(BTW, lest anybody get confused and start believing I’m half-bright : I’m not the author of this very elegant design :o. I merely saw a streamer called CrypticFox doing it and thought it was pretty dang clever)
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
Interesting–I’m surprised that’s stable. But yeah, CO2 definitely sinks to the bottom. Still, I feel like I need a pump and an atmo sensor or something…
What are the possibles uses for the miniature pumps? They have worse throughput/energy ratio than the larger pumps so when would you use them?
One great use I’ve found for the clock sensor is to combine it with a signal switch and an AND gate to turn off machines automatically at night if I forget.
Large pumps aren’t too efficient when the quantities are small. If you have some fluid dribbling in slowly, the small pump may be better (though probably better yet is to use a hydro sensor). Also, one may want to drain something, but can’t quite afford to have it running all the time. Though again, using clock automation might be a tad better here.
Nah, not really. That’s the beauty of it IMO - it’s 0 power, buildable from day 1 (well, you do need agriculture for the food boxes) and it’s damn reliable all thanks to how gasses behave.
The only time I had it sort of fail on me was when my entire habitat got very, very low on oxy pressure (because I hadn’t noticed I’d run clean out of algae some cycles ago and hadn’t switched to electrolyzers yet :smack:) which meant the concentrated CO2 inside the trap started decompressing & leaking out ; then when I hurriedly fixed the problem the CO2 left inside got repressurized and forced back down but there had been enough leakage that some O2 wound up on the upper shelf for a little while before it self-corrected again. I just set the priority on the lower boxes to 7 instead of 6, a dupe came in to switch all the food from one bin to the next and that was that.
I suppose an horizontal airlock door atop the ladder would prevent that from happening at all but even that’s a bit overkill IMO.
The reason it’s more-or-less stable is because gases don’t mix at all.
Any given square can only have one fluid in it.
There’s an unpowered water/polluted water separator design too.
Do you know how pumps work? I had a pool of oil+petroleum. One layer of petroleum and another of oil at the bottom. The pump would output both, however (alternating). Maybe the pump can pull from its entire 2x2 area?
I’ve gotten to the point where everything is kind of a hassle to do because everything I need to do is so far from base. And it’s hard to say for sure, but it seems like sometimes the dups won’t carry things efficiently. Like I’ll need something that requires 25kg of gold, so they go all the way to where there’s multiple piles of gold waiting to be swept up worth maybe 500kg, just grab the 25kg, then make the long journey back… so a lot of my dup time is spent on these tiny errands. I guess I should have a more organized system of smart containers, but I find it to be kind of a pain in the ass compared to rimworld because you can’t set container priority, so if you want a particular thing to be stored in a particular spot, you can’t just set it to store that thing and give it a high priority, rather, you have to go back through your other dozen storage boxes around your base and uncheck it there - much more of a pain in the ass.
You can, actually. The normal priority setting works. You can leave your already-built generic boxes at the default 5, and then have additional specialized boxes set to a higher priority, and they’ll put the specialized items in those boxes preferentially.
I also have the problem that dupes grab small quantities of stuff at a time. Not sure if there’s a way to fix that.
Oh, that’s very helpful. I thought I tested to see that work and it didn’t appear to, but maybe my test was flawed in some way.
So if I have all my in-base containers set to 5 priority and accept to receive all, and I stick one outside my base that only collects slime and it’s priority 6, they’ll always deliver the slime to the one outside the base (if they collect it all) and never to the ones inside the base?
Yes, until the outside box gets filled. That’s the theory at least. Can’t guarantee it works every time in practice :).
Also, it’s a good idea to set your conveyor network receptacles to priority 1 so that dupes pull from it and move stuff to actual containers.
Yup. And if there are N boxes that accept Stuff with the same priority, dupes will default to the closest one ; so you can set up temporary dumps where they’ll put all the little scraps from an area ; then when they’re done messing about you dump it all in favour of another box and they’ll start transfering it all by picking up the max they can carry instead of “whatever’s at my feet”
Yes, and gasses & liquids always seek the path of least resistance. In this particular case, in order for oxygen to flow down into the trap from the lip of the ladder, it would first have to void that one single tile of CO2, and since that CO2 can’t physically go up (being heavier than O2), it would have to *all *be pushed and compressed into the square immediately below (and possibly the diagonals). Which typically requires more force/pressure exerted by the O2 than just flowing up, left or right the ground and mixing with the existing O2 in those tiles. And so O2 just doesn’t flow down (barring very high pressure differentials, possibly).
