Reached cycle 100, and now I'm possibly doomed to fail. Rate my base so i know what to do right next time :)

[Nascarlaser1]

Spoiler

Hello!
I've been playing on/off since the space update, always a bit apprehensive since I'd never know when I'd need to re-start my colony due to an update. However, now that the game is fully released I'm back at it full swing, and i have my first base of the release. I reached cycle 100,but at this point I'm struggling to keep food running, and I'm rapidly approaching heat death due to my 2 geysers and my poor power setup. So, Rate my base,tell me what i messed up,and I'll try to do better next time. I will also answer any questions you have to the best of my ability :). Will probably provide the little graphs and such tomorrow.

I'm running with 7 dupes,but if i planned better I'm sure i could get at least 10. I focused too much on getting food that i did not see water issues creep up on me, and when I tried to solve my water problem using my toilet waste is when i discovered the unfortunate event of the water filter not getting rid of germs, requiring me to switch focus to that,which caused my food that was previously 50+calories for 7 dupes, to suddenly run out as my farms started getting affected by heat death. I'm purposely not sticking with a 3 dupe colony,because even though their easier I'm trying to see how many colony achievements I can get. My main food source was liceloaf, bristle berry up until heat death, and the occasional barbecue/omelet. 

Am currently at cycle 107 with 800 calories remaining and stress increasing,but i will continue till the final dupe goes down the red carpet to the light.

Edit: Fixed images

[watermelen671]

12 minutes ago, Nascarlaser1 said:

(also this is my first time putting pictures into a thread so if i messed it up i will try to fix)

Pro tip! Maybe put the pictures in a spoiler?

Like this:

Spoiler

[ruhrohraggy]

First off...teeny tiny pictures in teeny tiny resolutions make for much squinting.

Yep, heat death due to geysers. You typically want to try and isolate geysers when you can with insulated tile, and process whatever hot stuff they're giving you outside your base. Exceptions to this are the superpowered cool slush geyser and the p-water geyser, as those don't output all that much heat.

The other thing you should get into the habit of, is automating your coal generator (all generators tbh) with at least a single smart battery. It's very easy to get to, and only requires low-tech goods and a rock-crusher to refine the 300 some odd refined metal you'll need. Stick the smart battery right next to the coal gen, and the coal gen will only run to recharge the battery. Set the smart battery to send the "i'm hungry" signal at 10%, so the coal gen kicks on before it's out of juice and you dont end up with brown-outs.

Small things add up in ONI. Take the effects of automating a coal generator from the above example.

If you don't automate it, here's the extra stuff you have to deal with : Extra battery drain -> Coal generator works harder -> More co2 and heat -> More cooling possibly needed and co2 scrubber which needs even more power. So something as simple as smart battery, 2-3 lengths of automation wire and coal gen, will save you a fair bit in the early game.

Here would be my / a typical checklist for cycle 100 :

- Coal generator + Smart battery with automation wire attached

- Great Hall

- Rec Room

- Mushroom farm under kitchen (If slime biomes available, otherwise 6-8 mealwood per dupe or bristle blossoms if water permits)

- Plumbed bathrooms with closed loop water filtration

- Drecko and hatch ranch established. Dreckos for fiber, then let evolve into glossy drecko for plastic. 6-8 stone hatch + 2-3 smooth hatch for passive 75% metal refining. I feed the smooth hatch iron to setup for steel.

- Cold biome / AETN located with a nearby water source for potential SPOM or electrolyzer setup

- Pathway to bottom of map scouted out, with cold biome near bottom for easy metal / plastic refinery

Another fun tip is, you don't have to worry about germs in the clean water being sent to your bathrooms, and a closed loop system will actually end up water positive. So, as long as you're not using it to irrigate your crops, it's fine to just let it be germy. If you absolutely must destroy germs, you can send it to a liquid storage tank in a room full of chlorine. The chlorine will destroy germs lickity split.

My last piece of advice would be to try and centralize your builds. The more dupes travel, the more time you waste. Unfortunately, there's a reason most people's bases look like big blocky apartment buildings.

[chasinji]

seems pretty sustainable. keep going!

[bobucles]

You're nowhere close to heat death, look at all the green temperature on the map.  Simply move the farms into a cooler zone and start digging around for ice biomes. It looks like there's one in the upper left. Chip out a few tiles of ice, build a few ice statues or ice tempshift plates in a corner of your base, and the heat is gone for another hundred cycles.

[DrSugarFreeman]

1 hour ago, watermelen671 said:

Pro tip! Maybe put the pictures in a spoiler?

Like this:

  Reveal hidden contents

Or just include the save file.

3 minutes ago, bobucles said:

You're nowhere close to heat death, look at all the green temperature on the map.  Simply move the farms into a cooler zone and start digging around for ice biomes. It looks like there's one in the upper left. Chip out a few tiles of ice, build a few ice statues or ice tempshift plates in a corner of your base, and the heat is gone for another hundred cycles.

