Sorta amusingly, the biggest problem I have at the moment is the stupid meteors causing constant damage to the surface. They’re slowly breaking through the upper levels and causing damage I have to repair.
Bunker tiles are impervious to meteor damage but need a lot of steel. And steel needs lime, which needs egg shells–which I am very short of. I want to cover the entire surface with bunker tiles but it’ll be a while before I have enough steel to accomplish that.
A few things that people might find interesting:
A design for an automation trigger that slowly turns on and off. I wanted to turn some pumps on for 5 s, then off for 5 s to save power. Can change the duty cycle to whatever.
A design for a gas pump output buffer. Again, I wanted to save power by not running the pumps all the time, but I also wanted to handle peak loads. This splits the output into two gas columns, pumps if either column is empty, but routes the output to the empty one. If both are full then it shuts off. I had to take this approach because the sensors can’t tell if a pipe is full because it’s backed up, or because I’m in the process of filling it up again.
And finally, a big chunk of my condensation system. Forgot to screenshot the first part, but basically, sour gas comes in at ~30 C, gets cooled to -135 by the 12 thermo regulators, then gets pumped into a coldbox cooled to -160. The sour gas condenses to liquid methane, which I then reexpand into natural gas and pump into the big buffer chambers.
Just a little warning so others don’t get bitten the same way I have:
Be very careful about letting regolith “leak” into your base. It falls on the surface, gets crushed into lumps, and sits there–but is very easy for it to drop into crucial locations if you are not careful with excavating. The lumps can also just fly into openings from the meteor explosions.
The problem is that it is hot, and there is a ton of it. Many tons, in fact. I had a pool of water I used for coolant, and at some point I found it was overheating and turning to steam (not so good for cooling…). I investigated and found there was approximately 1600 tons of it sitting in the water–and it had an average temperature of 200+ C! I have my dupes trained up pretty well, and they can carry about 2 tons at a time, but that still took a long time to fix.
The resource tracker says I have 56,000 tons of it laying around. Fortunately, most of it is on the surface, but I still have little piles of it laying around causing heat problems.
Schematic explanations and images of such systems remind me of programming functions which can be modularly inserted into arbitrary projects. Maybe at some point someone will compile them and make a guide on Steam.
If put into an insulated room, could it be used for power? The 200C temp refers to the water, correct? How hot does regolith itself that hasn’t been in water tend to be?
Possibly! I haven’t tried it. The steam turbine generator apparently requires 227 C steam. That is possible–“fresh” regolith is around 300 C from what I see. It may well be possible to use it in a generator system.
The only trick is that to move the regolith around, you have to use storage compactors. These will heat their surroundings, but only fairly slowly. It may be hard to get the energy out of them fast enough to be worthwhile. Granite storage (high thermal conductivity), some tempshift plates, maybe a hydrogen heat exchanger–could be possible, though.
One slight bit of amusement:
I had a metal refinery which was constantly breaking the output pipe. I discovered eventually that you can’t feed it water over a certain temperature (something like 40 C), because it raises the temperature too much and turns to steam (at least when making steel).
I installed a refinery elsewhere, and sometime after that disassembled the first refinery. It was like a bomb going off! Literally turned the walls to magma and destroyed everything in the vicinity.
After reloading, I looked at the refinery contents to see what was going on. Contents: 12 tons of water at 1700 C. Just… sitting there quietly. I guess that the hot wastewater somehow kept increasing each time I made another batch of steel. I’d like to disassemble it but I can’t see how to do it without messing up a significant part of my base. Ideally I’d use the heat for something, but it’s so hot that it slags everything.
Looks like the next update on the horizon beefs up the rocketry update even further. I did not look too closely at what’s coming so as to not spoil things too badly, but it seems that there will be new fuels for the rockets (such as liquid hydrogen), including some that require oxidizer.
Seems that I should get started on a LOX condenser ASAP. The hydrogen condenser will have to wait since it’ll require a compatible coolant (apparently also coming with the update) that stays a gas down to where hydrogen liquifies.
