I’ll have to check it out. I like ONI but it starts to feel like a job after awhile.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
I know this is a thread necro, but is anyone still playing this game? I put it on my wishlist ages ago and forgot about it, but recently it came up for $10 including the DLC, so I grabbed it, and after a few false starts I have a pretty good start (or so I think) about 15 cycles in, and am totally hooked!
I started it, and got super hooked over a weekend. I think I might have played over 20 hours that weekend. But then I got bogged down in the details trying to set up the perfect generator (spacing and whatnot), and happened to try Subnautica for the first time the next day. That took over all my gaming for like five or six months.
Haven’t gotten back to ONI yet, though I did also briefly get into Kerbal Space program recently, but then Skyrim stole my attention.
Right at this moment Raft has its hooks in me, but I still have ONI (and KBS) installed and on my to-play list. I would recommend it for $10, for sure.
Yep, I dove in and am enjoying it greatly. I’m currently also attempting to rerun Cyberpunk, but that’s a game I play when I have a long stretch where I’m sure I won’t be interrupted, which is rare nowadays. ONI is perfect when that’s NOT the case. Breaks give me time to think things over!
I’m not going in blind, I’ve reviewed this thread as well as a few guides and videos. And like I mentioned, I had a number of false starts.
I’ll share pics and my progress later.
So I’m not able to post pictures right now, but I have a question so I’ll give a little background and then ask it.
Currently I’m about 50 cycles in. I have dug out big reservoirs for water and for polluted water, and have set up electrolysis as well as various industries around my base (which is set up using 16x4 rooms (plus 2 wall tiles for 18 tile levels), with a 6 square wide main shaft and 3 square wide shafts elsewhere. I just finished upgrading to lavatories and showers, but my water management system isn’t a closed loop yet.
Further, my oxygen is coming from electrolysis which means that my fresh water is slowly dropping. I’ve got 2 or 3 Slime biomes nearby, and I’ve recently finally breached one and started consolidating its polluted water. So, I’ve got tons and tons of polluted water available, and I plan to consolidate it and then pump it into my reservoir for treatment.
Which brings me to my question. I understand that treatment requires both removing pollutants with a sieve and germs with one of a few options:
- Heat the water
- Cool the water
- Put the water into reservoirs in rooms full of chlorine
- Irradiate the water
I do have ice biomes near me, some chlorine in the slime biomes I’ve breached, and a nearby clump or uranium. So it seems like all of the options are open to me.
I haven’t really gotten into heat management yet, and I understand that ice biomes can have their cooling avility depleted, so I’d rather avoid options 1 and 2 for now. That leaves either radiation or chlorine, but I’m having trouble deciding. Anyone got any advice?
I’ve continued playing, and ended up using chlorine to try and kill the germs. My clean water pool has ended up with about 2k germs per tile, which means that at some point I will need to run my clean water through another round of steralization, but that’s not really a problem, and no one is getting sick so far.
However, I did run into a different problem. Right where my 6 tile wide main shaft runs, I hit a hot polluted oxygen geyser. I have it isolated and will need to come up with a good use for it. However, hot oxygen doesn’t seem very useful. I need cooling, not heating, and while oxygen is useful, cleaning up polluted oxygen is a pain compared to simply splitting water.
Yep, still playing. I have 1175 hours into it.
I fairly recently started a map where I hope to get every achievement. We’ll see how that goes–some of them are pretty tedious. But I did get through the difficult initial “carnivore” and “super sustainable” achievements. It’s relatively easy going now.
Currently exploring the starmap with a rocket. Getting close to the end of the research tree.
There are other ways to cool. Namely, an aquatuner+steam turbine setup. Needs significant power, but solar power is abundant with the DLC now.
To be honest, I rarely worry about germs. My dupes get sick occasionally but it doesn’t have much effect.
Yeah, those are among the lamest of all geysers. Just lock it up and avoid.
Oh, excellent! I am glad to see you’re still here, you had a lot of interesting info earlier in the thread.
Here is my base, just as the 81st cycle is about to begin.
As you can see, I have a lot of space, and not much actually built up. I’m just starting to figure out rooms and automation, so I will probably be setting up some redesigned/specialized sections to handle stuff like hatch ranch > coal power, or a specialized mushroom farm.
Looks like a good start! I won’t spoil anything unless you ask since part of the fun is figuring things out after a disaster, but if you do want hints I’m happy to help.
You have plenty of time to deal with cooling issues, but make sure not to ignore it. You’ll really want an aquatuner+turbine setup at some point.
Are you playing with the Spaced Out DLC enabled?
Sounds good! Like I eaid earlier this is by no means a blind runthrough, so there are a number of issues I already know I will need to deal with, but not necessarily all of the details.
