Oh, but for a simpler solution to the power problem in general : hatch ranches seem to be a way to turn damn near anything into coal. 9 regular hatches or 4 stone ones will permanently feed one coal ginny with a small surplus of coal - a full ranch is 8 hatches in 96 squares. It’s space- and manpower-intensive, but kinda-sorta renewable.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
Thanks for the advice. Going to go with the gold pump for now. I had actually looked through the materials and they all said they fail at 167f. I didn’t realize that the gold modifier at the bottom wasn’t being accounted for and that I had to add the 90f tolerance myself instead of it being part of the stats up top. That should work for now - I just need a pump and some wiring in the hot area, I can keep the actual refinery and generator in a somewhat cooler area. Thanks.
Now I’ve got a pool of clean water that has lots of germs in it. I can use it for electrolysis, but if I run out of water for fresh water things, is there some way to degermify it?
Depending on the germs : heat it or cool it. Boiling it always works, but then you have to deal with steam :).
On the whole I’ve come to realize that germs are not that big a deal though. Food poisoning only harms dupes if they **eat **it (doesn’t matter at all if it’s in the air) and cooking contaminated stuff on the grill kills it - so it seems to only affects microbe musher food, which you should probably be off of at this point. It also wastes time because dupes will start scrubbing heavily germy items, but you can turn that off. That being said it couldn’t hurt to put a sink in front of the cooking area, just to be sure.
If you have slimelung in your water, that’s more annoying - you’ll have to cool the water pool below 20°C to kill 'em quick. Or you could just wait, since slimelung dies in fresh water.
Microbes would also affect cooking lifeloaf from mealwood, right? That’s still my primary food source.
I’m having 2 odd problems. So I finally got my oil setup going. Except it’s not going. The pump correctly pumps the oil to the oil refinery. The oil refinery pumps its output (petroleum) to the polymer press. But… neither of those buildings are doing anything. They’re just sitting there without an error message.
Is my setup correct? Liquid pump (crude oil)->Liquid intake on oil refinery. Liquid output on oil refinery->liquid input on polymer press. Gas output of polymer press vented into the atmosphere. Seems like it should be a complete system but they’re just sitting there idle. I can’t build a petroleum generator until I get plastic from the polymer press, so right now I’m just trying to build polymer.
The oil goes to the refinery, but nothing happens from there - the refinery isn’t sending out petroleum to the polymer press. Neither are overheated or lacking anything. Just not doing anything. There’s no gas output on the oil refinery, so I assume the natural gas just leaks out wherever the refinery is.
Also, I have air pumps putting in O2 into my exosuit dock stations. There’s a very small amount of non-O2 gas, enough to just repair the station rather than use energy on a gas filter. But they do take damage over time. For some reason my guys stopped repairing the damage. There are now 2 exosuit docks broken, with priority 9, both saying awaiting delivery of 10kg copper for repairs (I have 4000kg so no problem there) but no one will actually repair them.
Edit: Think I solved the latter problem - I think it wants refined copper rather than copper ore. I can do that. Still no idea on the oil refinery.
Oh god, I figured it out. The oil refinery is handcranked. I would’ve never guessed. It’s late in the tech tree - there’s no way to make an automatic oil refinery? That’s a huge pain in the ass for my long term energy plans - I gotta keep people on station all day far away from my base to turn the stupid crank.
So what was happening was due to the lack of refined copper (caused by fresh water mysteriously stopping half way through my fresh water system for no apparent reason), the metal refinery wouldn’t run. Which lead to no refined copper. Which lead to no atmo suit repair. Which lead to no one being able to get past the checkpoint and manually crank the oil refinery. It didn’t even occur to me that the oil refinery would be manually operated.
Any idea what’s stopping my water flow right in the middle of the pipe? It used to supply the whole base (below it would connect to some showers, lavatories, metal refinery, etc.) and now the water just sort of stops right there. And it’s not because the things above it (earlier in the pipe) are using up all the water - even if I turn all the electrolyzers off so they’re not using water above that part of the pipe the water still sits there and collects.
As with many things in ONI, there may be a trade-off between short-term simplicity and long-term efficiency; If you establish a pipeline from the crude oil deposit to your base and have the refinery and polymer press in your base, handcranking won’t be as much of a bother.
More generally:
Is there a reason to use a transformer as opposed to a battery? If you hook up a 20kW heavy wire to a battery then 1kW wires from the battery to power users, will there be damage? Does 1kW wire have some length limit?
