Running at maximum speed with the game in the background (I feel that space travel takes too long. I cannot imagine trying to use the most distant worlds as a source of resources), I’ve lost 3 dupes. They sure are good at getting themselves in trouble. 
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
Even with my diverse portfolio of power generation, I still run into issues where I don’t produce enough energy and my base goes into a downward spiral. Problem is when I have a surplus of power I build these elaborate mechanisms for things like cooling the base or automating production. But I need to put in some automation so they can shut down in a controlled manner so critical systems get highest priority for resources.
i.e I can’t generate oxygen or food because the now limited resources are all going to preparing perfect espressos for my dupes.
…and now everyone is dead 
I know what you mean. In fact, I’m currently fighting my own way through power problems. My hydrogen liquifier worked a little too well, and I liquified my entire stores. That left just natural gas, but my vent was shutting down just as I needed it. I had a spate of bad luck with solar; getting less than half power on average due to storms. And I had a backup petroleum generator, but it’s incredibly inefficient, because I have to do something with the excess heat and CO2 and all the extra pumps and stuff take even more energy.
I wasn’t in immediate peril, but I was slowly burning through my stores. And I pretty much had one dupe full time on oil refinery duty. Not ideal.
So I manually went through my base, disabled everything that I could get away with, and generally handheld things until at least my geysers were producing at a decent level again. Coulda been bad. Sorry to hear about your base :(.
Maybe this is getting more complicated than they really want, but it would be cool if they had an actual computer control system. Sometimes I want pretty complicated logic on my systems and building it all out of gates is a challenge. For instance, I want a priority system for my power generation that takes storage levels into account, and can shut down unneeded systems if things get too dire. A system with several automation inputs and outputs, with an internal programming interface would make these things easier.
Yeah, the gates can end up taking up a lot of room. To the point that some players may end up using a computer room; In the sense that there is an entire room dedicated to just holding gates and wires.
Is an actual computer control system the kind of element that could be done through a mod? Because if you know anyone with programming skills and an interest in innovative tech, that could be up their alley.
Hmm; who could you be referring to :)?
I looked into it a bit. The basic idea is straightforward. The problem as I see it is that ONI has only very limited means for user configuration of buildings. It has numeric sliders, checkboxes, and a couple of other things, but that’s it. It doesn’t appear to support anything like a text input box, which I’d need here (alongside a few other things).
It’s possible that a deeper mod could add support for this, but ONI mod documentation appears to be pretty sparse, and while I’ve reverse-engineered harder things before, I’m not quite motivated enough in this case. Plus my expertise is mostly in the C++ world, not C#.
In case any lurkers out there are interested, too much water was in fact the problem. I rebuilt the cooling setup such that once the water is all vaporized, it’s about 15kg steam per tile, and that works much better. The steam turbine runs much longer and more often.
To those out there with much more experience at this game, did you find on your subsequent playthroughs you were much more efficient? I’ve been reading Jahws’ “Surviving” guides which were linked earlier in the thread, and he’s launching rockets by cycle 380. I’m past cycle 600 and I haven’t even started refining oil yet.
If you’ll correct my ignorance: How is that a problem? Going from C# to C++ could be a problem because you have to learn to do things like allocate memory. What’s more complicated to do in C# than C++?
The best I can come up with is some kind of centralized room with switches to all the relevant buildings so you can turn as many of them on/off as you like while minimizing commute. It’s not as good as doing it automatically, though. I doubt they’ll include a programming interface, even in a game like this, although I bet it would be possible to make some pretty interesting games following the Zachtronics model of gamifying programming elements and principles. Do you know what percentage of the population has programming skills?
I’m definitely more efficient, but I haven’t attempted to minimize the cycles at all. Oasisse is only my second real playthrough, and really it was significantly easier than the first, despite being on the most difficult standard preset. But I was careful to take things slow so as to not grow beyond my means. So no early rocket attempt.
I suppose I could go back to the standard preset and see how quickly I could pull off a launch. That would probably mean going for a high dupe count. Might be a fun thing to try.
