A variety of questions I need help with.

[ButterStuffed]

Hey, I'm trying to figure out a couple things about this game and am not clever enough to figure it out myself within a reasonable amount of time. I was hoping that some of you fine people would be able to help me out.

1. Would an anti entropy nullifier be able to cool down say 3 electrolyzers and a couple of air pumps? I know it says it can nullify about 80 kdtu on the wiki but things never seem to work out how I imagine they will on paper when I put them into action so I was hoping for some clarification.

2. Is sleet wheat more efficient than bristle blossoms in terms of how much it consumes to produce? I don't seem to see many posts about sleet wheat farms and I always assumed it was either because it's not worth it or it's just too complicated.

3. What is the point of the mini liquid pump? The description implies that it's more power efficient but it sucks in 1/10 of what the regular pump does at 1/4 of the power usage. Am I really bad at math or wouldn't the regular pump still be way better?

4. Is there any point in breeding higher level shine bugs? I've been trying to use them to light up my dupe bedrooms and reducing the negative decor effects of heavi-watt wire but I hardly see people use them for that. Is it just not worth it or something?

5. What's the most efficient way to schedule a dupes day? I usually have 4 dupes in a single schedule with 3 blocks of sleeping, 1 block of bathroom break, and 2 blocks of leisure. Every 4 dupes afterwards has the schedule moved up 2 blocks so that no 4 dupes are using the facilities or the break room at the same time. Is that sufficient?

Apologies if my questions appear.. dumb. Also, thanks in advance if you answered my questions.

[Yoma_Nosme]

1. Build the electrolyzer with gold amalgam pumps as well, they won't overheat anymore when you pump geyser water in them. Separate o2 from h2. Cool the o2 with the aetn if you want, there are plenty ways of cooling. Rest is lost cause. 

2. You can harvest wild sleet wheat and live happily. Sleet wheat farms are late game because of the requirements. Berries are almost as early game as could be. But remember berries and mushrooms make same quality food for less hassle.

3. The mini pump is more efficient when there's less than 500g per tile left. The big pump would suck packets with 100g, 10g, 1g, 100mg, and so on and still use the full energy drain.

4. Not so sure. I don't think most people breed them. I for one just build a lure where I want to have some solar panels and live happily without caring anymore.

5. Sounds good. Just take care they get the +3 morale boost(or was it +4) idk anymore how much recreation is needed for this, look it up in the tooltips. 

Cheers. Enjoy your game

[PhailRaptor]

56 minutes ago, ButterStuffed said:

2. Is sleet wheat more efficient than bristle blossoms in terms of how much it consumes to produce? I don't seem to see many posts about sleet wheat farms and I always assumed it was either because it's not worth it or it's just too complicated.

If you do manage to pull it off, you're pretty much set for the rest of the game.  It is a complex process, requiring precision cooling of irrigation water right at the freezing point.  It is difficult to engineer a system to produce and deliver it, let alone actually construct it.  It also has a very substantial Dirt requirement as fertilizer, which is a substance that in the current state of the game is similarly complicated to produce in the necessary volume.

58 minutes ago, ButterStuffed said:

4. Is there any point in breeding higher level shine bugs? I've been trying to use them to light up my dupe bedrooms and reducing the negative decor effects of heavi-watt wire but I hardly see people use them for that. Is it just not worth it or something?

It's a similar problem.  You have to provide some very complex, and some very limited resources in order to micromanage your way through the breeding chain to reach the more complicated Shine Bugs, and frankly the Decor payout they provide is just not worth it.  You can easily provide similar levels of "Decor overkill" with just Statues and Paintings.

[Gus Smedstad]

I’m at cycle 1080 and I’m still struggling with my sleet wheat farm. My Dupes mostly eat barbecue and pepper bread, but sometimes they have to settle for stuffed berries. For reference I have 20 dupes; what you can support will depend on your population.

The obvious issue with sleet wheat is the cold, but the dirt requirement is an issue in the late game when all the initial dirt is long gone, and you’re relying on dirt produced by sieving polluted water and composting the resulting polluted dirt. CO2 is valuable now because of the CO2 + water -> polluted water -> water + polluted dirt cycle.

For a while I had that under control, but then the balance of my base shifted and my system started sending warmer (50 C) water to the sleet wheat farm, and the dual-AETN setup can no longer cool the water fast enough. I need to convert the cooling system to an aquatuner / steam turbine setup, but I’ve got more urgen things going on.

The point of sleet wheat is mostly food quality, and thus morale. If you’re solely interested in calories, stuffed berries are much easier and more reliable, and depend only on water. Generally there are enough water sources (cool steam geysers, polluted water produced by petroleum and natural gas generators) to make water a non-issue in the late game. If you’re still struggling with water (which is definitely a concern for much of the early and mid game), sleet wheat isn’t going to help.

