Water is huge. The map I’m on right now I just hit cycle 150, and I can do big projects like take advantage of the natural gas geyser I just found–but only because I started with plentiful water.
Something that’s super helpful is to find a swamp biome with a lot of pools of polluted water, and put a water pump in the lowest one and start pumping it into your cistern, where another water pump will send it through a cistern and into your main reservoir. When you’ve nearly drained that lowest swamp pool, dig a tunnel to the next highest swamp pool and start draining that water. Keep a switch on the water pump in the swamp, so it’s only working when your overall water supply is low.
Using this method I have a massive swamp lake ready for use, a full cistern, and a full reservoir that feeds multiple farms and other equipment.
I’m also struggling with the metal refinery, though, trying to figure out how to keep it happy.
Ok, this game is pretty cool. Glad I saw the thread.
My current base is humming along relatively nicely, but I can’t find oil, and I need that for the next set of stuff. Is it generally pretty far afield or did I get unlucky with my map?
Word of warning: be very careful with the heavy wires. They have a huge negative influence on decor. I started upgrading my grid and wondered why my dupes were totally stressed. Turns out that a line of heavy wires through a room is enough for around -400 decor; way too much to make up with decorations. If you must use heavy wires, put it in a shaft off to one side and run normal wiring through the rest of the base.
Yup–I’ve got my generators scattered around the periphery of the base (not on purpose, it’s just as I expanded each new generator made sense to put in a new location I discovered), and heavy wire runs in crawlspaces or narrow shafters around the base.
One tip I saw was to use transformers regularly: a transformer off of heavy wire converts the current to a reasonable amount of current for a few rooms of the base, and you can run regular wire from the transformer into those rooms.
My current game taught me the importance of airlocks and deodorizers. Managing air particles and gases is tricky. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been shying away from using powerplants but I guess I’ll have to.
Do I understand correctly that the reason you have transformers is to avoid having heavy wire in the equivalent of the “last mile”? Can you run several 1kW wires from the same transformer without problems?
I think the metal refinery might be a pretty advanced building and that the rock granulator is best for mid-game even if wastes 50% of the metal.
I have the choice of refining copper, iron or gold. Aside from max temp and decor, are there reasons to prefer one over the other?
The game does seem to be up your alley.
Oil is pretty deep. Here’s a chart of the biomes, what you can find in them and where they’re likely to be: Biome - Oxygen Not Included Wiki
Transformers definitely help with the “last wire” problem. A transformer’s 1kW output can, I think, support a maximum of 1kW of machinery; send it out from that single outlet however you want.
This is probably true. I have my hydrogen generator going, and it leaks polluted water everywhere. I’m wondering if setting up a refinery right next to it, in a pool of polluted water, would be a good idea–the water might help cool it down, and a water sieve can cool that water down when it gets too hot.
As for what to refine, I think that wire requires copper, but I’m not sure; when given the choice, I’ve been refining iron, since I’ve got so much of it.
Has anyone worked with utility shafts? My latest colony collapsed because of the lazy cook, so I’m about to start a new one.
I tend to expand in large chunks rather than bit by bit. That way, when I find a layout that works well, I can just copy/paste it over and over to add population. Utility corridors seem like they would help in that regard.
Cool; thanks. I don’t want to read too much on the wiki since I do like the exploration and discovery aspect. I’ll dig deeper, though.
I did start a new base with Skywatcher’s seed. One nice thing–a natural gas vent nearby. My older base had a steam vent nearby but I’m not sure I can build up steam infrastructure in time (it’s at close to 100 cycles with plenty of food and stuff but I’m running low on some basic resources like coal and algae). Gas generators come earlier and should be a big help.
One question–is there any way to encourage creatures to breed more?
I had the brilliant idea of trapping shine bugs in my berry farming chamber. Free light! And it worked pretty well for a while. They do lay eggs and reproduce, but it seems that it’s at just under the replacement rate. They were fed and happy, but eventually died off.
I was hoping to do the same thing with solar panels to have an almost completely renewable power source (just a tiny amount of minable food). But I need some way of creating a bunch of them. Even just laying two eggs per 25-cycle lifetime would be huge.
What do you mean by “utility shafts”? Would these be columns of space containing pipes, wires, etc.? If so, I don’t really use them–but my base is organize around a long ladder next to a fire pole.
I’ve got a hatch farm going–train a dupe to be a rancher, set up a grooming station, and I have a modest supply of meat and eggs. But shine bugs seem different; I can’t wrangle them, and I can’t tame them.
