my reservoir…
Adorably cartoonish graphics, next to no violence (I’m about 20 hours in and the closest I’ve come to violence is killing a tiny crab-monster for meat). But it’s got a pretty steep learning curve. I don’t normally watch videos to figure out how to play a game.
It’s quite kid-friendly. Your toons can die and it can involve catch, ranching and eating animals but it’s very light in terms of violence. It’s about the level of Minecraft or Super Mario.
It’s one of those games where you’re eager to learn from failures and apply the lessons to your next attempt. That’s a big reason it made it think of KSP.
Yes, it’s deep, you should see your first 10 games as introductions, learning opportunities.
If you have questions, perhaps others here can answer them. If you found out something neat, you could also mention it here.
Well, a couple hours of playtime, and I can see myself getting hooked on this.
I do have a couple questions:
I set up a row of algae terrariums to produce oxygen. Eventually, they were entirely encased in polluted oxygen, and when I moused over to see what the little red box was saying, it said they were out of algae. Does it die off and I have to find more? Or did my algae burner (or whatever that first thing is) use up all the algae out of my terrariums?
I built a group of planters, planted meal plants, and set up the mush maker to use the meal lice to make healthy, delicious bars of muck. Instead of ever getting used for muck, my [del]idiots[/del]duplicants just ate the damn seeds. Is there a way to prevent that?
I’m two colonies in, and neither has survived to see Day 20. This is giving me minor flashbacks to Dwarf Fortress, but with prettier mooks.
Almost every bit of machinery produces an unpleasant output. In the case of your algae terrariums, they make polluted water. If you look in front of the terrarium, you’ll see a bottle of greenish water–that’s the polluted water. Polluted water emits polluted oxygen.
Here’s what you’ll want to do:
Somewhere that’s somewhat removed from your main action, dig a deep hole–like, maybe 6 tiles deep by 4 tiles wide. You’ll need a ladder going down into it so you can get out.
From the plumbing menu, build a bottle emptier that’ll empty into the hole. (You can hit “O” to flip the emptier’s orientation when you build it).
Once that’s done, your dupes–the little dudes in your base–will automatically empty the bottles into the cistern you dug.
Eventually you’ll research deodorizers, which turn polluted oxygen into clean oxygen; you can put some around your cistern to cut down on the polluted oxygen.
Also, if the algae terrariums are out of algae, you gotta go dig up more algae.
I built a group of planters, planted meal plants, and set up the mush maker to use the meal lice to make healthy, delicious bars of muck. Instead of ever getting used for muck, my [del]idiots[/del]duplicants just ate the damn seeds. Is there a way to prevent that?
[/QUOTE]
Muck is made from dirt and water. You’ll need to choose “liceloaf” if you want them to cook the meal lice. But they won’t eat the seeds for planting new meal lice–they’ll just eat the product of the plant, so you don’t need to worry about that.
For your first 20 cycles, 4 dupes is probably enough. After that, adding a new dupe every 10-20 cycles seems about right: I’m at cycle 120 or so, and have 10 dupes now. You want to be really selective. If you can find a dupe with a +5 skill that’s helpful to you, AND has diver’s lungs (so they’ll use minimal oxygen), that’s one worth taking.
A couple of other tips:
-Build a central ladder in your base, and try to expand to the left and right of the ladder. The dupes look like they move fast, but they can waste a lot of time moving around instead of doing something useful. Minimizing their travel time really adds up.
-Leave a tile of empty space to the left and right of your central ladder. You really need gases to be able to move freely throughout your base (at least by default–later on you’ll want to control them), and having a wide air column in the middle will make that much easier.
-Build algae terrariums at the bottom of the base, where carbon dioxide will settle. It’ll prevent CO2 buildup.
-Build algae deoxidizers along the central air shaft, where they can do the most good–since gas moves most freely there, air pressure will build up less.
