Adventures in Living in Exosuits

[beowulf2010]

 

So, a few days ago I saw a post by @Saturnus talking about how game changing it was for him when he switched over to having his dupes basically live in their exosuits.  Between this and @mathmanican basically challenging me to do it by wanting to see my finished design, I finally took the plunge.

Spoiler

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/107566-when-do-you-set-up-electroylyzers/?do=findComment&comment=1212673

A couple notes of discovery:

• While 1 pump in a sealed based with a 16 terrarium bottled polluted water O2 generator can feed 8 suits when they are used only for leaving the base, this is not enough O2 for the same 8 dupes when they are in the suits for everything but sleeping.
• It takes a while to convert a base to living in suits so it's better to plan on it from the beginning.
• As per the previous point, build your O2 generator before trying to switch everybody over.
• If you do multiple beds per room, make sure have everyone on different shifts so your builder dupes that don't live in that room can sneak in to make modifications.

Because I tried to do everything at once, I had a few instances where guys were stuck in their rooms unable to leave because the docks didn't have enough O2 to fill the suit back up. Luckily, no starvation deaths or messes to clean up.

Here's a few pictures. I didn't both doing ventilation of plumbing overlays cause they're just a haphazard spaghetti mess that'll I'll clean up in a fresh base once the preview hits. And yes, I sandboxed in the viscogel for the unneeded (this build) "airlocks" on the bedrooms purely because I didn't want to take another few cycles to set up water/oil ones. 

Here's the overview of my new style residential block. In my next base, I'm going to set up 8 of these "apartments", 4 per side with a 2 dupe bathroom on the middle "floor". I'm going to use the printer room and the room directly to the left as the CO2 catcher room and wall these 6 floors off and insulate/cool them. Everything else will be exposed to whatever temperatures and gasses want to be there.

Spoiler

Here

Here's a zoomed in section of my 2 dupe bedrooms: (I put my drecko ranch on hold for the 40 or so cycles it took to fully convert my base so there normal beds will be changed over to the comfy beds soon. Also, steel production has been delayed so I haven't tamed my gold volcano yet so imagine the 2 outside statues as refined metal ones instead. What can I say, I prefer a variety of art styles within my need for symmetry.)

Spoiler

And here's my initial thought of a single bedroom and using the rest of the space for a 1 dupe public bathroom.  I'm not too fond of this so I'm probably going to just turn these into 2 dupe bedrooms that mirror the ones on the left. Too much spaghetti...

Spoiler

Any other lessons out there that I may have missed that I should learn before doing this again in my next base? Also, outside of a "public" area around the printer and a CO2 catcher at the bottom of the residential block, is there anything else that you all leave with the sealed/air conditioned part?

[Lurve]

My dupes live with a lot of suit stank. They *can* eat, poop and bathe in their suits, but it doesn't make any sense and I don't like that, so my base typically has a "core" with bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, great hall, rec room and research area, and several long rows of suits leading elsewhere. I try to seal off the base about the time a typical game would start building gas storage, so I can leave the exterior to stew in whatever. It's a real sewer out there, let me tell you.

You've mentioned the big changes to gameplay: if you don't have a large surplus of oxygen your suit tanks will back up and trap your dupes.

There's also a change to dupe selection: the -3 athletics trait on top of the suit malus renders a dupe basically stationary. It's not worth waiting for them to stat up, no matter how attractive the rest of the dupe is.

Also, multiple bases become so logistically complicated that they're just not worth it. Plan for a specific number of dupes (I like 24, if I can find the water to support them) and allocate space accordingly.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, beowulf2010 said:

Any other lessons out there that I may have missed

Here's a few more things to consider.

• They can sleep in their suit as well.  Keeps the showered buff, and allows you to use glass tiles everywhere to let in lots of extra decor.
  Spoiler

   

   

• If they start idling too much, they will probably start congregating by the exosuit stations.  Have something else planned for them to do if they run out of work (like run on a hamster wheel).  I love this because I set my wheels on priority 2, and then things that the sweeper arms should do, I put on priority 1. The dupes never do them. 
• Make sure you have O2 backed up, with extra reserved. You don't want to run out. Also, running out of power will trap your dupes inside as well. For me, I never see the "idle" message (because of the wheels) unless the dupes get stuck in their bedroom, or ride a regolith elevator (great post on reddit), or somehow get trapped somewhere.  

Have fun.  

2 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

While 1 pump in a sealed based with a 16 terrarium bottled polluted water O2 generator can feed 8 suits when they are used only for leaving the base, this is not enough O2 for the same 8 dupes when they are in the suits for everything but sleeping.

