I could use some constructive criticism on my previous base

[DrSugarFreeman]

So I just gave up on my newest save because I just screwed my base's air supply, plus Algae finally bottomed out. I got around 80 or so cycles with how I did, and if I had managed my Algae better, and not spread Slimelung like a dip****, then maybe I could have even gone further, but I have no clue because this is only like my fourth or fifth world and I'm still learning. My biggest problem so far is managing my damn algae. I used less Diffusers and Terrariums than my previous worlds and even so I ended up getting nowhere near as far as before. Furthest Ive been is maybe 150.

If I could get some peeps to gloss over my Save and tell me what looks good and what could use improvement, I'd be most appreciative. For the mean time, I'm going to wait for July to end so I can get in on the Launch Upgrade.

Ukrainian Crump-pit.sav

[DemainaNyx]

You can join the development build now if you want.  In Steam, Right click Oxygen Not Included, click Properties, select Beta Tab, opt into launch testing.

 

Honestly though, nothings it horribly wrong with your base.  There are things I wouldn't do, but that doesn't means it's wrong or bad.  The ladder from the bathrooms leading straight into a clean water tank for instance is something I avoid so I don't have dupes accidentally peeing in my clean water.  I never use the oxygen diffuser and instead opt for algae terrariums and deodorizers to oxygenate my base early.  You ran a lot of research but don't really have any need for it yet, meaning that dupe time could've been used for other tasks that could've advanced you along.  Instead of researching you could help dig tunnels or something.  Even the fact that you're cooking meal lice into pickled meal is more dupe time that could be used for other tasks.  If you plant a few more plants they could just live on raw meal lice so long as you have enough dirt which you probably will.  Again, none of these things are horribly wrong, but just that they slow your progress down.

 

First thing, don't worry about slimelung.  It doesn't do anything except slow your dupes down for a few cycles.  Obviously it's much better if they aren't infected with slimelung, but the disease system isn't dire any more so you can just ignore most diseases and just let them run their course without it killing your game.  Previously it used to kill your dupes after 8 cycles, but now they are just slower, so slimelung isn't anything to restart over.  Just put down some deodorizers when you enter a slime biome to convert the polluted oxygen into oxygen and the slimelung will slowly die out over time.  If you want to be faster about it, plant some buddy bud plants.  They give off floral scent germs, which triggers allergies, but also gets rid of slimelung.  In this game, only one type of germ can exist in a tile at a time, so if you spread floral scent where slimelung is, it will get rid of it.  Now, if your dupes have allergies, that could cause a different problem, but it eliminates the germs for 90% of the dupes.

 

As for algae, that is a early game oxygen solution.  After about 50 some cycles, you really want to be moving to electrolyzers as a more consistent source of oxygen since you can set them up once and basically forget about them for the next thousand cycles.  For electrolyzers, you need a consistent source of water though, so you need to go out in search of a cool steam vent, a cool slush geysers, a polluted water vent, or a water geysers.  Every seed is generated with 2 uncovered cool steam vents, so those are really easy to spot when you explore.  They can very rarely be destroyed by the runes throughout the map, but it's really uncommon.

 

Biggest thing is to explore more.  You are 80 some cycles in and only have explored the starting biome.  There's nothing wrong with going slowly, but you have to realize you are on a clock until you find a renewable water source.  I'm not saying you need to be digging out the whole asteroid, but just start digging a 2 tile tall tunnel out into the surrounding biomes to see what they have.

 

In this save you have a cool steam vent right under your base which is all you really need since that water can be turned into oxygen (using electrolyzer) and food (using bristles).  You also have a cool slush geysers on the bottom left of your base that would help a lot with this since it outputs polluted water at -10C.  If you let that dump into a large pit, you can pump water from that into a sieve to get clean water, send that water into an electrolyzer to get hydrogen and oxygen.  The hydrogen can be burned for power in a hydrogen generator so you don't need to use so much coal while you can pipe the oxygen through that large pit of cold polluted water giving you cold oxygen.  You can also use that cold water and run a radiator system through that steam vent room before sending it to your electroylzer, thus condensing the steam in that room and cooling it into a useable temperature for plants or something else.

