Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been

The Game Room
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Awesome, thanks for the pictures!

I’ve been able to keep food pretty high just between a supply of pacu and barbecue (for surf & turf) and pacu and lettuce (for sushi) and pincha and wheet. I’m doing very little farming at this point, mostly hunter-gathering from the hostile zones.

Two facts I wish I’d known before starting slickster ranching:

  1. They die when they’re above 150. I thought they’d be fine, given their environment, but after reloading four or five times, I finally watched the exact moment when my slickster vanished, replaced by a slab of meat. Online research revealed their temp conditions; I can’t find them anywhere on their in-game description.
  2. Critter traps melt when they’re in high temperatures, of course, but that’s okay: I could incubate an egg in my main base incubator, then trap the larva and take it down to the hot zone. No luck. If your dupe is planning to take the trap to a hot zone, the trap melts as soon as it’s picked up–even if it’s in a nice 30 degree zone. It melts in anticipation of its destination. You gotta incubate in the ranch where they’ll end up.
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Huh–that’s an interesting one. I don’t think I have much use for slicksters at the moment, but I’ll keep that in mind.

Farming is useful in that there are frequently beneficial side effects. I just finished setting up my pincha farm. It’s also a drecko ranch. The dreckos produce reed fiber and phosphorite–more than enough to supply the farm and most of my other phosphorite consumers. All it needs is polluted water, which I have plenty of. And a bit of electricity.

443

Got my oxygen liquifier going. The rightmost tank is for the LOX. I pump oxygen in with a valve that shuts off when the tank is full. It’s in thermal contact (via metal blocks) with a small pool of super coolant (just to the left) that I keep at -215 C. The coolant is cooled by an aquatuner sitting in petroleum, again going left. It gets pretty warm at ~230 C, but it can survive. It’s in thermal contact with a steam chamber that drives the generator. The steam is recycled back into the room.

I think it might even be net power neutral, or maybe negative. The steam engine is going at a constant rate of maybe 300 W. The aquatuner and pumps add up to something like 1500 W, but at a very low duty cycle; 20% sounds about right.

If I had planned things better, I could have used some of the cooling power to cool the generator instead of plopping down a couple of wheezeworts, but this works fine for now. I’m slowly automating all my wheezewort fertilization, along with everything else, so there’s not much else for my dupes to do. I only have five but I often have 1-2 idle.

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I feel like the science tree looks worse now.

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What do you mean by this? The changes since last year didn’t seem very significant to me. I had the vague sense that it’s better balanced, since when choosing the next thing to research, it seemed less obvious what to unlock next–but that’s possibly because I know how everything works now.

I just hit cycle 1000 with my new base and everything is going nicely. Really no disasters to speak of. I have enough liquid hydrogen now that I can send a mission to the temporal tear, but I think I’ll wait on that a bit.

I’ve just barely exceeded the capacity of my natural gas geysers, so I’m in the process of building a new oil->natural gas refinery. It’s a complicated undertaking, but easier than it used to be. It needs:

  • an oil->petroleum->sour gas heating chamber
  • a oil/sour gas cross-flow heat exchanger (pre-heat the oil, cool the outgoing sour gas)
  • a sour gas/natural gas condenser (already built for purposes of storing extra gas)
  • a sour gas/natural gas cross-flow heat exchanger (pre-chill the sour gas using the outgoing natural gas)

The heat exchangers are really only necessary for efficiency, but it makes a big difference: heating the oil from 50 C to 540 C takes a lot of energy, as does cooling the sour gas all the way from 540 C to -160 C. But with the heat exchangers, almost all of that can be recaptured. It’s coming along but it takes a while to build.

I find that I’m using a ton of steam turbines for heat deletion (thanks to Unpronounceable for the idea). I have a usual setup now, with a small steam chamber, a thermal connection to a pool of petroleum with an aquatuner, and then potentially a secondary coolant reservoir (used when I’m condensing gases–I can’t run that directly through the aquatuner).

This all works great but building so many of these is getting annoying. I’m tempted to build a central cooling system. I’ll still use petroleum for the coolant since it has the best temperature range aside from super coolant (which is too hard to get in large quantities). Liquid works much better than gas here due to the higher volumes (10 kg/s through a pipe vs. 1). I can keep the whole pool at about -40 C, which is good enough for most cooling purposes, though I’ll still need a secondary system for the gas liquifiers.

One other nice aspect is that although I’ll want several steam turbines to handle the maximum capacity, I can join them together with heat valves–that is, doors that open and close based on the temperature. That way, I can run the turbines at the optimal temperature for generating power. And I can easily cool the turbines using the coolant reservoir itself.