I just figured out the ice tempshift trick and it soooo good.

[mathmanican]

7 minutes ago, DrSugarFreeman said:

Or just include the save file.

I'm much more likely to reply to a picture than a save file. 

To @Nascarlaser1, your doing great. Keep trying. Set a goal for your next play throug. And have fun. Burn another base. Have you hit oil yet? Exosuits? Have fun.

[DrSugarFreeman]

10 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I'm much more likely to reply to a picture than a save file. 

To @Nascarlaser1, your doing great. Keep trying. Set a goal for your next play throug. And have fun. Burn another base. Have you hit oil yet? Exosuits? Have fun.

Really now? Hm. Thanks I fixed my own post.

[beowulf2010]

Also, identify one major cause of the colony failure and make a plan to combat that for next base. 

Looking at your base, I'd concentrate on making plans to thermally isolate geysers you are using for your next base. 

Pro-tip: geysers do not activate until you dig out the tile 2 up and 2 right from the leftmost neutronium tile under the geyser. Dig out everything else, build your infrastructure and insulating borders with an airlock/water lock, dig out that tile, research, then seal it up. 

[Eternal Firesea]

On the subject of food, I notice your mealwood farm is filling wit CO2, and there's plenty of slime in the surrounding biomes.  Growing duskcap mushrooms would probably serve you better, if you're willing to risk your dupes catching slimelung,
You also have a lot of hydrogen.  Leaning into hydrogen generators for power would free you from a lot of other concerns.  I do note your hydrogen pipe is backing up - you might want to put gas valve on the line so you can throttle down the flow of hot hydrogen when you don't need it.

[DemainaNyx]

Kinda hard to see what's going on, but I will give it a go. 

In general though, there isn't anything drastically wrong with your base.  You could probably continue to play on it but it would just take a bit to get things sorted out.  Playing it out until everyone dies teaches you a lot more than just bailing when the going gets tough.  You'll learn more that way and it'll stick with you more than use just telling you.

 

 

First thing to remember in any ONI game is that you need water.  Water becomes food and oxygen, so without water, your colony is doomed.  Yes, you can survive off other methods of food and oxygen generation, but the minute you get a consistent water source, you basically can become a self sustaining base. 

The easiest source of cool, renewable water to get is from a bathroom loop using lavatories.  Since sieves no longer heat up cool water, all that free water in your starting biome can easily be saved and multiplied via lavatories.  In every game my research goals are farm tiles, advanced research, deodorizers, and then lavatories/bathroom tech.  Lavatories won't completely solve your water problems, but it helps provide a buffer while you search for the next source so that would be my first suggestion is get a bathroom up and running ASAP.  I made this post a while back so not all the information is correct but the general loop still works fine if you'd like an example.

You want to go out and search for water after that, preferably cool water though.  Despite it's name, the cool steam vent isn't that great until you have a means of cooling it down.  If you can't find a cool source (30C or less; p.water geyser or cool slush geyser basically) then I recommend cutting your water consumption as much as possible.  The biggest source of water consumption I see is that microbe musher for liceloaf, so cutting that out would help.

 

 

For food, my suggestion is just to plant more plants.  A dupe can survive on just raw meal lice and since most maps spawn with tons of dirt, it doesn't really hurt you to just feed them that.  If you've set up a bathroom loop as well, you'll get dirt from the polluted dirt generated from the sieve as well to help mitigate the cost until you get further.  I've had colonies before eating raw meal lice up to cycle 400 so upgrading to better food isn't a necessity.  You need 5 mealwood plants per dupe to meet their calorie requirement so just plan accordingly and you should be fine.  I generally plant them one floor above my printing pod because it's usually in the center of the temperate area and takes the longest to heat up naturally.  If you feed hot dirt into your farm though it can cause temporary hot pockets but generally that isn't a problem till much later.

 

 

You mentioned germs in your toilet water.  In general, germs aren't anything to be concerned about currently.  Yeah, your dupes slow down but that's it.  There's no risk of losing a dupe due to sickness so if it's sickness or the death of a colony, just let them get sick.  If you'd like to decontaminate your water supply, a simple method is to chain at least 3 liquid reservoirs together in a chlorine environment.  The chlorine will remove the germs in the water and you'll have germ free water and polluted dirt from that.  I normally like to have more than 3 but 3 is the smallest amount you need to remove all the germs.  This is an older image but you can see how the germs in the third reservoir (right to left) has no germs while the first one has 50K germs.

