How to build an ugly base and make 11 tons of steel at Cycle 100

[camelot]

Be warned. This might be the ugliest 100 Cycle base you have ever seen.

Debris is everywhere, no art, almost no decor and main rooms filled with chlorine and carbon dioxide. And hell, this colony might has 10 tons of plastic but 2 dupes still need to sleep in a tiny, temporary barrack that suppose to be a recreation room. No comfy bed for dupes!

1. It's a very small and compact base for 18 dupes currently. The impact of the base to the environment is small.

2. Beside basic and essential rooms, it also has a pacu farm, an auto critter kill room and auto resource distribution system

3. In the industrial area, the notable things are a refinery room using crude oil, a compact oxygen cooling chamber and a auto pepper farm

4. I searched and chose a seed with at least 1 water geyser, 1 polluted water geyser, 1 metal volcano, 1 volcano in toolnotincluded (not reveal their location). I feel quite lucky that 4 geysers/volcanoes are not far from each other. Still I didn't use any of them at cycle 100

5. First important thing to setup was auto mushroom farm. After that, destroy the mealwood farms as soon as possible to improve food's efficiency per chores, hence more free time for dupes

6. When food was secured, go look for metal volcano. I found one very close to the base, felt so lucky and tried to tame it around cycle 55. Unfortunately, it was activated for like 10 cycles and gave me around 5000kg Copper. Very unlucky indeed. The progress would be much faster if you could get 40 cycles worth of refined metal (~20 tons)

7. At the same time, try to reach oil biome ASAP. Crude oil is essential for early plastic, great steel refinery's coolant and taming meta volcanoes. I started refine plastic around cycle 60 (was prioritized meta volcano first, damn!). Later, I finished Transit Tube Access to oil biome to quickly got all the fossil up and started to refine steel around cycle 75

8. Some overlays screenshots

Spoiler

Gas overlay

Power overlay

Temperature  overlay (~25 degree at bristle farm)

Plumbing overlay

Vent overlay

Decor overlay

Germ overlay

Room overlay

Industrial automation overlay

Living area automation overlay

Conveyor overlay

9. Some notable setup screenshots

Spoiler

Distribution system and critter kill room setup

Auto/semi auto pacu farming

Hope you like it.

[SamLogan]

You did a lot of things in only 100 cycles congratz.

But I don't understand why the reason of the "11 tons steel"?

[Gus Smedstad]

Could you explain what we're seeing here in the "tamed volcano" image? I have my copper volcano thoroughly under control, but it went through several stages before it became something stable and usable. I'm curious what your early game solution here is.

I see an auto sweeper, but no cooling for the sweeper, and no conveyor loader. Is the chamber in a vacuum, or is there an atmosphere in there?

I'm guessing your'e using a pool of liquid to cool the metal, and pumping the heat elsewhere. Where is the heat going? Are you using water or oil as your pool in the volcano?

My personal early solution to a copper volcano was just to flood it with water from a nearby polluted water pool. No cooling at all. With a large enough pool of water, it takes a long time before it starts turning to steam and dirt. Eventually of course this breaks down, and it's dumping heat into the nearby area, but it's the quickest and dirtiest solution I can think of.

[WanderingKid]

First: NICE WORK!  It's tough to get that much done quickly.  However, I personally feel that you've over-built for steel at C100. 

EDIT: Spoiler tags hate me.

As an example of what's possible (and this I feel can be significantly improved):

There's a few things I'd recommend if you want to try to optimize your build times.

• Ignore all geysers.  There's plenty of loose materials and water on the map that you don't want to waste time on the infrastructure.
• Gravity drop your debris to the bottom of the base and use plants for a décor bomb instead of ranching for morale.  Ranching takes a tremendous amount of time and resources both in building and maintaining.
  • You can send astronauts up eating raw mushrooms at 0% stress.
• Try to build once, and re-use areas.  For example, my mushroom area starts with planters which are removed (as it's faster than uprooting) and when swapping to shrooms.
• Skip tubes, use firepoles and use them early.  The power they require is excessive and uses up a lot of material, and you'd rather use that power for your earlier steel operations.  Stick a presser in an ice biome with some wires for the ton or so you'll actually need.

I had done this up with pictures and everything but I can never get spoiler tags to behave right.  If you'd like more specific examples I'll be happy to provide them.  Good luck!  Speed running this stuff is fun.  On a side note, be aware.  The fastest I've been able to get a dupe to be able to be an astronaut is ~Cycle 116, so that's going to be your actual bottleneck.

