Shrooms, man. Shrooms.
Got plenty of water. Guess I’m switching to berries.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
I’ve got a varied food supply: wild sleet wheat is a small component, bristle berries and shrooms make up the rest. I’m trying to breed my shine bugs as high as I can get them (have a few sun bugs now, with a royal egg in the incubator), so a lot of my berries and shrooms are going toward feeding the bugs.
I have about 150 KCals in liceloaf, hanging out in an unpowered fridge in the CO2 of my mushroom farm. I figure it’ll work as an emergency food source, but I don’t have much other use for it.
I also have a drecko farm going, in an effort to produce glossy dreckos, and three levels of hatch farms, in order to get the smooth hatches. What with all this livestock, I hope to have a good omelette station. My fear with the omelette station is that if I set the egg-cracker on continuous I’ll forget to save eggs for reproduction, but if I don’t, I’ll forget to crack enough eggs to prevent overpopulation.
I’m also a little worried that all this livestock is gonna hoover up resources that I’ll be wanting in the midgame or endgame.
Automation to the rescue! I think this works:
Build two fridges to store the egg type in question. Set one of them to be a higher priority than the other, and set the capacity on that one to what you consider a “safe” level of eggs. Dupes will fill that fridge first, and then use the other for overflow.
You want to use the automation signal of the high-priority fridge to control the egg cracker: if it’s full, then it’s safe to crack eggs. The problem is that the egg cracker doesn’t directly support automation. The solution is to put it in a little utility closet, and control the door with the automation wire.
But there are still a couple of other problems:
- Dupes could get stuck in the closet. The solution is to put some weight sensors in there, and OR the signal in to the door signal, so that if there’s a dupe in there the door stays open.
- There’s a sort of timing problem. When the fridge is full, the closet door will open and a dupe will go there to take an egg to the cracker. But as soon as they grab the egg, the fridge is no longer full and the door will close. So the dupe never gets a chance to use the cracker. The fix is to use a Memory toggle. Pipe the fridge signal to the S input to open the door (and keep it open). Then pipe the weight sensors to the R input, which allow the door to close once the dupe is inside (but note that due to the previous solution, the door will stay open as long as the dupe is inside the closet).
Hope that’s clear. It’s a somewhat complicated bit of automation but I think it’ll work. It gets even more complicated with multiple egg types, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader :).
Woah. That’s awesome. But I’m probably gonna just try to keep an eye on the egg supply :).
When you say drip water onto a machine, do you just mean having a liquid vent over top of the machine dripping onto the floor underneath the machine?
Yep. If you have a solid floor, you’ll want some means of the water flowing or getting pumped away. Making a mesh floor is easier, but you’ll still have to do something with the water.
What actually works best in my experience is to make the tile directly below the vent solid, and then the other surrounding tiles mesh. The solid tile can collect a bit of water, but not too much before it flows away via the mesh tiles. This way, you get cooling from both the drip and from the machine being slightly immersed.
Aww, no one wants to try my crazy automation schemes. I was going to suggest implementing a general-purpose fully programmable 8-bit microcontroller, but I guess that’s right out :).
Keep in mind that I’m borderline giddy about pumping cold polluted water over a steam vent before distilling it. I’m not playing at the same level as you :).
New question: I spent a bunch of time setting up a cooling system for my steam vent. After about 20 cycles, I’ve still not generated enough water to cover the 10 tile wide container to a depth of one square; my pump won’t even activate.
It’s spewing 122.4 g/s in its active state. At 600 seconds/cycle, that should be around 7.5 kg steam per cycle, right?
HOW IS THAT WORTH ANYTHING?
By comparison, my cool steam vent is sending out 7.5 Kg/s, and my cool slush geyser is sending out 7.6 Kg/s.
Did I just waste a bunch of effort on a nothing geyser?
Huh–I didn’t realize that steam vents had such lower output than cool steam, etc. But from the wiki, it looks like that’s expected.
Use it for a steam turbine, maybe? Unlike the cool steam geyser, it’s hot enough for that. Still not sure if it’s worth it, though.
I decided to leave the hot steam geyser alone, and now all my equipment in that room is broken, and it’s filled with 122 C steam at like 3000 g pressure, and the heat is leaking out. Sigh.
But meanwhile I’ve got the cool steam geyser near me cooled effectively: my peppernut farm is happily warm, and I’ve got a supply of cleaned water at 9C going to my main reservoir, and a supply of hot water waiting for me to get a hydrolyzer going.
Next projects: hydrolyzer, sleet wheat farm, natural gas power plant.
