Once you move past algae terrariums for oxygen, you shouldn’t need the bottle stuffs. Hydroponic tiles can be fed by pipe, and the best food doesn’t use water. Keeping a bottle emptier over a dump reservoir is still a good practice, for the aforementioned mopping, but most else can be run by pump.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
I think I’ve… beaten the game. Well, not really, but I have hundreds of cycles (maybe thousands) worth of resources and no outstanding crises. The dupes are stress-free and healthy.
I finally de-germified my secondary reservoir. I think I ran into a weird issue–there was a kind of persistent “bubble” in my tank which I think was somehow amplifying the germ level to insane levels (1 billion+ germs/tile). I fixed that by filling in the bubble and then deleting the tile. The germ levels then started dropping rapidly; like 50% per cycle (but exponential, so it took a few dozen cycles). I was cooling at the same time but I don’t think that was the fundamental issue. At any rate, the whole tank is at zero germs.
My polluted water tank is pretty contaminated with food poisoning, but I’m not too worried about that; I don’t really need it for anything. I can use it for toilet flushing if necessary after a filter.
Regolith keeps coming in so I won’t run out of filter material. Heat buildup has been solved. And I have a near-infinite supply of energy from oil->petroleum->natural gas cracking. Just have to open up a new magma pool every so often. Plus I have some geysers.
Maybe time to try the Expressive beta per MichaelEmouse’s suggestion!
I’d be curious to hear your professional opinion as to its work-in-progress-ness.
I’m sure the game will keep adding layers with further updates. Perhaps for now, a good challenge would be to have a near indefinite lasting base without using nullifiers, wheezeworts, geysers or other types of buildings which go against the laws of physics or have bottomless resources, with the exception of solar panels whose practical infinity is fair enough.
I’m quite curious to see what such a base looks like.
That’s going to be really tough without some kind of alternative. Real stuff in space has giant radiators to get rid of heat (frequently, the solar panels serve a double-purpose as radiators). I kinda wanted to try this out but it’s honestly impossible given the frequency of meteor storms–they bury just about anything in very hot regolith within a handful of cycles. Maybe if there were a way to turn that off, I could build a marginally realistic space radiator that wasn’t destroyed immediately.
Heat exchangers in ice work for a while, but not long enough, and once they’re gone they’re gone.
Sorry, I meant that I was curious to see what a base that could last for hundreds of cycles looks like. It feels a bit like we’re building a mix between an ant farm, a GI Joe base and a Barbie playhouse. Everyone will show their personality through the choices they made.
Can’t you use a bunker door and sensors to protect surface gear?
Sure, I’m happy to upload my current base to a Google drive or something. It’s still a bit messy but fairly smooth running at the moment. I’ll probably continue making small tweaks to it.
Bunker doors are not too useful today. Yes, they can protect stuff beneath them, but regolith piles up on top and has to be cleaned out constantly. I built some, and when I tried to actually use them, they melted–there must have been some really hot regolith in there. I probably see around a tile of buildup per cycle; that’s just too much to deal with. I need an automatic cleaning system, or maybe a meteor deflection system or something.
You can download my base here. I think you can just save it in your “C:\Users\Username\Documents\Klei\OxygenNotIncluded\save_files” directory. Have a few projects in various states of completion, as well as plenty of cruft from leftover experiments, but it’s mostly in working order.
I encourage others to download it and see for themselves. It’s easily an order of magnitude above what I have going.
I’ve been watching a series of videos on YouTube that teach the game by a guy named CrypticFox. It’s been helpful. I didn’t have any idea of all the stuff that was going on.
A lot of it is less complicated than it looks :).
I have three Nullifiers but several more coolant loops–some are disconnected, while others are sorta useless because they went through a heat exchanger already. Sometimes I have two or three sets of plumbing going to something, only one of which is connected for one reason or another. And in some cases I have some temporary plumbing set up just to move stuff around.
The same goes for automation wiring and other stuff–lots of temporary setups in there. And then, some stuff that is active but not really working as expected.
That said, there’s some stuff that works well, like the natural gas cracker. Almost no maintenance needed on that, and a big reserve in case something goes awry and I need a few cycles for maintenance.
One unusual thing you may have noticed: I use a lot of bridges when they don’t seem necessary. It’s actually for a good reason. The game is quirky when splitting fluid flows–for a T junction, it alternates paths, but if one side is blocked it just skips that “round” of pumping. So if one path goes somewhere that doesn’t need a huge amount of flow, like an atmo suit station, then it’ll get backed up and the preceding T-junction will only have a 50% flow to the other side.
The solution, for whatever reason, is to use a bridge. Tee directly off the bridge outlet, and it will equally serve all outlets but never get backed up. This can even go four ways–three can get backed up and the fourth still gets the full flow. This is great for atmo suits; set them up in blocks of four and use a bridge with each of the output paths going to one suit. I had some serious ventilation problems until I discovered this trick.
I hope you post that on the Steam forums so others can know that trick and most importantly, so the developers see it. That quirky liquid flow must be causing problems for many other players and they likely don’t even realize it. Your improvised solution would likely help others and the developers could learn from it and code a more economical solution into the main game.
I think the reason why it works may be because flow links (whether gas, liquid, solid) send down their content to 1 receiver at any one cycle whereas buildings (bridges being buildings) send to all which are connected to its output. Not sure though.
The most advanced bit is probably the electrolyzer system. This system serves two purposes–oxygen for the base and hydrogen for the Nullifiers. But the Nullifiers don’t need much most of the time, so I have to do something with remaining hydrogen output. Otherwise the whole thing would come to a halt, starving the base of oxygen.