Heat is definitely already starting to be a concern. So far my oxygen has been coming from electrolysis, which releases 70 degree hydrogen and oxygen. Rather than deal with separating and handling gasses, I’ve so far been placing my electrolysis machine as low in the main shaft as I can. Because gasses in this game form layers rather than mixing, this means I get layers of hydrogen, oxygen, and waste carbon dioxide in that order. I have then simply trapped the CO2 in a pit, and reversed the procedure at the top of the base with a large chamber, and simply kept pumping out more gas while enlarging the hydrogen and CO2 sinks to make sure that my habitable area remained full of oxygen.
But this is leading to two issues. First, electrolysis is adding lots of heat, and I have no effective way to cool things down. Second, as my base continues to grow and as I start needing zones filled with stuff other than oxygen (such as CO2 mushroom farms), simply letting the air settle into layers is not going to cut it.
So my next task is self evident. I need to do electrolysis in a controlled environment, separate the gasses instead of dumping hydrogen into my base, and use this opportunity to cool the oxygen while I’ve got it all in one place, before I dump it into the base.
I’ve seen a bunch of neat designs online for electrolysis machines powered by hydrogen generators that generate both oxygen and a little bit of net power. I probably will come with my own take rather than using a premade design, but that’s my next goal.
Forgot to answer this one - yes, the DLC is on, but I’m on a classic Terra map.
The CO2 is easy enough to deal with: carbon scrubbers work well. Stick one at the bottommost floor of the base and forget about it.
But yes, self-contained electrolyzer systems are handy and mostly power-neutral. I tend to use gas filters to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen, which uses a bit more power but isn’t that significant. On this past run, I tried a passive approach where I just built a giant funnel over the electrolyzers and some gas detector automation to ensure I only pumped out hydrogen from the top. Worked ok, but later I switched back to the gas filter mechanism to make it more compact.
My cooling approach is centered around my main water reservoir, which I keep at a reasonable temperature so as not to kill the plants and such. I then circulate it around the base to keep the tiles at a reasonable temperature. I don’t bother with trying to cool the electrolyzer output in that case; the base itself cools things off. This approach definitely requires an aquatuner, though.
Trying to make my dupes as comfy as possible:
Looks like I’m starting to blow some fuses, so upgrading to transformers (and maybe moving my power generation room out of the middle of my base) is in order, probably before I change the oxygen generation method.
The cold biome is leaking into my water reservoir (intentionally so), which is buying me time for dealing with the cooling issue.
Make sure to keep the heavy wiring out of the main routes. It has an extreme decor penalty. I usually make a vertical service tunnel off to one side, with some room for transformers to feed a few floors of the base each.
I was able to delay the wiring issue, and made it my goal to get my oxygen producer online by cycle 100. It is cycle 98, and I just fired this thing up.
It could use some tweaking - a smaller hydrogen hood might be a good idea, and probably only one pump, as the two spend most of their time off. Maybe add a third pump to the O2 section. But other then that - it’s pumping out O2 to vents all over my base!
I might run water through the ice biome and then through this room, to cool down the air before delivering it.
Cool! That’s sort of a hybrid of my compact (gas filter) version and the passive open version. The passive version didn’t need the O2 pumps at first since diffusion and pressure took care of distribution. I did eventually add pumps as the base grew larger, but it was nice to avoid that power use for a while (especially when my power is coming from hamster wheels).
I thought I was long past having to use manual power, but unfortunately I ran out of coal. I never completed a ranch setup and so my hatches remained wild and did not produce much coal at all, and I have burned through all the coal I can easily access.
Also, a number of them appear to have ended up at the bottom of shafts that ended up flooded, leaving me with just 3 live hatches.
I’m working on setting up natural gas generators to harness the vent I’ve got above my base. That should keep me from needing to hamster wheel. Then I can set up a real hatch ranch or three to power a few coal power plants.
Definitely use that natural gas! But you might consider pushing for solar as well. You need glass research, and to push upwards to the surface, but aside from that it’s easy to work with.
Although I got the achievement already, I’m keeping the “super sustainable” thing going. Solar+hydrogen+wheel+turbine power only. I don’t actually have a hydrogen vent, though, so I’m mostly depending on solar. There’s a magma geyser I might be able to use for steam power.
As for ranching, one small hint: you can put incubators on a timer so that they are not sucking power constantly. They only need to be on for a small portion of each day. Give them a high priority, though, so that when they are enabled, your rancher dupe drops everything and goes to them.
Solar sounds amazing but I’ll need lots of refined metal for that, for the high energy wires running all the way to the surface. So I need a temporary power source that will let me set up a real refinery, I think. It might be the next thing I work towards - either that, or dig deeper and go for oil and plastic instead.
I’m also thinking I might build some pacu farms next. I have a bunch of pacu in my dirty water tank, but I understand that I can feed them extra seeds to get tons of fish steaks.
I also got 10 Pacu as a print reward, but I can’t figure out how to take them to a water tank. They’re flopping on the ground, I cannot wrangle them, and I don’t have plastic for fish traps yet?