-Check out the priorities menu when you get a chance: it’ll let you tell dupes to prioritize the tasks they’re good at.
-When you get the jobs board (through advanced research), immediately check the “auto-prioritize” box. That way, when folks get new jobs, they’ll automatically prioritize the stuff that’s in their wheelhouse. (This should be a default-on setting, I think–it’s very rare you don’t want them to prioritize the stuff that their job specializes in).
Thanks for the tip to check auto-prioritize. I’m usually apprehensive about letting AI decide something in a video game but this seems to work well.
2 things about occupations:
I’m getting the sense that interests matter more than starting stats. Getting skill points 50% may be more helpful than starting with +5 after a while.
Do skills ever decrease thru non-use? How about other ways?
I found a menu to help with dupes eating lice meal or whatever before it was cooked into something not-useless - the Consumable tab. You can allow or forbid different foods, either by dupe or wholesale.
Fixed the waste of ingredients, it did. Colony number…four is going strong, at 49 cycles and counting. A couple idjits have died from refusing to do the last little bit so food could be provided, which is easily my biggest challenge so far. Terrariums provide oxygen, and a cistern will last long enough until I can get pumps and sieves up and running.
That’s where I’m at now. I’ll probably build another greenhouse and pull in a sixth dupe while researching my way up to renewable energy. After that will be experiments with hydrogen and chlorine, and all the other ways to create FUN! in a closed system. Outside of power generation, up to this point, everything else is pretty much renewable. Even power is, if you use enough mousewheels. I refuse to run the rat race, so coal mining and burning it is. Once I find oil, I might have to reevaluate.
Don’t give up on the rat race! Coal can be a real limiting factor if your coal plant runs constantly. I used the rat race until around cycle 60 or so.
Smart batteries are awesome: you can connect a smart battery directly to your coal plant using smart wire, and it’ll automatically shut off the coal plant once the battery is full, restarting it when the battery is at 20% capacity (or whatever measure you set it at). Once I got this setup going, my coal-burning plummeted, and I now have about 30 tons of coal in storage, ready for what I anticipate to be major power usage in late game.
I think I finally figured out how the different tasks line up - had an issue with no one wanting to get rid of polluted water until I realized it was considered a “deliver” task. I’m about to chain my cook to the grill however - even with her priorities set to “cook and NOTHING ELSE”, she wanders off everywhere. Three dupes almost died of starvation while she laid on the massage table for a couple days. I now have a second cook, to go along with two farmers, a miner, a gofer, and an engineer.
I’ve moved the generators to a “power room”, with a bank of smart batteries next door. A pair of super-wire drops is in the plans along the central ladder. If all goes well, I’ll be rearranging the entire base to take advantage of the central location.
Current concerns are water supply and heat. My lowest farm was over-temp, so it was moved upwards until I can get an HVAC system up and running. Even recycling polluted water, it looks like I’ll run out, albeit in twenty cycles or so. When I find sleet wheat and can start on berry sludge, that will help as well.
Dupe management is generally beyond what I’m used to (Dwarf Fortress). There are much greater demands for each additional [del]idiot[/del] dupe that you can’t just brute force everything with 60 [del]morons[/del] people.
I’m starting to plan how things should work, instead of constantly putting out little fires. This is the first time in this colony where I haven’t had warnings or even cautions all over the place. However, I also realize that I’m still dancing a razor’s edge - if I don’t find more water in a timely manner, everything goes boom.
I’m having trouble with the metal refinery and the heavy powerplants and wires.
Even when I make sure to make it a priority and to supply materials, power and water, the metal refinery often goes unused. The 1200w requirement seems make it squirrely. I had to use heavy wire directly which is likely to result in waste.
I linked a coal plant to a battery then the battery to a transformer then from the transformer’s output, I snaked conductive wires (2kW) and some of them broke, I’m not sure why. I would have thought the transformer was specifically to avoid that. Some of the wires that got damaged had nothing at the other end.