To deal with this, I have a gas sensor in the main hydrogen pipe that checks how backed up it is. If it’s backed up, then I have plenty of hydrogen and I need to divert the excess. So I close a valve which sends it to hydrogen generators to (partly) power the base.
There’s a tricky aspect here, though, because I don’t want to close the valve every time a gas packet passes through. I only want to close it when it’s continuously backed up. Fortunately, there is a gate (the FILTER gate) which only goes active if the input is active for N seconds. That worked well here since a single passing gas packet wouldn’t trigger it, just a sustained blockage.
It’s on the Klei forums at least. But yeah, hopefully the devs fix this at some point. Your explanation seems reasonable; that the bridge counts as a “building” and has different behavior.
Something it took me some time to realize: You can change that N seconds in both the filter and buffer gates, it doesn’t need to be the default time. That could be useful to finetune some flows.
I suppose the buffer gate, which stays active for N seconds after being triggered, could be useful for something related but I’m not sure what.
I don’t know what other gates people will improvise based on the simple building blocks already present or whether the devs will add more advanced gates in future updates.
Yup. I didn’t need it, but that feature could certainly be useful.
Another useful one is the memory toggle gate, which is excellent for hysteresis. That is to say, suppose you have a tank which you want to fill until you reach a high-water mark, but then don’t touch until it reaches a low-water mark. The gap is useful because otherwise the pump or whatever is going to be turning on in little spurts and thus inefficient.
When I was burning petroleum, I used one of those to control the production. I didn’t want the dupes to be constantly running back and forth as I dip below some threshold. Instead, with the hystersis, I could have them operate the machines for most of a cycle, and then for the next couple of cycles ignore it completely. They don’t waste time running across my base only to turn the refinery handle a few times and then leave.
Looks like there’s a few more things to fill out on my map. I scoured it for more geysers, which you can spot from their neutronium base (a 4x1 rectangle). Found a gold geyser (not that useful), a CO2 geyser (which I think I’ll use to feed my slickster farm, which is always on the verge of starvation now that I have more efficient power generation), and a couple of cold slush geysers (which put out polluted water). They’re pretty scattered, though, so it’ll take a bit of effort to hook them up.
Oh, that is a good use for it. I’m not sure that having the pump turn on for 1 second 10 times over a minute is less efficient than having it turn on for 1 10 second stretch every minute. Maybe it is in which case I’ve been doing it wrong.
But what is definitely less efficient is for Dupes to produce 1 unit of A then commute to another part of the base to produce 1 unit of B then commute to another part of the base to produce 1 unit of C then commute to another part of the base to produce 1 unit of A etc. It’s much better for a Dupe to crank out a batch of A until you have enough for a while then commute to another part of the base to crank out a batch of B until you have enough for a while etc.
The memory toggle, by turning on/off Dupe-operated machinery on the basis of batches, makes that machinery selectively available to the Dupe which helps to ensure the Dupes are less ADD in their task selection, thus wasting less time on commuting.
TLDR: Task-switching has costs for the most precious resource: the Dupes’ time. The memory toggle gate enables you to use that resource more efficiently by consolidating tasks into batches/packets.
Oh, jeeze. I didn’t realize that filtering polluted water into clean water didn’t do anything to the germs in the water. As a result my dupe’s health levels have nosedived in the past few cycles. It doesn’t help that my research assistant seems to be obsessed with rolling around in slime then running back through the whole base back to the supercomputer.
Not sure if I can save them, even if I go back a few days. The starter biome that this base is built in only had two clean water cisterns in it, and neither was that big. I can see a cold steam vent off to the side, but I’m not sure if I can dig to it and get it set up before running out the original water.
Then again, I have this cunning/stupid plan for a new base that only accepts flatulent dupes and powers everything off the gas they produce. I’ll call it “Bartertown”.
Yup. Even crazier–electrolyzing germy water just puts the germs into the air. This isn’t necessarily a disaster, since oxygen will kill germs over time. But if there are a lot of germs, it’s not good enough and the dupes will still get sick.
You can actually dump the filtered (germ infested) water into one of the hot zones (if you have access to a geyser that’s the best place) and fill the air around it with chlorine gas. It doesn’t take long for the water to become germ free. Then pump it into your fresh water tank. I actually have mine going through a series of areas, from highly polluted either where my sewer is or just pockets of polluted water, then through the water sieve filter thingy, then into a tank I built by a cold geyser (which gives you some fresh water anyway) where it sits until the tank is nearly full, then pumped into my main bases fresh water tank.
My main problem in my current game is oxygen. I finally solved the heat problem I had in the last game by getting a bunch of those cold generating cactus thingies and putting them throughout the base, especially where the generators are running but mainly by my farms.
Air though is an issue. I rely on scrubbers, algae air producers, carbon scrubbers and the like, and they just aren’t keeping up, plus I have a lot of other gasses that have gotten in (especially hydrogen and natural gas). I finally have a food system that is keeping up and giving me a good buffer for when something breaks, I have the upper level of materials in the pipeline, but it’s just the air that’s slowly killing the base and I don’t seem to be able to fix the issue.
Also, I can’t get the exo-suit system to work. I have a forge, I have a rack and checkpoint, but the forge says I need copper ore…but there is copper ore laying about everywhere. I’m not sure what I’m missing. I’ve gotten this thing to work in the past, but don’t remember what I did or what I’m doing wrong. So, I’ve been using the doors to limit access to the slime zone to only 2 duplicates and I have them going through a series of clean rooms going in and out. So far neither has contracted slime lung, but I had to really crank up making meds to keep them healthy and it’s a huge pain in the butt.