 

I highly recommend continuing or restarting this seed if you can and try setting up the system I explained above.  You won't always get a nice seed like this, but it should help you learn how to use things in the environment together to make your life easier.  The only gripe about this seed is that volcano nearby, but that can be left alone until later by just not digging it out.  I implemented my suggestion in the attached save however I did this while in the launch branch so you may need to be in it to open the save.

5d34bc3b2540d_UkrainianCrump-pit.sav

If you can't open it, here are some images of what I added to your layout.  This is around cycle 115 without me doing anything cheaty so you don't need to abandon your save to accomplish this.

Spoiler

Base Layout

 

Gas Pipes

 

Liquid Pipes

Power

 

Temperature

 

I didn't change anything up in the living area, just added to the basement area to handle your oxygen needs as I suggested above.  This is just an example of what you could do.  You don't need 4 electrolyzers honestly, I just like to have things pre-built and just plug them in when necessary instead of needing to go back and add later.  With 4 electrolyzers sitting there, I can easily handle 32 dupes before needing to add more to this setup, which is way more than you really need ever.

The polluted water is sieved and piped through the oxygen area pre-cooling the oxygen.  The liquid then goes over into the cool steam room to help condense the steam in there before running back into the electrolyzers which converts it to oxygen and hydrogen.  The Hydrogen at the top of that chamber is around 50C while the Oxygen in the bottom is around 15C.  The oxygen gets piped out and over into the large pool where it gets cooled to around 5C while in the water and slowly warms back up to around 10C at the top of the tank.  It then heads into the base where I use granite pipes to move it, both cooling the surrounding area and warming up the oxygen to 25C.

When the water leaves the oxygen room, it's around 15C so that's a really nice temperature to use to feed some bristle blossoms if you'd like to create some better food for your dupes.  Could dig out underneath the oxygen room setup and place it there to easily access the temperate water from that area.  With bristles set up, your base would be relatively self sustaining.  You may run into an issue with the hydrogen backing up in the oxygen room possibly, but it will eventually figure itself out.  That leaves you time to go explore the rest of the asteroid and find out what else is out there.

 

Of course, this is way longer than I intended it to be so I apologize for that.  Hopefully you can get some useful information out of this wall of text.

[xialeth]

Wow, thank you for that detailed explanation @DemainaNyx! Rarely have I learned so much from a thread, this was incredibly informative even without having looked at the save.

 

Thanks for sharing these detailed explanation and tips! (I for one have always been scared of using electrolyzers because of the water consumption, even when I had a geyser nearby... Though tbh I piped its 60°C water into the nearby ice biome while it was dormant and never got around to actually using it before frying my base with the polymer press xD)

[DemainaNyx]

10 hours ago, xialeth said:

Wow, thank you for that detailed explanation @DemainaNyx! Rarely have I learned so much from a thread, this was incredibly informative even without having looked at the save.

 

Thanks for sharing these detailed explanation and tips! (I for one have always been scared of using electrolyzers because of the water consumption, even when I had a geyser nearby... Though tbh I piped its 60°C water into the nearby ice biome while it was dormant and never got around to actually using it before frying my base with the polymer press xD)

No problem.  Always happy to help people understand this game better.

 

Best recommendation if you want to try something new is do it outside of your main base so that if it fails, you don't lose your save.  If you miss manage the coolant for a metal refinery and it releases hot gas, it's much easier to contain it out in a far off biome than next to your printing pod.  That or make a save before doing something new so you can experiment without losing progress.

 

You might want to try this seed if you want to experiment with electrolyzers.  Electrolyzers create two new problems for players: hydrogen and heat.   Containing the hydrogen to one room makes it easier to deal with but that heat is more of a challenge.  That's why I really like this seed because having that slush geyser nearby takes care of that problem for you without forcing you to learn new mechanics yet.

[Majorchubby]

What I love about this game is the infinite designs, every time I look at a base thread I see people doing the same thing but differently.

