Sustainable Colony Population

[Sliceofpow]

Assume that you have the in game resources, and all dupes trained in everything except cooking, research or art. Oxygen, food, or space is not an issue. I wouldn't mind dig and build projects completed in a few days as well as some dedicated dupes (farming, cooking, ranching, tidy, operate). The only limiter to population is playable fps and idle time(too many dupes). How many dupes would you put in a base to get things done?

Note: Currently at day 600 with 10 dupes just to cover all jobs. All trained and only 1 or 2 idle by end of the day without projects.

[Craigjw]

This seems to be a player preference, however between 8-24 dupes seems to be the golden zone, particularly when there are no lavatories available.

It may have changed recently due to a few optimisations, namely with pipes.  It also seems to depend on how complex is the base in general, as complexity uses up cpu time, which also effects how many dupes you can run on your bread maker confuser.

I am being quite conservative on my current playthrough with only 13 dupes, as previous playthrough's I've had 24 dupes and grinds my cpu too much late game.  Sometimes construction can seem to take a while for large projects, as I only have 11 dupes + 2 astronaughts.  Several dupes are multi-tasking cooking, farming and ranching, while I have about 3-5 on dedicated building/digging jobs.

I have several dupes on dedicated building, when I have no construction, these go idle.  I don't much care for them having a backup job, as sometimes I've found that they will switch to the backup job at an inconvenient time, which takes time away from the building job.

[ChickenMadness]

I usually play with 16-24 dupes and have no problems with sustainability.

I haven't tried bigger colonies than that though. I usually restart the game before then because I want to redesign my base.

 

[chemie]

optimizations have helped a lot.  22 dupes and no lag which is new for me. (meaning a "solid" 25 fps vs before when it would take dips to 10)

[fishoutofwater]

I have 12 dupes, I cleaned my map from debris, only set storage compactors to store one type of material, I got 35-50 fps, but then later I got massive drop to 15-20fps, I believed it happened after my drecko open ranch have 70+ dreckos, and I built the jet suit.

I wonder what else can cause fps drop.

[Miravlix]

Open Access Jet Suits is naturally bad since all dupes can path to every single open tile in the world.

 

I make a closed off space area the dupes use jet suits in, that means 2/3 of the map won't have possible path's after they equip the jet suit.

[Gurgel]

I was going up to 12 for a long time. That gets a lot of idle-time at cycle 1000 and later. I am currently going with 8. Every dupe gets trained in everything they can learn.

[Miravlix]

I don't get how you manage to make dupes idle.

 

I have 16 dupes and wish I had 24 because I just don't have enough to perform the non-storage tasks and even if they finished every task (like a priority 5 water cooler refil), they always have ton's of resource to clean up.

 

I guess with no rocket, no ranching, no anything and ESPECIALLY not bothering to clean up non-stored resources, it's fairly easy to make even a small number of dupes idle.

[Gurgel]

Everything cleaned up, rocket in use, but no ranching. I just automatize a lot of things. Isn't that most of the point of the game?

[socooo]

I have 12 dupes，they all live full lives

[TheGCat]

I play with 21 Dupes at the moment. For each Rocket (Currently 3, but I still build 2 new rocket silos ), I "build" another one. These dupes are always underway. So, no performance impact. If I use the farm stations, my dupes doing half the day only farming (Most Pincha pepper wild farming, enough for 20 Dupes). Very bad in my opinion, because any other stuff don't gets done. How many dupes u need is a game style decision. If u build always small and build the needful, 10 dupes or fewer maybe suffice.

If u want to build big and quick, more dupes is the answer. On the other side, if u don't need the dupes anymore, u can kill them. Heartless **** i know.

 

[ChickenMadness]

6 hours ago, Miravlix said:

I don't get how you manage to make dupes idle.

 

I have 16 dupes and wish I had 24 because I just don't have enough to perform the non-storage tasks and even if they finished every task (like a priority 5 water cooler refil), they always have ton's of resource to clean up.

 

I guess with no rocket, no ranching, no anything and ESPECIALLY not bothering to clean up non-stored resources, it's fairly easy to make even a small number of dupes idle.

Your base is probably very un-organised and wasteful. When I have around 20ish dupes I usually start running out of ideas for things to build and then they all start going idle. Apart from the ranchers, cook and farmers mostly.

At that point I make a big gymnasium full of hamster wheels they can use when they have nothing to do.

Need to try and keep everything grouped together.
All ranches in the same spot.
All power plants in the same spot.

After you've gotten all the basic infrastructure built you should re-arrange everything to be compact and connected by transit tubes if it's away from the main base. But then this is usually the reason I keep restarting the game after a certain point lol. Usually I'll spend a few hundred cycles optimizing my base and then figure out a design that brings a bunch of the seperate elements together like a jigsaw puzzle. Every play through I come up with a better base design. Thats my favourite part of the game. Starting off with a messy scattered colony. and bringing everything together into a small square lol.

You can even make satelite bases where all of your ranching is done and all of your ranches sleep and eat there to save them having to walk. And transport all the resources to your main base on a conveyor belt.

Another thing you might be doing badly is the scheduling and priorities. You have to spend quite a bit of time organising that when your base is big and you have alot of dupes. I usually group the dupes visually in different bedrooms when I'm planning all their jobs so it's easy to tell them apart.


This is an example of a base I made a few months ago where the dupes are mostly idle. The base is really tightly compact and most of the power is provided by things that don't need any maintanence (spoms, natural gas). And a small number of ranchers / farmers produce way more food than the colony needs.
 

 

 

 

[yoakenashi]

The maximum sustainable colony population is very high and is mostly limited by the world seed.

Preferred colony populations are usually much less than sustainable limits. Most people generally aim for 12-20 duplicants to make the colony easier to manage.

 

[LeifErikson]

I've always done 24 dupes at a time. Easily manageable without lag. I usually have 8 dupes by 100, 16 by 250 ish, and then 24 by 500 or so. Food is a joke, using a single mushroom farm, and for oxygen, right now I'm using 5 electrolyzers in a pyramid room, with cooled petroleum going through a bottom chamber to cool the oxygen to around 10 degrees before it enters my base. For power, I'm using all natgas generators from an oil boiler to natgas. Before space materials, I was using a single thermo regulator with hydrogen to condense the sour gas to methane, and the sour gas was coming from the oil biome through digging up some tiles to heat up the oil.