Cool. Yeah, steam turbines are awesome. Free cooling and free energy!
Extremely mild space-related spoiler, which you may be aware of already:
Once you collect a bit of niobium from space missions, you can start building things that survive just about any temperature. Refine niobium into thermium to get a +900 C temperature threshold instead of steel’s +200 C. Also, you can refine thermium back into niobium, but at a 20x ratio, so you only need a tiny bit to get started. I think you may need solid rocket boosters + the steam rocket to send a cargo mission, though.
I wonder if it’ll end up being your most-played game. I’m glad you like it.
I didn’t expect the thread to get to 500 posts. I guess it’s a pretty deep game that explores what only video games can do. I had an idea for making a game like this but now it’s a non-starter given how well it’s been done.
Love it! What a great story made possible by a great game. I totally understand what you’re talking about in this, even though it didn’t happen to me. Which is awesome.
There’s always something breaking down, that needs fine tuning, overflow, overheating, overcooling (sigh), or needs progress in ONI.
I’ve decided to restart my base. Even though it is going well it is kind of bursting at the seams now. I’ve learnt so much from this base that needs to go into the next design.
Next time I will share the seed I’m using in case somebody wants to play on the same map (share you good seeds too!)
There’s a fair chance it’ll become my most played game, but it is a tough crown to take. The current holder is Stellaris with nearly 1,000 hours. Not including subscription games like World of Warcraft. I’m currently at 110 hours, which makes it my #5 game on Steam (I switch games a lot). It needs 258 hours to take the #4 stop (Civilization 5).
Had a bit of a close call. I’ve been operating steadily with a dozen Dupes for like 500 cycles with only about 6 deaths. And I’ve got a pretty good base powered mostly by natural gas, hydrogen burned off my electrolysis operations and a coal backup generators. I have a good food mix and generally have about 100,000+ calories on reserve. Even have a deep well for petroleum refining, as I’m a firm believer that the ultimate purpose of my Dupes is to make the world’s plastic.
But what I’ve been finding is that the two natural gas geysers powering my base tend to go dormant about the same time. Power level drops, by recursive aquatuner loop water cooling system backs up and no longer cools my supply of geyser water, my farms heat up and crops die. At one point, my Dupes were barely making ends meet.
But, in my efforts to reach the surface, I found a hydrogen geyser, so it’s nice to have another source of steady fuel.
Also I finally figured out that my Dupes kept catching Zombie Spores from the Sporechid I planted in the main hall. So note to self - learn more about plants.
I definitely appreciate you starting the thread! I may not have run across it otherwise.
It’s currently in my number 2 slot, after… yes, Kerbal Space Program. My current top 5:
Kerbal Space Program: 743 hours
Oxygen Not Included: 469 hours
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: 426 hours
X3: Terran Conflict: 364 hours
Factorio: 306 hours
For most of these, the hours figure is a bit inflated. When trying to puzzle out the solution to a problem, I’ll often just leave the game up while I walk away to eat or do something else for a while. I find that solutions often come to me more easily when I’m not directly thinking about the problems.
I’m about the same at 498 hours for ONI. That’s nothing compared with my top 2 games:
Space Engineers: 2633
Cities Skylines: 1935
But like Dr Strangelove, these are both games I might leave running while I go do something else. I also don’t have a whole lot of other games I play regularly.
Surprisingly, I’ve played DayZ for 368 hours. That game it feels like I play for 45 minutes, get bored and then turn it off. Then again, do that regularly over 7 years of “early access” and I guess it adds up.
RimWorld, I only played 70 hours, but I think that’s because ONI took over my lust for managing semi-autonomous drones.
It’s totally self-contained, aside from power, and uses only a bit more power than breakeven. Running super coolant, it’s able to run the steam turbine full blast, and with maybe a 70% duty cycle. Really it’s only the pumps that need power since the turbine pays for the aquatuner almost exactly.
The steam chamber contains the aquatuner sitting in a small pool of petroleum to keep it a consistent temperature. Above that is the steam, which gets recycled back into the chamber. The turbine is cooled by the super coolant–it doesn’t steal much cooling power, but it needs something, and wheezeworts are a pain. Using this method, dupes don’t have to get involved, and I can lock the whole thing in an insulated chamber.
The gas pump is there only to perform an initial pumpdown to vacuum. It doesn’t cause a problems just leaving it in there.
