What things are necessary to look for in a seed for a long term sustainable game?

[superhanz]

Like something that would be possible to explore and discover all game content without restarts and new sessions? A friend told me I should start a new seed because chlorine volcanos became important because there is new content.

[Kabrute]

not important, merely less useless, liquid chlorine fed to gas grass fed to gassy moos produces nat gas....... its new content but not required content

[Lilalaunekuh]

The only requirement I have for a longterm seed:

-There should be a gold volcano

 

[phod]

In addition to what has been said, a slush geyser has become something I look for, they can be very helpful for all sorts of things. Having two on a map almost feels a bit too easy. 

[PhailRaptor]

None of these are actual requirements, but they all make it dramatically more likely for the map to be long term viable:

-> A Gold Volcano

This one is as close as it gets to being a requirement.  Without one, there is no infinite source of Gold.  Gold is a useful material to build Metal Tiles from, in part due to their fabulous Decor bonus, but also due to it's thermal properties.  Other Metals do not have this limitation.  Iron comes raining down from Metal Meteors.  Both Copper Ore and Iron Ore can be obtained from Space destinations.  The exception would be Wolframite, which has neither a Space location it can be obtained, or a Volcano that produces Tungstun.

-> An additional water source, beyond the 2 guaranteed Cool Steam Geysers

The simple fact is that Water is an extremely useful resource.  It can be transformed into a wide variety of other resources, most notably Food through Bristle Berries and Oxygen/Hydrogen through Electrolyzers.  There's even a path for Water to make more Water when you get to the point of industrializing the Oil Biome, rather than just collecting from it.  But also Polluted Water through Sinks, Lavatories, and Showers, which in turn can become other valuable resources.  Both Water and Polluted Water are the best recycled resources in the game.  While you can make due without additional water sources, it's a lot harder to do.  Your growth rate will be slowed quite substantially, requiring much more careful planning

-> At least 1 Oil Reservoir in the Oil Biome

The simple fact is that some maps just plain suck.  While unlikely, it is entirely possible for a map to spawn with zero Oil Reservoirs down in the Oil Biome.  While there are vast reserves of Oil present down there, it is still a finite amount.  You can make more through Slicksters, but their production rate is absolutely pitiful.  You'd lag out your game trying to offset the production rate of a single Reservoir trying to use Slicksters, nevermind finding ways to produce enough CO2 to feed them.

-> Minimizing the number of "useless" features

While no Geyser/Volcano object is truly useless, there are several that make you ask "what's the point?"  For example, Chlorine Vents.  There are only 2 ways in the game atm to consume Chlorine -- Pumping it for use in Ore Scrubbers, and liquefying it to irrigate Gas Grass from Space.  The problem with Ore Scrubbers is that it's almost impossible to use them effectively.  Unlike Sinks or Showers, which remove ALL germs on the surface of a Dupe using them, the Ore Scrubber removes a finite amount of them from objects placed in them, 480,000 germs.  This is worthless against blobs of Slime infected with Slimelung, which will be found with germ counts up to 1 million.  You'd need to chain 3 Ore Scrubbers in a row to remove all the Germs.  Worse, if any of the Ore Scrubbers in the chain are already in use, Dupes will pass over them, instead of waiting for them to be available.  Making the Ore Scrubber useful requires an insane amount of over-engineering that instead makes it impractical.  Irrigating Gas Grass has a whole slew of it's own problems.  First and foremost, you have to obtain some Gas Grass seeds from an Organic Planet, which exist only at some of the most distant Space destinations, which means you need a Rocket with a Hydrogen Engine, and all the subsystems required to fuel it (namely, Liquid Hydrogen, which is incredibly difficult to make).  After obtaining the Seeds, you have to build the farm for them to grow in, with Sunlight access to grow.  And once you've done all this, the only purpose of Gas Grass is to feed Gassy Moos, which must also be brought back from the Organic Planet.  Gassy Moos eat Gas Grass, and produce NatGas.  But as yet, Moos do not produce Eggs, so you must manually manage your Moo population to replenish them.  And while they do produce very useful NatGas from otherwise useless Chlorine, the rate of production is quite low compared to even a modest Oil Boiler, cooking Crude into Petro, then Sour Gas, which then can be liquefied and warmed back into NatGas.  Like, massive amounts of NatGas.  Gassy Moos and Gas Grass are a very neat production chain, but they are incredibly inefficient compared to methods that should already have been mastered long before you attempt Grass and Moos.