I’ll want a giant vat of petroleum, but that shouldn’t be a problem. And it’ll be a rather large build, but hey, that makes it fun. I do need to finish the natural gas refinery first, though, since the initial cooldown is going to be a huge power hog. Which reminds me; my ice biomes are close to melted now, which means I need another place for my generators, which means I have yet another reason for a central cooling system…

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I find having to pan and zoom around the research tree UI a bit annoying.

I’ve been playing it a bit and the game feels a bit nerfed to me. Then again, it used to feel like my colonies went into a death spiral because some things in the game didn’t quite work properly. But honestly, so far it seems like other than through gross neglect, it would be very hard to actually destroy my colony. Decorating hardly seems to matter. Slime areas hardly seem dangerous.

I don’t know. For a game like this, I kind of want to feel like my colony is one broken pump away from total collapse.

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Diseases were definitely nerfed, but aside from that, are you sure you aren’t just much better at the game now? My first run, I ran into many disasters–but they were almost always due to not foreseeing something. I almost ran out of food due to running out of dirt. I almost ran out of food again because my bristle blossoms overheated. My base as a whole overheated. Oxygen generation was stalled due to bad automation. I spread germs through my water supply. On and on. Also, I wasted a bunch of time on machine setups that didn’t work. I didn’t do a good job at maximizing efficiency via material selection and fast transportation. And of course, many of the updates broke some mechanism that I had been replying on (for instance, it used to be possible to convert petroleum to natural gas directly), so I had to deal with fallout from that.

This time around, I know the big things to watch out for, and am better able to deal with things when they do crop up. So it’s much easier overall, though still fun.

I will say that thermium and super coolant make some setups significantly easier. But they also require rockets, so there is some cost to getting to that point.

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I’m trying now to get a new self-powered oxygen module (SPOM) set up, and in the process learn about both aquatuners and steam turbines. (The “surviving the mid-game” guide remains invaluable, now that it’s updated for final release).

Two things I’ve learned:

  1. For some reason, my enormous oil pool at the bottom of the map continues to heat up, even though it’s separated from the magma zone by abyssalite. There must be some other source of heat down there that I’ve not identified yet. Now that most of the oil is above 275, even a steel liquid pump breaks down quickly. I’ve found a place where the oil is just below 275, and am pumping from there, but I don’t know what I’ll do when everything is above 275.
  2. I pumped some crude oil up to my new SPOM, without using insulated pipes. TERRIBLE MISTAKE. That entire area of my base quickly heated up to 90-100C, and my hospital cots are constantly in use. I’ve set up a half-assed cooling solution, but it’s set me back in time.

My rocket project is on hiatus, but once I get the SPOM going, I’ll return to that. I have no idea how to handle rockets efficiently. Or at all.

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Try applying your newfound knowledge about steam turbines to cooling your hot oil! If you build a chamber above the oil, you can pour water right on top (it floats). It’ll boil away quickly, and eventually heat to the >125 C that the turbine needs. Drop the waste water back onto the oil and you have a continuous process that generates power and cools the oil. It’ll only go down to 95 C this way, but that’s still much better than what you have now.

I found that turbines work better if you get rid of as much non-steam gas from the heating chamber as you can beforehand. Might be difficult for you if it’s too hot even for steel. It should work either way, but sometimes puffs of carbon dioxide or whatever will block the turbine inputs.

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As for rockets:
You have to start with steam rockets, since you can only get the research points for better ones by doing missions.

Start saving up steel now. You’ll need around 4500 kg or so to begin with. 2000 for the steam engine, 1000 kg for research modules, 200 for the capsule, and then miscellaneous extra for the rocket silo, gantries, etc.

You can pipe the steam in from anywhere. It needs a lot and it needs to be hot enough not to cool before it reaches the rocket, but besides that it’s not hard to deal with. You can set up a tepidizer to make steam but almost anything will work here.

Use bunker doors for the silo roof and hook up some automation to make it easy to open and close. I just use a hydro sensor since I can easily flip it on and off. The rocket will blast through the doors one way or another, but it’s generally best to open them first…

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Possibly. Then again, I haven’t got to rockets ever, so there is still a lot of game I’ve never mastered.

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You haven’t lived until you’ve liquified hydrogen!

You should try steam rockets at the least. They’re easy and sufficient for gathering isoresin (for supercoolant) and niobium (for thermium). These items make some builds significantly easier and higher performance.

453

Not quite there yet. I’m at the point where I’ve started scaling up my water and power production while starting to address potential heat issues. By base is comfortably located between two natural gas geysers and a steam geyser so resources shouldn’t be a problem for the foreseeable future.

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My heat exchangers are working beautifully–too well, in fact. Check out this gorgeous heat gradient. Icy-cold in the lower left, super hot in the upper left. Heat is exchanged between radiant gas pipes in 1x2 diamond blocks. The rest of the space is vacuum. It’s important to separate the chunks like this–otherwise, the whole heat exchanger will kinda converge on one temperature, defeating the whole cross-flow arrangement.

