They’re certainly the easiest way. The petroleum and natural gas generators produce (polluted) water, and a decent amount, but if your farming is water-heavy you’ll have to use a lot of oil. And probably create more power than you actually need–so you’d need to burn off the excess with heaters or the like!
The only other way I know about is to gather water via rocket, but that’s probably even worse efficiency.
I think you’re guaranteed at least some kind of water/steam geyser, though, so it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to extreme tactics.
I’m sitting on five right now. I keep wanting to add more, but then I remember the cascading failures of my old colonies and decide to hold off until I find that perfect dupe again. Maybe it’s time, though.
I’m finding that my colony tends to go into a “sadness spiral” where the dupes become to depressed to work or farm. Then they start starving or not making critical infrastructure fixes, which causes more sadness, which causes them to start vomiting and crying everywhere, then starve and so on…
Since my geysers are inactive, I’m dangerously low on water. I think I’ll just lock them all in the Dirty Water Intake Tank #1 and let the next batch of Dupes drink from their vomit and tears.
I do. The main problem appears to be that I only have a single natural gas geyser to power my base. When that goes inactive, I have a lot of coal, but that’s very labor intensive and leads to brown outs across the base. Oxygen and plumbing get cut off. I need to disable the exo suit checkpoint so dupes can venture outside the safe zone and they come back all dirty, wet and slimelungy. Then they get all stressed out and cry and vomit all over, etc etc.
As a lower-key set of solutions:
-Build several coal plants. Same amount of coal transfer, but since more is done at once, dupes aren’t running back and forth to fill up the plants.
-Turn off unnecessary power.
Try having some manual generators attached to the most important things, so that even if the gas runs out, the dupes can still provide some power. It ain’t pretty, but as long as your systems aren’t TOO complicated, it should get you through.
It’s also possible to find places you can save power or store gas until you need it, to shorten the amount of time you’re without the natural gas gen.
One observation on Solar Panels. The description lies; they do not need to be exposed to space. Any sort of light will work, even ones that can be found underground…like shine bugs.
In my last few games, I’ve had a sort of “shine bug explosion” – put some feeders out, a grooming station, make sure you dig some phosphorite to feed 'em with, and get a wrangler as soon as you can. I don’t bother with a stable, just put the grooming station someplace with central access.
Result? Hundreds of shine bugs all over the base. Free morale, a steady supply of lime-bearing eggshells, and light. There always ends up being a few places where dozens of them hang out; a solar array there costs only a little glass and can produce a hundred watts or so of “all the time” electricity. Not enough to to bring my space dreams to fruition, but it does mean there’s always a little kickstarter energy on my grid.
Does it strike anyone else that ONI can be seen as a microcosm of video game making or software start ups generally?
You start with a small number of people, much to explore and a lot of work to do. You have to balance the number of people you have and how fast you’re going through your food/cash. You have to be judicious in who you choose to join your team and sometimes, you have to attend to their emotions. You start doing things manually and inefficiently at first and then you gradually setup a system that works automatically, hopefully requiring little to no labor.
The subtlest but largest change seems to be that water sieves no longer cool water that’s already more than 40C; suddenly everyone on the forums seems to be scrambling to find alternate cooling methods.
Haven’t played for a while–I took my first world about as far as I could and figured I’d wait until the full release before restarting. I guess it’s time!
I never used the water sieve trick–I just collected all the wheezeworts I could (and from other planets once I got to that point) and sprinkled them around my base. I guess I could have made a fully automated air conditioning system.
Any idea if they’ve fixed the problem with hot rocks dropping into your base from meteorite impacts? I finally cleaned up my base from them, but it was annoying having literally thousands of tons of hot rock making its way into the base.
I picked it up not long ago and played it a bunch. Never got past the midgame. I’m waiting for the release build to get finalized before I dive back in.
I’m hoping that the final version doesn’t make temperature control such a massive challenge. I enjoy futzing with basic plumbing and electrical systems well enough, but it seems that the entire end game revolves around finding ways to delete heat from your base in ever-increasingly complex ways. I always get bogged down around the point where I have to start considering radiant piping and HVAC systems.
In the game as in life, whether you’re a cell, an animal or a planet, entropy will always eventually get you. They could make it easier at the start/mid parts of the game but the fundamental problem of heat will likely remain in the game, you just have to figure out how to deal with it. Perhaps by researching it, asking questions, thinking about it, trying stuff out and then showing how you did it better to others. That’s what the game’s about.
Heat’s not that big of a problem, since Klei also patched temp out ~ temp in, instead of guaranteed minimum temperatures for most machines. So your bathroom loop isn’t a guaranteed source of 40C in the middle of your base anymore - you can run it at 5C if you want.
OTOH, tapping cool steam vents and the like is slightly trickier now that you can’t get rid of half the heat so easily. And wheezeworts aren’t quite as useful since they need phosphorous daily to run at better than 25%.
The 3 currently-reliable ways to delete heat are:
the steam turbine - dump heat into steam to about 195C, returns it as 95C water, repeat. Plus you get power.
the ice maker - produces less heat than the ice will cool (but not nearly as effective as 1). Good for spot-cooling, though.
mass-deletion - hot hydrogen going into a hydrogen generator (also similar machines), or simply dumping heat into gasses and venting into space.
I went into release mode a few months back - the game has been pretty much finished, except for polish and tuning, and I didn’t want to burn out on it before it actually came out. So I’m just waiting for it to officially come out before I dive back in. It will be just like a new game, but not quite, which is how I’d prefer it.