The bunker doors/tiles offer protection against meteors, but they’re expensive (lots and lots of steel) and it’s easy for things to punch through before you’re finished covering the whole thing. And then you still need some areas to open, like for launching rockets, and those let in rocks. I did get my base covered, but only after a lot of stuff fell in. And I had to be super diligent about everything–for instance, once I had a major crisis because my power generation system needed cooling water, and hot rocks fell into a cistern I was using for cooling water, eventually converting the whole thing to steam. Only survived because I had built up significant stores of natural gas.
I set up a conveyor system to help out, but it was kind of a pain. There was way too much stuff to fit into storage bins, so I had to manually empty the bins–but then the sweepers would gather the stuff up again. Really I should have set up some kind of debris pit that the bins would dump their contents into, but all of this was getting annoying. My dupes didn’t have anything better to do than hauling stuff anyway, given how automated the base was by the end.
I thought about it, at least once I moved the rocks to one central location. But really I had plenty of energy with my natural gas condensation system, so it wasn’t worth it.
This sounds like the most sustainable one. A series of steel Thermo Regulators can reach a hot-side temperature of >195 C. Use that to drive the turbine, then pipe back up to heat it up again. Have to be a little careful not to overheat anything, but it should be possible to make it work.
It should be most efficient when using a counter-flow style of heat exchange–each step of thermo regulator adds 14 C, so you can have a kind of ladder that starts at 95 C, then goes 95->109->123->137->151->165->179->193->207, but I need to think about it more. That’s something of a late-game thing, anyway.
Ahh; I see that the turbine only needs 125 C steam to run. That makes everything much easier. It still needs steel, but far fewer regulator stages to get the cold side down to something base-friendly, say 20 C. Of course, machines with very hot output, like refineries, can be pumped directly to the hot side.
I started up a new run today. Lots of new things to explore. It feels easier, but to be fair I wouldn’t expect to have hit a crisis yet. The free items from the printing pod will definitely come in handy.
I plan on keeping a small colony for the time being. I remember some of my early problems previously coming from growing too fast. And fewer dupes means the free resources go farther.
My new base is coming along. The steam engine trick that Unpronounceable mentioned is really quite handy. Last round, the methane condenser was quite tricky and I never got it to be fully sustainable–I dumped the waste heat into some water, and just hoped it wouldn’t eventually overheat. This time, I’m using a steam engine to both eat the waste heat and generate some power (not much, but better than nothing).
The cooling cycle runs pretty hot–the aquatuner is immersed in petroleum and runs at 200+C, which transfers its heat via metal blocks to an evaporator, which cycles the steam. I don’t have niobium/thermium yet, so I just use gold for the blocks and the thermal conductivity isn’t great. But it all works.
I may not have to do the oil->petroleum->sour gas->methane->natural gas cycle. I got lucky with three natural gas geysers and one hydrogen geyser, which seem sufficient for my needs. I’m only building the methane condenser to make storage a bit more compact (I need some decent storage to cover the geyser off-cycle periods).
I may build another cycler like this for air conditioning reasons. I have a bunch of wheezeworts but they consume phosphorus, which is going to run out eventually.
I stopped at only 5 dupes this time. And one is an astronaut. It seems sufficient. They’re relatively good picks but one has allergies, and that was a problem early on (I didn’t know about the new allergy “germ”), since the bristle blossoms emit pollen and spread it over the whole base. Eventually I isolated the farm enough that it’s not a big deal now.
Like Chisquirrel, I’m waiting for the final release of the game this month. But last time I played a few months ago, it seemed like they nerfed slimelung a bit. Before, slimelung and other diseases seemed like a death sentence whereas now it’s a mild inconvenience.
I’ve been playing the beta release and having a blast. Up to cycle 260, the farthest I’ve ever been, and while my base is pretty stable, it’s not very efficient.
I’m playing on easy mode (basic asteroid rerolled until I got geyser-rich and metal-rich). All the metal I need, plus a slush geyser, 2 hydro geysers, and a natural gas geyser, giving me all the power and cold water I need. I’ve uncovered three entropy nullifiers and overfilled each room with hydrogen, so I’ve got some serious cooling potential–but I’m not using it to its full value.
Things I haven’t done and really need to get on:
I haven’t set up a great cooling system for water yet. All my extra water from steel manufacturing is sitting in a couple of hot tanks, and my two cool steam geysers have enormous pools of hot water sitting under them, as does my salt water geyser.
I haven’t made it to the surface yet. I have a tunnel to just under the surface building, but I’m not sure my best approach here.
I haven’t dug down to the oil biome yet. I’ve got about 6 tons of plastic from my glossy drecko ranch, but I don’t have any diamonds, and I know I need to get on the fuel train in order to move to rocketry.
I’m open to advice on this point in the game, but am also having a fun time just trying to make things efficient bit by bit.
Agreed. In my previous run, my colony almost collapsed a few times. Now, I just send 'em off to the sick bay and they’re cured immediately. I’m going a slightly better job this time around ensuring I always have atmo suits available, but it still feels much easier.
My water mostly comes from cool steam geysers. I found that a single nullifier is roughly enough to cool the water for a single bristle blossom farm. I keep a small cooling pond around (about 6x1 tiles) and fill it to a fairly shallow depth. I top it off with water from the main reservoir, and use a thermostat to control the flow from the nullifier. Net result is that I can keep it at a nice 20ish C.