Is that pump in the upper right powered?
I get that in terms of manual generator vs other types of generators, for instance. But the oil refinery is a powered building and it’s late in the tech tree - it doesn’t make sense for it to require hand cranking. The only reason it would is if the devs specifically wanted to make remote oil power plants to be more difficult, which is generally against the design of the game - things are difficult for natural reasons rather than artificial restrictions like a hand-cranked yet powered high tech building.
If I had known that’s how it worked, I would’ve built up pumps and pipe from the start, but I already laid a ton of heavy wire and no pipe - pain in the ass to redo all that infrastructure.
Does running a heavy wire into a bank of batteries, and then wires off those batteries work? Wouldn’t it connect to the heavy wire rather than the battery? In which case it would be overloaded when the heavy wire brought too much power.
Yeah, it’s doing that thing where little tricky blue balls move between each big blue ball, the thing that indicates that it’s pumping enough to keep the pressure in those pipes even as they’re used. Just randomly stops traveling at the point I show for no apparent reason. Didn’t realize that’s why I’ve been losing calorie reserves too - my farms, which have been successfully fertilized for 50+ cycles through those pipes, are no longer getting any water. I’ve had to build a seperate system as a workaround until I figure out why the main system isn’t working right.
Yes… but why ?! The musher eats 240W. A grill is a mere 60W, and pickled meal is more calories in one sitting, all without using any water ! Cooking it also doesn’t look like the machine is taking a painful shit :o.
The food quality is slightly worse, but it’s not like you can’t fix that with moar paintings :).
Yep. The entire circuit is considered as one - any wires that are underrated for the current will fail. Transformers, with two separate connections, create separate circuits, thus avoiding overloads. Batteries are just “waystations” on the circuit.
Whew. 464 cycles in, and while my base isn’t *quite *self-sustaining, it’s pretty close. I have heat exchangers on two nullifiers; one going straight to my farming setup and the other cooling my cistern. Temperatures are finally pretty stable and my farm is no longer dying. I’ve got a crapton of both fresh and polluted water. And it looks like I have enough oil to last a while. I stopped getting more dupes at 12.
What’s next? I’m tempted to put some solar panels up on the surface, but I’ll have to protect them against meteor showers with doors and a sensor. Might be worth it, though.
Incidentally, there does seem to be a backstory of sorts:
When you get to open space, you can see an Earth-like planet in the background that got hit with a rather large object. It appears that our crew has been sent to an asteroid to preserve some semblance of humanity.
@Senorbeef : if you still have a germy reservoir problem, I think I finally stumbled upon a long-term solution. First, turn your reservoir into polluted water - CO2 scrubbers do it at 1L per second and also, obviously, clean CO2 which is generally a good thing. Or you can run slime distillers. Or just have your dupes piss in it (isn’t it weird how toilets take 5L of flushing water in but output 12L of piss ? The bladders on these dupes, I swear !).
Then you run it all through a sieve - it’ll come out at 40°. Then pump it through an aquatuner sitting in the germy reservoir of pisswater. It’ll cool the clean water back down to 20°C and heat the polluted water like crazy, killing any food poisoning germs in it. But since that water then goes through the sieve anyway, it doesn’t matter that it’s near-boiling, because once it’s through the whole thing it’ll be back down to 20°c before you finally empty it in your usable, clean water reservoir. Slimelung naturally dies in fresh water, but if that’s the issue you can speed it up by heating the water back up to 25°C (eg through radiant piping it next to a battery or two) then pipe it down through a second aquatuner in the pisswater, which will bring it down to 5°C - and slime dies under 20°. Now you have an entire reservoir of 5° clean water* which incidentally is also perfect for cooling the air coming down from the electrolyzer !
- (actually there probably will still be a few germs in there since you need to “prime” the aquatuner before it really starts cooking the piss tank, but you could always run the whole cycle again ; or prime the tuner with some other water/liquid first, wait until it’s done cooked the vat of urine right properly *then *change the plumbing and turn the sieve on. Or you could just accept less-than-perfection and get them immune systems working, the concentration of germs should be much lower and within the safety threshold).
I keep restarting the game. Somewhere around the triple-digits of cycles, the complexity of the game starts to make it less and less fun for me. Hopefully I’m learning enough new stuff each time that each new restart gets me a little further into it.
You gotta do what’s fun for you. But so far I love the fact that the game keeps throwing new problems at you. Somewhere around cycle 300, I ran out of dirt. Dirt! The mealwood plants I used everywhere need a constant supply of it and eventually I used up every speck (which only exists in the temperate zone).