[xialeth]

14 hours ago, DemainaNyx said:

You might want to try this seed if you want to experiment with electrolyzers.  Electrolyzers create two new problems for players: hydrogen and heat.   Containing the hydrogen to one room makes it easier to deal with but that heat is more of a challenge.  That's why I really like this seed because having that slush geyser nearby takes care of that problem for you without forcing you to learn new mechanics yet.

I actually hopped into sandbox mode with my current seed (in a new save though) and uncovered the map, realizing that aside from two cool steam vents and two nat gas geysers (and an unholy amount of oil reservoirs, but then again, I did choose 'irregular oil' as a trait), I have one salt water geyser, so nothing really to help me learn Electrolyzers without having a whole slew of problems on my hands at once

Will this seed work if I plug it straight into the Launch Upgrade, or do I have to start the save in the MK III branch and then hop over into Launch Upgrade?

[DemainaNyx]

7 hours ago, xialeth said:

I actually hopped into sandbox mode with my current seed (in a new save though) and uncovered the map, realizing that aside from two cool steam vents and two nat gas geysers (and an unholy amount of oil reservoirs, but then again, I did choose 'irregular oil' as a trait), I have one salt water geyser, so nothing really to help me learn Electrolyzers without having a whole slew of problems on my hands at once

Will this seed work if I plug it straight into the Launch Upgrade, or do I have to start the save in the MK III branch and then hop over into Launch Upgrade?

I just loaded his save file into the launch upgrade.  But if you want to start from scratch, you'd have to start it in the MKIII branch and then move to the launch branch after.

When you do that, you wont have all the new biome stuff though.  You'll be able to get pips, pokeshells, and such from the printer pod but you won't find them in the wild.

[DrSugarFreeman]

On 7/22/2019 at 11:45 PM, DemainaNyx said:

You can join the development build now if you want.  In Steam, Right click Oxygen Not Included, click Properties, select Beta Tab, opt into launch testing.

 

Honestly though, nothings it horribly wrong with your base.  There are things I wouldn't do, but that doesn't means it's wrong or bad.  The ladder from the bathrooms leading straight into a clean water tank for instance is something I avoid so I don't have dupes accidentally peeing in my clean water.  I never use the oxygen diffuser and instead opt for algae terrariums and deodorizers to oxygenate my base early.  You ran a lot of research but don't really have any need for it yet, meaning that dupe time could've been used for other tasks that could've advanced you along.  Instead of researching you could help dig tunnels or something.  Even the fact that you're cooking meal lice into pickled meal is more dupe time that could be used for other tasks.  If you plant a few more plants they could just live on raw meal lice so long as you have enough dirt which you probably will.  Again, none of these things are horribly wrong, but just that they slow your progress down.

 

First thing, don't worry about slimelung.  It doesn't do anything except slow your dupes down for a few cycles.  Obviously it's much better if they aren't infected with slimelung, but the disease system isn't dire any more so you can just ignore most diseases and just let them run their course without it killing your game.  Previously it used to kill your dupes after 8 cycles, but now they are just slower, so slimelung isn't anything to restart over.  Just put down some deodorizers when you enter a slime biome to convert the polluted oxygen into oxygen and the slimelung will slowly die out over time.  If you want to be faster about it, plant some buddy bud plants.  They give off floral scent germs, which triggers allergies, but also gets rid of slimelung.  In this game, only one type of germ can exist in a tile at a time, so if you spread floral scent where slimelung is, it will get rid of it.  Now, if your dupes have allergies, that could cause a different problem, but it eliminates the germs for 90% of the dupes.

 

As for algae, that is a early game oxygen solution.  After about 50 some cycles, you really want to be moving to electrolyzers as a more consistent source of oxygen since you can set them up once and basically forget about them for the next thousand cycles.  For electrolyzers, you need a consistent source of water though, so you need to go out in search of a cool steam vent, a cool slush geysers, a polluted water vent, or a water geysers.  Every seed is generated with 2 uncovered cool steam vents, so those are really easy to spot when you explore.  They can very rarely be destroyed by the runes throughout the map, but it's really uncommon.

 

Biggest thing is to explore more.  You are 80 some cycles in and only have explored the starting biome.  There's nothing wrong with going slowly, but you have to realize you are on a clock until you find a renewable water source.  I'm not saying you need to be digging out the whole asteroid, but just start digging a 2 tile tall tunnel out into the surrounding biomes to see what they have.

