Looking for suggestions (Verdante)

[PickPay]

This map turned out to be more challenging than I expected (no Algae and very little water in starting biome).

Here's my situation :

I survived almost 100 cycles without an Oxygen Diffuser / Electrolyzer mostly from Oxyfern (about a dozen) ; eating primarly Lice Loaf - only recently added Waterweeds. I'm still running on Manual Gens (haven't got access to coal and my only Hatch died).

At some point I had a setup to desalinate salt water (above base) as I ran low, used lumber for power.

I did an attempt at an Electrolyzer/Hydrogen Gen setup and wanted to cool the oxygen but the Thermoregulator heat up too fast I know only the plants need cool air but I'm not too comfortable pumping hot air all around the base

- I'm thinking to setup an Ethanol Generator for basic power needs since I have a fair amount of lumber

and maybe have Pips replant (wild) Arbor trees at top right of the base (where natural tiles are). the Ethanol Gen also produces p.water, maybe enough (after treatment) for the Oxyferns !?

- Should I go for a Nat Gas geyser instead ? (there is one not too far east).

- How should I handle the 95C water geyser (as long as I dont have Steam Turbines).

-  What about food ? I looked for alternatives but there isnt that much choice on this map...

- I heard Lavatories actually produce more water than they consume, is that extra water worth the setup ?

[hypoeffort]

Yes the flush toilets do produce more than they input.   You should set them up for all the reasons your thinking.  Saves time and generates your Po2 in a septic tank.   

Do you have any rust anywhere?   You got salt for days it looks like.   The rust deoxydizers are stupid easy to setup and the o2 doesn't come out as hot.   I am 300 250 ish cycles deep on aboria. Oxyfern for base and 1 rust deoxydizer for the Atmos suits.  I got 2 blossom seeds in printer otherwise it was all mealwoods.   

Lettuce is useful for mushroom wraps if you got slime and a mushroom farm.   Otherwise there a waste of time currently. I have one setup atm and not using it. 

  If you have no rust you should make a simple SPOM (I like the crytpicfox one) with an eloctrolyzer and run the excess hydrogen for your base power.    Always go for the nat gas when you can.  Even if your not using it for a while. Dig it out so it can fill a large room with gas for you.   Simple water lock keeps it isolated.  They dont generate a lot of water but it can power the base 50% or more of the time.   Chuck an oil refinery inside the area as well to increase gas production.

 

Use the hot water for the electrolyzers.

[Rhogar]

Ranch pips.  They take no labor to feed, propagate arbor acorns for a small net of water, and have a convenient 75 cycle lifespan.  Get a drowning chamber and some convenient priorities and you can have a no delivery meat factory.  You just need to trim the branches every 16 cycles until you have the acorns you want.

 

Use aquatuner in a water bath with a steam gen on top.  Pipe a tile or two of high transfer aquatuner input to maintain the steam generator and you can use it to conquer the geyser.

 

Go for both power sources, but know you will need some industrial level cooling to maintain industrial power machines.

[Mutineer]

You seem to me have a very small base, even if you keep just 3 dupes for 100 cycles. Optimize your base, save dupes time.

A lot of work is 15% faster in light. Put your research stations on both sides of the printer to use it light. Reduce job by having a plumbed toilet as soon as possible. It reduces the amount of work your dupes do.

Set up energy system outside starting biome, you do not want to heat up starting biome. If possible grow more mealwood, do not waste water on food.

In reality, fern can provide oxygen for 6 dupes and use the same amount of water per oxygen as an electrolyzer. So, either if you have water grow ferns in hydroponic ties so you do not have to manually deliver water.
Do use an eating room, you need happiness.

If you do not have water for ferns, use oxidizer. You should have coal on this map. Build early granulator and produce refine metals. Automate coal generation with a smart battery. Speed up toilets, eating, cooking with automated light, use dupe detector.
Speed up industrial production with an automated light.
It might ever worth it to speed up harvesting mealwood with an automated light.
Use poles to speed up dupes movement downstairs. Basically, after researching options do use them to save the time of your dupes. Do use a power room. 900W coal generator is much better than 600W.

Basically, look on ways to speed up all tasks. My base was not perfect, but when I have 6 dupes and do not order anything, 4 did idle. 2 was enough to do everything base need.

[DemainaNyx]

Here's what I've learned about the forest biome.  Sorry for how long it is but hopefully there's some useful information in it for you.

