In the seed provided above, I had a nice, large base around Cycle 40 with (IIRC) 7 Dupes clustered around the initial zone but the map was from several versions ago. I started a new game on the same seed and lost my old base. 
The files might still be in my computer with the newer saves using the same seed blocking 'em.
I also have a different seed in sandbox mode to mess around.
Nope. If anything is left of the original base, it’s the initial save file.
Should’ve made a copy. 
Yup. This is useful for the lighter gases; hydrogen in particular. I have a room with some electrolyzers and a hydrogen generator. There’s an air pump at the top that feeds to a gas filter, sending the hydrogen to a generator and the oxygen to elsewhere in the base. The hydrogen mostly floats upward so the pump can get at it. I could do the same with various hydrogen reservoirs but that’s a finite resource. The generator doesn’t fully pay for the electrical cost of the electrolyzers, but it helps.
I’m at close to cycle 200 with 10 dupes. Algae is pretty much used up at this point so oxygen generation needs to come from somewhere else. Heat is really my biggest problem but I think I have a solution with my heat exchanger approach. It’s slowly but gradually cooling things off. And I just finished digging an oil well; now to hook up a processing unit and burn the natural gas for more energy.
Atmosuits: I put an atmosuit checkpoint linked up to atmosuit docks, hooked them up with power and a gas pump + oxygen filter, assigned the atmosuits to the Dupes I want to wear them. I assign a high priority to the atmosuit docks. Sometimes they wear them and sometimes not, I can’t pin down why. The atmosuits are currently sitting right in front of the atmosuit docks with the docks asking for delivery and the Dupes aren’t wearing them or putting them back into the docks. Suggestions on possible problem source/solution?
Hmm. They’ve always been totally reliable for me. I haven’t mucked with priorities or made any assignments.
It is always the assigned dupes that make it through without suits, or is it the unassigned ones? If it’s the latter, you could put a door in front of the passage that allows only the assigned dupes to pass. If the former–not sure, but do you just have a single exit point and no way to bypass it?
This game benefits very much from screenshots both to understand what others are saying and to just enjoy seeing the creativity and problem solving/creation of other people: Imgur: The magic of the Internet I’m curious to see everyone else’s.
In the second picture, the problem is that the Dupes just don’t make it past the checkpoint when it’s on, even if there’s a suit in the dock right next to it. For example, if I told any of them to talk to the ore scrubber or go into the slime polluted water reservoir, they wouldn’t do it.
If no atmosuits are assigned, will Dupes just take one if they have to make it past the checkpoint?
Dupes will just take an atmosuit if there’s one free, regardless of assignment. And in my experience, they won’t go past the checkpoint if there are no free ones.
It looks to me like your problem is that the suit racks don’t actually have suits in them. They should be hanging where the green outline is, not laying on the floor in front. Somehow they didn’t get delivered properly. Maybe manually sweep the suits and try the delivery again?
I’ll try that tomorrow. In the past, they would just pick them up but I’ll try not assigning them and sweeping them. Thanks. I must have made things more complex than they needed to be, which is a potential pitfall with this game.
What’s the point of undocking suits?
Well, it seemed like it was time for a culling. Whether I royally screwed up the priorities, or these guys are as dumb as they seem, 5 of my 8 dupes starved to death. In their defense, half of my population had slimelung from my headlong charge to a frozen biome, but I feel there is no excuse for letting fields of grain sit idle while everyone dies.
In good news, the power room is completed, and the metal refinery is up and running, with it’s own pool of coolant. I decided to do some math, and it looks like polluted water is the way to go - it has both a higher boiling point and heat capacity. Also, water sieves output clean water at 40 degrees, so it might work best to pipe a refinery in between a cistern pump and the sieves, with a valve to bypass if it’s full. That would confine most of your heat buildup to your sieves, where you can treat it with your cooling method of choice.
Heat problems start to rear their ugly heads two ways. One is breaching into the volcanic biomes (the ones near the starting area that are ~70°c ; and the one deeper down where oil and stuff is found and is basically at boiling temp), the other is moving beyond the “hamster wheel” stage of power generation and running heavy equipment around the clock.
The first is a problem because your guys will bring back the hot rocks and metal into your storage or just build stuff with it, where they’ll passively radiate for a good long while if you don’t Take Steps (like setting up a submerged storage to let them cool down before doing stuff with it) ; the second, well, machines tend to run hot. Not necessarily “deadly heat and boiling the atmo” hot, but even just the coal burner radiates 40°c which is deadly to the plants of the starting zone. Batteries run quite hot too. The algae oxy generators emit oxygen that ever so slowly fill the whole atmo at 30°c, which is *exactly *the upper limit mealworm and berries can survive, 1° more (e.g. from the lamp illuminating the berries) and they immediately keel over ! Electrolysis is even worse, oxy comes out of the machine at 40° or more depending on the conditions of the room it’s in… it all adds up over time.
You can delay all that with insulation tiles or liquid cooling but unless you have some way to bleed temperature out somehow, your whole base will heat up juuust a little bit every cycle.
And the problem with heat is that it’s easy to gain it, but it’s difficult to remove and every cooling method is all the slower that you have a large volume to cool down - i.e. your entire base’s atmo. Which is a problem when the first warning sign that your base has a heating issue is that your food production dies all at once
. You need to take care of or at least keep an eye out for the issue from very early on.
Kinda, the sieves also output polluted dirt, which you can compost but that’s 70°C.
Is there a mobile/tablet version coming?