I’m running oil through the bottom of the coldplate–I’m having steam problems in my lower levels and need to cool off a veritable lake of oil. It’s able to cool oil by ~50 C at 10 kg/s, so it’s going reasonably quick. I just want to bring the lake down from about 110 C to 95 C so that it doesn’t make steam that goes everywhere. But anyway, one could run water or oxygen or anything else through the metal plates.
So somehow I brought a 2000[sup]o[/sup]F piece of iron into my kitchen storage bin and in started melting everything and burning any dupes who tried to pick it up or even enter the room. I ended up having to “China syndrome” it out of by base by removing the floor under it.
I’m surprised they haven’t made fires and explosions a thing.
I doubt it still works (because the root cause was bugs), but you could fake a steam explosion by superheating the coolant of a refinery that had a broken output pipe, and then deconstructing it.
I had exactly that happen to me. In fact, on my previous game, I never could get rid of that refinery. It’s still filled with something like 10 tons of water at 1700 C. I’d tried deconstructing it but it slags everything. To get rid of it I think I’d need several layers of insulation, with maybe just one square built from metal so that I can slowly drain the heat away.
I’ve been splitting time between this, NMS, and futzing with Skyrim mods, so I haven’t gotten as far as you guys.
I did finally get ladders all the way up to the point where I can see space, and ladders down to near the bottom. And I discovered that I apparently didn’t fully understand ladders.
My up ladders work great, because I was constantly having to build baffles to prevent polluted water from dumping straight down into the base.
My down ladder started out as a shaft straight down from the middle of my base all the way to the first deep oil pocket it hit. This has turned out to be a very bad idea. Apparently, dupes will drop whatever they’re carrying if they can’t hold their breath any more, and there’s a lot of unbreathable air around that big ladder. Now the bottom of the oil pit has a huge pile of resources, and my dupes were spending 90% of their time going all the way down, grabbing something, climbing back up, running out of air, dropping what they were carrying, lather, rinse, repeat.
I got to this point with everyone fairly healthy and sane, mostly by not training anyone to too high of a level and using early-game equipment. Now, however, I’m at the point where I can’t research more stuff without the higher level stations. Plus, I think I need to start building out nicer accommodations to get morale high enough to support higher level training. Oh, and better food. I’m not going to be able to power all that on a couple of coal power plants and a single oil powered generator. It’s a pretty razor-thin margin of resources I have to play around with.
Yeah, that’s a super-annoying part of the game. They’ll drop what they’re carrying for other reasons, too:
the thing is too hot
it’s the end of their shift
the job that they were carrying stuff for become inaccessible, even for just a moment
It definitely means that the bottoms of ladders tends to pile up with cruft. That said, you can prevent a lot of it with atmo suits, once you get there.
Sometimes you gotta stop dupes from being, well, dupes. Either deconstruct two consecutive ladders, or else deconstruct one and build a wall in its place. Just be careful that everyone’s on the up-side of the ladder when you do this.
Then spend awhile getting your base in good shape. There’s a guide I’ve recommended in this thread, but I’ll recommend it again: Guide to surviving the early game. There are also guides to the mid-game and late-game.
Rather than use them as walkthroughs, check them out for incredibly useful advice about how elements interact, awesomely efficient builds, and general philosophy of play. Every time I build something from one of the guides, I learn at least one key new principle of play.
I had my most successful base. I lasted about 300 cycles, before I screwed up and didn’t notice that I had no dirt left. My farms failed, and everybody starved. Bah! I probably could have recovered except I goofed expanding my lettuce farms and flooded the whole thing.
I learnt so much in that last run. This next base will be better still!
A question. The outliner seems to “lie”. For example, it will routinely say “You have no algae” but I can see some lying around. Why does it report that I have zero of something when I quite obviously have some? For example, in my last game for a while it was reporting I had 0 tonnes of salt water. I had two HUGE reservoirs of salt water. Easily 40 tonnes or more. Anybody know how the logic of the outliner works?
First, the materials have to be accessible. If a chunk of sand fell and blocked the path to some stuff laying on the ground, it won’t appear in the list. Or if a door is locked, or there’s no ladder, or an empty atmo suit station, etc.
Second, it doesn’t count liquids or gases (or unmined solids) just out in the wild. That includes storage reservoirs. It’ll show stuff that you’ve bottled up but not if it’s just sitting in a vat.