 

Oxygen/Pressure:

Oxyferns, if you read them, only output 31g/s of oxygen and clean 625 mg/s of Co2.  That means 3 Oxyferns is just barely less than what 1 dupe needs to live and clean all the carbon dioxide they produce (a normal dupe need 100g/s of oxygen and exhale 2g/s of Co2; divers lung dupes need 75g/s of Oxygen; mouth breathers need 200g/s of oxygen; deeper divers lungs is 50g/s).  So, ideally you want 4 Oxyferns per dupe if possible.  In one map I had 10 ferns and managed to print 2 more.  The problem with Oxyferns though is that they only work if in carbon dioxide, which since they just barely produce enough to keep a dupe alive, means that they can't pressurize an area on their own unlike algae terrariums (they work with or without Co2) or algae diffusers.  

So, you need to add more pressure on your own.  Since we have trees and pips, I did it by burning lumber to help create the extra pressure via Co2.  The problem here is it produces extra heat, so you need to be careful of where you do it.

The water consumption of oxyferns is not as drastic as people assume.  Yes, it isn't tiny, but it will take a while to use up all that water in your starting biome if you feed it too them.  So long as you are on the search for more water while they pressurize your base, you'll be fine.  In most of my playthroughs I found some type of water geyser within one screen of my printing pod, some times even two or three. 

If you can not find a cool water source, you can use a valve to limit the amount of hot water you give you plants.  19,000g/cycle / 600 s/cycle means they need 31.66 g/s of water per plant.  So just multiple that by how many plants you have and that's the number you set the valve too.  I normally go a little bit less, because sometimes you won't have carbon dioxide and they will go idle, so low balling the number prevents water from backing up in the pipes of overheating the plants.  You can still overheat them, but it will take way longer to do so.

Once you have a stable setup, an ethanol generator is perfect because it fulfills the same role as the wood burner.  It outputs a ton of Co2, generates power, produces a ton of heat, but also produces polluted water.  So again, you need to be wary of where you place this and figure out a means of cooling it ASAP, but it will help you deal with your lack of algae producing oxygen buildings.

 

Food:

The one thing this biome does not lack is dirt.  Pretty much 60% of the tiles you dig up will be dirt tiles.  So, it makes sense to take advantage of that fact.  Mealwood works perfectly as it's easy to grow.  Just make sure to fulfill your dupes morale requirements via rooms and decor and you won't have a problem.  Once you find a stable water source, then you can upgrade to liceloaf if you want, but it isn't necessary.  So long as you plant 5 plants per dupe, they will have enough food to live.  

You said your hatch died, but look for other critters as well for food sources.  I set up an early game glossy drecko ranch inside my base and normally have so many eggs that I just crack extras for omelettes.  If you are lucky, trap some pips in a room with some hatches.  Pips eat arbor trees and produce dirt, hatches eat dirt and produce coal, so it's a nice little symbiotic system the also produces you free energy.  If you can domesticate them, that's more eggs.  You can also just kill them for meat, but I prefer to eat the eggs. 

The reason eggs are nice is because you can basically automate the process without automation.  Eggs will naturally crack in a storage container after so many cycles, leaving raw egg and egg shell behind.  if you heat raw egg above 80C, they instantly become omelettes.  So, if you have geyser with hot temperatures near by, you can put a storage container in it's room and use this to automatically cook your eggs for you.  Hydrogen, chlorine, or carbon dioxide is best since it's a sterile atmosphere so you can leave the eggs there until you remember and they won't rot.  Water works too, but you need to pull the omelettes out or they will rot, so it's not ideal.

 

Lavatories:

In my opinion, these are one of the best early game items to build.  It takes a bit to set the up, but it handles your bathroom needs for the rest of the game AND produces free water at whatever temperature the input is.  It costs 5Kg of water to use a toilet and you get 11.6Kg of water as output.  Yes, it's not a ton of water considering dupes only use a toilet once a day, but it adds up.  If nothing else, you can just put one packet of water in a bathroom loop and you will eventually have a full line which means all that extra water on your map can be used for other things.

My new game research focus is always farm tiles, advanced research, deodorizers, then lavatories tech.  I made this post a while back so not all the information is correct, but it shows a pipe setup that automatically makes sure your bathrooms are filled and extra water is emptied out if this idea is new for you. https://imgur.com/a/VilyrpW  It takes advantage of pipe priorities to direct the flow of water.

 

Pip Planting:

Taking advantage of pips to plant for you is very profitable but also kinda tricky.  Once you learn how their planting system works, it's very easy to get them to plant in the tile that you want.

