Cycle 475+

[Erasmus Crowley]

I might be done with the alpha for now. At this point, my dupes have 270+ decor requirements. I triy to keep them from stressing out, but it's too much hassle. I could euthanize them and recruit new guys, but that feels like cheating.

I did finally find out what good blossoms are for though. Mealwood eventually stops giving you new seeds, so you're limited on how much you can expand with them. Bristle Blossoms give you a brand new seed every time someone eats one the of fruits that it generates. You could potentially make endless fields of them.

I'm recycling all my used water via steam purification, which also generates infinite dirt. I use the dirt in the outhouses to generate contaminated dirt. Contaminated dirt can be turned into fertilizer if you care to, but I haven't needed it, so I never did. I haven't added any water to my reservoir since I filled in somewhere around cycle 50. Water is converted to steam in the battery room, then the steam is pumped into the chamber on the left to cool and revert back to water.

I have 4 levels of the base dedicated to generating contaminated oxygen via contaminated water laying around. The contaminated water is covered by mesh tiles so people don't walk in it.

I did figure out how to get infinite clean oxygen, but it's really hard to get it right. If you put contaminated oxygen through a series of thermal regulators it will turn to liquid oxygen at about -180C. That liquid oxygen was then pumped to the room on the right of the base, where it evaporated into clean oxygen. The hard part is that it consumes SO MUCH POWER that it's just not worth the hassle. If diseases were less of an issue I might have tried harder to get this to be more effective. Be careful that you don't cool the oxygen too much though, I have a few balls of frozen oxygen sitting around my base now that are bugged and won't thaw. One of them fell into some contaminated water and it's now accompanied by balls of contaminated ice that won't go away either. Bonus, this system created O2 at about 10C, so it also served as the air conditioning system for my Bristle Blossoms.

EDIT:

I forgot to mention. My CO2 from the entire base seems to flow down and then right for some reason. So it all accumulates in the bottom right corner of my base. Where it is all purified by a single CO2 scrubber that then pumps back into the water recycling system.
 

[Quantum1000]

It's too bad Pufts die so easily and don't respawn. They're probably the best way to decontaminate oxygen.

Also, I think the walls on your water tank are slightly overkill; I've never needed more than 3 thick.

[Silxer]

54 minutes ago, Erasmus Crowley said:

EDIT:

I forgot to mention. My CO2 from the entire base seems to flow down and then right for some reason. So it all accumulates in the bottom right corner of my base. Where it is all purified by a single CO2 scrubber that then pumps back into the water recycling system.

CO2 is heavier then other gasses, so it will naturally flow downward towards the lowest point of your base, while on the flip side Hydrogen is lighter then most gasses and will naturally flow upward towards the highest  point of your base, and O2 is somewhere in the middle.

[Erasmus Crowley]

3 minutes ago, Silxer said:

CO2 is heavier then other gasses, so it will naturally flow downward towards the lowest point of your base, while on the flip side Hydrogen is lighter then most gasses and will naturally flow upward towards the highest  point of your base, and O2 is somewhere in the middle.

Thats the easy part to explain. Any insight into why it all flows to the right?

[Silxer]

8 minutes ago, Erasmus Crowley said:

Thats the easy part to explain. Any insight into why it all flows to the right?

I'm not really sure why, I noticed this as well from what I've seen. 

[Targa_X]

So how long did it take 5 dupes on hamster wheels to charge all those batteries?

[Erasmus Crowley]

3 minutes ago, Targa_X said:

So how long did it take 5 dupes on hamster wheels to charge all those batteries?

Lol.

When everything was turned off? Not very long really. Maybe half a cycle to go from 50% to 100%.

When I had the liquid oxygen production system turned on? Well... I watched them do nothing but run and sleep for three solid cycles. I showed mercy and shut the system down.

[Hexicube]

4 hours ago, Erasmus Crowley said:

Thats the easy part to explain. Any insight into why it all flows to the right?

Probably a quirk in the gas flow mechanics more than anything else. Chances are it always looks to the right first to see if it can spread out there, and once it does there's no point looking left because there isn't enough left.

[Neopopulas]

The stress requirements are too hard to manage at the moment, there isn't enough to destress, stress goes up way too fast and it goes down way to slow. The only reliable thing is the massage table, which is inefficient and hard to use.

