Is it set up to hold algae, clay, gold amalgam or any other resource that can be found in the marsh ? That’d probably be it. Algae in particular is super annoying to me, because I’ve got my oxy makers on priority 9 and when they’re closer to the swamp than the storage, dupes will sometimes go fetch ultragermy algae to put in there. Which is S-M-R-T apparently :mad:. Truly, lazyness is what’ll bring down every civilization.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
Automation is a major step up challenge. I have very little programming background too but it’s mainly the kind of thinking you would be in a philososy course about logic. Go about it the same way you’ve gone about the game: Learn, plan, experiment then start the cycle over by learning from your failures.
Example: I realized that my liquid pumps don’t pump all the time but continuously take about 240Watts which is significant. So I put a liquid element sensor on a section of pipe going from the pump to my base. I set the liquid sensor to detect water so that if there is water in the pipe section where the sensor is, the sensor sends out an Active Signal. Then I ran an automation wire from the sensor to the input of a NOT Gate to invert the Active Signal into a Standby signal. Then an automation wire from the NOT Gate’s output to an automatic shutoff which controls the liquid pump’s power. So, if there’s water in the monitored pipe section, the liquid pump shuts off. Result: The liquid pump only consumes power when it needs to.
Next time you quit a base, take the time to try a few things with automation; If you’re leaving that base anyway, there’s nothing to lose.
Automation is potentially one of the best mechanics of the game.
Also the one that’s most likely to fuck everything up. So, yeah, best 
This game is, in retrospect, awful. It lets me virtualize my worst habits. “Oh, I need this quick. OK, let’s just setup a temporary solution here until I get around to doing it right, I’ve got other plans right now.” [60 seconds later) “Eh, this is inconvenient, but since I’ve got that piece of shit over there I might as well connect them while they’re there. I’ll re-do it proper when I do the first thing correct”. (60 cycles later) “Ugh there’s just so many shit systems connected to this one horrible decision, I can’t even begin to sort it out… I’ll just start a new colony, fuck it”.
Sounds like you’d be happier with sandbox mode enabled. 
Note: clicking the box for sandbox mode in custom settings only makes the mode available, you still need to activate it. Every single time you load that game.
In one of the The Expanse books, a character is talking about space colonies, and how there are so many interdependent systems in a typical colony, but without the redundancy and therefore robustness of a natural system. And when one system goes down, colony collapse is inevitable even if you can string it along for a while, because all the effects cascade and bring down all of the connected other systems, and the systems connected to those, etc. That’s pretty much this game in a nutshell.
I came really, really close due to a single stupid error. For some reason, my dupes were refusing to take care of a bunch of stuff–refuelling my coal generators, running the oil refinery, completing some super-important construction tasks, etc. Instead they were going out of their way to finish some extremely low-priority stuff, and mostly just running on their hamster wheels. I was out of battery juice and virtually everything was shutting down. I couldn’t understand it.
My lower levels (with power generation and some other industry) are hot and poisonous, and so I had an atmo suit checkpoint. And, due to a small defect in oxygen routing, they weren’t being refilled with O2 at a sufficient rate. So the dopes basically wouldn’t go down there except when a rare blob of O2 made it to one of the suits. It stopped like 99% of the necessary visits to those levels.
Took me quite a few cycles to find the problem and I just barely recovered. A few dupes almost suffocated or heatstroked since the only way to fix the problem was to let them down there without suits (since there was no sufficient power reserve to refill them even once I fixed the pipes). But with enough careful priority management I just made it.
Great fun!
I’m starting to see the utility of cooling. I kept getting oil spills near my polymer press and I wondered what it was. It was the plastic I made melting. I really needed that plastic to facilitate surface exploration by building a tube system.
Cooling air seems to be much easier than cooling liquid. Do I understand that the aquatuner needs to be either in a very cold gas environment or in liquid? I don’t seem to have any loose liquid to pour in its enclosure.
Naptha, probably. Not sure if it can be used for anything. Maybe it turns back to crude if it gets really hot.
Liquid, ideally. But you have to cool that, and the only ways to permanently eliminate heat (aside from exploitish stuff) is via Wheezeworts or thermo-nullifiers. The latter can easily drive an aquatuner, but really you might as well cool the plastic plant directly at that point. I haven’t yet found a use for aquatuners.
Yeah, I haven’t started with plastics but according to the Wiki it gets created at 75° and its melting point is 76. And the machines producing it emit a ton of heat. Good luck sorting it out :o.
Cooling is easier with liquids, but cooling the liquid afterwards is much harder to do than cooling gas.
