Is "no sweat" mode actually harder?

[Daikataro]

So, since a lot of updates came by, I figured I would start a colony in no sweat mode, just to see what was new. Honestly I was expecting stuff like dupes mining and building faster, squares dropping 100% or close to 100% of their mass, you know, game in general being more forgiving... Damn was I wrong.

I had two starter biomes that were absolute garbage, one with about 10 squares total of clean water, like 4 stories above starter spot, and another one with water directly above my starting camp. Starter dupes were also pretty terribly randomized, with several alergies and loud sleeper ones, and that was just the start...

By day THREE I had completely run out of oxylite and oxygen in general was at roughly 300g concentrations, hadn't I built already a power grid, that was the end of the colony. Day ten and I was all out of food, with muckroots nowhere to be found. Disease works... fine I guess? I dunno how often dupes were meant to be sick, but all I know is that, if I dig up a swamp patch, at least one dupe is going to get sick, no questions asked.

Also my asteroid is certainly nothing to write home about, with only a very small ice biome spawning close, rest surrounded by swamp on both ends, and volcanic as far up and down as the dupes can see. All in all, this was certainly not a "no sweat" experience.

[pacovf]

I think no-sweat mode just changes the morale, calorie and maybe immunity settings for dupes, making them easier to satisfy. World generation is the same no matter what, so you could just get unlucky with your seed, even in "no-sweat" mode.

[Sasza22]

The no sweat mode doesn`t affect the map generation. It`s still possible you get a garbage asteroid with low starting resources and cool steam geysers far away.

What it affects is:
- Hunger - dupes will eat less so food will last for longer
- Morale - low morale will have less of an impact and stress will rise slower
- Germ resistance - the chance a dupe gets sick will be much lower

The oxygen usage doesn`t change. Dupes can die like in all other difficulty options.

8 hours ago, Daikataro said:

Starter dupes were also pretty terribly randomized, with several alergies and loud sleeper ones, and that was just the start...

You know you can reroll starting dupes right?

8 hours ago, Daikataro said:

By day THREE I had completely run out of oxylite and oxygen in general was at roughly 300g concentrations, hadn't I built already a power grid,

The starting oxylite usually lasts for about a few days. I can`t imagine builing a single manual generator with a single oxygen diffuser and one or two batteries being impossible during that time. Unless you are terribly unlucky with the copper ore spawn.

8 hours ago, Daikataro said:

Day ten and I was all out of food, with muckroots nowhere to be found

You can find a lot of muckroots hidden in the rocks. Each crack in the starting biome has a chance to be a muckroot. You just need to mine most of the starting biome and you should be ok in terms of food for about 30 cycles roughly on that difficulty level.

8 hours ago, Daikataro said:

I dunno how often dupes were meant to be sick, but all I know is that, if I dig up a swamp patch, at least one dupe is going to get sick, no questions asked.

The sickness system is pretty random. Each dupe passing by oxygen with germs has a chance to get sick. If about 10 pass through it adds up and at least 1 will be sick. That said early you can ignore the sickness for the most part as all it does is slows them down.

8 hours ago, Daikataro said:

with only a very small ice biome spawning close, rest surrounded by swamp on both ends, and volcanic as far up and down as the dupes can see.

Do you have a screenshot of your base? Maybe there`s some worldgen weirdness going on there.

[Mr.Trueba]

No, it isn't.