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My first full play through findings...


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Hi guys,

Just thought i'd share some of the weird and wonderful things that we'd figured out over my first playthrough of the Agricultural Upgrade.

I've signed off on our colony at cycle 700 - however it was fully sustainable and could have essentially run forever. Food was sorted, water was infinite, waste water was controlled and temperatures were being managed. It was a bumpy road to get there, with a few peaks and troughs of potential despair mixed pleasantly with new discoveries. Here are a few of my findings.

  • Naturally planted crops can become excellent crops very easily - just by controlling temperature and air pressure. Lay a load of planter boxes in a workable area, i.e. mealwoods in a 20~ degree polluted area, plant the seeds in the boxes, deconstruct them, and you'll have excellent crops in no time. Same can be achieved with Sleet Wheet in cold biomes. Early food sorted.

 

  • Heavy watt wire can be bridged through wall tiles, and can be bridged OVER if you lay the bridges first, then lay the heavy watt wire. Not so much as a tip, more of a base-saving sanity maintainer. Wiring is incredibly powerful with the transformer changes, so I would recommend a "cavity wall" approach to your wiring. (keep your heavy watt/transformers in a little "utility" space where you can branch off your circuits)
     
  • Water cooling/heating in pipes is incredibly powerful for maintaining temperatures in your grow rooms. Run a radiator of non-insulated pipe made of granite, fill that pipe with your cooled/heated water of choice, then either closed loop it, or have it to a controlled "recycle" room to keep the flow going. It enabled us to achieve 100/100 pincha peppers and bristle blossoms. Beautiful :D 
     
  • Natural gas geysers are insane. Really. I'm informed by some of the legends of the forums that the gas output is currently broken, and has been fixed already in current testing builds, however as it stands now, 1 natural gas geyser can sustain 6-7 natural gas generators. Use it till they fix it. Manual generators should only be used to kick start your main system if/when it ever stops for any reason, and coal gens can be completely bypassed if you so desire (didn't use any in 700 cycles... We were lucky with natural geysers though I guess...)
     
  • Carbon dioxide/chlorine make the perfect "grow room" gasses - as they're both a plentiful nuisance, but also keep your crops produce from rotting if allowed to manually harvest. Pump it where you need it and sit back and bask in your splendor ;) 
     
  • Lag is still a factor - so have a project in mind and aim for it - don't over extend or unnecessarily expand to areas you don't need. Get the materials you need and build what you want to. My colony essentially became unplayable on stream due to over-exploring the asteroid in the search for wolframite (turns out we had bugger all anyway!), which lead to melting ice biomes, and huge, vast areas of mined out gas-discos. Although the piping/game optimizations have been brilliant, the lag caused by "open space gas meanderings" still very much exists :( 
     
  • Don't be afraid to mush bar. We ate a lot of dirt, and it did us no harm! Early game just handle your food as best you can until you've got either some natural crops or sleet wheat sorted. Chefs are also important dupes now - we ended with 4 chefs with 25+ cooking skill. 
     
  • Batteries on every circuit. No really. After your transformer - make sure you put batteries on your small wires. A massive battery bank on your heavy watt wire main circuit wont offer much - its the 1kw circuits that need the buffer most. If you want your machines to function without interruption and are maximizing your power draw per circuit, you'll need batteries. Best tip of them all really.

And that's all I can think of right now. I'll link to my series wrap up video so you can see some of the points mentioned here in the actual colony. All of this was done live on stream so no cheating, and all disasters were witnessed live :D 

Good luck with your colony!

-Life 

 

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Nice summary and I agree with all your points. Let me put just a few comments on it:

32 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Naturally planted crops... Early food sorted.

The only drawback is, I wouldn't call them Early, given the number of cycles you need to wait for first crops.

32 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Heavy watt wire ... can be bridged OVER if you lay the bridges first,

Going to be fixed SoonTM, bridging over heavy wire will be possible with no order restrictions.

