Getting dupes too quickly?

[GoHereDoThis]

I've tried to be picky with my dupes and that means a lot of scrapped dupes but I'm at Cycle 97 with 12 dupes and I'm just starting to get into issues with regards to algae and food shortage.  Granted that I've got full biomes just waiting to be explored but it seems that I'm hitting these crisis when I was doing okay before and so is this a result of expanding too quickly?  I'm just now starting to explore outside my base.

I got 60 mealwood plants but they can't seem to keep up with demand.

[crbd115]

I usually gate how many dupes I have based on what I have developed. Since an algae deoxidizer can provide 500 g/s of oxygen I usually stop at 5. Until either I know that I have enough algae on the map to run a second. Then I go to 8, because a electrolyzer (if running efficiently) produces around 888 g/s. Once I have enough food and water to do more dupes I go to 12. Easiest way to have enough food is to make sure to keep the wild plants in good condition. Basically you can get a lot of free food just by being careful about making sure wild plants get the conditions they need to keep growing. I use some mealwood to supplement this early on then bristle blossoms until I've developed enough I can run my farms for late game foods without any issues. Hope this helps.

[ishakaru]

4 minutes ago, GoHereDoThis said:

I got 60 mealwood plants but they can't seem to keep up with demand.

Well here's your problem. You should have moved on to at least mushrooms by now. Most maps have huge amounts of slime as long as you don't let it off-gas.  In extreme late game, you can sustain more dupes on less water through a pH2O->puft->slime->shroom chain resulting in a three tier food system(plumbers don't need BBQ).

 

As for O2 generation: Switch to terrariums asap. Don't pick up the pWater bottles, place deodorizers around them instead. Or find a cool steam vent and feed a SPOM using that. That should take care of 8.88 dupes. If you take on many more dupes a 2+ electrolyzer setup is recommended if you can secure a water source from a vent.

[yoakenashi]

54 minutes ago, GoHereDoThis said:

I've tried to be picky with my dupes and that means a lot of scrapped dupes but I'm at Cycle 97 with 12 dupes and I'm just starting to get into issues with regards to algae and food shortage.  Granted that I've got full biomes just waiting to be explored but it seems that I'm hitting these crisis when I was doing okay before and so is this a result of expanding too quickly?  I'm just now starting to explore outside my base.

I got 60 mealwood plants but they can't seem to keep up with demand.

Duplicants CAN be accepted immediately ever 3 cycles up to af least 35 duplicants (ie, 35 by cycle 100). It is a big challenge but possible.

SHOULD you do this? No, not at all (okay, maybe just once, ha). The rate at which you accept duplicants, or the total number you accept, is up to you.

Your best bet though is to first ensure you have the food, water, and other resources available to support more duplicants.

Also, as @ishakaru pointed out, you should be exploring outside of the starting biome as soon as you can manage safely. If you don’t expand, then your resources will dry up.

There is a sweet spot between expanding like a madman and doing nothing. Yeah, that’s probably not much help 

[Yunru]

I only accept dupes with a Learning of 5+, it really helps. Also I grow Bristle Blossoms around the Dupe Printer.

[crbd115]

38 minutes ago, Yunru said:

I only accept dupes with a Learning of 5+, it really helps. Also I grow Bristle Blossoms around the Dupe Printer.

I also do the learning 5+ lol but the bristle blossom around the printer pod is just genius 

[Sasza22]

2 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

is this a result of expanding too quickly?

I`d say too slowly. At least when it comes to outer biome exploration. At cycle 100 you should have the nearby biomes explored, a few geysers found (at least one of the guaranteed cool steam vent and you should be making your way into an ice biome for wheezeworts.

Also mealwood is pretty bad when moving towards midgame. Personally i change the mealwood farm into a drecko ranch but with how many you have you should replace them with either mushroom or bristle berry. Mushroom is generally easier as it can get hard to cool water early on.