Trying to cool the entire reservoir is just too slow. Water is dense. So just cool what you need for farming.
The asteroids don’t seem quite as damaging in the latest updates. On my last run, I waited a long time before reaching the surface, and found that the asteroids had already battered through to the inner biomes. It took a while to fix the problems that caused. This time around, there was no obvious damage once I got up there.
Probably no great need as long as your power needs are covered. Though I’d recommend setting up some storage since the hydrogen/natural gas geysers run on a cycle. I keep a bunch of petroleum around as a backup, though in practice the natural gas has been enough.
That’s my strategy, too. Just tinker around, trying to make things more efficient.
I found that paying attention to power makes a huge difference. Gas and liquid pumps eat a surprising amount, and being careful about when you turn them on makes a significant difference–for instance, only pumping when there is a decent amount of fluid available. For example, if you have a liquid pump fed by a slow drip, it will consume power continuously even though it’s barely pumping anything. Hook up a hydro sensor with a 20 kg threshold and it will pump at full capacity, but only a small fraction of the time. Much lower average power use.
Good advice! I have a great deal of storage–in addition to about 9 tanks full of hydrogen and 4 of natural gas, both gases are filling rooms to overpressure, from 10-20kg/square. Until I realized that you could build a gas pump out of steel, my main problem was that my hydro pumps kept melting.
But I should definitely be more careful about my heavy pumping, which isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. I tend to set up ad hoc pumps, to deal with gas disasters or the like, and then set up ad hoc storage tanks. At some point I should regularize the base, I think.
Not sure what your overall production rate is, but this might not be as much as it sounds like. A single natural gas generator takes 54 kg/cycle. I have about 4 generators running continuously, so 4 natural gas tanks doesn’t even supply enough for 3 cycles. Gas-filled rooms can store lot more, of course (if they’re big), so you may still be ok.
If the pumps are truly idle, there’s no problem leaving them around. I have a bunch of ad-hoc cruft as well, but mostly it just sits there doing nothing after it serves its purpose. But things like gas pumps around geysers should have some automation so that they don’t spend many cycles trying to pump near vacuum.
My geyser gas pumps are all automated. One of them I set to a pressure-and-gas-and-filter automation, which was a nightmare if the wrong thing made it into the room. I’ve set the rest to gas automation, but as I type this, I’m thinking I’m probably better off setting it just to pressure, and then setting a filter up outside the room until the room is 100% pure.
My cool steam geysers are mostly just isolated for now, as the cool slush is giving me all the water I need; and the salt water geyser has flooded a huge area of the base b/c I neglected it. I have a tank that’s about 10x16 of cold (like 15C) fresh water in the middle of my core base, keeping things chill and hosting pacu for a little variety in the diet.
There’s a volcano that I’ve left buried, not sure what to do with it; it occurs to me that maybe I should feed some of the hot water into that room and set up a steam generator. Could be a good next project.
Looks like hydrogen uses 60 kg/cycle, and I’ve got three of them going at most times, meaning I’ve got about 7-8 cycles in storage, not counting rooms. Yeah, maybe I’ll build a bunch more: as it is, I have trouble keeping the geysers from overpressure.
Slimelung WAS a death sentence - now all 3 diseases are easier to catch, but the effects are mere annoyances that will wear off if not re-exposed. You would not believe how much whinging went on about that.
Yeah, the asteroid-destroying meteors were a bug they fixed a while back. I’ve seen them teleport past bunker tiles though, so there’s still some bugs.
Pacu are broken-good right now - you can have an infinite number of them in a single tile of water and never feed them. All of them will lay eggs before they die at 25, and you still get their meat. Keeping one at a time fed guarantees infinite food. Make sure you limit its food intake, they eat a LOT of algae.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Not a huge deal–mostly it just seems like regolith that builds up, and I can take care of that with the mining lasers. But still, it would be nice if I didn’t have to worry about it.
I’m on the same game, having dug out an enormous oil pit and trying to figure out how to set up a reasonable oil refinery operation down below. I’ve been looking at the setup here, but it’s a little overwhelming. (I love this guy’s setups, because making them ends up teaching me a lot about the aspects of the game that I haven’t explored, e.g., how to use an AND gate, when to use a gas valve, etc.)
Slickster ranching is off to a terrible start: it turns out that slicksters love to dive into giant oil lakes and drown in them. I think I have two slicksters left, one in a wild section of the base and one finally ensconced in a safe room without access to oil lakes.
Getting something basic up and running shouldn’t be too bad. Build a room around an oil well. Build an extractor on it and pipe in water (use water from a steam vent since temperature doesn’t matter. Build the room floor a couple of tiles below the well and put a pump at the bottom to suck up the oil. Build a gas pump at the top to capture the natural gas that comes out. Add filters where necessary to purify the oil and natural gas.
Additions that you can make over time:
Automation on the pumps so that they only operate when there’s a reasonable amount of gas/oil present
An airlock sytem to reduce the amount of gas escaping each time the dupe comes in to operate the well
Automation in your oil reservoir to disable the extractor when full
Some wheezeworts or other cooling in the room so it doesn’t heat too much
Big storage vats/rooms for the oil/gas so that neither one becomes a bottleneck
Initially, though, you don’t need these. Start with the basics and work from there.
Making good progress, but there’s still a bunch of stuff to do. Need to build an oxygen and hydrogen liquifier system. And I want to improve my dupes food quality by having more consistent pincha pepper and sleet wheat production.