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The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
I just started this today and am still getting the hang of it - my first base lasted about 25 cycles but the last 5 of those were basically running on fumes. My second attempt went a lot better - I actually managed to finish the tech tree and start building some of the more advanced stuff, although I overreached and started running into power consumption problems, and was relying way too much on algae-based oxygen so when I started running out of that things went south quickly.

I have a few questions:

-I seem to have a really hard time reliably generating food. I can last for a while on the basic "turn dirt and water into food" and lice loafs, but all the more advanced cooker recipes seem to cost too many calories to be worthwhile given that I'm barely breaking even as-is. Any good rules of thumb for how many farms I should have per-person in the colony?
-Chlorine currently has no use, right? It's basically just something to avoid?
-Are there any resources that are entirely renewable or should I always be digging for more? I know there are vents for natural gas and steam, which would provide infinite amounts of those, but anything beyond that?

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The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Loopoo posted:

I meant cultivate by using those condenser machines that accept toxic ground sludge and output algae.

I think it's still basically the same (I don't know what has been changed since previous versions since I just started playing, but this was the only method I saw). There's a creature that poops slime but they produce way too little to be a reliable source. Maybe at some point they'll add capturing/breeding of various creatures which would make that more viable.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

enraged_camel posted:

I think how much slime they poop depends on the concentration of polluted oxygen.

Yeah but even in a big pocket of pure polluted oxygen they still don't really produce enough to keep up with the amount you'd need to keep a slime -> algae -> oxygen chain going indefinitely.

I feel like the intention behind algae is that it's meant to be an early-game crutch - you get a lot of it around your starting area, and the stuff that uses it tends to be easy to set up and has no byproducts that need to be dealt with. It's basically meant to carry you until you've unlocked the tech to build more complex setups with air scrubbers and electrolyzers.

*edit* Do polluted/regular oxygen have the same density? I haven't noticed one rising above the other.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 18:30 on May 23, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
More questions, after my 3rd attempt at a colony went pretty well (75 cycles and they're starting to spiral now, mainly because I ran out of coal to run my generators. It might still be salvageable but I feel like starting a new one with what I've learned anyway).

-Are transformers one-way? I came up with a nice setup where I keep my generators and heavy cables all running outside the base, then I use transformers on each floor to run small wires in through the walls to prevent overloading. However, I'd also like to set up some hamster wheels inside the oxygenated area just in case I need to generate emergency power; will they feed their generated energy back out through the transformers and out to the other floors?

-Are heavy cables supposed to be able to run through airlocks? I've found that if I build the cable first, then place an airlock on top of it after it's been constructed, the game is fine with that. But if I try to queue up both to be built at once, it'll tell me the location is invalid for the cable, and if I try to queue a cable over an already constructed airlock, it just doesn't let me place it. I assume some part of all that is a bug but I'm not sure which.m

-Is there a way to speed up melting ice? I had some mined ice sitting in a storage container that was heated up to 50 degrees (Celsius) by the surrounding water, and it was heating up, but VERY slowly. Admittedly there was 14,000 kilograms of it in there (the masses in this game are so weird), but still, the temperature barely moved over like a dozen cycles.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Elizabethan Error posted:

the thing with the heavy cables is probably an oversight, and the ice isn't melting because there's so much of it that whatever melts instantly gets refrozen. destroy the container if you want it to go faster?

I tried that - just dumping it in the 50 degree water directly didn't speed it up at all.

The thing is that it was JUST ice that was causing problems. If I put snow in the same container it melted almost instantly. I know snow melts faster than ice but it was a major contrast. Is ice some kind of weird special case where it's not just "water, but cold", but actually generates coldness somehow?

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Gammymajams posted:

Does anyone else find their CO2 scrubbers operate at a tiny fraction of the output it suggests on the building tooltip? Mines is operational but only cleans a tiny fraction of the expected CO2 out of the air, despite my clones holding their breath when they're around it. Anyone aware of a reason for this?

I think they can only clean one specific tile, so they can only suck in whatever CO2 is in that tile and unless the overall air pressure is really high, there won't be enough there to have the scrubber operating at max capacity.

