Getting to the mid-game in 100 cycles or less

[Saturnus]

First, let's define what I mean by the mid-game. Many people would probably define it slightly differently but I think that most will agree that if you have this check list filled out you are very definitely in the mid-game.

- Permanent solution for base cooling
- Permanent solution for higher tier food
- Permanent solution for oxygen
- Stable power supply
- Stable water supply
- All pre-space research done
- All dupes have access to atmo-suits
- At least temporary production facilities for ceramics, steel, plastics, and petroleum

Second, this is by no means a "perfect" game. Plenty mistakes were made during play but none that couldn't easily be fixed. It's played on terra because I think that's where most people play, and frankly other maps add too much random chance to make a single concise guide on. If you prefer another map, adapt what you can, if you want. Personally I don't like to play games with forest start because of how broken aluminium is but that's a personal choice.

The dupe strategy is closely tied to how many dupes I prefer to play with (12) and the need to rush to atmo-suits as fast as possible. So in order to get all dupes trained in suit wearing by the same time which dupes you pick when matters a lot. If a dupe has the right interests at the right time then that dupe might get chosen over a "better" one simply because interests increases skill levelling and morale.

So the first 4-5 dupes including the starting dupes can get two skills they are interested in before they must switch to supply and then suit wearing. The next 3-4 dupes can only have one interest skill before switching, and the last 3-4 dupes must go the supply/suit route immediately. So you want a researcher, a miner, and a farmer among the first 4-5 dupes. And you want a cook, doctor, and rancher among next 3-4 dupes. And lastly you can add a decorator among the last dupes. I tend to prefer multi-interest dupes.

There is one exception though. I always have a dupe with operate, and either supply or construction among the starting dupes. This dupe rushes mecha-engineer so he will be a bit slower to get suit wearing but it pays of compared to waiting to make rail systems/sweepers.

Anyway, let's get back to the slides. I've made a slide at the start of every one of the first 10 cycles, then every second for the next 20, and so on. I've compiled them into 8 mega-slides with 5 screenshots on each so zooming in to see details is required.

Cycle 1-5

Starting map is fairly good with a huge pool of water to the right and a smaller one to the left. Also a large chamber below to dump that water into. And a lot of plants. On the first cycle I made the standard outhouse, sink, 3 cots, hamster wheel, battery and research station. It's what you'd typically get done on cycle 1.
By comparison cycle 2 was slow due to changing the battery and running on hamster wheel a lot but got a lamp for the research station to increase research speed. Starting to get a mess hall on cycle 3 and killed the shine bug in the chamber above to make sure it didn't interfere with sleeping dupes. Also set up more cots and got the 4th dupe. On cycle 4 I started to drain the pool on the right to the bottom chamber. And replacing some tiles with air flow tiles, and added more outhouses/sinks (though technically not needed as dupes have staggered schedule so only one dupe a time will ever use it but the second one is for when the primary one is cleaned..

Cycle 6-10

On cycle 5 I added the supercomputer, prepared for draining the pool to the left and set up a pump at the bottom of the big pool. On cycle 6 started preparing to make a bristle farm. Yup, that's right, straight to bristle blossoms, no meal lice here. At this point I'm chronically low on metal ore however. And there's a large rein on the bottom left so I have to drain the small pool fast. While I wait for that on cycle 7 I open up to the chambers on the right. There's lots of oxygen there that means I can delay setting up algae diffusers for a bit. There's also a lot of plants. At the same time the farm is taking shape. On cycle 8 continued with the farm and got shine bug egg for the future lavatory on the right. And then on cycle 9 got the same for the future lavatory on the left, and finished setting up the farm and added a cooking station.

Cycle 11-20

Got the farm on the right finished and planted and started on the farm on the left. Added more bedrooms (well, barracks really). Then started making the lavatories, and picked up shine bug eggs for the future med-bay and recreation rooms. On cycle 14-15 started digging for copper so I can set up the oxygen cooler solution which requires a large amount of refined metal. But on cycle 16-17 reversed that decision and instead started on making a coal generator set up.
Added more bedrooms and finished the lavatory set up. It won't get switched on until I have different access point to the top, and can dump the polluted water in the power generator room as coolant.

