Sandstone biome only Challenge: How many dupes can be sustained.

[MustardWarrior]

So here'e an idea what if you never left the sandstone biome, how many dupes could you support in way that is sustainable?

I guess you can get some acorns and from what I understand the ethanol cycle is self sustaining?  So if you keep getting acorns you support some dupes like that.

Also obviously oxyferns from the pod are also going to be able to sustain a small number of dupes too.

Okay but beyond just waiting for more acorns and oxyferns from the pod there are other things you can do too.

So here's what I'm thinking, you have to hold out until you get some drecko eggs from the pod, once that happens you build up a farm of glossy dreckos with the hope of melting the plastic into naptha and the naptha into sour gas and then condensing that into natural gas obviously feeding them on wild mealwood.

So getting drecko eggs at some point seems pretty likely.  But where do you get a sustainable source of heat.  There are only so many metal refining operations and you can only make a kiln out of copper ore so many times before you have turned all of your ore into refined metal.  So I think in order for it to be totally sustainable you have to hold out until you get some iron ore from the pod.  Once you have iron ore you can make some steel and once you have some steel you can remake and melt steel kilns as many times as you want.  You would just have to get sage hatches and make enough food to feed them enough to get enough coal to be able to continuously remelt steel kilns in a vacuum.

[Gurgel]

My guess is "none". You need those geysers or you run out of resources eventually. Only exception may be a map with enough Oxyferns to keep one dupe alive.

[mathmanican]

With or without liquid duplication. With it, its really a question of CPU power and how laggy you deem is playable.

[asdf11784]

You'll only really be limited by how big the sandstone biome is. If you were trying to max out the number of dupes, you'd probably start making choices like having no beds and no mess hall because they don't really provide anything useful for sustainability and take up space.

 

If you're trying to be as space efficient as possible, then most likely you'll be using pacus for food and morbs for oxygen - since slimelung isn't lethal anymore, you don't even need to bother turning the polluted oxygen into oxygen (your dupes aren't doing anything useful anyway so who cares about the slimelung debuffs). If you wanted to it's possible to turn the polluted oxygen into liquid oxygen and then back into oxygen to deal with slimelung, but it won't be worth the space if you're trying to maintain as many dupes as possible.

 

Now.. since we don't really need any infrastructure to do much of anything with this kind of setup (other than what you need to set it up int the first place).. I'm going to say you can support *A LOT* of dupes (>100). The pacus don't need to be fed anything (they create an egg before they die of starvation), the morbs provide free oxygen and you can just let them roam freely throughout your base since you don't care about slimelung. Probably the limiting factor will be the number of pacus you can farm before it gets overcrowded, and then planting as many wild plants as you can for free food.

[MustardWarrior]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

With or without liquid duplication. With it, its really a question of CPU power and how laggy you deem is playable.

No liquid duplication and no morbs.

Also you will run out of algae for your pacus so I don't see how that is sustainable.

[mathmanican]

23 minutes ago, MustardWarrior said:

No liquid duplication and no morbs.

Also you will run out of algae for your pacus so I don't see how that is sustainable.

Once we get a shove vole from the printing pod, here is an option. 

• Have every dupe ranch as many shove voles as possible (build one grooming station per dupe in a 2 by 3 room). Limit dirt introduction to barely keep voles alive, and get out 2 eggs per life cycle (if possible). This gets all the food calories needed, and allows for expansion.
• Let all the extra food turn to rot and sublimate to polluted oxygen, and be used to keep the voles alive (converting polluted dirt to dirt). 
• Let pips plant mealwood everywhere else on the asteroid to capture PO2 as well (if the PO2 from the meat is not enough). 
• Don't bother with air deodorizers, as you can breathe PO2.
• Don't bother with beds or toilets, rather put a mesh tile below your grooming stations and stack them vertically from top of map to bottom and collect the pee at the bottom (and have someone mop it up once in a while for extra PO2 sublimation.  

If you don't like the shove vole option, then go with pips and wild grown mealwood - letting most of it off gas for PO2 production.  

Eventually, any of these options will result in too much lag to keep playing, so we're back to CPU speed, and personal preference on lag, being the key limiter.  

[Coolthulhu]

Depends partly on your hardware.

Ranching scales TERRIBLY at high object count because ONI uses some sort of coroutine for AI, which makes AI trigger at framerate dependent intervals. If you have a lot of critters, your critters will spend ages realizing they're being called to the grooming station.

In my 20 dupe colony with 60 hatches, this got so serious that my ranching times were well over 300% of what they should be. I can watch a dupe clap for 20 seconds before the hatch takes the damn hint.

[Grimgaw]

3 hours ago, MustardWarrior said:

Also you will run out of algae for your pacus so I don't see how that is sustainable.

Tame Pacu doesn't need any algae to survive whole lifetime of 25 cycles. Algae is only used to increase it's egg production beyond the guaranteed one (and polluted dirt I guess).

[MustardWarrior]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Once we get a shove vole from the printing pod, here is an option. 

• Have every dupe ranch as many shove voles as possible (build one grooming station per dupe in a 2 by 3 room). Limit dirt introduction to barely keep voles alive, and get out 2 eggs per life cycle (if possible). This gets all the food calories needed, and allows for expansion.
• Let all the extra food turn to rot and sublimate to polluted oxygen, and be used to keep the voles alive (converting polluted dirt to dirt). 
• Let pips plant mealwood everywhere else on the asteroid to capture PO2 as well (if the PO2 from the meat is not enough). 
• Don't bother with air deodorizers, as you can breathe PO2.
• Don't bother with beds or toilets, rather put a mesh tile below your grooming stations and stack them vertically from top of map to bottom and collect the pee at the bottom (and have someone mop it up once in a while for extra PO2 sublimation.  

If you don't like the shove vole option, then go with pips and wild grown mealwood - letting most of it off gas for PO2 production.  

Eventually, any of these options will result in too much lag to keep playing, so we're back to CPU speed, and personal preference on lag, being the key limiter.  

Yeah I guess I didn't even consider letting stuff rot into PO2.

Don't dupes consume like 60kg of oxygen per cycle though.  Doesn't one meal lice only give you like 1kg of PO2?  So if we figure 600*0.1 = 60kg of PO2 per cycle per duplicant consumed.  So that means if we include pee we need 12*(60-6.7) =  = 644.4 mealwood for a single dupe?

 

3 hours ago, Grimgaw said:

Tame Pacu doesn't need any algae to survive whole lifetime of 25 cycles. Algae is only used to increase it's egg production beyond the guaranteed one (and polluted dirt I guess).

Yeah looking into it it seems like the pacus can sustain their population without algae and every time they die you get meat and lots of free eggshells in the process.  I guess I'll look into that for some free meat/lime production.

[metallichydra]

it would be so much better if we had a subforum for challenges