Good to hear about the steam turbine. Sounds like some kind of heat physics bug with high pressures.
It’s not harder, just more outside my core experience.
For instance, I’m used to stepping through x86 assembly when trying to figure out the behavior of some unknown function. It’s pretty tedious and can be hard to keep track of what’s happening, but I’m reasonably good at it at this point. But no one steps through C# bytecode; instead one can use decompiler tools to convert back to source, and from what I hear they work pretty well because of the extra information embedded in C# binaries. However, I’m not familiar with these tools because I only every use C# for little quickie projects. Not harder, just different.
One cool-looking mod I came across was a wireless automation signal transmitter. You built a transmitter and receiver building, and then selected a channel from 1 to 100.
Although apparently intended just to avoid super-long automation wire runs, it would also make some logic setups much easier. No routing problems obviously, and also if you need to swap two signals, you just change channels–no need to rewire anything.
Now that I think about it, that combined with a kind of ubergate would really simplify things. Toggles for invert input A, invert input B, invert output, and XOR vs. OR would be sufficient for just about everything interesting, I think.
No idea. But the programming interface I’m thinking of wouldn’t require more advanced knowledge than the gates to–less, actually. I think more people than wrap their heads around if/then/else constructs than, say, XOR gates or SR latches.
Maybe I’m missing something about priorities. I’m currently trying to refine a ton of steel to build my first rocket. I refined a bunch of iron, built a storage container close to my metal refinery, set the filter to iron until it was totally full with 20 tons, then disabled the filter, so the iron dropped out. So there is now 20 tons of iron sitting on the floor very close to my metal refinery. But every time the refinery is ready for more iron, one of my dupes goes up to the surface to fetch some that’s fallen from meteorites. They’ve barely touched the 20 tons of iron sitting right there; it’s only down to 18.9. Meanwhile, as soon as a dupe finishes making a batch of steel, I click on the refinery, click on the Errands tab, see that one of the dupes has supplying the refinery as their current errand, click on the dupe… and sure enough, they’re all the way up at the surface fetching iron, and have to climb all the way back down, change out of their jet suit, and climb further down, taking way too long. What gives? I have proximity enabled in the priorities screen.
Did you set the priority of the iron you want them to focus on first?
I feel like an idiot. Ignore my post. The storage container was full of iron ore, not refined iron.
On another note, does anyone know how to make your dupes let your auto-sweepers load stuff instead of doing it manually? I have an oxylite refinery, a submerged smart storage bin, and an autosweeper that can reach both. About half the time when the refinery drops a new chunk of oxylite on the ground, instead of letting the autosweeper put it in the storage bin, one of my dupes takes it on as a task, even if they’re halfway across the map.
The simplest way is to have it behind a locked/permissions removed door - no access, no dupe tasks.
I have a pretty decent self-sustaining, largely automated base for 15 dupes now. I’ve found that by putting a couple of sheets of drywall behind my steel robo-miners on the surface and blowing CO2 exhast on them, I keep them cool enough to avoid overheating when removing regolith.
I’m on the verge of launching my first steam rocket and soon to have a thriving space program.
Next step - Switch to what I call “Iron Man mode”. What I mean is every round one becomes available, I HAVE to select another dupe. I imagine resources will soon become very strained and I’ll be forced to lock lots of violent, sick, stressed out dupes outside of the core base with all the amenities.
Yeah, I do the same thing, except I use my infectious polluted oxygen vents. I’m feeding all my CO2 to molten slickster ranches, to reclaim energy in the form of petroleum. And I’ve found that drywall behind the robo-miners doesn’t seem to make any difference. I thought it would because it would make the gas stick around a little longer, but I tried some with and some without, and the ones without come to the same temperature equilibrium as the ones with.
Finally got some supercoolant, so I’m currently working on liquefying hydrogen and oxygen for rockets. I thought I could do both with the same cooling loop, but it turns out oxygen freezes before hydrogen liquefies. So now I need to tear the whole thing down and replace it with two separate supercoolant circuits.