Yosma’s comment about mushrooms is way off; fried mushrooms are a morale +1 food, and stuffed berries are a morale +12 food. Not remotely comparable. Fried mushrooms are an early game food because the resource requirements are very low when slime is still a plentiful resource, and mushrooms are tolerant of high temperatures. Later in the game slime mostly runs out, cooling to 30 C is easy, and water’s unlimited.

The point of small pumps is the size. I’ve yet to build any, but theoretically they’re useful for compact builds where water or gas volume moved isn’t very important, just that you’re pumping at all.

I’m currently running 4 shifts of 5 dupes each. I give them an extra block of downtime in the morning, mainly so can use recreational facilities. The problem with downtime blocks before sleep period is often they get used just getting back to the center of the base, and the dupes don’t reliably get any morale boosts from recreation and showers that way.

 

[hacksaw12]

One mini pump advantage is the small packet size when you're working with touchy liquids like LOX or LH2. The 1kg packets won't change state in your pipes, breaking them.

[Sasza22]

6 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

1. Would an anti entropy nullifier be able to cool down say 3 electrolyzers and a couple of air pumps? I know it says it can nullify about 80 kdtu on the wiki but things never seem to work out how I imagine they will on paper when I put them into action so I was hoping for some clarification.

I was using this kind of setup a few times already. With 2 electrolizers it ended pumping pretty cool oxygen in my base which was nice for keeping it at a right temperature. Using insulated pipes on top of that might make your base pretty cold. While i never did the math on that my setup remained at a low temperature for 400+ cycles.

6 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

3. What is the point of the mini liquid pump? The description implies that it's more power efficient but it sucks in 1/10 of what the regular pump does at 1/4 of the power usage. Am I really bad at math or wouldn't the regular pump still be way better?

Basically whenever you need to pump small amounts of liquid, like from nat gas generators. Similar liquid gas pumps are perfect for managing gas produced by fertilizer makers. The low pawer usage makes it easier to manage power load.

6 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

4. Is there any point in breeding higher level shine bugs? I've been trying to use them to light up my dupe bedrooms and reducing the negative decor effects of heavi-watt wire but I hardly see people use them for that. Is it just not worth it or something?

Iirc most shine bug morphs other than the basic one have higher decor bonus (+50 instead of +30) up to the nega bug that has +80 and a longer lifecycle (75 cycles instead of 25). The radiant bug has even higher decor if you manage to get one (you feed them with diamonds). The decor amount they produce could be in theory used to nullify negative decor from heavi watt in industrial areas.

Ranching shinebugs can be annoying. If they escape the ranch they might lay eggs uncontrollably leading to a population explosion and eating up your fps. Some people avoid doing it for that reason.

6 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

5. What's the most efficient way to schedule a dupes day? I usually have 4 dupes in a single schedule with 3 blocks of sleeping, 1 block of bathroom break, and 2 blocks of leisure. Every 4 dupes afterwards has the schedule moved up 2 blocks so that no 4 dupes are using the facilities or the break room at the same time. Is that sufficient?

More leisure blocks add to morale of dupes. If you make a schedule for high level jobs like tenured scinetists or astronauts you could add more leisure to keep their morale high (max is +4 from 5 downtime blocks). You could also make sure each shcedule has 1 dupe doing a vital task like science or oil well operation so that there is always one dupe doing it when others are sleeping.

[Neotuck]

A low tech option for sleet wheat cooling is to use wheezeworts, you don't even have to precool the water

This may seem like a lot of wheezeworts but if you have an ice world within rocket range you can get all the wort seeds you need, also the printing pod can provide some wort seeds too if you're lucky

60 sleet wheat with farmer's touch can feed an army of dupes with +5 quality food

[Vampyre_by]

1) Yes. It's a pretty simple setup

 

[Guest]

On 3/16/2019 at 1:38 AM, ButterStuffed said:

3. What is the point of the mini liquid pump? The description implies that it's more power efficient but it sucks in 1/10 of what the regular pump does at 1/4 of the power usage. Am I really bad at math or wouldn't the regular pump still be way better?

Couple of examples where I have found use for mini-pumps.

Small refinery room. Size makes it advantageous and the volume of gas that needs to be pumped is small.

LH2 and LOX production. Again, size makes it advantageous but the limited volume it pumps is part of the build.

 

On 3/16/2019 at 1:38 AM, ButterStuffed said:

4. Is there any point in breeding higher level shine bugs? I've been trying to use them to light up my dupe bedrooms and reducing the negative decor effects of heavi-watt wire but I hardly see people use them for that. Is it just not worth it or something?