Ok, so I switched to farming bristle blossoms. They need water and light, but no dirt. Great!
But my cistern is largely supplied by a steam vent, which outputs hot water. And although I’ve cooled it off somewhat with a heat exchanger, it’s still pretty warm. And pumping that into my farm makes the farm warm. Which–especially combined with the lights–kills all the crops.
So I did a mad rush to repurpose my heat exchanger to only cool the farm water and not the other stuff, so as to get maximum benefit. And then connect to the other nullifier to get some cooling effect.
The great part is that all of these problems are, well, predictable and therefore fair. But they are also somewhat inevitable, so there’s always some crisis at hand. The game stays interesting but not by the game throwing random crap at you. You are the instrument of your own demise.
I’d like to make it to 1000 cycles–but that will likely require making some sustainability improvements that I don’t understand yet.
Yeah, I agree that while there is some RNG involved (the map of course, but also when exactly a dupe will want to pee and ditch a load of purulent ooze right next to the oxy vent) it’s mostly all controllable - or at least you totally feel in control and that the game and physics are harsh but fair. Plus the complexity tends to be a) incremental and b) very much something that you learn by doing, and then the next time around you start organizing for this new layer of Stuff and thinking ahead from the get go.
It’s much like Don’t Starve that way (or Dwarf Fortress, for that matter) - you’re meant to have your colonies die again and again in silly, unexpected or completely bonkers ways then start all over again with newfound wisdom. It’s part of the fun. And of course you’re also meant to make grand designs with that wisdom that totally work on paper and then go pear shaped because OMG why did you dig that one tile before making this other one you idiot now there’s lava everywhere and I’m fucking HAPPY you got burned to death first, it’s all your fault and totally not mine ! 
And hey, there’s also debug mode available if you want to try some things out or just dick around with the physics.
Oh yeah, the whole “dig the wrong tile first” has created some amusing incidents. No deaths from that yet but I’ve had to drop everything a few times to mount a rescue mission while one of them is freezing to death or whatever. And then there’s the scientist who can’t help but get one little bit of research in on the steam vent, and instead of running to safety became incapacitated.
That said, I’ve no shame in reloading a save in case something stupid happened. I’ve only had a few deaths and none that I kept.
What is it that’s overwhelming you? You might want to dig into automation if you haven’t, it’s there to help you deal with the increasing complexity. It can be fun to set up a labor-saving automatic system that works well.
The more you play it, the more it resembles KSP in that regard.
Heh–it’s the automation system that’s most intimidating to me. I’ve done a bit with it, but I have very little programming background, and my attempts at getting things to work have not been super-successful.
But it’s not really a problem. Like I say, each time I quit in frustration, I’ve learned a little bit that I can apply to my next game, so I’m having fun :).
Of course, then there are things like the latest game, where by cycle 45, two of my dupes are in rapidly failing health due to slimelung, even though I thought I was very careful with slime; come to find that even though my storage isn’t allowed to hold slime, it’s positively teeming with germs, in a way I haven’t seen in any previous game. Not sure what’s causing that.
My most recent project is heating related, again - a closed cooling system for the farms, using a nullifier. It’s only in the developmental stage, as I’m still unlocking the required techs. A liquid of unknown chemical makeup will be pumped from a reservoir to the nullifier, where radiant pipes will allow it to be cooled, then through insulated pipes to the farm, where it will run through the farm tiles and back to the reservoir. The current plan is polluted water, but a FUN! goal is to do it with liquid chlorine using the frozen biome.
At this point, I’m fairly certain I am synonymous with Satan, in the eyes of my dupes. They get everything running all nice and happy, and I try something like this, which inevitably leads to the deaths of everyone involved.
I’m curious how that goes. I’ve been using hydrogen gas. It cools down to ~-20C, which seems to indicate that I’m maxing out its cooling capability (otherwise it would get colder). But I really dunno.
I have three ventilation pipes going to it: an insulated one feeding a high-pressure vent, another insulated one being fed by a pump, and a normal one carrying hydrogen from an electrolyzer. The electrolyzer feeds both the nullifier and the system (via standard vent). The system clogs up if you feed too much gas; having the high pressure vent on the return prevents it from doing so.
Hydrogen does have the nice advantage that it never turns to liquid/solid, so the system is entirely gas-phase. But liquid chlorine is more fun.