Using those same properties, you can make airlocks out of CO2 (by setting some down in a kind of U-bend or T tetris-piece shaped little hollow if you prefer), which won’t ever let gasses flow through as long as there’s CO2 in the pit all the way to the “ceiling” of the deepest part of the U. That design might be sensitive to very high pressure differentials (haven’t tested it to e.g. contain a high pressure steam vent), but it’s plenty good 'nuff to seal an early base from the swamp biome, all without any tech researched or dupes getting slowed down by waiting for airlock doors to open (and in any event airlock doors allow some modicum of gas exchange to happen every time they open, so you have to build them in series for them to just not let *any *of the bad stuff in… it’s annoying and takes space/power/time). I often use that setup to link my 'shroom farms with a submerged slime bin sitting outside the lock for example.
If you replace the CO2 in the U with some water, it’ll make an actually perfect seal because gas can’t displace liquid, period. The downside then is that dupes get soaked passing through, which stresses them out. In most standard applications CO2’s good 'nuff.
I’d recommend using chlorine airlocks for the swamp, rather than CO2 - get disinfection as a bonus. As for the “soaked” debuff…that’s what massage tables & décor are for.
As for the question about pumps…I think you’re right - it can pump whatever is on any square covering the pump. I tend to over-engineer solutions for what should be simple situations like that. Especially since, as the game is still alpha, I have an unfortunate tendency to remember how things used to work, rather than what they were changed to be. :smack:
Yeah, but for some reason I have brain spiders about chlorine.
I know, rationally, that in this game it’s just another mostly harmless gas that will only make dupes puff up their cheeks and as long as you don’t let it build up too much it’s no bigger deal than CO2 is ; but years of WW1 history must have definitively labelled it as “SUPER TOXIC handle with extra care” to my addled brain :o. I swear I manipulate that stuff like it was nuclear nitroglycerine cancer and the smallest mistake means my entire colony is going to up and die on the spot if it escapes containment for a millisecond. Whereas I’m in contrast pretty damn cavalier about handling lava.
Just one of those idiosyncrasies I guess 
Newest problem: my polymer presses won’t pump. They’re undamaged, not overheated. They have petroleum pipes connected right to them, and when I hover over the connection, alongside the refinery status it also says “10kg of petroleum at 120f”, meaning the pipe right next to it is full. No error message or anything, it just says “not pumping” - they’re powered, they’ve got petroleum, they’re not disabled, there’s no automation attached to them, there are no error messages - I can’t figure out why they’re not producing plastic.
And… even though it’s a problem that has stuck around for like 15 cycles now… as soon as I post it I figured it out, the CO2 exit line on it (which I forgot they had) had a broken section between it and the liquid vent. It could’ve said pipe blocked or something.
Would someone who enjoys ONI be likely to enjoy Factorio? How are they alike/different?
I’d think so. I do, at least!
In both games, you collect resources, build stuff, and manage several different systems (electricity, fluids, etc.) to keep your base running. To unlock more advanced buildings you have to do do research. Factorio has an ostensible goal of launching a rocket, but really you can just treat it as open ended.
Factorio has a survival aspect (don’t let the aliens kill you) but it’s a relatively small part of the game (and in fact I usually play with that disabled). There’s no food or anything that will run out in Factorio and not much in the way of damaging waste products. In ONI, it’s crucial that you not just manage but exploit waste products (heat, CO2, pollution, etc.). If you don’t, your colony will die. In Factorio, if you run out of materials you just explore further out.
The satisfaction in Factor (for me) comes with building a smoothly running, self-sufficient base. You can use automation to turn resource converters (oil crackers, etc.) on and off, direct trains and conveyor belts, etc. ONI never quite reaches that hands-off point; there is almost always some imminent disaster that you have to micromanage. There is still the goal of a smoothly running operation but it’s not quite the same.
Factorio builds up to increasing degrees of automation. You start by mining resources by hand and eventually have a network of fully automated hi-tech production. You get some automation in ONI but you’re still handholding it a lot. Because of this, a base in Factorio can be enormous. You can even use automation to build more of your base automatically–say, building out a huge solar farm. In ONI, all buildings are hand-placed.
So overall they’re very different games and yet I think a person that would like one would like the other. They work on different scales and different degrees of micromangement but have a lot of the same core elements.
Thanks for the info. I’ll try the demo.
Have you also played Don’t starve (from the same developers as ONI), SpaceChem or Dwarf fortress? If so, how did you find them, especially compared to ONI? I’m asking Dr. Strangelove but anyone who’s tried them is welcome to chime in.