Pips will only plant in a spot if there are less than 3 plants around it in a 5 up, 5 right, 5 down, and 6 left area (see image below for area; red is desired tile the new plant will grow from, yellow is area they check).  Because of this, it is best to plant from the top down and from right to left at least for upward growing plants (I haven't fully tested hanging plants yet).  Someone posted a much better image before but I can't find it so here is my rendition.  To get a pip to plant in the red box, it checks every tile in the yellow box and counts how many plants it sees.  There is currently only that one Mirth leaf to the right in the box, so it is free to plant here.  The two Mirth leaf plants up top are just out of the box so that's why planting top down works.  A 4 tall room makes planting very easy because of this.

Spoiler

If you look in that picture, there is another natural tile just below with a ladder on it.  The reason for that ladder is so the pip only sees the spot I want it to see.  By covering that place with a ladder, the only available spot to plant was that red tile, so the pips quickly grabbed a seed and planted it.  Now, since this floor is done, I can delete that ladder chunk and the pip will plant there next.

For most seeds, you can either plant them in groups of 3 or every other tile (see image below).  The bottom room has 1 less plant than the top room despite them being the same size.  The reason because of this is that pitcher pump just barely in frame.  That far right tile being 1 higher means they can't plant there because plants on the floor above it are in that yellow area, so the bottom room loses a plantable space because of it.

Spoiler

For Arbor Trees, you really want to plant them in specific locations.  Do it like this: space, tree, space, tree, space, tree, space and repeat from the beginning (see image below).  The reason for the spaces on the outside of the group is to produce a 2 tile gap between each group of three trees.  The bottom row is much easier to identify the pattern because of the natural tiles vs the man-made tiles.  Trees will only ever grow 5 branches and because of that two tile gap, every tree in this pattern will grow exactly 5 branches.  The group in the bottom right of the image below shows off how to achieve 5 branches per tree in this configuration.

Spoiler

 

Basically, you place two ladders around the center trees.  The outer tress grow their outer branches since there is room to.  That takes up 3 branches on the side and 1 out the top.  Once these branches are growing, you can delete the inner ladders.

If you count the big blocks, you can see exactly 15 blocks.  The blue tree has 5 branches, the orange tree had 4, and the purple only has 2.  The green spaces are yet to be claimed due to the ladders.  Once the ladders are deconstructed, the two green spots on the left will become branches for the purple tree since blue can't grow any more branches, and the two green spots on the right will be split with purple and orange each getting 1 branch.  By making sure that the outer trees use up those outer spaces first, it ensures that each tree gets 5 branches.

 

Power:

You will pretty much always need power, but you have to manage heat when using it.  I like to limit my power uses until I can set up a steam turbine and aquatuner setup outside of my base.  I mostly just run manual generators with a few wood burners or coal generators in the way bottom of my base while the rest of my base is around the tip.  Once I can set up a glossy drecko ranch, I'm able to start making steam turbines.  I set up one electrolyzer in it to get hydrogen so they regrow their scales but remove it quickly. 

Build a steam turbine up top and a room below it.  In the bottom room you put an aquatuner and fill the room with water.  I fill my steam turbine room with hydrogen.  Use the liquid from the aquatuner to cool your oxygen generation and turbine (and possibly your base) and use the steam turbine to eat the heat the aquatuner produces.  You just recycle the steam from the turbine back into the aquatuner area and all the heat in your colony will disappear.  The problem is this requires a lot of power upfront.  1200w for the aquatuner and it's going to be running for a while to cool down the water in your radiator system.  Having a supply of resources available (nat gas, petrol, coal, hydrogen) ready for this process will make it much smoother.

I like to enclose my power rooms.  I rarely use the power room bonus since I'm normally swimming in power anyway, but it's nice to enclose it so that emissions don't escape and flood your colony.  You can decide if the power room bonus is worth it or not.  Normally I don't have tons of refined metal until I reach space, so I'd rather save my refined metal for buildings rather than microchips.

Opening and setting up a pump for gas vents is important so I tend to do that ASAP so that they can start producing.  I store it in an infinite gas storage tank but you can also just store it in reservoirs.

 

 

There's probably more I could say, but I've been writing this for too long already so hopefully that's enough information.  If you have any more specific questions, I'd be happy to answer.

[camelot]

Verdante has forest, rust and slime biome, so enough dirt, slime, algae, ethanol, rust and water

Meal lice and mushroom should be your main food source early game

Ethanol (pool in the rust biome, not from wood) should be your main power source early game. Caution: It produces a lot of CO2, so be warned

Rust should be your main oxygen source early game

So my suggestion should be: Explore as soon as you can (with or without atmo suits). Stumble upon ethanol pools feel like hitting a gold mine!