Also bear in mind that scrubbers only remove CO2 from the air. They do not produce oxygen. So your clones will be holding their breath because once it removes that CO2, it's just going to leave a vacuum.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
The main issue with the gas/liquid behaviour is the fact that substances can't mix at all. Only one gas/liquid can occupy a tile regardless of how much of it there is, so you can end up with these weird low pressure bubbles floating around because there's no other gases of the same type for them to join up with, but even a single gram is enough to prevent anything else from occupying the tile. This can happen a lot with CO2 because when dupes exhale they release a very small amount, and while it will collect down at the bottom of your base eventually, it might take a while to get there depending on how you have it all set up.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
So after failing my first few colonies I've got the hang of this now. I'm currently on cycle 200ish of a pretty much stable colony, mostly trying to get temperature stuff to work to set up a renewable farm. I don't think temperature quite works right yet; the lack of convection currents means that it takes AGES for temperatures to move around, leading to bizarre scenarios where a room can be freezing on one side and warm on the other and stay like that for dozens of cycles, and trying to pump air around manually to cool a room doesn't really seem to work either. There's also a weird bug where airlocks next to a vacuum sometimes just start dropping in temperature very quickly for no reason. Although if you want to cool a room it does work a hell of a lot faster than trying to do it "properly".

I've also been playing around with air circulation, mostly just because I like the idea of it rather than any real need to keep my colony clear of gasses. I might have gone a bit overboard with it, though:





The central part (left in the first screenshot) is my main base proper, which is where all the beds and kitchen stuff are and is all sealed off by little 2x2 airlock rooms. I had gas pumps in them originally to make them actually work like proper airlocks but that's how I discovered the temperature bug so I took them out since the heat loss was quickly reducing my base to freezing temperatures (the doors would just devour the heat, then heat from adjacent tiles would spread into the doors very fast because of the huge temperature difference, and so on).

The bit on the right is my big filter setup, where basically all the gas pumped out anywhere gets sent and separated into separate rooms and handled depending on what it is; CO2 gets scrubbed, polluted oxygen has air fresheners, chlorine just kind of sits there, and hydrogen gets piped into generators once it's built up enough to give more than a few seconds of charge (only one of those three hydrogen generators is actually enabled - I underestimated how quickly they eat the stuff up).

On the left in the second shot is my farm which has a big zig-zag vent pattern which is filled with cold air from thermo regulators to try to cool down the room more effectively. You can't see it in this screenshot but it's got thermostats that will turn themselves off once it drops below 19 (I'm trying to grow mealwood). Honestly the wiring setups I've got is just as crazy as the vents - I've tried to automate as much as possible in my base but since you can't connect stuff remotely very easily it means a lot of wires running wayyyy off one place to a sensor then wayyyy back to the thing it's actually supposed to be controlling. There's a few spots where I just decided it wasn't worth the trouble so I just put them on manual switches.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 10:07 on May 29, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Tree Bucket posted:

It's interesting to see Cheshire Cat's population! After about a dozen utterly failed colonies, I've finally learnt that it isn't always a good idea to print new Dupes the instant they become available. Particularly if I'm halfway through sorting out an oxygen crisis....

Yeah I learned that rejecting dupes after 8 or so was a good idea after a few colonies failed because either my food production couldn't keep up with the demand, or my oxygen production ended up eating through my entire algae supply (I'm up to 12 in this one just because I got it stable ages ago so I was comfortable letting in enough to put in another sleeping room). It's a lot like Banished where a sudden population influx might seem helpful in the short term but actually ends up dooming your colony because it can't sustain the new numbers.

Admiral Joeslop posted:

What should I be concentrating on in a new colony? My first two were beset by lack of oxygen, then lack of food.

Those two are pretty much it, but a few tips on keeping them manageable:

1) As mentioned above, don't just keep printing new Dupes when they come available. Find the level you're comfortable sustaining and just leave it there. It's also worth rejecting a set if none of them will be very useful for your current needs (e.g. you don't have anyone with cooking skill and none of the 3 on offer have it either).

2) For food, you are probably going to get a shitload of mealwood seeds when doing your initial digging out, so they make a good early food source. You can also just set mush bars to continuous and that will be sufficient to keep people fed.