If you keep improving the base while accepting new dupes you should be ok with around 10-15 even up to 20. Above that you might have layout problems (rooms not fitting your design) and heat problems especially if the farms end up near the edges of the starting biome.

[Lawnmower Man]

3 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

I`d say too slowly. At least when it comes to outer biome exploration. At cycle 100 you should have the nearby biomes explored, a few geysers found (at least one of the guaranteed cool steam vent and you should be making your way into an ice biome for wheezeworts.

Also mealwood is pretty bad when moving towards midgame. Personally i change the mealwood farm into a drecko ranch but with how many you have you should replace them with either mushroom or bristle berry. Mushroom is generally easier as it can get hard to cool water early on.

If you keep improving the base while accepting new dupes you should be ok with around 10-15 even up to 20. Above that you might have layout problems (rooms not fitting your design) and heat problems especially if the farms end up near the edges of the starting biome.

Yeah, even with just 20-30 mealwood, you will be surprised how fast your dirt disappears.  You really don't want to be looking up how to make more dirt when you haven't even started on other food sources.  IMO, it is very important to realize that you are given enough resources to start comfortably, but the geysers are what keep your base running long-term.  So exploring and exploiting those quickly is the key to success.

[Jackblac]

10 hours ago, Yunru said:

I only accept dupes with a Learning of 5+, it really helps. Also I grow Bristle Blossoms around the Dupe Printer.

I use the printing pod to create a great hall with a flower pot. This means early morale wont be a problem. 

[Christophlette]

45 minutes ago, Jackblac said:

I use the printing pod to create a great hall with a flower pot. This means early morale wont be a problem. 

You can just put 3 flower pots and you have a great hall too. At least in QoL1 it's working with only flower pots and flowers in those.

[Gurgel]

12 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

I`d say too slowly. At least when it comes to outer biome exploration. At cycle 100 you should have the nearby biomes explored, a few geysers found (at least one of the guaranteed cool steam vent and you should be making your way into an ice biome for wheezeworts.

And alternatively, you can just ignore that advice (I do) and take your time. The only really critical things at the start are oxygen and food, and much later temperature and CO2. To get the most of the game, develop your own approach and style and do not follow some "recipe" from others. And failing a few times is part of that.

Just as an example, I usually stay at 3 dupes until food is secure (fried mushrooms in my case) and at 6 dupes until oxygen is secure (cold steam vent feeding electrolyzers is my preferred approach). Getting to 12 dupes early is a pretty sure way into catastrophe, unless you know what you are doing. You can probably save this, but I recommend putting up 6 graves and filling them to do so.

[Sasza22]

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

And alternatively, you can just ignore that advice (I do) and take your time. The only really critical things at the start are oxygen and food, and much later temperature and CO2. To get the most of the game, develop your own approach and style and do not follow some "recipe" from others. And failing a few times is part of that.

I`m not saying my apporach is the best and everybody should do the same. I`m just pointing out that getting stuck in the starting biome for too long might end in resources running low. It`s good to explore the outer parts for extra supplies but only when you are ready for it. Especially if it involves digging through slime biomes.

[DemainaNyx]

It's entirely possible to take a dupe every time the printer lights up, I just don't cause I don't want the stress.  You have to progress steadily with more dupes because the basic items won't work for long.  Mealwood, for example, needs 5 plants to feed 1 dupe.  That's a ton of dirt and dupe time to take care of all that which you really need to dedicate to other tasks.  If you are using algae terrariums, you can survive a long time on that with just a little exploration but I generally don't stick with it for long simply because I need my dupes for other things, not cleaning out terrariums.

 

My approach is to have 6 dupes until I have a stable food source that isn't mealwood (or mostly isn't mealwood) and a steady cooled oxygen source.  