32 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Water cooling/heating in pipes is incredibly powerful for maintaining temperatures in your grow rooms. Run a radiator of non-insulated pipe made of granite, fill that pipe with your cooled/heated water of choice, then either closed loop it, or have it to a controlled "recycle" room to keep the flow going. It enabled us to achieve 100/100 pincha peppers and bristle blossoms.

Closed loop cooling/heating is going to be fixed very soon as well. Re-cooling/heating that AC liquid is going to become an issue I guess. Pincha Pepper plant is no problem with space heaters, I solved cooling bristle berry farm by hydrogen pipe from which a valve was constantly stealing 200 g packets and running them through a regulator - just enough to not overheat the regulator, and to keep the pipe contents cool enough. Constant power draw, though, in both cases as plants keep screwing up the temperature.

32 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Batteries on every circuit.

Issue with batteries is that they produce heat, so if your local grid is small and its power consumption intermittent, you may prefer relying on your distribution power bank where you can employ powerful cooling schemes. In my last large base I had no problems whatsoever even with no batteries on any of the local grids. If you run into problems, batteries may solve it. Hopefully this will get tackled too eventually.

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24 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

Nice summary and I agree with all your points. Let me put just a few comments on it:

The only drawback is, I wouldn't call them Early, given the number of cycles you need to wait for first crops.

Going to be fixed SoonTM, bridging over heavy wire will be possible with no order restrictions.

Closed loop cooling/heating is going to be fixed very soon as well. Re-cooling/heating that AC liquid is going to become an issue I guess. Pincha Pepper plant is no problem with space heaters, I solved cooling bristle berry farm by hydrogen pipe from which a valve was constantly stealing 200 g packets and running them through a regulator - just enough to not overheat the regulator, and to keep the pipe contents cool enough. Constant power draw, though, in both cases as plants keep screwing up the temperature.

Issue with batteries is that they produce heat, so if your local grid is small and its power consumption intermittent, you may prefer relying on your distribution power bank where you can employ powerful cooling schemes. In my last large base I had no problems whatsoever even with no batteries on any of the local grids. If you run into problems, batteries may solve it. Hopefully this will get tackled too eventually.

Natural crops can be planted as soon as you start digging out your starting area - and if you plan ahead and leave some decent banks of terrain, they're ready to harvest by cycle 20ish. I'd say that's pretty early :)  Food rations, muck roots and a few mush bars would make this very comfortable. Later if you're so inclined you can go back to these and plonk some atmo switches/vents/lights and thermo switches in to ensure they're always excellent - but that'd just be for a pet project rather than for any real use.

likeso.png

As regards pipe temp changes, you know that i'm an advocate of this - been waiting for it for a long time and already have my systems figured out :D And did you say power draw? "power"? you mean that imaginary variable (at present) :p 

I've never had a battery over heat, I always cool them either with a circuit of recycling gas pipe, or a similar water build. This base was mostly water cooled with closed loops as it was our first agricultural playthrough and I was out of my comfort zone - I normally avoid all "bugs/exploits/gifts from the gods" in favor of doing things the hard way :) 

 

12 minutes ago, Xuhybrid said:

Would you say it's still worth having batteries in a bank on HW or just have them after the Transformer?

Does this mean you're starting a new colony?

Yes, but only to act as a buffer for your power gens - mostly just put batteries on your actual end circuits.

And yes, new colony tonight :) 

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1 hour ago, Lifegrow said:

Naturally planted crops can become excellent crops very easily - just by controlling temperature and air pressure. Lay a load of planter boxes in a workable area, i.e. mealwoods in a 20~ degree polluted area, plant the seeds in the boxes, deconstruct them, and you'll have excellent crops in no time. Same can be achieved with Sleet Wheet in cold biomes. Early food sorted.

Amusingly this is a bug. Harvest rating is going by the assumption that the plant is growing in a planter.
You can see this in the UI in the "Predicted Time Remaining" and the ever growing "Predicted Yield".