FYI, here is my base around cycle 108 in Verdante too

 

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

[PickPay]

Thank you all for your helpful (and detailed) contributions 

I have already made some changes based on your recommendations and will continue to come back for reference as I progress.

Jobs done :

- Ethanol Gen. with a water Sieve.

- Replacement of farm tiles for Oxyfern by hydroponic ones.

Next up :

- Lavatories

- Test Meal lice (instead of Lice loaf to save water)

I haven’t got access to mushrooms yet so maybe I should stop lettuce then.

I think the reason I haven’t used lighting is because of the extra heat, maybe with a Dupe detector it’s no big deal then. I’ll move the research next to the Pod.

Rust is quite far so I’m not sure it’s the best option but I have to dig through Abyssalite anyway if I wanna reach algae now...

My Pips are hungry even with Arbor trees in the stable. I need to replant more. I have never ranched Dreckos either. I’ll have to figure that out.

I might try the valve for hot watering my plants see how that works, clever idea if it does not stifle them.

Steam Turbine setup is definitely a must for serious heat deletion but I’m not sure I’m ready for it yet.

I’ll see if I can dig out the nat. gas geyser.

Well I like to explore but it often seems like more trouble and labor intensive which is why I’m not doing it more. I’d like atmo suits but I need more oxygen for that...

[DemainaNyx]

9 hours ago, PickPay said:

My Pips are hungry even with Arbor trees in the stable. I need to replant more. I have never ranched Dreckos either. I’ll have to figure that out.

I believe pips are only able to eat the branches they can access.  So for your ranch your trees are still growing, thus there is nothing for the pips to actually eat.  And because those two trees are so close to each other, you will only get 2 branches that they can eat from.  It might be best to relocate your ranch to the area on the left of your base by the storage containers where trees already exist just so they don't die.  Level out the area around the tree and use ladders to encourage the trees to grow their bottom most branches.  I haven't tried this, but if pips are like dreckos you might be able to place tiles on the ceiling so that the pips can eat the top branches as well so they have more food sources.

[Nebbie]

Priority number one is water for the oxyferns, and warm generator runoff sieved will kill off things a lot slower than hot geyser water. With that in mind, don't worry about heat for the first 100 cycles or so, and absolutely rush to natural gas and ethanol power. Food is less of an issue for temperature with ranching; I recommend dreckos first because they will get you essential resources eventually, and they don't really eat much of your mealwood. 

Now, once you've got a handle on things, you will notice serious heat issues. Steam turbine + aquatuner is necessary unless you do something really exploity to cool down your base, cause the whole ethanol setup puts out tons of heat. You need three things to get started:

1. 1200kg steel for the aquatuner
2. 800kg refined metal for the steam turbine
3. 200kg plastic for the steam turbine

Ranching pokeshells will get you a decent bit of lime for the steel. Don't bother refining any metal for the turbine, as oil biomes contain the ideal lowest-thermal-conductivity refined metal of lead. Don't use aluminum, as it's thermal conductivity is utterly ludicrous, only beaten slightly by thermium; 800kg of it will instead make for a tempshift plate way better than a diamond one. Glossy dreckos will get you the plastic relatively easily. Altogether, this should be doable by cycle 100, saving your base from heat issues.

Now, even with a turbine refunding some of the power cost, an aquatuner isn't cheap power-wise. I recommend adding a coal generator with sage hatch ranching to provide the extra power...and this is where killing your starting hatch is a problem. You will eventually get a care package for a hatchling if care packages are enabled.

Do all of that right, and you'll easily make it to cycle 200. As a tip on carbon skimmers and bathrooms, you want each to have its own sieve, so that issues with balancing water sources (power generators, geysers) and sinks (oxyferns, later electrolysis, eventually maybe robominer cooling) don't break their looping. I strongly recommend planning out where to put carbon skimmers ahead of time, as well, since otherwise the piping is atrocious.

As for bathrooms, they're a slight net gain instead of a perfect loop, so use a bridge in the loop with the pipe on its input running past as a way to let excess flow out (it'll continue past the blocked bridge), and treat that flow out as a water source. Now, you can still run into trouble eventually with backup if your water sources put out mare than you can sink, so make sure if you pipe in some geyser source to put it on a liquid shutoff with a backup detector (two bridges in a row, inputs and outputs connected, second bridge in flow direction's input is where you put a sensor, as the second bridge is only used when the first is blocked, similar to what to do with the bathroom loop's excess).