Cycle 21-30

Finished the coal power set up and started on a new access to it. Then actually started on making the oxygen/farm/base cooler which is finished by cycle 27. Also starting making a floor in the power set to dump polluted water into, so I can dig out the slime above and just have it dump into that preventing any off gassing. And also hoping to find some reed fiber seeds buried (there's only two types of buried objects in a slime biome; reed fiber seeds and mushroom seeds). Finished the floor and switched to lavatories before cycle 30.

Cycle 31-45

Found more than enough seeds (only need 3 or 4 but 5 is a nice buffer) Dumping extra polluted water in from the slime biome to make sure there's plenty for the reed fibers by cycle 32. Then set up an atmo-suit forge and started refining metal for the atmo-suits.By cycle 39 the oxygen production is starting to shape. By cycle 45 the oxygen production is set up (with algae diffusers for the time being), the atmo-suit docks are charging, and all atmo-suits are done. Now just waiting for enough dupes to skill up suit wearing to make the switch. Usually I want at least 9 of 12 dupes to have the skill before switching.

Cycle 46-60

Added some decor and cleaned the place up a bit over the next couple of cycles but by cycle 51 the pincha pepper farm is starting to take shape. The pincha peppers is to get higher tier food (stuffed berries) for the dupes and to delete to lavatory water output. Somewhere between cycle 48 and 51 enough dupes had suit wearing skill to switch to the suits.
There was a large pool of polluted water blocking downward digging on the left side (and there's a geyser (of unknown type) blocking downward access on the right). By cycle 54, that's all pumped into an infinite storage (about 70 tiles worth of water). The pinch pepper farm/fertilizer set up is slowly taking shape as well.

Cycle 61-80

By cycle 64 the fertilizer synths are running but the pinchas aren't warm enough yet. It takes a while. By cycle 68 started making a metal refinery set up so I can make steel. Progress is made towards reaching the oil biome. Cycle 72 and the oil biome is reached and starting setting up the natural gas vent above the base as that one is still active. By cycle 76 both geysers are capped permanently, and luckily for me they pretty much perfectly supplement each other. One coming out of dormancy when the other goes inactive. By cycle 80 I started on the natural gas power set up.

Cycle 81-100

Started making a polymer press/refinery set up, and yes it naturally has liquid flow start/stop. And the natural gas power set up is done at around cycle 84 as well. By cycle 88 the water/base cooler and the water sieve/disinfector set up are being done at the same time. By cycle 92 they're almost ready, just waiting for vacuum in both places. Cycle 96 and both are done. Now just changing to electrolyzers instead of algae diffusers for oxygen, and setting up carbon skimmers left to do. And voila, cycle 100 and everything on the checklist completed.

It's a bit messy but it'll do. I'll get back with a more detailed look at all the parts. And should some one like to see it, I can keep playing the same map, and see how many cycles it takes to be space-ready.

Cheers.

[Samson.ONI]

I think a lot of players define what stage of the game they are in based on what materials they have access to. Diamond, lead, steel, crude oil, petroleum and plastic being mid-game materials. The way you define it makes a lot more sense however. Your base looks well thought out, and props for having implemented so many permanent, sustainable solutions in only 100 cycles.

[Steve8]

I guess living in exo suits is a solution to dealing the CO2

I get distracted by having lots of big plans and making tons of changes. And I'm not one to dig out the whole map, but I do spread a lot and could never be that super compact. Earlier I noticed that my dupes most of their time traveling. So I installed transport dupes. With plastic thanks to glossy dreckos I got very early on. That made getting heavy industry up less pressing, though I've wanted to do it for ages.