By growing wild the growth rate is 1/4 the planter rate so 1 modifier (likely air pressure) is enough to reach 100%.
It just takes forever.
 

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2 minutes ago, Risu said:

Amusingly this is a bug. Harvest rating is going by the assumption that the plant is growing in a planter.
You can see this in the UI in the "Predicted Time Remaining" and the ever growing "Predicted Yield".

By growing wild the growth rate is 1/4 the planter rate so 1 modifier (likely air pressure) is enough to reach 100%.
It just takes forever.
 

Yeah I figured as much, as it was removing fertilizer/irrigation from the equation. As regards the speed - it's obviously nowhere near as efficient, but it's free and plentiful - so plant a fair few of them and it's a pretty handy backup if nothing else :) 

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35 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

With a fix to NG geyser gas production, power is going to become a real variable too.

I did say "at present" :D I welcome the changes - I'm always up for a challenge!

1 hour ago, Lifegrow said:

And did you say power draw? "power"? you mean that imaginary variable (at present) :p 

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2 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

I did say "at present" :D I welcome the changes - I'm always up for a challenge!

I did say "I agree with all your points" too. There's nothing wrong on what you posted, they are all valid and correct points regarding the current game.

I was just putting it in perspective of things that await us in near future because they are going to have some impact on approaches you chose, to avoid confusion or feeling of wasted effort if someone decided to try them too.

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6 hours ago, Kasuha said:

With a fix to NG geyser gas production, power is going to become a real variable too.

Do you know what the planned rate is, in terms of NG generators one geyser will support?  If possible I'd like to practice around the future, rather than a broken present.

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50 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

Do you know what the planned rate is, in terms of NG generators one geyser will support?  If possible I'd like to practice around the future, rather than a broken present.

Afaik it's as the tool tips suggest after the bug fix.

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5 hours ago, Kasuha said:

I did say "I agree with all your points" too. There's nothing wrong on what you posted, they are all valid and correct points regarding the current game.

I was just putting it in perspective of things that await us in near future because they are going to have some impact on approaches you chose, to avoid confusion or feeling of wasted effort if someone decided to try them too.

I'm only joking bud, i'm British remember - I wasn't defending myself, just being blunt as ever :D 

2 hours ago, watermelen671 said:

Can I just say, that you sir, have a magnificent beard. If @JoeW were to give you a title, anything other than Beardman would be a dishonour. :wilson_smile:

Why thank you, that's very kind - it's made entirely of Beefalo fur though i'm afraid to admit....

1 hour ago, Moggles said:

Afaik it's as the tool tips suggest after the bug fix.

Yeah, I think I saw @Risu say it's intended to support 2 and 1/3 NGG's, but now that I write it i'm not sure if i've confused that figure with something else. Tooltip says 60g/s but i'm not sure if that'll be the final amount (as that seems crazy low for end game colonies). 

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3 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

I'm only joking bud, i'm British remember - I wasn't defending myself, just being blunt as ever :D

Why thank you, that's very kind - it's made entirely of Beefalo fur though i'm afraid to admit....

Yeah, I think I saw @Risu say it's intended to support 2 and 1/3 NGG's, but now that I write it i'm not sure if i've confused that figure with something else. Tooltip says 60g/s but i'm not sure if that'll be the final amount (as that seems crazy low for end game colonies).

6 kg over 100 seconds, 45 kg over 370 seconds, 9 kg over 30 seconds, idle for 100 seconds.

(6 + 45 + 9) / (100 + 370 + 30 + 100) = 0.1
 

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8 hours ago, Risu said:

6 kg over 100 seconds, 45 kg over 370 seconds, 9 kg over 30 seconds, idle for 100 seconds.

(6 + 45 + 9) / (100 + 370 + 30 + 100) = 0.1
 

Hmmm, so 3 x geysers for 5 x generators.... I could make that work :D Looks like i'll be building a lot of natural tile gas-viaducts to keep the pump numbers down... Flatulence and fertilizer makers have never looked so appealing :) 

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