Anyone have a good guide on space scanner sensitivity? I want to build more rockets, each with its own dedicated scanner to open/close the bunker doors, but if you start building space scanners close together the network quality of your meteor-sensing ones drop way down. Apparently the game considers them all to be part of the same network even if they’re sensing different things.
I’ve had pretty good luck with just 2 spaced a bit apart scanning the skies for meteors.
I added a third scanner for my rocket ship, but it’s pretty far from the other two. But generally I haven’t had much trouble with the scanners.
I’ve launched my crappy steam rocket a few times. My main issue right now is dealing with the heat and fueling the rocket. I have a volcano next to the launch pad where I can pump in steam before the pipes break.
There are a couple of physics things that bother me about the game:
-Why do steam pipes break when water condenses in them? I can see the opposite happening or the pipes breaking when water freezes.
-Crude oil and petroleum are lighter than water IRL. Water should sink when it lands in petroleum.
-Gasses with a high pressure differential move too slowly. The game has no such thing as "explosive decompression.
So I guess when the scanner says its sensitivity is low, it doesn’t really matter?
I followed Jahws’ Surviving the Late Game guide on building steam rockets, and had no problems. In fact, I built his “convertible steam boiler” but with water rather than petroleum, and the tepidizer never ran once during the whole time I was using a steam rocket-- the water had so much heat it it that I had moved on to petroleum rocketry long before it ever got cool.
Not sure what you mean by dealing with the heat being a problem, unless your rocket engine is way down inside your base. Just build it out in space, and leave at least a 9 tile gap above the top of your basel.
Finally got the final achievement: 35/35. Some of these were tricky; others annoying. Taming a Gassy Moo requires a great deal of support infrastructure: space access, chlorine liquification, high performance rockets, biological bay, and some other things. Not to mention some finesse with the critter wrangling (it looks like it may be impossible to complete without sorta gaming it). But anyway, it worked out in the end.
On the more annoying end of the spectrum was “Job Suitability”, which requires every dupe to do an errand in an atmo suit for 10 cycles in a row. The problem is that it is glitchy, and doesn’t really track things properly, so you don’t know if you’re making progress or not. Some errands don’t count, either. I did eventually complete it by making a giant, useless construction project that ate up everyone’s time but ensured everyone had plenty to do.
As for the posts about rockets heating your base: I built a big block of metal just below my rocket exhaust, and coupled it to a steam chamber with a turbine. Auto-cools the whole thing and makes free power to boot. The metal can take a launch or two, even of a hydrogen rocket, without melting. Normally it cools off enough between launches that it doesn’t matter.
Klei just released an update to ONI with a bunch of new automation options. Among them, a notifier building–exactly what I was asking for previously! They also added ribbon cables to combine 4 automation wires into one. Should make for some nice, compact setups.
I finally built something I’d been thinking about for a while: a (mostly) automated metal refinery. That is, something that doesn’t require a dupe standing by continuously. Check it out in action.
No exploits, at least no intentional ones. It produces 6+ tons of refined copper a day, and only needs a dupe to work on it a small fraction of the time. It runs indefinitely, or at least until the ore runs out.
More properly, it’s a refinery amplifier. The only way to get the heat needed is from refinery coolant, which can get very hot indeed. I use glass as the coolant since it’s the only really hot liquid you can get without exploits (via the glass forge). But it’s so efficient with heat (I use a 40-stage cross-flow heat exchanger) that I get something like a 30x return on refining (i.e., it refines 3000 kg for each 100 kg from the refinery building).
For some reason, it’s also massively energy positive. I have to run two steam turbines on the output just to capture the waste heat. I’m not sure why, since copper and copper ore have about the same heat capacity, and I’m certainly not putting that much energy into it. I’m not complaining here, but I think I may have unintentionally exploited something.
Anyway, I’ve managed to refine 450 tons of copper so far and am actually running short on ore. Not that I have any real use for that much copper, but it’s kinda cool to have a real industrial-scale converter going.