I do have a metal refinery up and running though. Just for some small patches of steel here and there. I simply pump up polluted water from a pool and dump it right back in. No fancy cooling needed for that. Not a long term solution obviously

[thewreckedangle]

hm.

out of interest, what is the reason for "rushing" it like this? 

[Fleetfeet]

26 minutes ago, thewreckedangle said:

hm.

out of interest, what is the reason for "rushing" it like this? 

The game is largely about efficiency and optimization. This is a logical, useful, and entertaining continuation of that, no?

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

There is one exception though. I always have a dupe with operate, and either supply or construction among the starting dupes. This dupe rushes mecha-engineer so he will be a bit slower to get suit wearing but it pays of compared to waiting to make rail systems/sweepers.

I've found this is critical.  Lately during world-gen I've made sure one of my starting dupes likes supply, operate, and either construction or research.  It really gets annoying when you start to build rail systems and find that your operator can't construct, or that you don't have a dupe trained through mechanical engineering yet.

 

Also, sweet guide.  I tend to take things slower, but there's nothing in your guide that I don't address on my way to the mid-game.

[Junksteel]

Amazing work. I love that base design. Thank you for sharing!

[beowulf2010]

44 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I've found this is critical.  Lately during world-gen I've made sure one of my starting dupes likes supply, operate, and either construction or research.  It really gets annoying when you start to build rail systems and find that your operator can't construct, or that you don't have a dupe trained through mechanical engineering yet.

I couldn't agree more. Having a Dupe with supply and operate interests is invaluable to getting conveyors up in a timely fashion. 

@Saturnus, thanks for the write up. Gonna study this tonight and see what other ideas/systems I can pillage from you. 

[Saturnus]

4 hours ago, Steve8 said:

I guess living in exo suits is a solution to dealing the CO2

It's not for that though. It's a solution that allows you to save an enormous amount of dupe time they'd otherwise waste on running back to an area to catch their breath dropping whatever they're carrying in the process. It also allows you to completely ignore any heat or cold.

That's the basis of the solution of having the dupes in atmosuits straight out of bed. However, that in turn allows you to make your base completely different since you can just make a double bell system with CO2 at the bottom where the farm is and oxygen at the top where the dupes sleep. That means that no other gases entering your base has any effect what-so-ever as CO2 automatically excludes all other gases since it's the heaviest gas, and oxygen which is only needed in the bed rooms is the second lightest gas. I've not come to the point where it's needed yet but later hydrogen will also be automatically deleted by the oxygen vents should it stray into the base.

[zOldBulldog]

Very slick and very compact.  I would love to see you expand on the details for the various pieces.

Some things that look better than anything I've seen before and that I would love to fully understand are:

- The method you use for infinite material storage (and the thinking behind it)

- The method you use for infinite liquid storage.

- An in-depth explanation of your overall method for cooling the base.  I see clues here and there but I am not sure I fully understand it.

[Rebrait]

The light are making the research fast?

I see a topic about that and i think isn´t

 

[Saturnus]

23 minutes ago, Rebrait said:

The light are making the research fast?

I see a topic about that and i think isn´t

Outside possible inaccuracy with a stopwatch I measure 5% increase in research speed.

[Sandra2104]

Could you show liquid overlay?

[BLACKBERREST3]

10 hours ago, Rebrait said:

The light are making the research fast?

I see a topic about that and i think isn´t

10 hours ago, Rebrait said:

Outside possible inaccuracy with a stopwatch I measure 5% increase in research speed.

He's talking about this topic. If it is a 5% increase in speed, then how is he getting the same amount of power consumed?

 

[Saturnus]

13 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

He's talking about this topic.

I don't see how this question is relevant to this thread.

[storm6436]

Nice.  Hope that map keeps working out for you.  I generally take a lot longer to get there, usually about cycle 175ish, but most of that is due to the fact that I basically decide up front where my industrial stuff is going to end up going, and spent the first 50 cycles digging out and insulting the base proper before moving on to strip mining the hell out of what is going to be my industrial area.  From a timeline snapshot perspective, it doesn't look like I accomplish much for the first... 80-100 cycles other than the mentioned insulation... and then suddenly *poof* inside 20 cycles I have every facility except the permanent bulk cooler and oil.  mostly because at that point I've set up my temporary cooler and I'm using it to make sure I don't boil myself to death spamming ceramics.

