Also, I am wondering if it might be more efficient to dig a big hole, seal it, and dump the natural gas there, instead of in tanks (I’ve filled up 20)
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
If you find the teleporter, it’ll take you to a planetoid with a cool slush geyser that produces large amounts of (-10 C) polluted water. Aside from that–petroleum generators produce much more polluted water than nat gas. But you’ll need to refine petroleum from oil, or produce ethanol from arbor trees.
Instead of a big hole, just cordon off a large area with tiles and put a high pressure vent inside. It can then store gas at ~20 kg/tile (vs. 1-2 at ambient pressure).
I have found a teleporter, but I haven’t harnessed it yet. I will finish digging out exploratory chambers as I may have some dirty geysers at home (fingers crossed) but if not I guess that’s the next step. I want to grow fiber reed, so I need lots of dirty water.
More reason to dig deeper…
I keep wanting those, but they require plastic, and I don’t have that yet. (I finally found a Drecko but they’re really far away, and it will take time to breed glossy ones anyways). Maybe it IS time to dig deep.
Well, keep digging, as they say!
Plastic production isn’t that hard at small scale. The dupes can survive short trips to the oil biome without suits, as long as you put in some small breathing areas (I use algae terrariums). And you can transport small amounts of oil with a pitcher pump. Just bring up a few hundred kg of oil and go from there. You’ll want large quantities of plastic later, but if you’re bottlenecked on a couple items like vents or turbines, the manual approach is fine.
Whelp, I can see both space and some crude oil reservoirs. Nice to have a sense of scale as to how big everything is. I also found a hydrogen vent, which I’m working on sealing. No vold slush geysers yet, but now that I have an idea of the scale I will dig exploratory shafts to see if I can’t spot any more geysers.
Meanwhile, I’m not too far from petroleum. It’s about a biome’s height down. I think I’ll dig a depressurized pathway down there, then set up a mini-base with its own oxygen supply (though I’ll send down power). Once that’s up and running, I can start making fuel and plastic (I might set up the operation with gas masks to get plastic a bit sooner, and add life support later).
By the way, I’m making my way through a salty red biome. I assume salt and salt water will be important later, but so far I’m just making sure to avoid mixing salt water with anything I care about.
Salt water you can desalinate into fresh water. It’s a little easier to work with than a cool steam vent. The salt can be refined into table salt for a little food bonus. Though oddly, it takes like 100 kg of salt to make like 5 g of table salt. Sort of a wasteful process, there.
I knew about that interaction, but I was thinking it might have industrial uses, or could he melted to store energy or something.
Nothing explicitly like that, but give it a try if you want! You could heat salt via magma and move it around once it melts. It looks like the melting point is lower than equipment built with thermium (which you can only get from space). So a molten salt heat store is definitely doable, if not entirely practical.
I’m trying to improve my automation. I think I need a central storage room with bins, vents, and chuts, where everything is dropped off to be picked up and sorted by autosweepers, then sent whereever it is needed.
So for example, I’ve got a bin storing soil, clay, fertilizer, etc and I have the ability to pick up these things and send them to my farm rooms.
I think smart bins should let me get specific amounts of various materials sent over to keep the farms stocked…
Apparently not, it just sends a green signal, so I would need a ton of bins if I wanted multiple resources to be brought into each room.
Maybe it is still workable. One smart bin per material needed in each room, and just be smart about what goes in the rooms to minimize the unique resources needed.
Some ideas that now seem practical: a great hall with a fridge (are there smart fridges?). Basement below great hall full of co2. All prepared food is dumped into the co2 pit. Auto-sweepers then keep the fridge full.
Storing slime in water and sending it to the mushroom farms as needed is also a no brainer. I’ll also need a renwable source of the stuff, and I do see a puft nearby, so it may be time to learn to puft ranch.
I want to start harnessing the polluted oxygen geyser. Oxygen is light so cooling it should be a breeze (as I am learning with my natural gas setup). Then I just need a room full of deoderizers.
All this will wait until after I have a basic petroleum and plastic room set up just above the petrol level, at which point I will harness a little bit oil. I’m used to thinking about the liquids in this game as much deadlier than they actually are due to years playing Dwarf Fortress, where a half tile of water absolutely can and will kill your dwarfs. It took me a few failed runs to stop being so terrified of water! But that does mean that I have a plan to tap crude oil from a nearby pool without ever putting my dupes remotely in harm’s way.