So, all you folks with Drecko farms – how are you feeding them? The “Critter feeder” doesn’t list them as a target species, and none of the things they supposedly eat grow in hydrogen except for the Pincha Peppers whose lifecycle is painfully slow…
Dreckos don’t eat from the feeder, they eat the actual plant, at any stage of growth, resetting the cycle. Just plant some pinchas on the ceiling (or mealwood in a stratified atmosphere of CO2/H2 for glossy dreckos).
Yup. I’ve got a combined room, with some hydroponic tiles on the floor growing mealwood and bristle berries to feed 1/2 and 1/2 regular and glossy dreckos. The room is pretty tall, so that it’ll hold a good layer of hydrogen near the top, which I piped in pretty early on.
nm
I’m now around cycle 250, and going pretty slow (I think) for this point in the game. Oxygen’s fine–I’ve got a self-powered oxygen room. Food is fine–I’m around 200Kcal, most of which is pepperbread. Two medium-size rooms are full of natural gas at near 5Kg pressure, waiting for me to ramp up usage.
I moaned before about a map with oxygen, oxygen, and more oxygen geysers, where my water was almost nonexistent. My new map has:
-Hot steam geyser
-Cool steam geyser
-Hot water geyser
-TWO cool slush geysers
I am NOT hurting for water. On the contrary, I’ve twice enlarged my main reservoir, and it’s brimming over with 17-degree pure water, and I’ve got four auxiliary reservoirs that I’m managing. The problem on this map is gonna be what to do with all the extra water. I’m thinking about trying to set up a steam turbine effectively.
Meanwhile, it’s time to get advanced research done! Up near the surface now, and planning to make my move into rapid transit and telescopes.
I started up ONI again a couple weeks ago to see the new updates, and have not been disappointed. “Cool Haven” just topped 250 cycles, and I’ve reached a point where I’m trying to move towards more automation. All the research that can be done below-ground is finished, a glossy drecko farm is slowly finishing the bedrooms, and two natural gas geysers and two cool steam geysers are sealed off and ready for exploitation. The steam geysers together produce more than enough to run a single electrolyzer loop and most of a skimmer’s requirement as well. I uncovered two nullifiers in a single frozen biome, less than 20 tiles apart, and have about a dozen wheezeworts harvested and ready for use, though running my irrigation water through the frozen biome has kept heat under control, so far. A cooling system is in design at the moment to properly utilize what I have so far, which should be sufficient.
I DID just reaarrange my entire living quarters; everything was still built up in the haphazard way a colony tends to start. Bedrooms are now arranged around the great hall, dance studio, and bathrooms/showers, with med bays nearby. I went for a total overhaul, which probably took longer and DEFINITELY demolished my dupes’ stress tolerances, but everyone came out the other side little worse for the wear. Once cooling and geysers are sorted out, it’s time to take advantage of the oil I can barely see at the bottom of my map and set up a decent cooling pool for a refinery.
Things were touch and go for a bit with this seed - there was little algae or dirt available in the starting biome, so moving on to bristle blossoms and electrolyzers was the main driving force. Even algae distillers had trouble keeping up, once I had a chlorine room to decontaminate everything. I’m starting to get excited for having a fully functional base and throwing giant wrenches in it to start space exploration.
Nice stuff! Always fun to rip things out and improve them.
I made a few improvements to my own base:
- Expanded my CO2 food preservation room. The old one was getting pretty cramped. Now have room for 1M+ calories, with room for intermediate and final products.
- Finally fixed up my water chilling system to be auto-regulating. I had a cooling system before, but it kinda sucked and didn’t maintain a constant temp. The new one uses automation to target a nice temperature.
- Automated my berry and pepper farms as much as possible. This was my first real use of the shipping system. It delivers phosphorite to the peppers, and returns harvested peppers. The berries just get their harvest gathered. For both, I turn off the lights/irrigation if the storage is full. The only slight annoyance here is that the autosweepers don’t actually harvest for you; they just pick up the harvested stuff. But it’s still a big reduction in dupe workload.
On the downside, I accidentally contaminated my water storage with food poisoning. Not really a huge deal, but kinda gross.
Not sure about my next project–maybe a sleetwheat farm. A bit tricky since you pretty much have to irrigate with water in a narrow temperature range (0-5 C), but I think I have the hang of water temperature control now. And a bunch of wheezeworts to do the actual cooling.
How many dupes are you guys running with? I’m still using my original dozen.
I’ve kept it down to eight, for two terrible reasons:
- Some rando guide I read recommended this size.
- That’s how many cots fit in a single barracks.
But things are happening kind of slowly for me, and I have plenty of surplus calories and an insane amount of water. I think I’m gonna hire a few more workers and expand my operation.
Are geysers pretty much the only way to have more than enough water?