3) For oxygen, algae deoxydizers work faster than algae terrarium, but are also much less efficient in algae consumption - you can easily burn through your entire algae supply if you are relying too much on the former. I like to use terrariums as my primary oxygen source, and then just have you deoxydizer which I keep disabled and enable if my oxygen supply starts to get too low.

4) If you follow the advice in 2 and 3, you'll probably be consuming a lot of water (both mush bars and terrariums require a lot), so securing a reliable water source is vital. Most of the water outside of the starting area will be polluted, so your early exploration should be focused on trying to find a steam vent for renewable fresh water. Then you should set up a system to pipe the water output closer to your base (You don't want your dupes having to run all the way over there to collect water - it will both take a long time and the heat from the steam will hurt them).

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 04:19 on May 30, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Demiurge4 posted:

This game is basically what Space Base DF-9 should have been. One day I'll build a base where my dupes breathe only contaminated oxygen.

Honestly I've found that polluted oxygen isn't really much of a big deal. None of the diseases currently in the game are particularly dangerous - some of them don't even seem to do anything at all.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Demiurge4 posted:

Materials have hardness and temperature transference stats that determine how they react to pressure and how well they retain heat. If you build your walls out of a tough material you won't need thicker layers and I'm sure you can calculate the max pressure a natural gas vent can generate inside a space before it stops outputting and adjust your wall thickness accordingly (I think gas vents will defeat a 3 thick sandstone wall). The main problem with gas chambers is that the gas pressure will beat out your doors and eventually leak out.

I saw a video where a guy built lights inside his growth chambers from a material with a high heat transference and they ended up being way more efficient than space heaters.

I honestly haven't really had a problem with gas pressure since it tends to max out at 2000g per tile (1000g appears to be what the game considers "normal" pressure) in most circumstances - any player-made objects that produce/pump gases will automatically stop at this pressure level. Natural gas vents stop at about 5kg per tile. You can see quite a bit more pressure occurring in pockets with polluted water in them, since it will continue to produce gas forever, but even with 15kg or more gas per tile it never seems to break any of the surrounding rock. I did have leakage problems with my water reservoir when using sandstone for the walls, though - granite works much better, abyssalite best (abyssalite will also be a natural insulator without even having to make insulated tiles - the heat transference on it is essentially zero).

Incidentally, the game could really use a pressure overlay - the oxygen density overlay only lets you see how much oxygen or polluted oxygen there is - even 1000kg of CO2 will still just show up as red.

Also yeah lights can produce a crazy amount of heat. I put a couple or ceiling lamps in my farm area just for fun (I don't THINK plants are affected by light but just in case), and had to turn them off because they were loving up my temperature control which I'm already having enough problems with - the tiles with the lamps in them very quickly rose up to 90°C.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 17:08 on May 30, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
If you haven't played since the last patch, they did nerf how much gas was being produced by natural gas vents (apparently they were producing 4x more than the tooltip said they were). So one vent probably won't be sufficient to sustain your entire base anymore.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

GenericOverusedName posted:

Does that actually make them have the water they need in their inventory or however it works? The heck.

Yeah, although weirdly they still need an initial run by hand to get them started. If they're already going though, they will absorb water from the environment if it's available.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Algae is a mostly non-renewable resource, sadly.

Mad respect to anyone who manages to herd all the map's Puffs into a sustainable ranch.

You can produce oxygen without algae though, and if you're careful with using it, you can make what algae there is last a really long time. The main thing to be aware of is that deoxydizers use a up algae a hell of a lot faster than terrariums (500g/s vs. 33g/s). So although they produce oxygen more quickly, you shouldn't really rely on them as your primary source. Terrariums use up a lot of water, but water is renewable so that's not as big a deal.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
They will produce oxygen without CO2, though. Eating CO2 is just a nice bonus thing they do. It does still make the most sense to put them at the bottom of your base for that reason, though.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Tenebrais posted:

I've tried using that as a source of water but it turns out 20 tonnes of ice melts really slowly.


I really need to find a steam vent. Natural gas geysers give me a source of polluted water to purify but that relies on my sand supply...