 

In this save you have a cool steam vent right under your base which is all you really need since that water can be turned into oxygen (using electrolyzer) and food (using bristles).  You also have a cool slush geysers on the bottom left of your base that would help a lot with this since it outputs polluted water at -10C.  If you let that dump into a large pit, you can pump water from that into a sieve to get clean water, send that water into an electrolyzer to get hydrogen and oxygen.  The hydrogen can be burned for power in a hydrogen generator so you don't need to use so much coal while you can pipe the oxygen through that large pit of cold polluted water giving you cold oxygen.  You can also use that cold water and run a radiator system through that steam vent room before sending it to your electroylzer, thus condensing the steam in that room and cooling it into a useable temperature for plants or something else.

 

I highly recommend continuing or restarting this seed if you can and try setting up the system I explained above.  You won't always get a nice seed like this, but it should help you learn how to use things in the environment together to make your life easier.  The only gripe about this seed is that volcano nearby, but that can be left alone until later by just not digging it out.  I implemented my suggestion in the attached save however I did this while in the launch branch so you may need to be in it to open the save.

5d34bc3b2540d_UkrainianCrump-pit.sav

If you can't open it, here are some images of what I added to your layout.  This is around cycle 115 without me doing anything cheaty so you don't need to abandon your save to accomplish this.

  Hide contents

Base Layout

 

Gas Pipes

 

Liquid Pipes

Power

 

Temperature

 

I didn't change anything up in the living area, just added to the basement area to handle your oxygen needs as I suggested above.  This is just an example of what you could do.  You don't need 4 electrolyzers honestly, I just like to have things pre-built and just plug them in when necessary instead of needing to go back and add later.  With 4 electrolyzers sitting there, I can easily handle 32 dupes before needing to add more to this setup, which is way more than you really need ever.

The polluted water is sieved and piped through the oxygen area pre-cooling the oxygen.  The liquid then goes over into the cool steam room to help condense the steam in there before running back into the electrolyzers which converts it to oxygen and hydrogen.  The Hydrogen at the top of that chamber is around 50C while the Oxygen in the bottom is around 15C.  The oxygen gets piped out and over into the large pool where it gets cooled to around 5C while in the water and slowly warms back up to around 10C at the top of the tank.  It then heads into the base where I use granite pipes to move it, both cooling the surrounding area and warming up the oxygen to 25C.

When the water leaves the oxygen room, it's around 15C so that's a really nice temperature to use to feed some bristle blossoms if you'd like to create some better food for your dupes.  Could dig out underneath the oxygen room setup and place it there to easily access the temperate water from that area.  With bristles set up, your base would be relatively self sustaining.  You may run into an issue with the hydrogen backing up in the oxygen room possibly, but it will eventually figure itself out.  That leaves you time to go explore the rest of the asteroid and find out what else is out there.

 

Of course, this is way longer than I intended it to be so I apologize for that.  Hopefully you can get some useful information out of this wall of text.

Lots of stuff here I already know, but I've been wary of putting any of it into practice. Slimelung deadly or not, I still got irritated that I used my fresh algae and polluted my entire central corridor with it. I was just getting to Buddy Buds and I was going to use my slime for a Mushroom Farm right where you placed that second Power Transformer across from my Coal Plant and under my Polluted Water reservoir. I'm gonna have difficulty with these sorts of designs because I'm the kind of guy who likes to make everything look nice besides making systems work. All that open space down by the Neural Vascillator makes me anxious, but it seems like its of no major concern when I think about it seeing as I can manage my Dupes' stress really well. I've yet to see a stress reaction of any kind, let alone any Dupe get above 10% stress.

My plan was to (and now that I think about it this would have taken forever) use the runoff from my bathroom setup up top to sieve off some clean water and then find a way to sanitize it for consumption. I had no clue about that Cool Clush, and I was taking my time getting to the Steam Vent because I was wary of heat seeping into my base. I was just about to start working on that Mushroom Farm with those Pufts living in the Slime biome, but again Slimelung was distracting me and when I realized I had compromised my base' productivity I kinda rage quit. I was trying to manage my algae for oxygen, and like you said Electrolyzers are much more efficient, but so many things were on my mind. Hydrogen production, using that Hydrogon to start a Dreck farm and subsequently a Power room for Hydrogen Gens, cooling the oxygen and so many other things that I got overwhelmed.

