Oxygen Not Included

You don't need more than 4 colonists till waaaay later. Basically adding more colonists is the most consequential decision you can make.

At the very minimum do NOT add a fifth colonist until after you've built a plumbing system that recycles the washbasin/toilet/shower water into more non-potable water. Bear in mind that even if you clean the polluted water through a sieve, all the germs will still be in there. You can use the purified but germy water for toilets or oxidizers but NOT in anything that will end up being eaten or drunk.

iirc you can use the germy water for irrigation. That won't transfer into cooked food.
Also note, germs die in clean water slowly over time. So, purify it immediately, then let it sit as clean water. you generally also want to turn polluted water into clean water asap, as polluted water also creates polluted oxygen.

Water sieves do not take damage when salt or clean water pass through them. And they don't even use power when it happens either. so you can dump salt, polluted water, and clean water into the same pool, pump all three up through a water sieve, and desalinator, and end up with just water coming out. no extra power cost of a filter.

TJT said:

Just got back into this for the first time since it officially launched. Slimelung is no longer total death if you don't handle it well? Doesn't seem so harmful at all compared to what I remember.

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Yes, slimelung is a complete joke now. Still a major pita if you let it flood your base, but you can be fairly sloppy about dealing with marsh biomes now.

My 2nd colony I was super conservative about exploring the slime biomes because of the guides I'd seen online about how fast slimelung would kill all of your dupes.. but i quickly learned that it wasn't too bad. This current colony all I have done is made sure to keep the air in my base deoxidized and store all of the slime+algae in a chlorine room. The dupes are mostly carrying the toxic waste right through my base to get to the chlorine room but it doesn't matter. Occasionally (pretty rare) someone gets slimelung from working in the slime biome but they recover within 2 cycles. I had a few fish floating around my base which I think were breathing slimelung on my dupes and infected a couple of them.. when i figured that out I killed and ate the fish..

TJT said:

So my colony just failed because 3 idiots got stuck and just wouldn't leave the area despite an door I manually opened. They just ran back and forth and eventually died...

I couldn't do anything to get them out of there. What the fuck?

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Show a screenshot? Dupes get stuck often because of mistakes you've made that sometimes can be hard to find. It might have been a pathing bug but I've had dupes get stuck 100s of times and it's always been something I could fix.

TJT said:

So my colony just failed because 3 idiots got stuck and just wouldn't leave the area despite an door I manually opened. They just ran back and forth and eventually died...

I couldn't do anything to get them out of there. What the fuck?

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Did you have permissions set on the door itself?

TJT said:

So my colony just failed because 3 idiots got stuck and just wouldn't leave the area despite an door I manually opened. They just ran back and forth and eventually died...

I couldn't do anything to get them out of there. What the fuck?

Click to expand...

need a pic... was there a three tile height they couldn't jump somewhere? Also make sure the door permissions are defaulted to allow everyone to pass both ways.

Slimelung had a major nerf. It's not instant death anymore. I'm not sure if they'd even did from it. Seems more like it's a massive production malus now.likely

Terrarium farms are good to poop in little walkways like that. It creates an o2 pocket they can run to. It's the ghetto solution. Kinda gamey. As long as o2 exists in the tile, they'll breath it. Even if it's a miniscule amount.

I've used polluted water cistern to create o2 before. If you don't care about speed you can use a deodorizer and create oxygen with sand. And you can make a closed loop carbon scrubber with 3 pips of water easy peasy.

You don't really ever need to, but it works. I always wind up with a jillion tons of sand and no good way to turn it into a jillion tons of glass without cooking my smeltery. I guess I should do water to steam to turbine, but that is such a convoluted bit of building for a resource you don't seem to need a whole lot of. And the temperature regulation on the piping would be trial and error, no good way I've found to estimate average heat exchange for one block of radiant.

Maybe I'll do a new base and build all that high instead of low, try to make a space radiator. A little bit of drywall, a dab of liquid, void on either side. I think that would radiate. Slowly. Have to fill the room with hydrogen. Or at least the top.

Manual airlocks can be strange. I'll use them sideways sometimes on a main shaft to capture gasses and I cant remember exactly what the issue is, but I do remember that if you do 2 horizontal airlocks with a spacing between them you have to use one exact configuration or else the dupes won't recognize it. They'll check the first lock for pathing, recognize that they can cross that tile, but then the second lock they won't if it's horizontal. I forget exactly, I remember I had to fiddle with it.