In the meantime, I’m collecting as many wheezeworts as I can. I think I have a couple hundred at this point. Heat is my eternal bane and wheezeworts are the only solution (given that thermo nullifiers are limited). I set up my sour gas condenser to do most of the work via wheezeworts and it’s much more efficient now. I have enough spare capacity that I could tap off it in case one of the new rockets can use liquid methane.
New update is out. Glad I collected a bunch of wheezeworts! Rocketry is a lot harder now; you first have to map things out with a telescope, and then the rocket modules require a ton more research, and then the rocket fuels are more difficult.
The savegame update also kinds screwed things up; it created yet more regolith everywhere that I had to clean up, and then deposited little piles of stuff all over the place, including some warm rocks in my methane condenser. So it was evaporating everything right away until the rocks cooled down to -160. Bleh…
On the upside, it does look like there’s a ton of cool new stuff to explore and gather, but it’ll take a while to get there.
Anyone still playing? Perhaps I’m talking to myself. Wouldn’t be the first time.
The new update adds lots of nice features, but boy is it buggy. Two biggies: I can’t change the telescope research (after a completed research) without reloading the game, and most of the shipping automation items (like the auto-sweeper) will no longer build at all. Really weird. I can work around the first one but shipping is basically hosed for me with the second (aside from systems I’ve already built).
The new rocketry stuff is much harder. Space research (the third research type) now comes from bringing back research data from missions, not from the telescope. The telescope is used to discover the new mission targets instead. The baseline rocket is steam powered, and has fairly miserable range, but it’s enough to get to the next research tier, which enables solid boosters, and with that petroleum rockets. I thought that maybe my already-built petroleum rocket would still work, but it didn’t–it needs oxidizer stages, and I couldn’t build those without the research. So I had to deconstruct everything and start from scratch.
All of the rocket types are more difficult than before; steam alone is trickier than petroleum, since I had to build a boiler (fortunately, the hot regolith came in handy here). Solid boosters need oxylite, which can now be made in a new machine (which takes a lot of power). Petroleum rockets also need oxidizer, which can come from oxylite or liquid oxygen. LOX is more efficient but harder to make (my condenser is still pre-chilling). That’s all I’ve done so far; the next stage is hydrogen rockets, but that needs materials that I can only gather from missions.
So there’s still plenty to do. I cut one thing close: I had to build a Pacu farm to make egg shells for more steel, but didn’t have much algae left. I ran out of algae just after gathering enough for my rocketry needs. But I can get more steel from missions, so I no longer need the farm (plus, I more or less have enough steel for now).
I still don’t quite have an infinitely sustainable base–at some point I’ll run out of hot magma for turning oil into sour gas. Need to think about that one. It’s fine for the next couple thousand cycles, though.
The devs have more or less said that ONI is feature complete, and they’ll focus more on fixing bugs and various shortcomings. That seems very reasonable as it’s already a pretty huge game in terms of what you can do. Maybe a little too big; the learning curve might be a turn-off for some.
I enjoy your posts although I’ve taken a break from playing until it’s fully released. I figure they intend full release to be around Christmas.
Based on what the devteam said, one of the things they’ll focus on is making it fun for beginners. Not everyone goes into a game with the my-first-ten-hours-are-comedic-training KSP mentality.
I’ve never played and feel like I don’t need to. These posts are entertaining enough!
Ok–glad people are reading! I’ll continue to write about the latest impending doom that my base is facing. Also, it’s the first 100 hours that are training, not the first 10 :). I agree that they could stand to make it more beginner-friendly.
I just ran across these little animated shorts–they’re pretty cute, and have a couple intriguing “lore” bits:
Oxygen Not Included [Animated Short] - Automation Upgrade - YouTubeOxygen Not Included [Animated Short] - Space Industry Upgrade - YouTubeI think I enjoy the early to mid game a lot more than beyond that. After a while everything you want to do becomes complicated and takes forever - everyone is so busy with their random daily chores that it’s hard to get anyone out there accomplishing things far from your base. I guess that becomes easier in the late late game once you’ve got transport tubes and such, but I’m kinda stuck in the middle where I’ve got to really start doing heat management to stay alive and it takes forever to get anything done.
Heat management is definitely a challenge. Particularly in the new update, where you have to use insulated tiles instead of standard abyssalite tiles.