So the 2 main things I get from farming shine bugs is light and decor. If you are farming them for light to use with a solar panel, there is no point to the high level morphs. If you are farming for decor, the top morph is like +90 decor and you get +15 from the light and they live for 75 cycles. I haven't had a bug farm in a while, but the last time I did not have to feed them special food to advance them to the higher morphs.

[Oozinator]

1 hour ago, nonoxyl said:

Small refinery room. Size makes it advantageous and the volume of gas that needs to be pumped is small.

 

That would be a bad move, to build ref room that way, without any decor, because dupes spend much time there..

[Guest]

Depends on the moral requirements of the dupe using it. My only dupe can meet their moral requirements with no decor bonus.

[Oozinator]

10 hours ago, nonoxyl said:

Depends on the moral requirements of the dupe using it. My only dupe can meet their moral requirements with no decor bonus.

WTF why is "showered" working for you. Showers are bugged for me, dupes never wash "grimy" away..
Mhh that makes not really sense 30+ morale, when your single dupe has to handle jobs in such areas.
Never socialized, really weird..

[Sasza22]

5 hours ago, Oozinator said:

WTF why is "showered" working for you. Showers are bugged for me, dupes never wash "grimy" away..

Are you sure dupes end showering. They sometimes jump out right before finishing to do something else. Also walking into any kind of liquid can make the grimy again iirc. So if you have a waterlock it might cause a problem.

[Neotuck]

11 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

Are you sure dupes end showering. They sometimes jump out right before finishing to do something else. Also walking into any kind of liquid can make the grimy again iirc. So if you have a waterlock it might cause a problem.

This is why I double the default "bath time" on my schedule.  A showered dupe will start working even if they are still scheduled for bathing.

I don't think water locks cause grimy.  They cause soaked and soggy feet.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Oozinator said:

WTF why is "showered" working for you. Showers are bugged for me, dupes never wash "grimy" away

really? that seems strange. I assume they complete the shower errand?

7 hours ago, Oozinator said:

Never socialized, really weird..

My dupe missed it in the previous screen, but she does get socialized all by herself at the water cooler. She must hear voices...

[Gus Smedstad]

“Grimy” is not a problem. Showering is what gives +3 morale, not removing Grimy. Grimy is what motivates a Duplicant to take a shower, provided it’s bath or leisure time. You actually want Grimy or they won’t shower.

I’ve been completely haphazard in my approach to decor, and my morale is sky-high across the board. My dupes vary between 30 and 40 morale as I write this.

For example, Catalina is at the bottom with 30 morale. +16 Pepper Bread, +6 Great Hall, +2 Danced, +2 Bedroom, +2 Three Shift Break, +2 Washroom, +1 base morale, -1 Ugly decor. The third Leisure break is in the morning, before bathtime. Often it gets used for a shower and the bathtime doesn’t get used, but it’s available for dancing if the Dupe didn’t get grimy.

Rowan is at the other end at 40; the differences are +3 Showered, and +6 Nice decor.

90% of my decor is in the great hall and and the bedrooms. I have one ladder with lots of statues, but it’s in a secondary area and dupes only go through it sometimes. I’ve got a hallway with lots of displayed space artifacts in my surface base - some of those are ridiculous, +90 radius 9, +126 radius 10.

The museum hallway isn’t very effective, since dupes run through it, but moving some of the space objects to the great hall where they’d be more effective is a very low priority since morale is so high anyway.

[lee1026]

As a rule of thumb, if you are eating either BBQ or pepper bread, decor is a concept that you don't have to care about. You only need 20 morale for the top tier job (astronauts are not counted because they are simply removed from the morale system once they enter the rocket). BBQ or Pepper Bread both give +16. You only need the great hall bonus or bedroom+washroom.

 

The -15 stress from  BBQ's soul food effect will make the concept of morale even more academic.

[Guest]

add in -20% stress from sunny disposition and its not a big deal even if you miss the mark on moral several cycles in a row.

5 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

astronauts are not counted because they are simply removed from the morale system once they enter the rocket

I am very much hoping that this will not remain the case. Astronauts being removed from the colony when on mission and being able to leave astronauts permanently in the rocket is just lame imo.

[goatt]

1 ATNE can reduce 69 degree of a full time working electrolyzer, and the number is 23 degree if there are three electrolyzer. So finally output is 70-23 = 47 C. You will have 47c oxygen if you cool both oxygen and hydrogen. If you cool Oxygen only, you will get 40 c oxygen. And it’s a good temp oxygen for me. Cooling ALL the output gas is not efficient, as some gas will get warmed in warm area in the end, and your cooling that gas will be a waste. I would encourage regional cooling. Just use a woot to cool the part you wanna cool the most.

4. Higher level shine bugs are fun, but not efficient. Better bugs don’t provide more light for solar panels. But breeding higher level bugs are not hard, it just takes some time.