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Again, none of these things are requirements, but each of them that is satisfied makes the map significantly more bountiful.

[dallion]

Absolutely, water

 

o2, food, is the most basic life support resources in this game, they all rely on water, so more dupes more water you need

and cold slush is a pretty good coolant cause easy to obtain and remove heat "legally"

 

I don`t think any metal volcano is necessary, 

[gbudiman]

Polluted water. Even better, cool slush geyser.

In ONI, polluted water is more valuable than clean water. Why?

- Pincha, fertilizer maker, early-game metal refinery coolant, and just coolant in general for your base or steam geyser. It gets too hot?

- Run it through water filtration to get clean water. Delete some heat and produce polluted dirt, which can be transformed into dirt, a limited agricultural resource.

[Garueri]

5 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

None of these are actual requirements, but they all make it dramatically more likely for the map to be long term viable:

-> A Gold Volcano

This one is as close as it gets to being a requirement.  Without one, there is no infinite source of Gold.  Gold is a useful material to build Metal Tiles from, in part due to their fabulous Decor bonus, but also due to it's thermal properties.  Other Metals do not have this limitation.  Iron comes raining down from Metal Meteors.  Both Copper Ore and Iron Ore can be obtained from Space destinations.  The exception would be Wolframite, which has neither a Space location it can be obtained, or a Volcano that produces Tungstun.

-> An additional water source, beyond the 2 guaranteed Cool Steam Geysers

The simple fact is that Water is an extremely useful resource.  It can be transformed into a wide variety of other resources, most notably Food through Bristle Berries and Oxygen/Hydrogen through Electrolyzers.  There's even a path for Water to make more Water when you get to the point of industrializing the Oil Biome, rather than just collecting from it.  But also Polluted Water through Sinks, Lavatories, and Showers, which in turn can become other valuable resources.  Both Water and Polluted Water are the best recycled resources in the game.  While you can make due without additional water sources, it's a lot harder to do.  Your growth rate will be slowed quite substantially, requiring much more careful planning

-> At least 1 Oil Reservoir in the Oil Biome

The simple fact is that some maps just plain suck.  While unlikely, it is entirely possible for a map to spawn with zero Oil Reservoirs down in the Oil Biome.  While there are vast reserves of Oil present down there, it is still a finite amount.  You can make more through Slicksters, but their production rate is absolutely pitiful.  You'd lag out your game trying to offset the production rate of a single Reservoir trying to use Slicksters, nevermind finding ways to produce enough CO2 to feed them.

-> Minimizing the number of "useless" features

While no Geyser/Volcano object is truly useless, there are several that make you ask "what's the point?"  For example, Chlorine Vents.  There are only 2 ways in the game atm to consume Chlorine -- Pumping it for use in Ore Scrubbers, and liquefying it to irrigate Gas Grass from Space.  The problem with Ore Scrubbers is that it's almost impossible to use them effectively.  Unlike Sinks or Showers, which remove ALL germs on the surface of a Dupe using them, the Ore Scrubber removes a finite amount of them from objects placed in them, 480,000 germs.  This is worthless against blobs of Slime infected with Slimelung, which will be found with germ counts up to 1 million.  You'd need to chain 3 Ore Scrubbers in a row to remove all the Germs.  Worse, if any of the Ore Scrubbers in the chain are already in use, Dupes will pass over them, instead of waiting for them to be available.  Making the Ore Scrubber useful requires an insane amount of over-engineering that instead makes it impractical.  Irrigating Gas Grass has a whole slew of it's own problems.  First and foremost, you have to obtain some Gas Grass seeds from an Organic Planet, which exist only at some of the most distant Space destinations, which means you need a Rocket with a Hydrogen Engine, and all the subsystems required to fuel it (namely, Liquid Hydrogen, which is incredibly difficult to make).  After obtaining the Seeds, you have to build the farm for them to grow in, with Sunlight access to grow.  And once you've done all this, the only purpose of Gas Grass is to feed Gassy Moos, which must also be brought back from the Organic Planet.  Gassy Moos eat Gas Grass, and produce NatGas.  But as yet, Moos do not produce Eggs, so you must manually manage your Moo population to replenish them.  And while they do produce very useful NatGas from otherwise useless Chlorine, the rate of production is quite low compared to even a modest Oil Boiler, cooking Crude into Petro, then Sour Gas, which then can be liquefied and warmed back into NatGas.  Like, massive amounts of NatGas.  Gassy Moos and Gas Grass are a very neat production chain, but they are incredibly inefficient compared to methods that should already have been mastered long before you attempt Grass and Moos.