Yeah relying on melting ice for water doesn't really work at the moment because while it will give you a LOT of water, it melts very slowly, and unlike real ice, it melts all at once rather than slowly converting from ice to water. So you'll start with 20 tonnes of ice at -30C, dump it in some kind of 90 degree sweatbox, then 100 cycles later you'll still have 20 tonnes of ice at -1C, then one cycle after that all of a sudden you'll have 20 tonnes of water at +1C.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

temple posted:

I've played this game for 119 hours and just realized you can rotate doors



Yeah, this is handy if you're trying to seal off a vertical area but still want people to be able to pass through. Something I discovered before I realized this is that they CAN'T open a vertically oriented door from above or below (I would also assume they can't open a horizontally oriented door from the sides but I don't know why you'd set something up that way anyway).

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Dogen posted:

Ugh I never get voids. I saw one once when I was still learning and assumed they were a regular feature but from what I read it's a map generator thing where if it tries to build something and it can't a void gets out there?

Running filterless doesn't help NG that much because although they're easy to isolate you can run several geysers through one filter no problem, as compared to the amount of work it takes to separate H and O2. I usually enclose them anyway but I have someone go in there occasionally to pick up the fertilizer.

I think voids are generated the same way as natural gas/steam geysers but the odds of them appearing are much lower. So while you'll usually get a few of each geyser on your map, you might not get any voids at all. They might also be restricted to less common biomes as well - I know that volcanic biomes seem to be less common than slime or glacial, so if it requires one of them to spawn that just cuts the odds even more.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Omi no Kami posted:

So I had my first genuinely successful long(ish) base at 30-ish days elapsed before things became irrecoverably screwed. I thought I had a good thing going with a contained vertical space layered into a carbon dioxide pit, then electrolyzers, then living/working spaces, then a hydrogen trap at the top where I built a hydrogen generator and gas filter:



That generates more than enough oxygen for three crew (I keep getting warning messages that I'm consuming more than I produce, but I've never seen the oxygen drop from teal to blue), my problem is with power: even with two electrolyzers running fulltime, the hydrogen generator eats way more hydrogen than the electrolyzers produce, so I can't count on it for consistent electricity. Coal generators seem finicky (lots of CO2 and my guys never refuel them), and I haven't found a good natural gas source yet- is there a way I can modify my oxygen setup to produce more hydrogen, or should I just rush for natural gas right away and hope to find a geyser before my infrastructure gets too big?

The coal generators probably weren't being refuelled because of priority settings - if you have everything at priority 5 (the default), then Dupes will do them in a more or less random order (I think they actually do have a kind of internal prioritization for tasks at the same level - they seem to prefer certain ones a lot of the time). So with only 3 dupes, it's entirely possible that they'll just never get to it because more tasks will be generated than they can keep up with. With coal generators, because you don't need to refuel them that often, it's usually a good bet to set them at priority 6 or 7 and set their threshold to 20% or so. Hydrogen generators are very good but also very hard to keep filled up - they're nice for a quick burst of energy to fill up your batteries but it's unlikely that you'll be able to keep them running continuously.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Dogen posted:

Hydrogen generators are more about recapturing the energy you expend with electrolyzers than an independent source of power

Yeah, even if you tap into a natural hydrogen pocket you'll burn through it incredibly quickly with a hydrogen generator.

The way I've kind of worked things out is that your main power supply should come from manual generators initially, then natural gas later (since both are 100% renewable). Coal makes for a good bridge between those if you're having trouble finding natural gas geysers, since you generally find quite a bit of it in the initial biome, but it will run out eventually. Hydrogen is basically "bonus" power - same output as natural gas, without the byproducts, but the fuel supply won't keep up with the rate of consumption.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

temple posted:

Chlorine is harmless though it is unbreathable.

Hand sanitizer uses bleach stone which produces chlorine. It's counterproductive because dupes rarely think to use it, showers remove the dirty hands debuff (along with other negative effects), and it leaks chlorine gas into your base. Bleach stone comes in small quantities as well and not worth the effort. Even the devs criticize hand sanitizer and say that no one should use it atm.

