25 cycles in and still doing ok, but it’s sloooow going. I’ve got food (via mealwood and hexalent) and oxygen (via electrolysis), but energy is hard to come by.
For the time being, I’m sticking with the mousewheel and occasionally the wood burner. There are no coal deposits within easy reach, nor are there hatches I can farm. I’ve uncovered one geyser so far, which has hot (but clean) water, so that’s convenient, but no natural gas or anything so far. And I’m constantly blocked by hard-to-dig stuff.
So it’s definitely a challenge, though I’m making progress. I’d really like to get my energy production up, but don’t yet see a way. Arbor trees worked well on my last base but I need a big polluted water source, and don’t have one yet.
And I thought I had problems with one of my volcanoes running out of energy. Basically, all the magma has cooled down to 126 degrees. So I need to send some dupes in to clear it out.
My dupes are hurt. But I think they’ll get better. I found a copper volcano, which is nice since it means I can avoid a metal refinery for the time being, but I have no atmo suits yet (they need copper themselves, not to mention a better oxygen supply and power). So my dupes have been braving the volcano naked and suffering for it.
They’ve also been trying to clear out the water geyser, which I’m going to need pretty soon (there are only tiny pockets of free water on the map, polluted included). It’s hot and they’re scalding themselves there as well.
So they’re injured a lot, but on the upside I finally built a hydrogen generator to do something with the excess hydrogen that I’ve so far been letting rise to the top of my base. I still need to automate it properly so as not to waste the hydrogen, but I’ll take what I can get for now.
Thankfully, base heating is not yet a problem and it looks like I’ll have time to do something about it before it’s an issue.
I see an oil reservoir nearby that I can tap into. Once I do that, energy shouldn’t be a problem. But I need the atmo suits first.
Another problem is that there’s no iron and very little gold amalgam so far. So all my buildings overheat at 75, which isn’t much. But there is a little gold and if I’m careful there’s probably enough for the critical parts, at least until I discover iron.
It sounds like a pretty extreme challenge. Far beyond my current skills for sure.
For the first time, I have transit tubes and comfy beds! Both are so valuable. The beds giving a passive heal takes a lot of pressure off the hospital. And transit tubes means my dupes spend more time working and less time travelling. Although I still have the “long commutes warning”. Sheesh, what do you need to do to get rid of that? This game needs teleporters. Maybe in a DLC.
Huh! I didn’t realize the comfy bed gave a health regen boost as well. Good to know!
I’m at cycle 75. This is the ONI I remember from the beginning :)! For every problem I solve, more arise. It looks like heat is going to be a problem sooner rather than later.
Fortunately, I just ran across a leaky oil fissure, which should supply me with my energy needs. I need to build up the infrastructure for it, but that’s looking promising at least.
I also just finished an atmo suit dock, which had a prerequisite of a self-contained electrolyzer system. I needed to do that anyway, but I’d have waited longer if it weren’t that everything outside my main biome is hot as hell and unbreathable.
The heat is going to kill my crops if I don’t do something soon, but I really need some iron (steel, actually) to build my standard cooling loop. I still haven’t found any. Gotta look farther afield, apparently. I haven’t found an ice biome at all, in fact.
Cycle 100! Not much changed since last time. I’m edging towards sustainability, but I still have to face the heat problem. I put it off for a bit by sealing off my base but it’s still going to be a problem, and I still don’t have an ice biome to tap.
I forgot how inefficient the petroleum generator was. The leaky oil fissure isn’t quite enough to power my base. So, still using manual generators. I think I will have to tap into the oil reservoir after all (using an oil well). That should give me enough margin for my other plans.
I did at least run across some small iron deposits. It’s not much, but I don’t need a lot. Just enough for an aquatuner and a few other items. Then I can build a steam turbine/aquatuner loop and stave off the heat. At least my dupes are no longer always in the hospital burn ward since building the atmo suit dock.
I’m sticking with just 4 dupes for the time being. I was careful with the selection and made sure they had a broad set of skills. I chose the +1/+1/+1 combo for each one to maximize the morale boost.
Pulled off a huge coup–two hydrogen geysers right next to each other. This was a huge benefit and means I can actually get ahead of things, power-wise. I’m also close to finished with the pre-space research, so I’ll have an extra dupe from now on. I had occasionally been putting my research dupe on other duties, but for the most part he was researching or analyzing geysers, so it’ll be nice to have him do real work for a change.
Besides that, I have steel production going, but it’s slow due to the lack of eggs from creatures. There are pockets of fossils, so I should be all right, but they really aren’t making it easy.
Did I mention all the sand? Like 1/3 of the tiles are sand. It’s annoying to cut through because it falls, and it’s almost worthless. Bleh.