But the one I’m using for the sour gas generator is working too well, as I mentioned. The hot ~540 C gas is heating up the incoming crude to >410 C, where it transforms from crude to petroleum. And unfortunately, even though they’re both liquids, it breaks the piping when this happens. This seems like a bug to me–pipes carry a fixed mass per section, so there’s no real reason why to can’t transform from one liquid to another.

For better or worse, I have a solution. The vaporizer uses an aquatuner to generate the heat. It’s the only reliable device–the tepidizer works (and well) until you reload your game (I had the same bug 8 months ago–weird). I didn’t feel like rebuilding it each time, so instead I used a thermium aquatuner and let it get super hot. So I have a nice cool oil output. I can use this to cool the outgoing sour gas a bit (only down to 410, so that it won’t overheat the incoming oil). Sorta annoying, but they, those are the kind of things the game throws at you. In any case, I’m generating a crap-ton of natural gas now. I’m sure I’ll find a use for it.

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I got my sour gas generator working well, but it seemed like it was using too much power–by base was just barely breaking even.

I realized that I was being wasteful with my aquatuner setup. It uses a fixed 1200 W when running, and changes the temperature by a fixed 14 C. But the heat capacity of different liquids varies dramatically–crude oil is only 1.69 DTU/C/g, while water is 4.18 and super coolant 8.44.

I had been using oil as a liquid since I had it easily available, but switching to water made it almost 2.5x more power efficient. And not just the 1200 W aquatuner, but the pump that drives it as well. It was going nearly full blast with oil, so maybe 1440 W continuous. Switching to water brings it down to maybe 600 W. Huge difference!

I need to gather more super coolant. That will double efficiency again. This does mean my plans for a base-wide cooling system need to be revised. Using petroleum for coolant would be a huge step back in power efficiency. Water would be ok, but doesn’t get cold enough. And the fullerene I need for super coolant is hard to get in large quantities. However, I can build a two-stage coolant loop that chills the petroleum using a short loop of super coolant. That would only need a few hundred kg of super coolant, which I can manage.

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I had a whole big post typed up about starting a new base after updating to launch update, but the hamsters ate it.

Executive summary: Frikkin Slimelung.

Also, steam geysers are neat except when there are two right next to the spawn and everything overheats in three turns, even before mealwood plants can grow.

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Oh, that is bad luck. Pretty sure I’d just reroll at that point. Part of the fun is working with the hand you’re dealt–the different geyser types all have their different uses, and have to be dealt with in their own ways–but if they’re overheating your crops right off the bat then you’re always going to be fighting them.

I got pretty lucky with my geysers; 3 nat gas, 1 hydrogen, 3 cool steam, 2 chlorine, 2 gold, and a few others–but am missing some, like a hot steam vent or magma volcano. So, you win some and lose some.

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I’ve got a magma that I still haven’t dug out yet. Is it worth it? Do you use it for steam? Is it something I should dig out ASAP so I start gathering its resources?

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I’d say leave it for the time being. Magma is useful as an extreme heat source.

Off the top of my head, use one is for the oil->petroleum->sour gas->methane->natural gas process I’ve mentioned. Drop crude on hot magma and it goes to sour gas immediately. However, this is only useful if you have the rest of the pipeline in place. Also, without a volcano, magma is a non-renewable resource. It cools surprisingly quickly when used for sour gas cracking.

Another use is for regolith->rock conversion. This is something I’ve been thinking about as a very late-game thing. The asteroid has a finite quantity of rock and sand available, but an infinite amount of regolith. Surprisingly, because regolith has such a low heat capacity, it’s possible to melt it into magma using much less energy than you get by cooling the resulting magma back down into igneous rock. Free energy, and gives a free source of rock (which can be made into sand).

The trouble of course is that the temperatures are very high and building an automated system that doesn’t melt will be very tricky. I think some people have done it but I’m hoping to figure out a system on my own. I’m nowhere close to running out of these materials yet but I may go for it when I have nothing else to do.

460

I’m just about to pass the 100 hours played mark (I had about 30 hours in Early Access so about 70 on launch). I’ve made my first arguably successful base. It is ugly. Oh how it is ugly. But it is working. I have power, oxygen, food, etc.

I basically have two problems. One, everywhere outside my base core is cold. Really really cold as I’m playing on Rime. But all my bases before this failed due to heat, so I want to remove that aspect in effect for me. Cold is almost as challenging! There was a point where half my farms wouldn’t grow due to heat!!

But man, what a great game. Klei knocked it out of the park and a few counties over in my opinion. Stellar. I wonder if we’re going to get DLC like Dont’ Starve? Certainyl ONI must have sold well? I hope so. I wonder what they will add if there are any DLC?