It's not so much that they rarely think to use it, it's that they specifically only use it before they eat. Meaning that if they've already showered by that point, they won't use the hand sanitizer because it's redundant, and any other time they just ignore it as an option.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah honestly it's not as if it's hard to just seal off a geyser area to prevent gas escaping. If it goes overpressure it just stops producing gas, it won't break your walls/doors or anything.

(Also I think Chlorine is still harmless for now - they can't breathe it but that's the only negative effect, so it's functionally equivalent to CO2)

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Aug 23, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Also unlike a Roguelike you can make separate save files and reload if you really screw up. The auto save will always overwrote the previous auto save but you can make as many manual saves as you want.

That said, it is a bit harsher as a game than something like Sim City - it's more along the lines of Banished in terms of difficulty. Not brutally hard but long-term survival requires careful planning and good use of your resources.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Aug 25, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

enraged_camel posted:

In other news, they still haven't added a mechanism to automatically turn off generators once their connected batteries reach a certain percentage, huh?

It works for the manual generator, but every other generator keeps chugging even after their batteries become full, which is super annoying as it wastes valuable fuel.

The setting works for the normal generators too, but it doesn't mean that they turn off automatically when the batteries fill up; it means that dupes won't refuel them until the batteries drop below that %. So you want to set the limit down to about 20-30% or so.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

enraged_camel posted:

Incorrect. You can set up access control on doors.

I think this is only on electric doors, though? And it only works while they're powered. I may be misremembering though.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Truga posted:

A 3 wide opening is a lot more than 3 times more effective than a 1 wide one, too, due to how gasses seep around. I always try to make my mesh tiles 3 wide when I can due to this.

Yeah bear in mind that gasses can't mix, so if you've got like 1 gram of CO2 floating in a 1 tile opening then it will prevent any other gasses from passing through that space at all.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Sage Grimm posted:

Nope! Wheezeworts and those weird nullifiers are the only things that are anti-entropic. That is, the only things that are explicitly there to remove heat from the system. You've got the bug corner cases where machines output at specific temperatures no matter their input and dripping tiny amounts of water cooling things down far more significantly than they should, but they really shouldn't be relied upon to be available once ONI is fully released.

I'd imagine even in full release state you're probably still going to see temperature weirdness due to difficult to solve issues like floating point weirdness.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
It's easy to underestimate food needs because you start with a fairly decent buffer, so you don't tend to get a good sense of how much food is being consumed until you run out, and if you haven't already set up your farming system by that point, you're basically hosed.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
With the added surface biome, couldn't you just delete heat by venting out hot gas directly?

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Multithreading is a hard thing to do well; it has a way of introducing bugs that are very hard to diagnose since you can no longer 100% rely on the order things execute in. Most likely they have the main gameplay logic all running on one core and they maybe have the interface on another, since that's a fairly common way to keep the UI smooth even if the game itself starts to chug.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Is there a use for the ore scrubber? As far as I can tell the only material you ever really pick up that has germs on it is slime, which will just re-populate itself after you clean it anyway.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

RandomPauI posted:

I'm just not managing the transition to the midgame. I can watch the videos and read the posts but SPOM and temperature optimizations and the like just goes in one ear and out the other.

The thing about this stuff is that it's honestly more mid-late game than midgame and it's easy to start to worry about it sooner than you really need to. Guides stress this stuff more than is really necessary, because they're experienced players who know that just setting it up this way initially is easier than trying to reconfigure an existing setup, but it's also a "running before you can walk" thing. Algae diffusers will carry you for ages and temperature is something you really don't even need to think about early on. If you haven't personally experienced the issues those guides are meant to solve, then don't worry about them. By the time you do run into those issues you'll understand the guides better anyway.

The thing about the way the game is set up is it's designed to kind of push you to keep digging around for more things. Solving one problem usually creates another so you have a natural forward momentum but it's not easy to tell how urgent any specific issue actually is. Most of the time, issues aren't as urgent as they seem so you'll want to keep an eye on them, but don't feel the need to push harder than you're comfortable handling. You will probably unlock a bunch of research stuff well before you'll have any reason to use it.