An automated MOGOM will make you more than enough PO2 for this. I like the simplicity of electrolyzers, so here is what my current O2 generation room looks like.

Spoiler

It outputs 2000g full time (till it backs up), and each set of pumps connects up to 8 stations (I use 12 dupes with 16 suits). The storage is for hydrogen. Never had an O2 shortage. I just start this thing up a few cycles before I move to exosuits. If interested, I can share how I get this self-primed without much effort (I'm sure you've got your own favorites on O2 production). 

 

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Lurve said:

 There's also a change to dupe selection: the -3 athletics trait on top of the suit malus renders a dupe basically stationary. It's not worth waiting for them to stat up, no matter how attractive the rest of the dupe is.

Yeah. I don't take dupes with negative attributes anyway, but even a new 0 athletics dupe is fairly worthless for the 10 cycles or so to get exosuit training. 

@mathmanican, I agree. Those "Dupe idle" warnings are invaluable when you design a base to never have idle dupes.

Thanks for the warning about brown outs. I had actually forgotten that, like shutoff valves, they stop working with no power even though they don't actually seem to draw any power. 

As for oxygen, I use a 2 pump infinite gas storage room to hold any surplus and full any empty or not full packets. 

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a rough estimate of how many dupes worth of exosuits can be run using a single gas line and 3 blocks of sleep? I'm pushing up to 16 dupes soon and would like to know if I need a second line sooner than later. 

[Gurgel]

Number of pumps is actually pretty simple: A pump pushes 500g/sec max, so one pump in pure oxygen can just barely serve 5 regular dupes if nothing ever goes missing or wrong. For full-time living in suits, better make that 1 pump per 4 dupes or so. And if you need to filter in addition (getting rid of Hydrogen), something like 1 pump for 3 dupes may be better. You can still use tanks and automation to not have them run permanently.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Number of pumps is actually pretty simple: A pump pushes 500g/sec max, so one pump in pure oxygen can just barely serve 5 regular dupes if nothing ever goes missing or wrong. For full-time living in suits, better make that 1 pump per 4 dupes or so. And if you need to filter in addition (getting rid of Hydrogen), something like 1 pump for 3 dupes may be better. You can still use tanks and automation to not have them run permanently.

 With the way I do my O2 lines, I'm not too concerned with how many pumps I need cause I make the infrastructure necessary with enough redundancy to keep the pipes completely full 100% of the time, even through short electrical failures. I'm more concerned about not having to reroute O2 lines when the first line fails to keep up with demand. 

Now that I have time to write stuff down, napkin math (actually, Post-Its) is telling me that just under 11.5 exosuit docks can be kept full by one line. But this is assuming a couple things that I'm not sure are true or could change based purely on dupe behavior. 

Assumption 1) The dupe is out of the suit for just about the full 3 blocks I currently have scheduled for their sleep (75 of the 600 seconds each day.) and only those 3 cycles. 

Assumption 2) The exosuit only takes in the amount of O2 the dupe should have breathed in.

So this means a dupe breaths in the suit for 525 seconds per cycle in the suit (52.5kg per cycle, or 87.5g/s averaged over the full 600 seconds). A single gas line can supply 11.43 simultaneous 87.5g loads. 

If I got this right, I'll probably round all the way down to 8 docks per line just because that fits in so well with all the other calculations that play well with 8 dupe population blocks. But 11 docks should give me a buffer of 22.5 full packets a day that are not needed. This combined with 4 shifts "should" be enough. 

Any obvious errors or assumptions? 

[Gurgel]

26 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

Any obvious errors or assumptions? 

Lets see: 75 sec of 600 sec no need for pumped oxygen. That means 52.5kg oxygen per suit needed. That means one full line at 600kg/cycle can supply 600/52.5 suits, i.e. 11.42 suits. Hence using one full line for 11 suits under these conditions will be sufficient. Your buffer will be 22.5kg, i.e. 22.5 packets. Looks good. 

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Lets see: 75 sec of 600 sec no need for pumped oxygen. That means 52.5kg oxygen per suit needed. That means one full line at 600kg/cycle can supply 600/52.5 suits, i.e. 11.42 suits. Hence using one full line for 11 suits under these conditions will be sufficient. Your buffer will be 22.5kg, i.e. 22.5 packets. Looks good. 

Cool. You know feeling when you're doing something that you know you're doing it right but you have that nagging feeling that you're forgetting something? Yeah. That was me. 

[Gurgel]

9 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

Cool. You know feeling when you're doing something that you know you're doing it right but you have that nagging feeling that you're forgetting something? Yeah. That was me. 

I do know that feeling well