Beginner Questions

[Olleus]

Got this game a couple of weeks ago to get me through quarantine, and I'm loving it! I've restarted a couple of times as I learnt game mechanics, and I feel like I have the basics reasonably well understood. On my current game I've reached the point where I've built a telescope and can produce plastic and steel in decent quantities, but I've hit a number of problems that I couldn't find advice for how to manage. I'm not hoping to have those fully automated huge bases I've seen screenshots of, but something that can keep ticking reasonably well.

1) Errand priority. My dupes are all over place, climbing a 200 tile ladder to the space biome, digging precisely 1 tile of mafic rock, and then climbing all the way back down for a completely unrelated errand. How do you stop this? I've tried setting priority based on their skills/attributes, having them all the same, or having the proximity thing flagged. Doesn't seem to make much difference, they're spending 60% of the time walking around, basically in circles. I probably got more built in the first 50 phases then the next 50 ones because of this. It's very infuriating.

2) Resource management. That's tightly linked to the above. How to you manage the tons of ores, raw materials and the like that get dug up? I've set up a big square with 80 storage containers, conveyor rails leading to it with a handful off loaders, all serviced to each other by auto-sweepers. The belts start off in my exploration/mining tunnels. The idea is that dupes that are digging would carry the materials back to the loader in the tunnel and then resume digging. Doesn't work half the time, most of the time they prefer walking back carrying some pathetic 50kg of sandstone. Apart from when they decide to walk to a loader on the other edge of the map to put stuff there.. I've made sure to put the priority on the loaders are all the same, and higher than my central storage square, doesn't help. Now I'd also like to have an efficient way of getting resources from this central area to various processing/construction sites, is there any way of doing this reasonably?

3) Morale and breakroom. How exactly do I make dupes use jukebox, arcade machine and the like? Sometimes they use them, but other times they ignore them even when on 10/20 morale. Do I need multiple of each if I have a big colony (20 dupes currently)? Is it better to put them all in one huge great hall/recreation room, or to spread them around my central base? Is it worth having them on different schedules so their's less crowding for these amenities? Same things for showers, I tried setting half of my dupes to shower in the morning, and half in the evening, but it didn't achieve so much.

4) I've been designing things to have one central base with all my living/eating/entertainment quarters in the middle, and the industry/agriculture stuff tightly around it. Only things feeding from geysers/vents/volcanoes/oil wells, mining tunnels and my telescope are far out. Is this a reasonable way of doing things? Or should I have some of my dupes sleeping close to the space biome to work on rockets?

5) Gas management. How do you prevent gases leaking everywhere? When exploring I deliberately avoid pockets of helium/natural gas/chlorine, because otherwise they make their way back to my base and stick around forever. How do you prevent this happening, or how do you live around it? I've tried walling off the pockets from the outside before going in to get the critters/plants/resources in there, but it's a pain and there's always some leakage. Similarly, how do you have stables/farmers with non-standard gases be "tidy" without that gas leaking absolutely everywhere?

 

Sorry for the long post, lots of things on my mind! I really like this game and I want to have things working well, rather than just skirting disaster all the time (as I've done with heat problems so many times!)

[Sasza22]

1. In the priorities tab there`s a setting in the corner that lets you "enable proximity". It will make dupes prefer closer tasks and should reduce scenarios where they dig one tile and run to something else.

Specialising dupes also helps. Just have a dedicated miner, builder etc. give them very high priority in their tasks and they will do a lot of things in a row rather than run to harvest a single crop. Personal priority overrides global priority settings (1-9) so make sure you got some dupes on life support tasks and cooking as well.

2. Most of the time there is no need to sweep up all the rock you`ve mined. You will have over 20 000 tons of rock and there is no reason to keep it in the base. Personally i use the "sweep only" setting on supply bins for rock and just order the sweep n the areas where dupes spend most time. The rest i keep lying around as it doesn`t really matter.

If you really want it swept you could put auto-sweepers in areas with most ore and lead it to a conveyor shute and dump all to a single tile to save storage space.

3. Dupes need time to use the recreation machines. They will prioritize toilets and eating during breaktime and only use jukebots and other stuff if they have time left. First thing to do is increase their break time (in the schedules tab). Another thing might be connected to your base layout. If they need to much time to return home they won`t be able to relax. Try making fire poles wherever possible and replacing ladders with plastic ones. If you have enough power consider using transit tubes to the distant areas.

4. It`s reasonable to have everything in one place. Just keep in mind some machines produce a lot of heat. You want them away from het sensitive stuff like your farms. It`s best to have your base connected with space using a transit tube to save time. Or at least a fire pole from top to the base so they can get back faster.

5. There are a few techniques to manage gas. You can use corner building, which means you build your tiles diagonal, as gasses can`t pass diagonal walls but dupes can build through them.

You can also just leave a lot of room above and below your base, with airflow tiles everywhere and let the gasses settle above and below (mostly below) your base.

[Olleus]

Thanks for the answers, that will go a long way.