Yep. I’m trying to get things like electricity/water/etc. out of the main quarters, to ease up on the decor hits. Plus, with thermal resistant blocks, I might be able to isolate the heat away to help in the mid-game.
Went back to see if I could salvage my second run–and it’s still chugging along at cycle 135.
Searching for oil, I delved too greedily and too deep, and managed to give everyone a case of slimelung. Was looking pretty rough for a while but with vitamins everyone recovered.
Managed to build an atmo suit for further explorations. At this point, algae is the limiting factor, as I’m pretty much out. I’ve switched to algae distillers but they need slime to function, and collecting slime without a suit will just make everyone sick again.
I might switch to electrolyzers for the oxygen instead if I can’t sustain the slime collection–we’ll see.
I’m having some difficulty using automation. I put a pressure plate in front of (say) the grill, use wires from the plate to the grill and the power auto-shutoff, make sure that the pressure plate will turn on if 29kg+ (the Dupes weigh 30kg) get on the plate and they won’t walk to the plate even when given the right job and high priority.
I did find the pressure plates useful to turn on/off the power by myself; You don’t need a Dupe to change setting so you can put 1000kg as the quantity and change whether the trigger is being above or below 1000kg which turns off the machine at will. It’s a cheap workaround to knowing how to use the mechanics properly, though.
Anything you stumbled upon that surprised you while playing?
Hmm. Presumably, the dupes aren’t seeing the station as a viable destination when it’s unpowered. I haven’t used the automation much but I have used the door access modes, and you can see that they won’t bother traveling to the door if they can’t open it. Probably the same thing is going on here.
From what I understand algae distillers have a pitiful ROI if it’s even positive. I’ve been told to think about them less as an algae producer and more as slime (and slimelung) disposal.
Also, I hate you all for getting me interested in this game, and I hate Klei for what they’ve built. It’s not a game, it’s turtles all the way down. “Yay, finally got my food production out of the gutter ! Crap, now all my water’s turning to piss. OK, this setup should cycle nicely… dammit, brownouts. OK, fossil fuels are limited but this will hold for a while and the CO2 buildup seems to… wait why are all my plants dying ? Why is my entire base 40 degrees and climbing ?! Wait, the processed poop is not only 70 fucking degrees, it’s also still laced with poop germs ? EVERYBODY STOP FERTILIZING RIGHT NOW ! The poop is a trap ! AAAH !”
Also, fluid mechanics are weird in this game. I wanted to make a neat plumbing setup that would have used a deep pump to supply only what the space toilet needs and flow the rest into a big reservoir for later use, with valves and everything, but apparently you’re not supposed to make T junctions because that fucks everything up. Instead of flowing equally in either tube, or (what I wanted to do) to have the excess flow caused by a valve on one arm of the T go the other way, the water flows fully one way for one “tick”, then fully the other for the next. Had to instead set up a second pump in my big reservoir and essentially design a separate plumbing network just for the space loo. It works, but it’s inefficient power-wise.
I also got the weird problem that my little janitors are not picking up dirt. I’ve setup a dump room with tons of chests for all the materials, and ordering people to sweep shit up before mining new stuff works for everything else, but they won’t pick dirt up even though there are empty chests with “dirt” as their only allowed stuff.
Pro-tip though : the gate by which the dupes get in is a free, heat-less light source, good for early berry farming.
Still not sure how to deal with heat creep though. Even thick, insulated walls around the major offenders (and those hot exterior biomes) that only slows the problem down but it all heats up eventually and cooling systems require more power so more heat… Entropy’s a right bastard.
My base is going quite well–I had a steam vent nearby which I was able to tap into, and which gives me unlimited water. Nice!
I had it pump into my main cistern, but that had the side effect of making it rather warm–and my nearby crops were starting to die. What to do?
Well, there was an ice cave nearby. So I built a heat exchanger–I pumped the warm water through insulated pipes to the cavern, then through radiant pipes, and then back through insulated pipes and back into the cistern. It’s slow, but it’s gradually reducing my head load. I’ll probably automate it next.
Only problem is the radiant pipes need a lot of iron. But it’s working well so far with just a short segment.
I don’t know if I’m playing like most other people. Around Cycle 80, I have 5 Dupes, my tech tree is nearly complete and haven’t dug much beyond the initial temperate zone. I don’t have any problems with heat.
I’m trying to get the Dupes to trying to get some Dupes to wear atmo suits while digging a long and narrow shaft down the swamp and into the frozen and oil biomes.
A thing I found is that air pumps don’t seem to require being on the ground. Intuitively I always put them there but they don’t seem to require that which would increase opportunities.