Midgame progress sequence

[zOldBulldog]

The sequence of progress for the midgame stumps me a bit.  I wonder what is the best practice.

So, let's say the early game was successfully completed.  You have a reasonably stable core base, you broke into a caustic biome and collected a supply of gasses, you made atmo suits and have a small supply of gold amalgam from the slime biome, food is fine and you might even have a power/gas distribution system in place to help you get oxygen where needed, collect gasses from pockets and get key gasses to your builds.  Let's even assume you explored a bit and found the locations of various vents, geisers and volcanoes.

Key steps for the midgame that should lead to a self-sustainable base are:

• Finding oil.
• Tapping a steam vent for unlimited water.  Can be done with plain gold amalgam, no steel and no oil, but it is best done if you at least have oil and most efficient if you have steel.
• Setting up a SPOM or two for unlimited oxygen, including cooling the oxygen to a comfy temperature.   Can be built and cooled with a few wheezeworts and copper/gold supplies even if fed hot water, but the better ones will end up requiring better materials.
• Cooling water.  Primitive methods exist, but efficient methods require oil and steel.
• Setting up multiple sources of renewable power, including from SPOM excess hydrogen, from natural gas geisers, etc.
• Tapping and processing oil and tapping volcanoes.

 

So... in what order would you tackle those tasks, and did I miss any critical ones?

[Steve8]

There are other easy ways to get more water like sieving the tons of water in the slime biomes or desalinating salt water. It's not unlimited, but it will last a long time. And getting rid of inconveniently placed pools is good too. If you don't mind a more manual way just build some ice temp shift plates above your fresh water pool. As a bonus it chills your water and the the area around it.

Setting up a SPOM can be done relatively early. For me it's my first larger project. I like to use an AETN for cooling. It's not enough for very large scale designs, but it can do 2 pipes of oxygen (so 1-3 electrolyzers). More if you used incoming cool water to pre-cool the oxygen, but that an issue in of itself. In my current game I have a cool steam vent basically right next to the AETN. And in other games I got lucky with close placement too.

One simple way too cool water is to run the chilled oxygen from the AETN through your fresh water pool with radiant pipes. And run water lines also with radiant pipes through it. But as said, the more oxygen you cool with the AETN the warmer it gets. You can easily chill down a single pipe to negative temperatures though.

Another good transition step is finding a natural gas geyser. That allows you to run easy to set up natural gas generators which can be your first large scale power net. I mean one using transformers to spread the load to several subnets of conductive wire. This gives you enough power to do some aquatuner cooling

That oxygen and power also allow you to set up exosuit docks. You need those to access the oil biome and get into space. But you can also do them earlier. Like using coal power and just pumping in some regular algae oxygen from your base. Fun fact: you can pump searing hot oxygen into suits and dupes don't mind. So if you have a rust biome, the oxygen directly from a rust dexyodizer becomes an option.

Another early "larger" project for me is some autosweeper automation like clearing out eggs out of my Hatch stables. And either turn them into omelettes or setting up an automated drowning chamber and eating the meat. Other things here and there can also receive some autosweepers.

[Mojo Filter]

Midgame for me is mostly about getting my industrial capacity set up. With steam vents supplying water to my oxygen generation, which I will disagree that you need any advanced materials - gold or iron will do fine, I head for the oil biome.

In the meantime, I start making a giant pile of ceramic, get my metal refinery set up, and start thinking about where I want my oil refinery and polymer presses.

I will also build some sort of pacu farm for easy meat and egg shell production, but beyond that, I am personally not much into ranching. However, on my current base, I decided to set up one of Brothgar's shine bug reactors, which gave me an early need for glass. Considering how ridiculously effective the reactor has been, I very well might make that part of my regular mid-game.

Then it is just about stockpiling steel, plastic, glass, and ceramic for whatever you plan to tackle next.

[Steve8]

Yeah, a gold pump is perfectly fine if you want to be on the safe side. Cool steam vents are located in the toxic biome anyways, so you naturally dig up some gold.

[MorsDux]

1. oxygen and food

the rest depends on your map.

but it is usually this:

2. processed metal

3. plastic

3. metal refinery

4. steel

5. steam space

6. petroleum space

7. oxygen and hydrogen liquification

8. hydrogen space

And while you are doing all this, depending on your difficulty level, dupe number etc. sometimes you have to put extra steps in to increase morale, or increase oxygen and food productions, and stuff like power, it all depends on what you have on the map...