 

I tend to play it for half an hour or something and then just restart now.

[O.n.y]

11 hours ago, Erasmus Crowley said:

 At this point, my dupes have 270+ decor requirements.

My eye began to twitch nervously >.>

[Ecu]

11 hours ago, Neopopulas said:

The stress requirements are too hard to manage at the moment, there isn't enough to destress, stress goes up way too fast and it goes down way to slow. The only reliable thing is the massage table, which is inefficient and hard to use.

 

I tend to play it for half an hour or something and then just restart now.

The stress requirements aren't actually hard to manage at all until such a time that your dups get higher than 100 decor.  At that point it does indeed become quite frustrating.

[artemiyME]

thanks a lot on sharing steam strats, i finally made my first steam wooooo! FREEDOM FROM SAND DEPENDENCYYYYY

also on massage tables - make massage table priority 9 and assign a high-stress dupe to it, he will lay on it until it drops to 0% (or needs food or pee), that's my best suggestion for late-game stress management, or go semi-cheat mode with vomit-only route for endless contaminated water.

[Escaped]

Klei: "Well currently the game is not able to reach full sustainability"

This guy: "That's where you're wrong pal."

[Neopopulas]

12 hours ago, Ecu said:

The stress requirements aren't actually hard to manage at all until such a time that your dups get higher than 100 decor.  At that point it does indeed become quite frustrating.

I should rephase. Maybe 'too hard' isn't right, but 'too frustrating' or 'not fun'. I would actually have basically no problems at all if the massage table was a non-assigned 'use as needed' station like the outhouse, food pooper, treadmill, etc. Its the need to constantly check and remember and manually assign and manage the stress which gets frustrating.

[Saturnus]

9 hours ago, Escaped said:

Klei: "Well currently the game is not able to reach full sustainability"

This guy: "That's where you're wrong pal."

Let's see it run to 2-3000+ cycles before we talk about true sustainability, shall we? Sub-500 cycles is relatively easy. It's the heat death that eventually gets you.

[Masterpintsman]

7 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

It's the heat death that eventually gets you.

Which can currently be avoided by dumping thermal energy into room full of vacuum.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, Masterpintsman said:

Which can currently be avoided by dumping thermal energy into room full of vacuum.

It's still not completely perfect but sure, if you can be bothered to play that long, you can relatively easy set up a system that could be played for several years playing constantly at highest speed setting but even that will eventually heat up I'm afraid.

Don't bother about trying to stretching the game play out too much. The later game content has clearly not been fleshed out yet, so just try it out and restart, trying out how different stuff works, exploit the exploits while they last, and report bugs. It's what an alpha release is for.

[Ecu]

4 hours ago, Neopopulas said:

I should rephase. Maybe 'too hard' isn't right, but 'too frustrating' or 'not fun'. I would actually have basically no problems at all if the massage table was a non-assigned 'use as needed' station like the outhouse, food pooper, treadmill, etc. Its the need to constantly check and remember and manually assign and manage the stress which gets frustrating.

Actually it isn't hard or frustrating or anything to manage until your dups get over 100 decor requirement.  Early on you can get the decoration research, make a few statues near the area your dups are at predominantly, and blam...stress dealt with.  

You could also make a massage table per dup and they will use it when they have no other tasks at the priority level the table is at.  However, I personally find that making a couple massage tables and just having them set to priority nine, as emergency stress relief is better.

[MarkusReese]

15 hours ago, Escaped said:

Klei: "Well currently the game is not able to reach full sustainability"

This guy: "That's where you're wrong pal."

It depends on perspective.  While a person can extend play.  Outside of magic generation exploits, it is impossible.  Two main exploits.  First is the stress enduced water supply.  No toilets and vomit is infinite water.

Second is the infinite air like mentioned here.  Gas generated from nothing.  Both these we can expect dealt with soon.  Most probable I suspect is that contaminated oxygen will produce from existing gas, and giving dupes a hydration level with toilet water recovery.

There steam I do not consider exploit plus there is non filtration exploit ways of dealing with gas. 

Reaching 100 cycle without exploiting, I have obtained with a 12 dupe colony.  But didnt run it past that.  Mostly is just testing and experimenting mechanics.

[O.n.y]

As decor requirements were capped with current patch - you can continue your colony!