 Oh, it might not be terribly efficient, but early game I usually do the CO2/Cl pits and H2 ceiling collection, but since one or both usually covers where I want to go, I end up with temporary reservoirs so I don't waste the "Scamper for air" time you mentioned.

 

[Saturnus]

Let me say that this is by no means a "speed run" I can do everything achieved here even faster if I didn't care about set ups and base layouts going forwards. I would also have dug around the giant pool of polluted water blocking access downward instead of spending many cycles on pumping it up.

The reason I rush to the mid-game, and the reason things are set up the way they are is because I have a clear vision of what I want my base to look like, and the rush is because the sooner you get these things sorted the sooner you can start making use of the whole map. There's no point for me in building up slowly because in the beginning you have very limited resources available so I think it's better to have the fundamentals of a base permanently set up as soon as possible, and then build from there when you have more resources available, and your dupes are far more potent.

That out of the way. Here's some of the parts in the build that may be unusual to some. The aquatuner/steam turbine water cooler and the water sieve are so basic I think most will know how they work and is set up.

Farm, base and oxygen cooler

It's pretty simple. The bottom is filled with water that act as a thermal buffer and heat exchange medium for the radiant pipes.
Water comes from the right (in regular pipes in insulation tiles) and goes through the water cooler.
Then cold water comes in from the left through radiant pipes, goes around and is tapped by the farms and lavatories.
That means that all cold water used by the base (but not the electrolyzers which doesn't use cooled water) goes through the cooling tank.
Since the cooling tank is in direct contact with the hydroponic tiles and regular pipes are behind all plants it's basically impossible barring a major mistake on my side to get the farm too hot. And frankly, that's what really matters.
The oxygen comes in from both left and right though radiant pipes in the cooling tank, and at the end the oxygen is exactly the same temperature as the water within 0.2C. That oxygen goes to the docking stations and the vent at the top keeping the bedroom nice and chilly (about 21C-24C).
The lavatory water which is fairly cold is used to cool the power plant at the top of the base before being sent to the pincha pepper farm.

Natural gas geyser set up

 

I find this a pretty standard set up but someone on discord asked my to post it. It's pretty basic. Just two steel pumps. A bit of automation so only one pump can be on at the same time. And with a vent in a bit of oil to make an infinite storage on the left side.
When pressure rises in the right chamber natural gas will be pumped into the infinite storage on the left.
The reason for the puddle of oil covering the whole floor is that it is extremely easy to set up and can withstand the natural gas temperature. Just dump some oil on the floor. If more than 2kg over the vent then mop a bit until it's under 2kg. When you have plastic and can make high pressure vents it's even easier because then you just have to hit under 20kg oil covering the vent. You'd have to be really forgetful to mess it up.

Oxygen Module

I've detailed this set up before but what is unusual about this particular version is that when set up like this you can use manually fed algae diffusers instead of electrolyzers since all element sensors are set to oxygen, well technically all set to NOT oxygen with the NOT gate. The top 2 element sensor are for the filters, and the bottom one is for the blockage sensor to shut off the pumps when the pipe is filled to avoid messing up the filtering.
With algae diffusers what is NOT oxygen is just vented out. With electrolyzers what is NOT oxygen is deleted with hydrogen generators (or you can store the hydrogen if you like). When going from algae diffusers to electrolyzer you just make sure you make it's a vacuum inside before hooking up the water input line.