I normally try to get a bathroom loop (bathroom -> sieve -> back to bathroom with some going sieve -> metal refinery -> electrolyzer) set up ASAP so that I have a continuous water source that I can feed a few bristles, get my electrolyzers going, and start generating the refined metal I need for the radiant pipes.  If you use a valve to control how much water you give bristles, it will take longer for them to over heat from the sieve water.  That allows me to generate more seeds for later while letting my dupes focus less on taking care of food.  So I focus my dupes on building my oxygen room while I set my digger to explore around the caustic biome.  When I find a cold biome I take all the wheezeworts I can.  4 of them go to cooling my oxygen and hydrogen generators.  If I have extras, then I look into making a drecko ranch/bristle farm in my base.  Pump some hydrogen into a room, place a wheezewort or two in the hydrogen, and plant your bristles on top of the room.  The hydrogen and wheezewort cool the metal hydroponic tiles and combat the heat from the sieved water and keep things running pretty smoothly for now.

That's my safe zone.  I now have food and oxygen.  It's not sustainable since I'm using more water than I'm producing (40ish Kg a cycle from dupe waste, 20Kg of which goes to 1 bristle), but that just means I need to find more water and feed it into the existing structure and I can easily survive. 

 

Remember though, it's a single player game. No one is grading how you play or how efficient your design is.  I have a mess of pipes running through my current base, I am barely power positive at times, and I am learning how to deal with keeping things from exploding in space, and I'm on cycle 700.  I personally avoid killing the critters on the map while others make specific killing rooms so they get meat while I just live off the eggs.  It's all for fun, so do what works for you. You'll eventually figure out what works for you and your playstyle.

[fishoutofwater]

On 1/16/2019 at 3:54 AM, GoHereDoThis said:

I got 60 mealwood plants but they can't seem to keep up with demand.

try BB next time, rush bathroom loop then the remaining water only for BB, stop research until you find steam cool vent.

[Echo_Hotel]

I generally only get another Dupe when the workload or travel time becomes too high. Usually that means something like 5-6 Dupes for the first hundred and 8-10 for the second hundred cycles. Smart Batteries + Coal Generators are my first conservation goal then finding water and building a SPOM, then plumbed bathrooms, then a Hatch farm to feed the dupes and the generators. CO2 filled pantries are energy free infinite food preservation and upgrading to Chlorine later sterilizes it all and lets you forget about kitchen hygiene entirely. Oh and always keep a primitive bathroom in reserve in case you break your water system without noticing. 

The last and most important thing I would go back and tell my beginning self is not to be afraid of chlorine or slime lung, neither are the end of the world like the default Dupe sterilization schedule would have you believe, the simplest airlock will keep you safe from them.

[WanderingKid]

I crash through dupes at incredible speed, I'm usually trying to get the starting 16 dupes up by Cycle 40, sometimes 50 if RNG hates me.  I do scum-load the dupes once if they're complete trash though, as the game behaves better with the occasional save/reload anyway.

I regularly have 70+ mealwood planted early, but I start swapping by cycle 30 and have completely moved over to mushrooms between 40-45.   I've also have a very particular build I like to use that makes it much easier to tend the mushrooms.  This is it when it's just finished flipping over and I've gotten my mechatronics engineer recently.

However, I also pretty much just crash into the horizontal biomes without a care in the world, other than some insulated tiles to protect the farms from heat.  A handful of deodorizers do a lot of work if you're not at Miserable levels.

 

[GoHereDoThis]

Thanks guys!  Much info to digest here but simply put, I've been taking it easy and just enjoying the build process here, but still trying to be optimized in terms of researching stuff.  I can't exactly remember why I've not liked mushrooms; when I first started playing, I went to mushrooms and bristle blossoms but could not sustain them for very long, hence I tended to just stick to mealwood.

I've also not explored much outside the base due to wanting to have exo suits so that my dupes are not at risk of getting slimelung.  I know, I know, they can go out for a few cycles and still keep enough resistance that they don't get down with slimelung, but I'm a benevolent, loving overlord and dupe safety and happiness is high on my priorities

[ChickenMadness]

Try and dig out of the start biome as soon as possible and get some dreckos to ranch as well. So you can get a head start on plastic and reed fiber. It's easy to setup a drecko basic ranch, you just make a box with an electrolizer in it and wait for the top half to fill up with hydrogen, then delete and put the plants in etc.