Spoiler

 

 

One thing you might consider adding is carbon locks to access areas outside of your main base.  Basically it's a place where carbon dioxide will naturally fall and it will help prevent gasses from mixing.  I would use this as my entrance to that hydrogen geyser so it doesn't release all that hydrogen into my base and heat it up.  A water lock is much better for an area like this where we want a pure supply of gas, but then you deal with dupes being soaking wet so a carbon lock works until we can get exosuits up and going.

Spoiler

 

Since you were lucky enough to find a hydrogen geyser, I would immediately start building a few more to run your power setup currently.  No point generating extra carbon dioxide when a hydrogen generator will do it with no exhaust.  It will also save your coal for later.  I would recommend either relocating your power room closer to the hydrogen vent or rerouting your gas pipes because piping that hot hydrogen through your base is not going to help your heat problems.

 

 

In the future, keep extreme temperature materials out of your base.  You can see from your images that your water pool in the center is really hot.  I assume at some point you dumped water from that water geyser or that cool steam vent there but it's hard for me to say.  It doesn't make sense for water in that section to be as hot as it is naturally though so that's my guess.  Until you can easily cool 40C+ temperatures, keep them out of your main base.  You can obviously use that water still via a pitcher pump, but keep it outside. 

I recommend designating a zone that is your main base.  This will be the area that your keep cool and well oxygenated for the rest of the game.  Farms and ranches can either be inside this area or outside depending, but this area is important to keep comfortable so your dupes have a safe place to return to if something goes wrong elsewhere on the map.  I basically carve out the center of my asteroid and that becomes my main base that is a cool 20C all the time whereas the temperature outside can range wildly from -10C to 100C.  I only monitor the temperature in this main area though which saves me power and resources cooling only what's needed instead of everything.

 

 

Honestly, I wouldn't quit your base.  Here are some images of one of my bases and you can see that I too have insane heat problems.  I survived them though and now am at the point I'm about to regain my cool base again.  It just requires a bit of planning but you can easily deal with heat issues until you get a cooling solution setup.  Try to dig out to find a cold biome to tide you over for now.  Or set some kind of requirement for restarting like after 3 dupes die, then you start a new map.  That way it might prevent you from running away from a learning situation.

Spoiler

You can see a distinct pattern established.  Most floors are 20 tiles long and 4 tiles tall with a 3 tile wide gap where ladders and fire poles go.  Each floor is then broken up by doors to designate a 64 tile area which is perfect for most rooms you would want in your main colony. 

My temperatures are very hot due to the world I'm playing on, so I have to put my food in special places to deal with this.  I recently got my cooling setup going and will probably use it to cool my entire base soon.  Right now it is cooling my oxygen setup so the oxygen comes out a 8C but it warms up to around 20C by the time it reaches this base due to the 60C temperatures everywhere. 

My original power setup it is still running some of my machinery currently but I am in the process of upgrading it on the left as well as insulating my base from the outside world.  My cooling is limited to my drecko ranch, the small mealwood patch above the dreckos, and the remainder of my original meal wood crop in the center.

I haven't upgraded my room situation yet.  Currently I only have a great hall, barrack, and washroom.  Eventually I will upgrade them to a Bedroom and add a Recreation room but I haven't had the need to do it yet.  With some clever Nature Reserve placement my dupes get a ton of free morale.  My newest dupe has +21 Morale and the highest morale require I have is 18 on my veteran digger who is suffering from heat stroke.  Most of my dupes require around 10 Morale, so I'm in no hurry to build new things or upgrade their food.

 

[Gurgel]

One thing that simplifies things, but makes them slower, is hamster wheels for energy. In fact, in my current base, I stayed on hamster-wheels until I got solar running. The only exception was two hydrogen generators to prevent hydrogen buildup after I changed to electrolyzers. 

My other recommendation is to find a cooling-source with some haste. Since you do not need to keep ice-biomes intact anymore for Sleet Wheat (you can just plant it "wild" later in artificial "natural" tiles and keep things cooled), ice biomes come in handy for that until you find or build something better. For most effective cooling of water, for example, build temp-shift plates from ice directly into the water.

Also note that dupes have a slight heating/cooling effect when below/above 37C.

I do not think your base is doomed. But time to experiment and get creative. You may also want to not expand the population for a while.

[Darkin Coaled]

You still have some water, you could save this. Mush bars are the way to go if you're running out of food.

As for heat death of crops (and crops are usually the only thing that you need to take care of), you can get a quick ice maker setup, build an insulated 1 tile channel under your farm tiles, put a storage bin on one end of it, set it to like 20kg and only allow ice in it, priority 9. Some way of removing excess water at the other end of the channel is also useful. The ice maker itself should go into an area where heat won't cause too much of an issue. When the temperature has dropped to around 15-20 degrees you should be done insulating the rest of the farm.