 

I appreciate your ideas and help figuring out what I should do with my base, but I'm most likely going to start a new seed. Feels like cheating to me now that I know about that cool slush. I didn't discover it legit and I don't feel like I deserve to use it, you know? Anyways, thanks again for your help. I'll be sure to put those tips to good use.

On 7/22/2019 at 11:45 PM, DemainaNyx said:

You can join the development build now if you want.  In Steam, Right click Oxygen Not Included, click Properties, select Beta Tab, opt into launch testing.

 

Honestly though, nothings it horribly wrong with your base.  There are things I wouldn't do, but that doesn't means it's wrong or bad.  The ladder from the bathrooms leading straight into a clean water tank for instance is something I avoid so I don't have dupes accidentally peeing in my clean water.  I never use the oxygen diffuser and instead opt for algae terrariums and deodorizers to oxygenate my base early.  You ran a lot of research but don't really have any need for it yet, meaning that dupe time could've been used for other tasks that could've advanced you along.  Instead of researching you could help dig tunnels or something.  Even the fact that you're cooking meal lice into pickled meal is more dupe time that could be used for other tasks.  If you plant a few more plants they could just live on raw meal lice so long as you have enough dirt which you probably will.  Again, none of these things are horribly wrong, but just that they slow your progress down.

 

First thing, don't worry about slimelung.  It doesn't do anything except slow your dupes down for a few cycles.  Obviously it's much better if they aren't infected with slimelung, but the disease system isn't dire any more so you can just ignore most diseases and just let them run their course without it killing your game.  Previously it used to kill your dupes after 8 cycles, but now they are just slower, so slimelung isn't anything to restart over.  Just put down some deodorizers when you enter a slime biome to convert the polluted oxygen into oxygen and the slimelung will slowly die out over time.  If you want to be faster about it, plant some buddy bud plants.  They give off floral scent germs, which triggers allergies, but also gets rid of slimelung.  In this game, only one type of germ can exist in a tile at a time, so if you spread floral scent where slimelung is, it will get rid of it.  Now, if your dupes have allergies, that could cause a different problem, but it eliminates the germs for 90% of the dupes.

 

As for algae, that is a early game oxygen solution.  After about 50 some cycles, you really want to be moving to electrolyzers as a more consistent source of oxygen since you can set them up once and basically forget about them for the next thousand cycles.  For electrolyzers, you need a consistent source of water though, so you need to go out in search of a cool steam vent, a cool slush geysers, a polluted water vent, or a water geysers.  Every seed is generated with 2 uncovered cool steam vents, so those are really easy to spot when you explore.  They can very rarely be destroyed by the runes throughout the map, but it's really uncommon.

 

Biggest thing is to explore more.  You are 80 some cycles in and only have explored the starting biome.  There's nothing wrong with going slowly, but you have to realize you are on a clock until you find a renewable water source.  I'm not saying you need to be digging out the whole asteroid, but just start digging a 2 tile tall tunnel out into the surrounding biomes to see what they have.

 

In this save you have a cool steam vent right under your base which is all you really need since that water can be turned into oxygen (using electrolyzer) and food (using bristles).  You also have a cool slush geysers on the bottom left of your base that would help a lot with this since it outputs polluted water at -10C.  If you let that dump into a large pit, you can pump water from that into a sieve to get clean water, send that water into an electrolyzer to get hydrogen and oxygen.  The hydrogen can be burned for power in a hydrogen generator so you don't need to use so much coal while you can pipe the oxygen through that large pit of cold polluted water giving you cold oxygen.  You can also use that cold water and run a radiator system through that steam vent room before sending it to your electroylzer, thus condensing the steam in that room and cooling it into a useable temperature for plants or something else.