According to the FAQ:
However, the game is still in Early Access. Don’t Starve has a mobile version, but only until long after the game had been “officially” completed.
I started a new game–each time I think I refine my base. On the bright side, my new base had two neural vacillators near the starting location (each one gives a single dupe a major bonus, e.g., +10 strength). On the downside, water’s a little scarcer, and I can’t find a frost biome anywhere. I’m on day 75 or so, and starting to worry about heat.
Whew. I got lucky here with at least three frost biomes nearby. I harvested a bunch of Wheezewort, which saved my crops and at least stopped the temperature rise in my “industrial zone”.
I also ran across an Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier. I’ve yet to hook it up, but it looks like it can cool virtually my entire base with the right hydrogen heat exchanger setup.
Something else must be causing that, peepee accidents maybe? Hydrogen generators don’t have waste.
Alright, so for power management, it took me a bit to figure out. Each set of wires is a circuit that shares power load equally. Even if it’s branched, if you have more than 1KW of draw on that circuit, the whole circuit can take damage. So you have to set up circuits based on powering equipment which totals less than 1KW.
So the best way to approach this is to have your power generators somewhere that they can be interconnected with heavy wire relatively easily. Make a heavy wire main trunk that runs through your base, either horizontally or vertically. But heavy wire has a huge decor cost, so you’re going to want to reserve a tunnel (2 spaces enclosed by tile) to run the heavy wire. The tile will block the decor decay. In this power corridor, you run your heavy wire (obviously), but every so often you also have a transformer. That transformer can connect your wire circuits (each drawing less than 1KW) to the main power wire. It’s also a good idea to put batteries in these corridors - not only are you not using the extra space for anything else, but if they’re connected directly to the main base heavy power line you don’t have to worry about matching batteries to particular circuits, the heavy line batteries can supply power to anywhere in the circuit.
Part of the difficulty is learning this stuff on the fly - I didn’t know how power worked and so my power plants are scattered, I left little room for utility corridors, etc. Every time I learn something new about the game I want to go back and design it from the ground up with that knowledge. But I’m at around cycle 60 with a healthy base - everything is running pretty well, got a good electrical/plumbing/ventilation cycle, food production is good (although I need to start exotic farms for fancier meals), everything is researched. I’ve been focused almost entirely on making a self sufficient base and have done almost no exploring. Trying to figure out how exosuits work now so that I can go digging around in other biomes.
I am very low on coal which is going to present a problem. I don’t see coal anywhere else on the map - is the starter biome the only place you get coal? There is a steam geyser in sight, so I could try using that as a power source.
Another tip: build your base more vertically than horizontally. Having one central ladder keeps things moving pretty well and then later on you can put a firepole next to it which will significantly speed up movement around your base. Leave a space open on either side of the ladder - for the eventual fire pole but also makes oxygen transfer around your base easier.
The caustic biome has a crapload of coal. One key thing to do is to hook up your coal generator(s) to a smart battery–the coal generator will otherwise run constantly, wasting a lot of coal. This incredibly detailed guide for the early game has some detailed diagrams midway down. The midgame guide by the same gamer is also really good, although it’s a little beyond me for now.
:smack: Natural gas geyser, not hydrogen geyser.
Personally, I don’t truck with no transformers. First of all, the movies sucked. Secondly, they’re heatness right in the middle of the works, and that’s no good. With smart batteries you can shut down generators automagically so that they’ll only run when something is drawing enough juice to drain all the batteries connected to it (as long as the smart bat. is the first one in the daisy chain from the ginny), so I rather like having N separate power loops each connected to an individual generator. Plus when you do it that way you can better weather fuckups on a given power loop instead of having your entire operation shut down because a wire burned down somewhere or the batteries melted or somesuch.
FWIW, with the right pump setup the electrolyzer + hydrogen generator combo is power positive. That does mean switching from burning coal to burning water obviously, but if you happen to have a renewable source of that… 
Also FWIW, fancier meals are not really necessary - if you have enough statues and paintings lying around (especially in the sleeping quarters and the mess hall) your guys won’t ever stress out from eating even raw worms (pickled worms don’t spoil, but really you don’t need to even process them, just store your food in a CO2 pit, it’s sterile and prevents decay).
The only upside to switching crops is to lessen the man/hours of your farmers and gofers because mealworm plants are quite labour intensive, both in terms of fertilizing the pots and carrying the stuff to your kitchen. Shrooms are much better in that regard (high crop yields, good calorie/weight ratio), but they require slime which is a PITA to handle safely inside the base without giving everyone lungrot.
I haven’t really tried herding critters much, would hatches be a viable/renewable source of food, whether as omelet or raw meat ?
Having a weird problem. To make up for the lost coal generation until I get the turbine set up, I put manual generators next to the coal ones. Then I connected them by heavy wire to the main power trunk, which is connected to everything else via transformers.
The dups will hop on the hamster wheel and then immediately jump off. If I select the wheel, it says “batteries sufficiently full” - what batteries? Every battery in here is at 0%, nothing is powered.
They’re connected to the same power trunk the coal plant was, so it’s not a wiring issue as far as I can tell. I can’t figure it out.
Also, is there some way to set the default repair value of electrical line breaks higher? I was trying alternate methods of wiring just to see if I could get past this bug and one of the lines blew (because I was using regular wires instead of heavy) - and line breaks are always started at 5 priority. You can correct it manually, but sometimes you gotta run a grid in emergency conditions (like if you connect 2 grids temporarily) and get a bunch of circuit overloads. I’d like repairing them to start at a default priority of like 8 every time instead of me having to manually change them.