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Again, none of these things are requirements, but each of them that is satisfied makes the map significantly more bountiful.

Man reading your texts leaves me very happy

Not only you strived yourself to make such a well done and satisfying text but all you said was completely opinionless, directful and helpful

Thanks for your help

[tzionut]

Quote

Without one, there is no infinite source of Gold.

Space is also source for infinite gold...

But the only thing you need as guaranteed is water. If you have at leas 1 cold steam vent you can manage a population of 8 dupe for whatever experiment you want to do.

If you don't have other geysers or vents is no problem at least for me, even the missing of oil reservoirs. You can convert all the crude oil to petroleum (standard way or more efficient using a boiler) and use it for plastic or rocketry until you research hydrogen engine, then whit electrolyzer you will need only water for rocketry...

For power wheel for start, then coal, then steam using magma (solar isn't viable any more.. to much regolith dropped by comet again) if you don't have oil reservoirs or nat. gas vents

Anything else can be obtained from space (except wolfram) and some creatures

[yoakenashi]

I see two questions here:

1. what is necessary for long term sustainability
2. what is necessary to discover all game content

For the first, there are no "requirements" for a long term sustainable base. Sure, water and polluted water geysers make the game easier, but they aren't required. There are strong player preferences, but again, they are not requirements.

For the second, I would say 1 of each geyser - but since that's not possible (number of geyser types is greater than the number of geysers that appear on a map) let's look at the available geysers and see which introduce something somewhat unique to the game:

• Carbon Dioxide Geyser - Carbon dioxide is abundant from duplicants, and cold is abundant from (pick your choice of heat deletion), but I personally do not routinely come across liquid CO2, so I would add this to the list
• Cool Slush Geyser - An excellent source of water and cold. Can be good or bad depending on how you handle it. Definitely add this to the list.
• Leaky Oil Fissure - never had one of these. You can gain more petroleum from Oil Reservoir's, but this is definitely unique.
• Water Geyser - important for general play, but water is not something unique.
• Polluted Water Geyser - polluted water also not something unique.
• Carbon Dioxide Vent  - again, CO2 is often in abundance.
• Chlorine Gas Vent  - need this as there is no other unlimited sources of chlorine in the game.
• Cool Steam Vent - water is not unique
• Hot Polluted Oxygen Vent - polluted oxygen is not unique
• Hydrogen Vent - sure, electrolyzers produce hydrogen, but I would still add this to the list
• Infected Polluted Oxygen Vent - some could consider the added germs to present a challenge in the game, but germs I feel are nothing unique
• Natural Gas Geyser - you'll likely get one or two of these (I do not know the map generation rules off-hand)
• Steam Vent - water is not unique
• Copper Volcano - sure, there is not an unlimited source of copper in the game, but nothing is dependent only on refined copper.
• Gold Volcano - same as copper.
• Iron Volcano - refined iron literally rains from the sky!
• Minor Volcano - just a smaller version of a normal volcano.
• Volcano - I may have passed up the metal volcanoes, but the sheer amount of magma produced is why I am including this. Plus the variability of the magma volcanoes makes for some interesting builds.
• Oil Reservoir - you'll get several of these anyways.

Based on this, and @Cairath's awesome website: https://toolsnotincluded.net/, there appears to be a few maps out there that have at least one of each of the geysers in green.

Now, as the OP suggested, this may change if Klei makes another change like the Gassy Moo, but it currently appears that each geyser has it's own importance and use in the game.

[PhailRaptor]

1 hour ago, tzionut said:

Space is also source for infinite gold...

I was not aware of this.

44 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

For the first, there are no "requirements" for a long term sustainable base. Sure, water and polluted water geysers make the game easier, but they aren't required. There are strong player preferences, but again, they are not requirements.

This is generally true, but I feel it's not quite that simple.  It's going to come down to how many Dupes are "enough".  Every map has a maximum Dupe count it is capable of supporting, that is a function of how much Water, Polluted Water, and Polluted Oxygen it creates (as well as other resources that can be converted into those).  But then the question becomes whether or not adding additional Dupes is relevant or not based on your base's workload.  Having a base with 50 Dupes in it may not be any more efficient than that same base with only 30 Dupes, with many of them idle for extended periods of time.  Or it could be non-viable at 30 because there's too much work for that number to handle.