 

I highly recommend continuing or restarting this seed if you can and try setting up the system I explained above.  You won't always get a nice seed like this, but it should help you learn how to use things in the environment together to make your life easier.  The only gripe about this seed is that volcano nearby, but that can be left alone until later by just not digging it out.  I implemented my suggestion in the attached save however I did this while in the launch branch so you may need to be in it to open the save.

5d34bc3b2540d_UkrainianCrump-pit.sav

If you can't open it, here are some images of what I added to your layout.  This is around cycle 115 without me doing anything cheaty so you don't need to abandon your save to accomplish this.

  Reveal hidden contents

Base Layout

 

Gas Pipes

 

Liquid Pipes

Power

 

Temperature

 

I didn't change anything up in the living area, just added to the basement area to handle your oxygen needs as I suggested above.  This is just an example of what you could do.  You don't need 4 electrolyzers honestly, I just like to have things pre-built and just plug them in when necessary instead of needing to go back and add later.  With 4 electrolyzers sitting there, I can easily handle 32 dupes before needing to add more to this setup, which is way more than you really need ever.

The polluted water is sieved and piped through the oxygen area pre-cooling the oxygen.  The liquid then goes over into the cool steam room to help condense the steam in there before running back into the electrolyzers which converts it to oxygen and hydrogen.  The Hydrogen at the top of that chamber is around 50C while the Oxygen in the bottom is around 15C.  The oxygen gets piped out and over into the large pool where it gets cooled to around 5C while in the water and slowly warms back up to around 10C at the top of the tank.  It then heads into the base where I use granite pipes to move it, both cooling the surrounding area and warming up the oxygen to 25C.

When the water leaves the oxygen room, it's around 15C so that's a really nice temperature to use to feed some bristle blossoms if you'd like to create some better food for your dupes.  Could dig out underneath the oxygen room setup and place it there to easily access the temperate water from that area.  With bristles set up, your base would be relatively self sustaining.  You may run into an issue with the hydrogen backing up in the oxygen room possibly, but it will eventually figure itself out.  That leaves you time to go explore the rest of the asteroid and find out what else is out there.

 

Of course, this is way longer than I intended it to be so I apologize for that.  Hopefully you can get some useful information out of this wall of text.

By the way, are Terrariums really more efficient than Diffusers early game? I thought that the water demand and the algae demand would make it ultimately less worth it. Of course you do get the water back, but it takes time to set up a proper distillation source to remedy pollution.

[DemainaNyx]

Yeah, that's one thing that I worry about with newer players.  The learning curve of this game was high when I started playing but it's gotten even higher as new things have been added.  I've played this game for some 1700+ hours and got to learn most of these systems while they were added vs having the world to play with.  I'm sure some of your research was to see what each thing did whereas for myself I know exactly which machine I need so I focus my efforts to only research what I need when I need it.

However, if you'd rather learn from experimenting, don't let me stop you.  If knowing that that geyser is there feels like cheating to you, feel free to start another game.  It's a single player game afterall and your enjoyment is all that matters regardless of what some random person on the internet says.  My recommendation for keeping this seed was simply so you could skip dealing with the heat issue that electrolyzers produce and get further into the game to experience more.

Your ideas are sound though so either you've had some experience with these systems before or are good at figuring them out.  Placing your Mushrooms under the polluted water tank might've caused a problem due to the location of your carbon scrubbers, but I didn't really look at the automation you did to know for certain.  But the fact you are looking ahead and trying to solve the next problem is good.  

Just try not to let the game discourage you when an unforeseen issue arises.  One of my favorite time was when I ran out of algae and my base got flooded by carbon dioxide.  I frantically made a temporary base in a slime biome, survived off of polluted oxygen while trying to cure the deadly slimelung infections I had, and somehow managed to set up an electrolyzer setup and reclaim my original base.  I felt so accomplished after surviving that that I forgot I was the reason it happened to begin with.

 

6 hours ago, DrSugarFreeman said:

By the way, are Terrariums really more efficient than Diffusers early game?

It depends on your definition of efficient.  Do you want an easy setup that wastes resources or to save resources and cost a bit more time?