Temporary Petroleum/Plastic set up

Also a pretty simple build. As it should as it's only temporary. Crude oil is pumped from the oil biome. What is not used by the oil refinery is just used to cool the set up and dumped back out. Sure this will heat up the crude oil but very very slowly so you don't have to worry about it for hundreds of cycles unless your oil biome crude oil is near 100C already. I just dig to the top of the oil biome first. Just deep enough to get a decent pool of crude oil and access to some fossil, diamond, and lead as well. The crude oil at the top of the biome is usually well below 100C.
There's a consumption based start/stop on the oil refinery so dupes don't have to work at it for seconds at a time refilling a single 10kg portion of pipe. The buffer here is just pipes but that's still a 200kg buffer or the polymer press running for 240 seconds which is fine.
The polymer press shut off is temp is higher then 99C to avoid the water inside turning to steam. And the 2 mesh tiles is there to make it possible to mop up water should it get above 50kg or so.
The hydro sensor was for a mini-pump to drain it automatically but then I remembered minipumps have 75C overheat temp so it wouldn't work. Regardless, the two mesh tiles to mop on is fine.
EDIT: thinking about it I'll probably replace the mesh tiles with a pneumatic door controlled by the hydro sensor with a 200s buffer gate. And put a mop command over the door that will only be accessible once the hydro sensor triggers and close the door.  

[Hakon]

On 1-10-2019 at 9:20 PM, Saturnus said:

- Stable water supply

Thanks for sharing this great colony!  I was just wondering where your normal water comes from, I can only see the sieve. Does that sieve keep up with your consumption?

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, Hakon said:

Thanks for sharing this great colony!  I was just wondering where your normal water comes from, I can only see the sieve. Does that sieve keep up with your consumption?

Right now it's still on starting water for the base part. The sieve currently only feed the electrlolyzers. But yes, one sieve is enough and just the pools of polluted water I can see around or have already gathered will be enough for the next 100 cycles at least. There's a salt water geyser on the right side, and the next thing I would do playing this map is to check what all the geysers Easter eggs I've uncovered are.

[Rebrait]

19 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I don't see how this question is relevant to this thread.

I was not talking 100% about the topic but wondering if you had the answer to whether the bonus is being applied or not

But, to make a more efficiency and optimization game, the research sequence is important!

if the light isn´t giving the bonus maybe you can change the reserch sequence and make a even better gameplay

[BLACKBERREST3]

Just now, Rebrait said:

maybe you can change the reserch sequence and make a even better gameplay

This is one of those things that are unique to everyone's playthrough especially if you're going for a perfect run.

[Rebrait]

1 minute ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

This is one of those things that are unique to everyone's playthrough especially if you're going for a perfect run.

if the research is giving a 15% bonus from the light is a really smart move to research light first
if it isn´t you are only loosing dupe time from the research and the power generation

(the bonus matter to the hamster wheel???)

[BLACKBERREST3]

3 minutes ago, Rebrait said:

if the research is giving a 15% bonus from the light is a really smart move to research light first
if it isn´t you are only loosing dupe time from the research and the power generation

(the bonus matter to the hamster wheel???)

Doesn't work on hamster wheel

19 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I don't see how this question is relevant to this thread.

saturnus doesn't want us talking about it in this thread for some reason so just talk about it from the topics in the lit workplace section on this thread instead.

 

Last thing I'll say about it is that we need a list for it badly, but no one has had the time to test it lately. We only know about a few of them so far.

[EnderCN]

On 10/1/2019 at 3:41 PM, thewreckedangle said:

hm.

out of interest, what is the reason for "rushing" it like this? 

Because long games get boring and make people want to quit playing.  That is why there are so many players who will admit they have played thousands of hours and still never made it to space.  It is really hard to stick with a base past like cycle 200 for most players so the more you can get done in that time the better.  Also for me at least if I take a break for a few days because Im busy I won't go back to an advanced base and continue.  Most games are like this for me, take a break from a game of civ and I might as well be done with that game, I won't want to continue later.

[Sigma Cypher]

Quote

And should some one like to see it, I can keep playing the same map, and see how many cycles it takes to be space-ready.

Raises hand.  Yes!! I should very much like to see it.  Thanks very much for this.  It could be the most concise guide I've seen for ONI.