[camelot]

10 hours ago, SamLogan said:

You did a lot of things in only 100 cycles congratz.

But I don't understand why the reason of the "11 tons steel"?

Steel is good for bunker doors and marketing purpose I guess 

9 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Could you explain what we're seeing here in the "tamed volcano" image? 

I see an auto sweeper, but no cooling for the sweeper, and no conveyor loader. Is the chamber in a vacuum, or is there an atmosphere in there?

Here's the normal view. It's really a simple build. Vacuum in the chamber, a pool of crude oil, some radiant pipes from refined metal, 1 sweeper, 1 loader and 1 door that blocked dupes' access (sometime a gas pump too, for safety reason). Sweeper and loader are set to be activated at different time by clocks (so refined copper could be cooled down as much as possible). 

This build is stable, I've built it in every play and only get some minor issues. The metal volcanoes often have average output around 300-350g/s (500kg per active cycle, 200kg if including inactive cycles) and that heat could be easily deleted in various method

For me, I use that hot polluted water to feed the fertilizer makers, pepper farm and water sieves. The rest will be vented to different side of polluted water pool (far from the pump), so cooler water at the pump side and hotter water at the other side. Eventually, the volcanoes will become dormant, and the temperature of the pool will be equal and stable.

In my experience, with enough water (my pool at this moment isn't that big) you can stabilize the refined metal's temperature. It should never be over 80 degree at active cycle and should be around 50 degree when volcanoes are dormant. Pump new water to the pool when needed (I didn't build that logic and pump at this base, but it's simple: have a liquid shutoff connected to a temperature sensor)

[SharraShimada]

I dont want to brag, but without any rush, i start making steel around cycle 120-150, with already plenty of plastic, a stable food ressource and water in storage. All in a clean oxygen flooded base with everything dupes ever wanted. 

What i´m trying to say is, its not that hard, if you figured out, how to build a stable system. Everyhing goes smooth. 

Okay, it depends on the difficulty settings, but its possible.

[camelot]

@WanderingKid

I saw your play toward rocket, very cool try indeed.

However at this moment, I don't feel the need to go to space very much in mid game. For me, it's quite tedious and doesn't offer much. The only thing I'm interested in mid game from space is Vacillator Recharge (I also don't want to touch steam turbine until it got some reworks)

Also, when rushing toward astronaut, you might need to allow him to do all the research since you need to master tenured scientist asap. So 1 super dupe at the expense of the others. But it's only my guess at best. If you could share stats about your dupes' skill, that would be very helpful. Here are some of mine, basically ~10 of digging, construction and athletics

Spoiler

 

So my next main goal is to build bunker doors and solar farm. The rocket would be after that.

And thanks for your recommendations. I did the same as you suggest most of the time. Beside copper volcano, I collected resource only from a nat gas geyser, just because it's very near the way to oil biome. And the ranch I mostly focus on is pacu (only have 1 part time rancher)

Also, some screenshots of your living and industrial are would be very helpful

26 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

I dont want to brag, but without any rush, i start making steel around cycle 120-150, with already plenty of plastic, a stable food ressource and water in storage. All in a clean oxygen flooded base with everything dupes ever wanted. 

What i´m trying to say is, its not that hard, if you figured out, how to build a stable system. Everyhing goes smooth. 

Okay, it depends on the difficulty settings, but its possible.

@SharraShimada

Yes, this is my main point. Majority of players could do this, there's nothing very special. I feel that not to explore early and inefficient farming/food method like mealwood, musher are things that held players back.

Maybe in the May update, they would buff the disease, nerf the exosuits so it might be much harder to explore early. I still remember the feeling when playing this game before geysers were added. Much more harder.

[goatt]

I wish I can do what you’ve done. I just can’t overcome distraction from ugliness (not lack of decor). I’ve always had to ponder over design decisions, and fix small aesthetics imperfection. But you did it.

[Gurgel]

If you have a water geyser _and_ a polluted water geyser, things become very easy. If you know in advance that you have them and where they are, then even easier.

[flapee]

I took different approach on this play-through. To maximize duplicants effectiveness, the travel distance was reduced by CMB™ ( compact mini base, expandable to at least 12 dupes ) no ranching, no storage, no power plants = no distractions