Here's a bunch of math if you are interested:

Spoiler

 

Duplicants breath in 100g/s of oxygen and output 2g/s of carbon dioxide.  That's 60Kg of oxygen and 1.2Kg of carbon dioxide per cycle.

An Oxygen diffuser uses 550g/s of algae and 120W to produce 500g/s of oxygen.  Thats 330Kg of algae a cycle to produce 300Kg of oxygen a cycle.  They only need to be filled so that's one dupe interaction and 1 diffuser can supply enough oxygen for 5 duplicants.

An Algae Terrarium uses 30g/s of algae and 300g/s of water to produce 40g/s of oxygen and 290.33g/s of polluted water.  In addition to that, they also remove 333.33 mg/s of carbon dioxide.  That's 18Kg of algae and 180Kg of water a cycle to produce 24Kg of oxygen and 174Kg of polluted water while also cleaning 200g of carbon dioxide a cycle.  Assuming we sieve that polluted water, that's -6Kg of water a cycle.  They require 3 dupe interactions (filling water, filling algae, emptying polluted water) and you need 2.5 terrariums to produce enough oxygen for 1 duplicant.

 

If we have 10 duplicants for a cycle, that's -600Kg Oxygen and +12Kg Carbon Dioxide

2 diffuser, +600Kg Oxygen, -660Kg algae, 2 dupe interactions, -power, +heat

25 algae terrariums, +600Kg Oxygen, -450Kg algae, 75 dupe interactions, -150Kg clean water, -5Kg carbon dioxide

So, the question is what's more important to you?

Early game, I tend to have a very small power grid, no way of cooling, a lot of clean water, and a lot of free dupes.  So while the diffuser is a simple solution, it uses more materials for being simple and produces more heat.  The terrariums take more time to use, but solve two of your main problems (oxygen needs and carbon dioxide build up) for almost a third less algae and a bit of water.  To run these 25 algae terrariums, it would take 6.6 cycles to use 1 tile of water and I know you had plenty of clean water in your last base sitting unused.

It's really up to you though, but if running out of algae is a problem, terrariums are a nice solution for the cost of one dupe to run it constantly and some clean water. 

The one big downside is that if the polluted water bottles are not picked up quickly, they will offgas polluted oxygen into your base.  Normally I counteract this with deodorizers being the 3rd thing I research (basic farm, advanced research, decontamination) and just place four of them flanking my terrarium setup to stop this.  Some people even go so far as to never cleaning up the polluted water bottles and living off the oxygen the deodorizers produce.  I generally try to sweep up the water and dump it into my polluted water storage tank to preserve my water but both methods work fine.  Eventually my bathrooms get connected to the storage tank so the polluted water sits there until it is recycled which gives me an easy place to dump excess water from bathrooms as well as an easy setup to prime them so using terrariums fits nicely into my base building plan.  I even made an Imgur post to explain to someone on Reddit how I set up my bathroom loop to automatically prime the system and deal with excess water with one simple loop.

[DrSugarFreeman]

On 7/24/2019 at 10:25 PM, DemainaNyx said:

Yeah, that's one thing that I worry about with newer players.  The learning curve of this game was high when I started playing but it's gotten even higher as new things have been added.  I've played this game for some 1700+ hours and got to learn most of these systems while they were added vs having the world to play with.  I'm sure some of your research was to see what each thing did whereas for myself I know exactly which machine I need so I focus my efforts to only research what I need when I need it.

However, if you'd rather learn from experimenting, don't let me stop you.  If knowing that that geyser is there feels like cheating to you, feel free to start another game.  It's a single player game afterall and your enjoyment is all that matters regardless of what some random person on the internet says.  My recommendation for keeping this seed was simply so you could skip dealing with the heat issue that electrolyzers produce and get further into the game to experience more.

Your ideas are sound though so either you've had some experience with these systems before or are good at figuring them out.  Placing your Mushrooms under the polluted water tank might've caused a problem due to the location of your carbon scrubbers, but I didn't really look at the automation you did to know for certain.  But the fact you are looking ahead and trying to solve the next problem is good.  