After that, the next priority is a high pressure gas vent. I have a few more cycles betore the natural gas vents run out, and I’d love to stock up by pumping a room up to 20 atmospheres as you described. Natural gas is actually my main power source right now, and the longer I can keep it that way the longer I can focus on things other than power generation.
I also need to give my dupes new quarters. I’m up to 15 now and the barracks are alright, but I want to set up new barracks somewhere else, and maybe individual bedrooms for highly skilled dupes who are running against their morale limit.
Hmmm, so reading up on it, auto sweepers will deliver resources to farms. So I could use automation to once per cycle grab the required amount of materials (dirt, slime, etc), use filters to get the amounts to the right rooms, and just drop the materials on the floor. Dupes will still need to come in to use the farming station and to harvest, but I can put a smart bin by the farming station.
I managed to dig my way down to the oil biome, and carved out a large reservoir with a pump at the bottom. I then dumped a number of crude oil pools into the reservoir, and pumped them up into a small chamber I had prepared with an oil refinery and plastic maker. Just enough to get the industry going - I will need to refine my process soon. I’d like to start pumping out tubes, so that getting down here won’t take so long.
I also need to fix the water dripping into my main shaft (from the natural gas generators way at the top by the vents). I’ve been holding off on a permenant fix for the dripping because I’ve had bigger fish to fry (namely, getting oil and plastic) but I think it is time to fix up what was always a temporary setup. Once that’s done I can extend the main shaft all the way to the oil biome and set up major plastic and petroleum operations.
I did run into an interesting snag when digging my reservoir. There’s a spot where the lava was behind only a couple tiles of abyssite, and this led to extreme temperatures getting through and nearly killing my diggers. I had to build insulated tiles to let them finish the task.
You can actually just wait for the crops to fall on their own. It takes extra time, but if you’re not too concerned about that, you can just lock the doors or set the crops to 1 priority and you’ll still get food out of them.
I’m surprised that even one layer of abyssalite wasn’t enough insulation against lava. It’s an almost perfect insulator–way better than insulated tiles. You sure there wasn’t some other conductive path?
I saw that, but my understanding was that they still consume resources during this time? Won’t 4 extra days of slime and dirt add up pretty quick?
Yeah, I’ll try to get a screenshot later
Oh, weird issue. I have a puft prince I lured from a cavern, and I have 3 pufts I got from eggs. I lured the puft prince halfway across my base with slime lures, but now he’s about 2 levels above the cage I want him in eventually, and he won’t go any further. I can’t figure it out! I have lured just a few tiles away from him and he ignored them.
Yeah, it still consumes resources. Whether it’s still worth it depends on the circumstances. If you have lots of water, waiting for bristle blossoms to fall isn’t really a great cost. Or for sleet wheat, the grow time is so long anyway that 4 extra cycles isn’t a high percentage.
I didn’t realize there was a sensor that counts the critters in a room. That’s a game changer. I think it’s time for some ranching automation.
So at this point I have 4 polymer presses pumping out plastic, which is automatically sent up a chute to be dumped in my base for easy access.
I need to renovate my natural gas handling facilities, and one of the vents has gone dormant, so this is my chance. Right now I have inefficient piping and a mess of sealed reserve chambers as well as gas tanks scattered around my base. I want to condense this into 3 or 4 rooms filled with gas tanks that I can pressurize, doubling up on my gas storage.
One of the rooms that currently holds natural gas tanks will be converted to capture and deal with the polluted water running off from the generators. I will also move my metal refineries away from the top of my base.
My base is such a huge mess, I think getting it in order is just going to be a massive chore. Also, I kinda hate how perfectly gridlike I made it; I know that’s probably ‘optimal’, but I regret how boring it makes my base look.
Now that I actually understand a lot more of the mechanics, I think it is time to restart, and try again!
Since the main part of the game that I ignored so far is space, I’m going for a Spaced Out start. I also went with what I assume will be a harder start - Desolands asteroid, which has a Lush Core.
I expect this to go poorly and barely know what to expect… We shall see!