[Ecu]

2 minutes ago, MarkusReese said:

It depends on perspective.  While a person can extend play.  Outside of magic generation exploits, it is impossible.  Two main exploits.  First is the stress enduced water supply.  No toilets and vomit is infinite water.

Second is the infinite air like mentioned here.  Gas generated from nothing.  Both these we can expect dealt with soon.  Most probable I suspect is that contaminated oxygen will produce from existing gas, and giving dupes a hydration level with toilet water recovery.

There steam I do not consider exploit plus there is non filtration exploit ways of dealing with gas. 

Reaching 100 cycle without exploiting, I have obtained with a 12 dupe colony.  But didnt run it past that.  Mostly is just testing and experimenting mechanics.

I don't really consider either of these to be exploits.  Vomiting when stressed is obviously an intended aspect of the game.  Utilizing it as a water source seems perfectly fine and really should be fine to stay in the game.  However, I wouldn't be surprised to see more penalties applied to stress and contamination.

Currently the game needs to have methods to generate resources from nothing essentially because resources are destroyed completely (not just converted to another form) by a multitude of situations (building, doors, pipes, etc.).  As such utilizing these systems is also not really abusing an exploit, I don't feel.  Some of the methods of generation may be a bit too good right now (such as contaminated dirt generating contaminated oxygen), but that'll be balanced better I'm sure as time goes on (or contamination will be given harsher drawbacks).

Being able to clean air by cooling and clean water by heating means that you can reasonably keep a colony going perpetually.  Yes, at some point, you would have to rely on vomit/urine for some water generation, but you don't need to have your entire colony that way.  You could create a sealed sub-colony with a few dups that creates the water for the rest.  However, this is really only at the very extremes of cycles.  For quite a long period of time, you could process slime into contaminated water which you could clean.  If you don't use the broken bridges/valves, you could likely make your water last a very long time purely via steam cleansing.

So you can indeed reasonably be sustainable, even without using dups to generate water.  With them doing so, you can sustain forever.

[MarkusReese]

The generation I only comsider expoit because I doubt that was intended to be a resource collection method was all.  Potentially adding more water and air than what existed on the map and defeating the whole challenge of colony collapse.  It is sort of expoit definition, using game mechanics to bypass intended mechanics.  Indeed long term stability without zero point matter generation is possible, but once a person makes use of it as a functional part of their base, am pretty sure it is no longer working as intended.

 

Just like how matter distructiom is my one negative for the alpha, matter ceation is another.  I really hope further development leads to a true closed system.

[Destros09]

13 minutes ago, MarkusReese said:

distructiom

Watch out imdamisterL will give you a title for that

[Ecu]

1 hour ago, MarkusReese said:

The generation I only comsider expoit because I doubt that was intended to be a resource collection method was all.  Potentially adding more water and air than what existed on the map and defeating the whole challenge of colony collapse.  It is sort of expoit definition, using game mechanics to bypass intended mechanics.  Indeed long term stability without zero point matter generation is possible, but once a person makes use of it as a functional part of their base, am pretty sure it is no longer working as intended.

 

Just like how matter distructiom is my one negative for the alpha, matter ceation is another.  I really hope further development leads to a true closed system.

I disagree.  If they did not want these liquids to be usable, they would have made them into their own unique liquids that could not be recycled.  Instead, they made them into liquids that can be recycled.  What I see is that said things should be based on calories.  That would better balance the mechanics in a reasonable fashion.

However, during alpha you don't tend to focus on such balancing.  You instead work to get mechanics into the game and reduce bugs.  Beta tends to be where you tighten up your balance as you progress towards release.

To be completely honest, trying to look at this too realistically is a mistake.  It is a game and as such we are bound to have resources destroyed.  It's best to accept that and implement generation mechanics to allow people to work through such issues.  I expect that as additional content is added to the game, these systems will become less simple and more Rube Goldberg.  That is indeed what many of us seem to want, as well.

[haschischtasche]

On 2/26/2017 at 5:34 AM, Erasmus Crowley said:

Thats the easy part to explain. Any insight into why it all flows to the right?

I think it flows to the right because your Gas Pumps are on the right. There is slightly less atmospheric pressure to the right which long-term makes it replace more gas to the right than to the left.