And yeah, temp tuners remove heat from whatever is travelling through them but transfer it to the air (or liquid) around them. Ideally you sit them either in a hydrogen room stuffed with wheezeworts or a pool of liquid you’ll deal with later - but with water than can be dicey, you can end up flashboiling it and have your machine suddenly conk out right after that. Polluted water has a higher boiling point and more heat capacity.
Doesn’t look like it. It seems like it once had interesting properties, but now it’s just another liquid ; and it’s not used by or in anything.
Does the glass forge say: “MISSING.STRINGS.BUILDING.STATUSITEMS.PIPEMAYMELT.NAME” while being unusable for other people too?
My colony turned into a yellow hell of slimelung
I hear Johnny Cash singing, “It turned into a yellow hell of slimelung…”
One thing I’d love to set up is some customizable alerts. For example:
-Any time a dupe has >150K germs (or maybe 250K)–so you can catch illnesses early.
-Whenever food has gone down 3 cycles in a row (or whatever number).
-Whenever oxygen has gone down 3 cycles in a row (the more frequent notices are useless)
-Whenever a consumable resource (algae, coal, etc.) drops beneath a given threshold.
-Whenever the water in a given pool exceeds a given temperature.
Also, I figure at some point there’ll be sign-making. This would be really useful: I’d love to label rooms with my plans for them, and I’d also love to have mouseover labels for storage.
Is there anywhere that upcoming features are teased?
Not sure, but I agree that some expansion in automation would be great. Factorio is an excellent model here; its “circuit networks” are much more advanced than ONI’s automation, since the signal wires can carry far more information than a binary signal. Not sure how far down that road they want to go, though.
Among other things, Factorio has a siren building that can be set to go off based on boolean operations. So you can easily test if some resource is below a limit and get an audible notice in that case.
Has anyone worked with a steam turbine yet? Is it possible to actively concentrate heat into a specific water supply then run the steam through a turbine in order to cool it AND create power?
I looked for it but found nothing. Updates seem to come out every 1-2 months though.
I’ve been wanting to create a control room around the research stations where you could control nearly every part of the base using signal switches. Labeling would be useful for that.
You may want to start a thread on Steam and tell the devs about it. If they’ve been thinking about it or other people agree, it may influence them.
Sign-making seems like a pretty easy and useful to implement. You can already change the names of your Dupes, I’ve been giving mine creative names like “Research Farm Cook” and “Supply Build Dig” based on their stats and interests.
I built a turbine on top of a geysers but my timing was bad and I’ll have to wait 68 cycles more. If I remember correctly, you need a 3000g pressure differential between what’s on top and beneath and turbine and the region beneath the turbine has to be about 220°Celsius. If you manage it, please show us how you did it as that would be pretty impressive.
Steam turbine might work well down near magma though.
Which reminds me, has anyone else been surprised by inundating oil when prospecting for it? I’d dug a deep, narrow shaft to get to the oil quickly and once I started digging in the ground near crude oil deposits, it suddenly came out and flooded the narrow shaft about the height of a biome.
I think I saw somewhere they have a regular 6-week update schedule, but I can’t find that now.
I’ve been dismantling the research stations by around cycle 60 or 70 or whenever I complete the research tree; that’s much earlier than I get much need for switching. But I do like the idea of a central station for controlling the base.
Good idea!
I need to go prospecting–just found the biome that has oil, but haven’t dug in it at all yet. I do have a question: is there an easy way to find geysers? So far all I’ve found in my current world is a cool slush geyser, and I’d love to find some others.
Other than the ones that are readily apparent : look for neutronium. Every “hidden” geyser sit on an indestructible plate of neutronium that has no heat and is indestructible, for coding purposes (because technically geysers and volcanoes are buildings and you could disable them by destroying the surface they sit on ; so the devs made sure you couldn’t). Neutronium is black & sorta veiny ? I mean you can just look at any geyser you’ve already uncovered and see what it looks like. All you gotta do next is look for it in the strata you’ve uncovered. If you don’t see any, dig further - the number of geysers on any map is fixed (although the types aren’t).
Anyone use the transit tubes or conveyor belts yet? Any tricks to it? I’m at the stage where I’m considering building them but having trouble finding tutorials on youtube so I’m wondering if there are tricks or things to avoid with them.
Tube transit: I think it costs 10kW each time you use it so it’s best done for long range upward/sideways travel.
I ran into the problem of being told there was “No landing available” at several junctures. Turns out, I needed to run the mouse over sections I’d built to smooth them over. It didn’t cost anything, it just connected several adjacent sections into a whole.
I think the main issue you’ll have is making enough plastic and making sure neither the newly-made plastic nor the machine that produces it overheats.