Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been

Is there a transformer between your batteries and the manual generators?

No, I’ve got the batteries hooked up to the same heavy line that runs from the power plants to the transformers.

I managed to fix it for reasons that didn’t make sense - I made a redundant connection between the manual wheels and the main power trunk via regular wires. There’s no reason this should work since they’re already connected by heavy wire in the same way the coal plant was. Usually if there’s something that doesn’t make sense I can pin it down to my error - often I mix up the input/output pipes for example - but this one isn’t making sense to me. But it’s working for now.

Yeah, that is strange. Well, it is still in Early Access.

I had my generators hooked up via standard wire since I didn’t want to pay the decor cost, but they kept frying. When I unlocked the heavy conductive wire, I tried using that instead since it’s not quite so hard on decor–but couldn’t convince my electrician to actually install it.

Turns out that my main electrician had the “Unconstructive” trait, meaning he couldn’t actually build anything. Bleh. I put him on gofer duty and trained up another. Serves him right.

Atmos suits require a ton of oxygen, 200kg per charge. That seems excessive. Does it at least model partial usage? If someone goes out for a bit, and comes back, they might’ve only used a small fraction of the oxygen and it doesn’t need a full recharge, right?

I have 2 docking stations at the end of an oxygen pump and it still takes somewhere around a full cycle to fill them up with oxygen.

Edit: It may be that 200kg is all the station holds, rather than what the suit holds. That would make more sense.

I’m a little baffled. The daily reports are reporting huge energy losses on the order of 500KW (which is almost half of what my base uses), with most coming from my 2 coal plants. But the batteries on that line never become full - they’re only at like 70% at most. How am I wasting energy if I’m not even filling the batteries connected to those generators?

Edit: And now I’m back to the point where the manual generators won’t operate because “batteries sufficiently full” even though most of my base is unpowered. I have to use the redundancy trick before - the one that makes no sense because I’m just making a redundant connection to the main heavy wire power trunk with wire - it adds nothing functional, no new connections, but it works. Problem is because I’m carrying a load over the wires instead of heavy wires, it results in a lot of circuit overloads. Not even sure how to fix it since it doesn’t make sense.

So today I learned that materials have different pressure resistances, and large sandstone-bottomed water tanks are not a good idea.

I noticed that when wearing a suit, a Dupe will have an additional bar which depletes which is likely the oxygen. I think the suit can carry 200kg of oxygen and if you still a fraction of it, you don’t need to recharge all of it.

My reservoir is shrinking and heating up, and I spent so freakin’ long trying to get a thermo aquatuner set up in the frost biome (finally found a couple). Snag after snag after snag, and meanwhile my farms were all inactive.

So I reloaded a game from before I started experimenting with the aquatuner. Built about two dozen ice blocks directly in the reservoir (they instantly melt if submerged in water, instantly adding icy water to the reservoir), and got the temperature from the mid thirties to the low twenties.

Sometimes low-tech is the way to go!

Nice! I didn’t even think about building ice blocks. For some reason, seeing them in the decoration menu made me think “these are just magic non-melting blocks that don’t do anything”. I should have been trained out of that by now…

My Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier setup is taking forever to build. It’s super far away and needs tempshift plate for the heat exchanger, a ton of insulated ducts, and other stuff. It’s coming but I may need one more thing to tide me over for a new more hours. I have an existing heat exchanger and tons of Wheezewort plants and it’s still not enough.

My current biggest problem may be CO2 production, though. It’s getting really dense in the lower reaches of my base. I found a Slickster, though, which converts CO2 to oil. Currently engaged in a breeding program so I can have a few dozen converting away.

Yeah, I’ve got a thermo-nullifier, but not a ton of hydrogen, and a small enough water supply that I’m very skeevy about using the electrolyzer until I get that in control.

I like to run my electrolyzers off the output from a sieve.

That’s a pretty smooth plan, I gotta say. But even then, my polluted water supplies are very low–I’ve found 6 or so additional biomes, and only one of them is swamp. And I’ve got a pipe right now draining the next-to-last polluted water pool I’ve found in that swamp.

Still, maybe that’d be workable…

I got lucky with my steam vent. It’s currently in a dormant stage but when it’s active it produces a ton of water. And I have a big cistern that gets me through the dormant periods.

The Nullifier really doesn’t use much hydrogen, though. It uses less than 10% of a single electrolyzer’s output (and I have four of them going now since I have zero algae left and slime conversion ins’t really sustainable).

Careful there. Sieves don’t kill germs. Electrolyzing your septic tank sounds like a great, renewable idea until you aerosolize food poisoning all over the place… No, I absolutely did not learn this the hard way, why do you ask ?

If you’re careful, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue, as long as you keep the air free of pollution - pure oxygen kills food poisoning pretty quick, and slimelung a bit less quickly.

I haven’t gotten to the point of using hydrogen or chlorine, but I’m curious if it’s possible to pump the gas into a frozen biome in order to condense it, then pump the liquid down into a containment area surrounded by airflow tiles, then passing infected oxygen through to kill germs and cool surroundings. Chlorine condenses ~-35 degrees, while oxygen doesn’t liquefy for another 60 degrees cooler. Sounds like a project, or FUN!, to me.

Ran into a problem. I’ve been having trouble with long term power generation - I have mostly slime biomes. The best shot I had at a decent amount of power generation was when I spotted oil in a biome about 3-4 biomes deep. So I undertook this massive project to dig my way down there and run heavy wire all the way there, figuring I’d generate power down there and run it back through the wire to my base.

It didn’t occur to me to check temperatures. Everything in that zone is 185-230 degrees F. I’ve got an area fairly close at 120f where I can run the actual power plants themselves, but the liquid pump would be immersed in liquid of 185 and malfunction. Short of running a massive project to cool down that area with the ice area 3 biomes over, is there anything I can do to salvage this situation?

How do germs react to a high carbon dioxide environment? Do they die, keep spreading, become dormant?

They become dormant.

In the current version of the game (I expect it to be patched out) you can build makeshift anti-entropy devices with sieves. No matter how hot liquid comes in, it comes out tepid. And piss water is **very **good at storing heat. So you want to pump piss water on top of your machines or in radiant pipes behind them to pick up lots of heat, the go into a sieve to cool down, then find some way to turn it back into piss - by running it through some CO2 skimmers for example.
The only thing you have to be careful for is, you don’t want the pisswater to pick up so much heat that it vaporizes inside the pipes or it’ll wreck the works - it’ll turn to steam around 120°C (240 F).
Also, build your machines out of gold amalgam instead of copper and your pipes out of granite/obsidian (if you want heat exchange) or igneous/abyssalite (if you don’t), it’ll tolerate much higher temps before throwing a cog (e.g. a gold pump should tolerate 125 C/~250 F).

You could also put a bunch of wheezeworts in pots down in your machine area and fill it with hydrogen for better heat dissipation and/or run various pipes through such a fridge, if you find the sieve heat deletion a bit too “exploit” for your tastes. That’s what the wheezes are there for, but of course they are a limited resource.