And it's not just as simple as "I play this way so I require this", either.  The locations of features may make one base layout effective, but another impossible.  Are you going to be shipping the produced resources to a different location for processing, or do you have room on site to build the industry required for that process?  Does your processing system require an AETN, or a long term heat source from the Oil Biome or freshly fallen Regolith?

[Lilalaunekuh]

1 hour ago, PhailRaptor said:

Every map has a maximum Dupe count it is capable of supporting

But that the limit you are reaching is a space one.

=> You can build a couple water positive system

(A row of rockets flying to the first planet can emit more steam than the need to start; You can turn all CO2/Oil/Petroleum into more water ... You can even use more duplicants and reduce their daily O2 consumption by not letting them breath all the time. Or use the stress response.)

If your really in the mood build a room and fill it with morbs (there is no room you can call "full" of morbs^^), you can turn all polluted oxygen with just one intermediate step into coal -> CO2 -> Petroleum -> Sour Gas -> Nat Gas -> Polluted Water.

 

 

2 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

• what is necessary for long term sustainability
• what is necessary to discover all game content

The first one is for sure "nothing".

But to discover all content my opinion is a bit different:

2 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

Carbon Dioxide Geyser

Nice way to turn some water into polluted water, but the problem is the low ouput.

(Can be less than half the daily CO2 production of a single duplicant ...)

 

2 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

Hydrogen Vent

Sounds like just a bit of addtional clean energy, but the high temperature will require much effort to use it early.

And a maximum of 75g/s average output for the perfect hydrogen vent doesn´t really justify the hussle.

=> If you got space materials it´s easy to use, but still not very space efficient

[PhailRaptor]

28 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

(there is no room you can call "full" of morbs^^)

I think it can be considered "full" when the gas pressure in the room is too much for them to produce P-O2 anymore.  I believe it's the same 1.8 kg/tile as P-H2O, Slime, and Rot Piles creating P-O2.

[yoakenashi]

43 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

you can turn all polluted oxygen with just one intermediate step into coal

As far as I understand, converting polluted oxygen can only be done via Hatches. Are you suggesting one of the following paths, or something else entire?

pO2 -> Deodorizer -> Clay -> Hatch -> Coal

pO2 -> Puft -> Slime -> (Algae Distiller -> Algae ->) Hatch -> Coal

[Lilalaunekuh]

Yes you need even more critters (mostly hatches)

[ruhrohraggy]

Would have to go with water for sustainability. Doesn't matter what kind of water. P.water, clean water, cool steam geyser...Long as it's water.

Water sustains the 2 most important system, Oxygen, and food.

I'd rank it : Cool slush > P.water Geyser > Water geyser. Simply due to heat management.

Cool slush comes out around -10C. P.water around 30C, and water geyser in the 90C region.

You get 2x cool steam vents by default, so I don't really count those.

P.water can be used to generate P.o2. Normal water can be used to generate p.water bottles in algae terrariums which can be used to create more p.o2, which can be used to make slime and mushrooms for food. 

P.water for pincha peppers, Normal water for bristleberries.

Electrolyzed water gives you energy (hydrogen) and o2. Water is pretty strong.

Right now, this is probably one of the strongest / easiest to sustain seeds on the search....

https://toolsnotincluded.net/seeds/988663407/296074

The important stuff is : 4 Cool slush, 2 nat. gas with good rates.

It's on average ~14-15 kg/s if all geysers are left open...or 9,000 kg/cycle. Enough to sustain ~12-13 max range hydrogen fueled rockets...

The fun stuff is also a chlorine geyser, and a copper volcano, 2 resources that are typically non-renewable.

You don't have to worry about heat, you don't have to worry about oxygen, and you don't have to worry about food, which are the big-3 for dupes dying. (Other than them getting stuck in an unreachable location without building material or oxygen, or entombment...but really, you have to be playing at 10x speed and not paying attention at all for that to happen)

It's also a great start with accessible food, and you're not completely surrounded by slime (Which most often i am)...and the AETN location is just disgusting. Right next to both a cool steam vent AND a slush geyser, for the easiest SPOM ever...

This seed is the epitome of "Play me for thousands of cycles".

[Gurgel]

All settings are long-term sustainable, the question is only for how many dupes. With 12, any setting will do. With more, you could run into problems and may have to hibernate or eliminate dupes to get by.

[Lilalaunekuh]

6 hours ago, Gurgel said:

All settings are long-term sustainable, the question is only for how many dupes.

For me it´s always less about how many dupes my seed can handle and more about how many dupes my cpu can handle ...

(Since QoL MK1 my fps gone up so time for more dupes^^)