In any case, things are still going fairly smoothly. Once I have some steel produced, I’ll finally be able to get some real cooling going.
Screenshot in case you’re interested. Look at the sand!
Wow! Amazing progress for cycle 150. Even just surviving is remarkable. I finally have a stable steam economy going. I really thought volcanoes would be able to sustain more steam turbines than they can. But I’ve learnt otherwise. Also, now that I know I need to periodically clean up the rock produced from the volcano I’ve redesigned entry to make it easier (and so I won’t lose precious precious steam).
As usual, ONI gives me what I needed most just when I don’t need it any more :).
Around cycle 160, my crops started dying due to heat. I thought I had a few more cycles to go, but apparently not. Fortunately, I had a bit of food stocked and was able to finish building my base cooler before running out. It’s not as efficient as a supercoolant-based one, but it’s not bad and it really doesn’t have to work too hard.
Just as I completed it, the pod printer gifts me… a wheezewort! A precious wheezewort seed, which I plopped down in the middle of my farm. That got my crops going even before I had placed all the cooling pipes and such in my base.
That said, phosphorite is at a serious premium and I will run out in short order, so I needed the base cooler anyway. It also allows me to switch to bristle blossoms, which I had wanted to do anyway (my dupes are sick of eating those disgusting bugs after 200 cycles). Still, it has smoothed the transition.
I was also able to mostly finish my oil refinery. This isn’t utterly crucial but I’d like some power reserve for when I embark on further projects. The hydrogen geysers are nice but because they run on cycles I want to be sure I have some reserve for when they aren’t going.
So things are looking up for my dupes. I think they’ve made it through the difficult parts. Time to explore deeper and further up and see what else they can exploit in their hot and sandy home.
I haven’t tried this yet, but it’s not totally shocking. The flip side of this is that steam turbines are great at getting rid of heat–so good, in fact, that your magma just doesn’t last that long. But as part of a cooling system, that’s exactly what you want.
I did on my other (1700 cycle) base, but on this one I haven’t had time to set up a ranch yet. Also, I only just found a chlorine geyser, but being almost at the top of the map it’s going to take time to tap. Since mined resources are so limited on this map, I need to be careful not to grow things that use something non-renewable. The chlorine/balm lily/drecko ranch is a good one but like I said, I needed chlorine first.
I’d like a pincha peppernut supply but I have no polluted water source other than what I can produce via power plants and carbon scrubbers. That might work out–I have a CO2 geyser that I can use as a renewable source of polluted water. But again I haven’t had time to set it up. Not starving due to overheated crops has been more on my mind.
Things are running very smoothly now, with ample stores of hydrogen, natural gas, petroleum, and oil. Water is still from a hot geyser, but my cooling system continues to work well, and so I’ve managed to convert my crops to bristle blossoms, which demand reasonably cool water.
My vent selection, while by no means terrible, isn’t particularly broad. I haven’t explored 100% yet, but it looks like I’m not getting a polluted water geyser. The hydrogen is nice, but I also have several polluted oxygen vents, which are basically useless.
So I’ll have to make my own from CO2 vents and carbon skimmers, which is fine. Need to figure out the throughput on on that. Hopefully it’s enough to supply at least a few pincha pepper plants.
I also have salt water and chlorine geysers, which will come in handy later on. For now, my dupes are just happy to not be eating meal lice all the time.
It does, but in the spirit of “things which would have been handy a long time ago”, that would have been a fantastic thing on cycle 4 since O2 production was so difficult then. But now I have a nice self-contained (and mostly self-powered) electrolysis system, with plenty of water, so it just isn’t worth much these days.
I could use it as an O2 source for liquification, and don’t even have to purify it first–the liquification does that for you. But it’s going to be a while before I start building liquid oxygen rockets. Lime is scarce, and if I’m going to ramp up steel production I’ll probably need to build a high-efficiency egg shell farm. Probably either Pacu or Dreckos since they can be farmed with no resource input.
It’s too bad that muckroot can’t. I basically have to dedicate a container to it since it can only be swept.
Oh and I like Shine Bugs for egg shells. Sure they eat a little bit of berries, but they also help grow the berries for no heat. I’m usually swimming in shine bug eggs (so I eat the extra). So even though they eat some berries they make up for it in omelettes.
Shine bugs sound like a good idea. Pretty low resources and high reproduction rate.
It looks like they need ~1 blossom plant per bug, which is a little more than I’d like–mainly because I’m trying to stick to things that can be 100% automated when possible. But they’ll eat phosphorite, too, and I can set up a completely automated/zero input phosphorite farm. Will take a while since I have to pipe in the chlorine, but aside from that it should work well.
Even with just four dupes, they’re standing around idle half the time. Lazy! So this will make a good project.
Idle is like a pre-suffocation indicator.