[Stoof]

I don't think your done in this one yet.  Some mistakes I can spot on a quick glance.  It looks like you're pumping hot geyser water into 2 pools close to your base, stop doing that immediately.  I'd find an ice biome and dig some ice, build temp plates from ice above those hot water pools to cool them and stop them cooking your base.  I'd get your farm surrounded by insulated tiles, it looks like if it's not cooking already it soon will be, maybe consider a temporary weezewort if you need to get it cooled down.

 

Next base I'd try to build around a single shaft 3 tiles wide to allow gas to flow better and keep your areas closer together

[Nascarlaser1]

Thanks everyone! Sorry for the bad screenshots they looked much better on my PC pre-upload . Next time around I will stick them in spoilers (never knew that was possible 0-0). I plan on keeping this base until the last dupe dies :).

 

Spoiler

8 hours ago, DemainaNyx said:

in the future, keep extreme temperature materials out of your base.  You can see from your images that your water pool in the center is really hot.  I assume at some point you dumped water from that water geyser or that cool steam vent there but it's hard for me to say.  It doesn't make sense for water in that section to be as hot as it is naturally though so that's my guess.  Until you can easily cool 40C+ temperatures, keep them out of your main base.  You can obviously use that water still via a pitcher pump, but keep it outside.

 

10 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I'm much more likely to reply to a picture than a save file. 

To @Nascarlaser1, your doing great. Keep trying. Set a goal for your next play through. And have fun. Burn another base. Have you hit oil yet? Exosuits? Have fun.

I honestly have 0 clue why that's so hot. The only water ever put in there is cleaned polluted water from my toilets/oxygen machines. my guess is that its from when i was fidgeting around with my hydrogen setup trying to get it to filter right,i might of accidentally dumped some of the hydrogen into the area which heated up the water in the pipes, which gradually built up over time. All water from the geysers is only used for the pitcher pumps, since right now its for food only (haven't gotten anywhere close to electrolyzers yet).  I will work towards cooling off the water,but other then having heat stroke/possible heat death (which I plan on fixing with insulated tiles as soon as i get food back under control), I did not know it was important to cool it off. 

I'm in sight of an oil biome, which was my goal before everything started breaking on me. Its right under the hydrogen vent (which is contributing to the heat there). Once I get my base's food settled and water cooled I'll head down there, because plastic would be useful. I dont have exosuits at all,not even unlocked on the tech tree yet (I unlock stuff when i need it, so my dupes are not wasting time that could be spent repairing stuff I broke. 

How would I upload my save file? I was going to do it but i could not figure out how before I needed to go to sleep lol.

 

Also, i keep having wires in my base randomly overload and break. Does anyone know of the reason for this to be happening,or is my base glitched? It started happening after I hooked up the hydrogen generator, even though I only ever have 1 or the other generator running at 1 time. Sometimes if I'm having issues i have hydrogen+hamster,but I dont think that would be too much power,+the overloads are happening even when the hamster wheel is off.

[bobucles]

11 minutes ago, Nascarlaser1 said:

All water from the geysers is only used for the pitcher pumps, since right now its for food only (haven't gotten anywhere close to electrolyzers yet)

Found yer problem, champ. Hot water is useful for many things, but if you put it into your farm, you end up with a cooked farm. There's a reason no one says to use hot water for your farms (it's still great for pincha peppers though).

 Keep hot water away from the core of your base, and keep machines that use hot water away from the core of your base. Even 35C water is hot enough to start causing problems in the farms. If you have ice, you can ice bomb a hot area with tempshift plates. Place them directly on the floor and they'll explode in a splash of refreshing cold mist.

11 minutes ago, Nascarlaser1 said:

Also, i keep having wires in my base randomly overload and break.

Normal wires cook at 1kW use. Advanced wires cook at 2kW. Keep power generators and batteries on heaviwatt wire. A direct wire connection between thicc wire and thin wire will destroy the thin wire. Use transformers to connect heaviwatt wire to normal wire.

[Nascarlaser1]

31 minutes ago, bobucles said:

Found yer problem, champ. Hot water is useful for many things, but if you put it into your farm, you end up with a cooked farm. There's a reason no one says to use hot water for your farms (it's still great for pincha peppers though).

 Keep hot water away from the core of your base, and keep machines that use hot water away from the core of your base. Even 35C water is hot enough to start causing problems in the farms. If you have ice, you can ice bomb a hot area with tempshift plates. Place them directly on the floor and they'll explode in a splash of refreshing cold mist.

Normal wires cook at 1kW use. Advanced wires cook at 2kW. Keep power generators and batteries on heaviwatt wire. A direct wire connection between thicc wire and thin wire will destroy the thin wire. Use transformers to connect heaviwatt wire to normal wire.

ah ok :). I've been using normal wires exclusively, and thought they could handle more.

[Nascarlaser1]

Just realized why that pool of water is so hot. I put an heater unit in it to kill of the FP germs,and...uh...apparently i forgot to shut it off XD.