Have you scoured the whole map for wheezeworts? It’s really worth exploring every little corner for them. You should be able to find a dozen or more. They’re extremely handy since they require no input resources at all; they just cool down whatever area they’re in. They work even better if you can put them in a hydrogen atmosphere.
Regarding inefficient working, I’ll repeat MichaelEmouse’s trick: build things using the “local” mineral if it doesn’t matter. Need a bunch of ladders and tiles through a granite area? You’ll have a bunch of granite laying around; the dupes are pretty good about using whatever’s nearest.
Does emptying pipes actually work? I’ve never had to do it before, but I have a pipeline to my electrolyzer full of polluted water. I’m trying to empty it so I can connect a clean water source, but my plumber just sort of walks up to one of them, and his progress bar fills over and over again (sometimes only half way before it starts again) and nothing seems to happen.
It worked for me in the past. Did you cut the pressure to that section of pipe? If not, emptying a section may simply leave room for the liquid in the previous section so your plumber could be there for a long time.
Aha, yeah, I see what’s happening now. It kinda sucks up from the source of the pipe as you empty it, and there was still a way for the dirty water to get in at the end of the pipe. I cut that off, so he should ideally keep pumping it out until that pipe is empty.
I’ve restarted a couple more times; my latest restart is after reading a guide, and finding so many good ideas (e.g., a system for using only gray water for showers and lavatories and sinks) that I figured it’d be easier to restart than to try to implement all these ideas.
Plus I had things going on like a magma volcano erupting near my sleet wheat fields that looked like they’d end in tears.
Got my liquid oxygen and hydrogen condensers running. They both have more or less the same design: a thermo aquatuner chills “super coolant” (one of the new recipes you can only get from imported materials), which is thermally coupled (via wire bridges) to a chamber that I pump gas into. The aquatuner itself sits in a pool of petroleum, which is circulated through a wheezewort chamber. I have some extra automation to ensure it doesn’t overheat or anything.
The LOX condenser works great, recharging a rocket’s worth of propellant (2700 kg) in several cycles. The rocket missions last longer than that, so I’ve never had LOX be a limiter.
The hydrogen condenser is not as good. The problem is this: hydrogen liquifies at around -254 C (technically, the condensation point is -252.2 C, but it needs a little extra in practice). The super coolant freezes at -268 C. And the aquatuner cools by 14 C per cycle. I don’t want the coolant to freeze in the pipes, so the incoming coolant has to be no less than -254 C (254+14=268). And then there’s the thermal gradient from the bridges, which take a degree or so. So for much of the time, the coolant bath is only barely cooler than what I need. The first part of the cycle is ok at -268 C, but then I have to stop pumping so that it doesn’t freeze, waiting for it to warm back up to -254, and so I’m only actually condensing hydrogen for a fraction of the time.
Lowering the freezing point by just a few degrees would really make this a faster process. Maybe there’s another method I’m missing, but I’m not seeing it yet. I thought about using liquid hydrogen itself as the coolant, but it freezes at -259 C; even worse than the super coolant. It wouldn’t make it through a single pass of the aquatuner.
For now, I’ll have to save the hydrogen rockets for rare missions. Fortunately, there are plenty of research points available on the closer targets. I’m not sure yet what materials the far destinations have.
My base is finally 100% sustainable (I think)!
The last non-renewable resource I used was magma. Drop crude oil on magma, generate sour gas, then recondense the gas into methane. Worked well, but magma is a finite resource and I don’t have a volcano.
However, the new update adds niobium and thermium (made from niobium and tungsten), with +500 and +900 overheat temps respectively. I can make gas pumps and other machines that survive under high heat. Now I can boil oil directly!
The only trick is that the main liquid heater is the liquid tepidizer, which in theory is only good to 85 C. I needed 538 C. But the tepidizer has a little quirk: it always goes on (for ~5 s) when it first gets power or an automation signal. So I hooked up a little automation circuit to just pulse it every few seconds. It boils the oil into petroleum and then sour gas just fine this way.
The rest of the unit is just a heat exchanger, to preheat the oil and precool the sour gas. Not strictly necessary but saves energy, and with my rocket propellant condensers I’m close to the edge of my energy needs.