You can't make exosuits without reed fiber. They'll also go towards your food supply once they're at max population and you can start killing them off for meat or cooking omellettes.

Theres no reason to stay inside the starting biome. I start digging outwards right from the beginning to get what I need. Then after I've got them (mushrooms, puft eggs, drecko, wheezeworts, etc.) I go back and start building my base infrastructure. I try to make sure I have access to a drecko before the time I have a dupe in the ranching job. (takes a long time to breed plastic dreckos)

Just build water airlocks on the edge of the start biome to keep the unwanted gasses out.

[Lawnmower Man]

I would go one further and say that most folks will use most/all of the starting biome space for their "core base", which is a good reason to expand outwards.  If you start building power/factory/cooling/etc. infrastructure outside of this space, then you can eventually build a nice insulated wall around the core, which goes a long way towards keeping it at a balmy 20 C without having to move around a bunch of buildings.

[Neotuck]

4 minutes ago, Lawnmower Man said:

I would go one further and say that most folks will use most/all of the starting biome space for their "core base", which is a good reason to expand outwards.  If you start building power/factory/cooling/etc. infrastructure outside of this space, then you can eventually build a nice insulated wall around the core, which goes a long way towards keeping it at a balmy 20 C without having to move around a bunch of buildings.

this is true, I have a habit of keeping the printing pod at the center of my main base

[Lawnmower Man]

3 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

this is true, I have a habit of keeping the printing pod at the center of my main base

I was going to ask why you use metal tiles everywhere instead of carpet/plastic, but I didn't realize they have a decor of 15!  I guess that pretty much negates the airflow tiles all by themselves.

I am a little surprised to see metal refineries and a glass forge inside the core.  I assume you have cooling running through your floors?

Any reason for all the lights everywhere?  Aesthetics?

I'm also surprised by the extravagance of multiple jukeboxes/arcades/espresso...is that necessary, or just for symmetry and because you can?

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, Lawnmower Man said:

I was going to ask why you use metal tiles everywhere instead of carpet/plastic, but I didn't realize they have a decor of 15!  I guess that pretty much negates the airflow tiles all by themselves.

I am a little surprised to see metal refineries and a glass forge inside the core.  I assume you have cooling running through your floors?

Any reason for all the lights everywhere?  Aesthetics?

I'm also surprised by the extravagance of multiple jukeboxes/arcades/espresso...is that necessary, or just for symmetry and because you can?

I'll admit this pic is from debug mode and I model my survival bases based on this design and this was done before QoL so there wasn't any carpet tiles at the time

yes to all 3 questions

 

[GemeinerJack]

Just as a rand note for metal tiles everywhere: gold or niobium has a 50% decor bonus, so the tiles can get up to 22.5 decor but you should only attempt this if you can get stable into space or have a gold vulcano tamed

[Lawnmower Man]

3 hours ago, GemeinerJack said:

Just as a rand note for metal tiles everywhere: gold or niobium has a 50% decor bonus, so the tiles can get up to 22.5 decor but you should only attempt this if you can get stable into space or have a gold vulcano tamed

Yeah, I was lucky in that I got both a gold and a copper volcano and have been spoiled by the mass of refined metal, even before breaching the surface.  On the other hand, the gold volcano is kinda wrecking one of my ice biomes, even though it's encased in insulated ceramic.  I need to get in there and suck the heat out, but I've been working with the copper instead for now, because it's closer and easier.

13 hours ago, Neotuck said:

I'll admit this pic is from debug mode and I model my survival bases based on this design and this was done before QoL so there wasn't any carpet tiles at the time

yes to all 3 questions

 

Yes the double rec machines are necessary, or yes you just like to show off and maintain symmetry?

[Neotuck]

symmetry