Since regular water sits on top of polluted water you could brute force it with having a hanging pump. You could create an overflow (if you have room) and drain the top layer off your cistern, filter it back in. All solutions that i've found to that problem are annoying. But what you can do is build the cistern intially with that error trapping in mind, create an overflow tank near the top of your primary tank, leave a gap so that your top primary tank will flow into the overflow, leave a row of empty tiles or mesh tiles to drain from the bottom of the overflow back into the bottom of the primary, have an airlock automated to control that return pipe hooked up to a hydro sensor -- basically an architectural water filter that operates on the restriction that fluids will not mix and clean water rises above polluted.

You -could- do all that, set it and forget it. you could also just float a pump to a filter, deal with that for a cycle, and then deconstruct it.

TJT said:

So the culprit was a one tile height to a forcibly opened manual airlock. I am guessing the dupes consider the door itself to be another tile unless it is on the same level they are.

Also, what is a good method to get a small amount of good water out of a polluted water cistern? I am growing my reeds but some small amount of good water got in there and fucked up all my hydroponics. I can just get more polluted water soon but.. Still annoying.

Also going right into hatches worked out well. I only farmed meal lice up until I got a blossom farm running. Then straight to some hatch stables. I have a nice battery bank where I just turn on my coal gens for a little while until they're full then turn off the generator again until I need it. Using power switches everywhere this build has also been really helpful.

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Shower-toilets directly into reed hydroponics first, THEN into reservoir.

TJT said:

Also going right into hatches worked out well. I only farmed meal lice up until I got a blossom farm running. Then straight to some hatch stables. I have a nice battery bank where I just turn on my coal gens for a little while until they're full then turn off the generator again until I need it. Using power switches everywhere this build has also been really helpful.

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OK so the sooner you get over the hump of basic automation the better off you'll be. Read the wiki or sit through a good intro on youtube of it when you have the chance.

Even if you only use it to make your power generators fuel-efficient or just to use atmo switches to turn systems/doors on and off, it'll probably be the most helpful ONI system out there. Getting some basic automation going early on is the key to running your base with as few colonists as possible---especially if you're going into heavy ranching, which is very labor-intensive and cannot be automated.

I research the manual refinery as soon as I can so ill have enough refined metals for a smart battery and some automation wire before I build my first generator, otherwise itll keep burning fuel even when the batteries are full and you'd need to task a dupe to turn it on/off manually.

This game is so complex it's crazy. I'm loving it so far though. I've been reading forums and watching YouTube videos like crazy and I still feel like I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Lots of the systems that seem mandatory for long term colony survival I still haven't even seen, much less attempted to build. I'm hoping the video series I'm watching will show how to build most of them because even screenshots can't really show everything.

I was just rewiring my core power network to upgrade a lot of it to 2MW wiring and I accidently depowered all of my atmo suit docks. All of my lead was stored outside the checkpoint too for some reason so my dupes couldn't finish building the wires to get power back.. 'no problem' i think, ill just disable my atmo suit checkpoint for a minute.. which of course leads to every dupe in my base rushing to the bottom of the oil biome to pick up lead off the ground. The good news is that I now have way less mouths to feed.

I also have one dupe who is dead but won't die. She appears zombified. I have permanent drowning, scalding and starving alerts from this dupe, who says her current errand is 'die' she has 0 health and can't move from where she is - about 12 tiles deep in 100C crude oil - where she was standing on a pile of other corpses I have since removed and memorialized.

Luckily the only really important dupe I lost is my sole researcher who I can do without for a while until I train up a new one.

Apart from that things are going well. I'm starting to build a power network across the whole map, tap into heaps of geysers, got stable refinery/polymer press going with cooling from an AETN.. Trying to set up an aquatuner/steam room now so I can get some better cooling and start mass refining.

ranching dreckos is a super easy way to get plastic without using power, cooling or oil. Just gotta design their stable in a VERY specific way so that they spend a good amount of time in hydrogen gas, which is what induces mutation into glossy dreckos, which can be shorn to make plastic.

Considering the full vertical costs of the petroleum then cooling the polymer press, glossy drecko ranching is probably a must. I've built whole transport tube networks without ever building a single polymer press.