Just try not to let the game discourage you when an unforeseen issue arises.  One of my favorite time was when I ran out of algae and my base got flooded by carbon dioxide.  I frantically made a temporary base in a slime biome, survived off of polluted oxygen while trying to cure the deadly slimelung infections I had, and somehow managed to set up an electrolyzer setup and reclaim my original base.  I felt so accomplished after surviving that that I forgot I was the reason it happened to begin with.

 

It depends on your definition of efficient.  Do you want an easy setup that wastes resources or to save resources and cost a bit more time?

Here's a bunch of math if you are interested:

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Duplicants breath in 100g/s of oxygen and output 2g/s of carbon dioxide.  That's 60Kg of oxygen and 1.2Kg of carbon dioxide per cycle.

An Oxygen diffuser uses 550g/s of algae and 120W to produce 500g/s of oxygen.  Thats 330Kg of algae a cycle to produce 300Kg of oxygen a cycle.  They only need to be filled so that's one dupe interaction and 1 diffuser can supply enough oxygen for 5 duplicants.

An Algae Terrarium uses 30g/s of algae and 300g/s of water to produce 40g/s of oxygen and 290.33g/s of polluted water.  In addition to that, they also remove 333.33 mg/s of carbon dioxide.  That's 18Kg of algae and 180Kg of water a cycle to produce 24Kg of oxygen and 174Kg of polluted water while also cleaning 200g of carbon dioxide a cycle.  Assuming we sieve that polluted water, that's -6Kg of water a cycle.  They require 3 dupe interactions (filling water, filling algae, emptying polluted water) and you need 2.5 terrariums to produce enough oxygen for 1 duplicant.

 

If we have 10 duplicants for a cycle, that's -600Kg Oxygen and +12Kg Carbon Dioxide

2 diffuser, +600Kg Oxygen, -660Kg algae, 2 dupe interactions, -power, +heat

25 algae terrariums, +600Kg Oxygen, -450Kg algae, 75 dupe interactions, -150Kg clean water, -5Kg carbon dioxide

So, the question is what's more important to you?

Early game, I tend to have a very small power grid, no way of cooling, a lot of clean water, and a lot of free dupes.  So while the diffuser is a simple solution, it uses more materials for being simple and produces more heat.  The terrariums take more time to use, but solve two of your main problems (oxygen needs and carbon dioxide build up) for almost a third less algae and a bit of water.  To run these 25 algae terrariums, it would take 6.6 cycles to use 1 tile of water and I know you had plenty of clean water in your last base sitting unused.

It's really up to you though, but if running out of algae is a problem, terrariums are a nice solution for the cost of one dupe to run it constantly and some clean water. 

The one big downside is that if the polluted water bottles are not picked up quickly, they will offgas polluted oxygen into your base.  Normally I counteract this with deodorizers being the 3rd thing I research (basic farm, advanced research, decontamination) and just place four of them flanking my terrarium setup to stop this.  Some people even go so far as to never cleaning up the polluted water bottles and living off the oxygen the deodorizers produce.  I generally try to sweep up the water and dump it into my polluted water storage tank to preserve my water but both methods work fine.  Eventually my bathrooms get connected to the storage tank so the polluted water sits there until it is recycled which gives me an easy place to dump excess water from bathrooms as well as an easy setup to prime them so using terrariums fits nicely into my base building plan.  I even made an Imgur post to explain to someone on Reddit how I set up my bathroom loop to automatically prime the system and deal with excess water with one simple loop.

Well exploration wise I've taken your advice. I've started cutting into the core of a Frozen biome and have mostly encapsulated a Cool Steam Vent for use. Out of everything so far, my biggest concern is the encroaching heat coming from the steam vent. I have yet to insulate the bottom or left side of the base because my Dupes cant enter the room without getting scalded. Its pretty annoying. I have a loop of my foreman going in, building and digging, getting burnt, resting in a triage cot, then going back to working in the room. I'll eventually get it done, and once its done I'll see about getting some Electrolizers set up. An amazing thing that just might make it super easy for me is that I found two Anti-Entropy Thermal Nullifiers literally right on top of each other. Its nuts.

Hopefully after getting cool air flowing into my base I can start mining out a place to raise Dreckos and Hatches.

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