Your main concerns in the early game are going to be food and oxygen, and food is honestly more of a big deal than oxygen since it has a lead time - you need your farms to be set up well before you're in danger of running out, because it's going to take a few cycles before you get anything out of them. If you're running low on oxygen you can just plop an algae diffuser down and turn it on right away. This is not a forever solution since algae does eventually run out, but it'll last you long enough that you shouldn't feel the need to rush a switch to an electrolyzer based oxygen setup and finding an unlimited source of water.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Mar 11, 2019

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah I see the midgame as the point when you've achieved stability, but not sustainability. You can basically achieve everything I'd consider "early game" without leaving the starting biome.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Adenoid Dan posted:

I don't really care for things like water locks - even though they don't violate the laws of physics any more than most things in the game.

My dupes make frequent use of the med bay D:

The atmosphere outside the steam room was chlorine which combined with hot steam should be even more interesting but I guess most people don't want that kind of "fun".

I get this feeling but honestly the thing about the weird physics cheats is that often the non-cheaty way of doing the same thing either takes up a ton more space, or just plain doesn't exist. There are certain quirks of the physics system in the game that you just kind of have to accept as a given for that universe and finding clever ways to exploit them is the game, essentially.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

bird food bathtub posted:

How a straight up air lock building doesn't exist yet I don't know. Until something so obvious exists I will continue to use waterlocks to take their place because, really, why doesn't it exist?

I think the idea is that engineering it yourself is part of the game. Like all the parts are there - your job is to assemble them. The thing about waterlocks is they kind of cut all the bullshit so you have a thing your dupes can just walk through without needing pumps or vents or filters or anything else to prevent gases crossing the threshold.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

User0015 posted:

Yeah, I'm honestly surprised powered doors don't act as airlocks to be honest. And the only other really common "airlock" design is to use 3 doors with a delay timer that deletes air in the middle section. Not exactly a better solution imo.

Yeah I feel like gas/liquid deletion kind of falls under the same sort of "cheaty" category of water locks. Like it's valid as far as the game physics are concerned but it FEELS wrong.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

ExtraNoise posted:

I reached cycle 60 for the first time last night and I was thinking I finally got the hang of this game when I read this post and now I'm worried my dupes are heading toward a "heat death" because I have no idea what that is. Will my base continue to get hotter and hotter? What horrible calamity have I overlooked in my hubris? :ohdear:

Best beginner moment thus far: One of my dupes suffocated on farts. 10/10 would recommend.

Heat death is probably not something you should REALLY worry about too much if you've never made it that far before because other things are much more likely to mess you up before then, but it is healthy to be aware of it. Basically what it boils down to is that there are usually more ways to create heat than there are to remove it, so over time your base will just get hotter and hotter. This isn't REALLY a problem for dupes themselves because the temperature required for them to start taking damage is pretty high (I think 70C?), but most of the food you'll be relying on comes from plants that stop growing when the ambient temperature hits 30 or 35C, which isn't that much higher than the initial temperature in the starting biome.

The main way to combat it is wheezeworts, since you can place them pretty much anywhere. Anti-Entropy Thermo-Nullifiers work much faster, but have to be found by digging around so their placement is not always convenient. They also need a supply of hydrogen to run but they don't need very much so this isn't a big deal. You honestly probably don't need to worry about taking the average temperature down EVERYWHERE - if the asteroid overall gets hot but your main base area is kept temperate then you're still fine.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Demon_Corsair posted:

How do I make the infinite gas storage trick work? It just works and looks so much better then giant columns of gas storage containers.

You need a vent over a tiny bit of water. No more than 1800g on a normal vent or 20kg on a high pressure vent (the latter is pretty easy since usually water only hits 10kg per tile). What will happen is that the liquid will prevent any gases from entering the tile but not block the vent from working, so any gases it puts out will get pushed into an adjacent tile and just keep doing it forever.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

oh jay posted:

My favorite fail state was a run I played using rust deoxiders, on one of those maps without algae. I basically ignored the chlorine cloud a hundred cycles, but finally got around to Carbon Skimming. I skimmed enough so that the chlorine lowered down to the mealwood I was farming, and by the time I had noticed, everybody starved.

But think of how clean it all was

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The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
I feel like the biggest direct physics violation is regolith melters where you get a bunch of free heat energy from literally nowhere because of the fact that regolith technically just transforms into an entirely different substance when it melts.

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