Does "enable proximity" override the other priority settings, or complement them? The advice for morale is good, but doesn't really answer my questions. Is there any advantage to having multiple arcade machines/jokebox ect...? Is it better to have one great hall with everything there, or multiple recreation rooms? As for gases, diagonal building is a great idea. But that doesn't seem feasible with farms, how do I grow things in chlorine (and provide fertilizer, harvest them, ect...) without constantly leaking chlorine everywhere and having to endlessly pump more in?

[Lacost]

1) I suggest you take some time and follow a Dupe to see which errands it will perform and in which order. One important thing: Dupes do not have common sense! If they are in space with a priority 5 dig and a priority 6 dig appears in the oil biome, they will head down and perform the task. You usually get the most out of your Dupes if you only issue construction errands at one corner of the map at all times.

2) There are no combined tasks in the game for mining and storing. A miner will only dig but never carry anything back. This task is performed under supply and storage. Dupes can carry good amounts of stuff around if they perform storage actions but will do the classical: 50 mcg of algae supply run to restock the deoxydizer. This is mostly where automation comes in: Issue a compactor to be filled with 20 tons at once, reduce the priority of it so that your Dupes don't bother with it anymore and let the auto sweeper peform the supply errand to the machinery. This saves a ton of time wasting supply errands.

3) Recreational buildings are all completely optional and (in my opinion) a late game tool to flex your decadency muscles. Build a great hall, washroom and barracks and decor bomb your living area. The +120 max decor is a lie. Dupes will benefit from +1000 decor just fine. This will give you enough morale to last you through the midgame.

4) High athletics skills allow you to build a central base. The most time your Dupes waste are supply errands and you want to keep them as short as possible. So I would say having everything centralized is a good way to do the early game.

5) Build liquid airlocks. If you are not on highest stress settings you will have no problems caused by being wet. If not then wait until you have access to atmo suits.

 

[Olleus]

Is it worth giving a dupe high priority for both, say, digging and tidying so once it's dug a hole it will then pick up after itself? Or same thing for construction and supplying? I'm still curious what, exactly, "enable proximity" does.

 

I looked up how liquid airlocks work. It seems a little... cheesy. Why isn't there a door type in this game that acts as an actual airlock? (say, twice as wide as a normal one), with very slow door opening/closing, that maintains gases on both sides? It would take ~200W of power and not open unless that was supplied. Graphic could be a revolving door kind of thing.

[Lacost]

2 minutes ago, Olleus said:

Is it worth giving a dupe high priority for both, say, digging and tidying so once it's dug a hole it will then pick up after itself? Or same thing for construction and supplying? I'm still curious what, exactly, "enable proximity" does.

 

I looked up how liquid airlocks work. It seems a little... cheesy. Why isn't there a door type in this game that acts as an actual airlock? (say, twice as wide as a normal one), with very slow door opening/closing, that maintains gases on both sides? It would take ~200W of power and not open unless that was supplied. Graphic could be a revolving door kind of thing.

Tidying is only for items marked with the sweeping errand and gets its priority from there. Storing is for automatically sweeping stuff into containers. The priority is taken from the container setting. Supplying is for delivering stuff to machinery with priority from the machinery setting. All three of them will haul stuff from the ground. So you have to check what exactly your Dupes are doing when they carry something around.

The only way you can get your miners to pick up after themselves is setting the storing errand with a higher priority than the mining errand. But then they will mine 1-2 tiles, stop, pick up what lies on the ground, deliver it to a storage bin, run back, mine 2 tiles and repeat. --> Highly inefficient. You are better off assigning a dedicated hauler that does these storing errands and let the miners dig up as fast as they can.

 

There are door-airlocks with automation that delete the gas in between 2 doors. However, this can interrupt the pathing of your Dupes. A liquid airlock is the cleanest build you can have. Both for speed and pathing issues.

 

 

 

 

[Olleus]

Ok, awesome, played around on sandbox with liquid airlocks and diagonal construction and I think, used together, this will solve my gas issues!

My only main remaining confusion is entertainment buildings and recreation room. If I want to use them (rather than just decor bombing), what's the best way of doing so? I get that I need enough down time for my dupes, but should I spread my recreation rooms around, or just have one big one? Should it be separate from the great hall? Do I need multiple of each in a big colony? Oh, and what's the deal with water cooler/juicer/esspresso machine? Can the same dupe use all of them, or is it more of an "or" kind of thing?

Actually, the same placement question comes with toilets, is it enough to have near sleeping quarters, or do I need them spread out too?

 

That's more questions that i thought actually...

[Sasza22]

As for the amount of recreation buildings and toilets it depends on how many dupes you have. From my experience 3 plumbed toilets are enough for 20 dupes but outhouses might get all filled at the same time causing problems. Each recreatuional item works differently. A jukebot can work for 5 dupes at a time and the buff lasts 3 cycles iirc so a single one should be enough for a 15 dupe colony, the coffee machine has a shorter buff and only one dupe can use it at a time. I think you need to experiment and find what setup works best for your colony.

The proximity setting (while i`m not 100% sure how i works) should be the last step for the dupe to find the task. First thing is his personal priority, the they check the global priority and finally when they got multiple errands with same personal and global priorities they pick the closest. Also there`s the supply bin problem that makes the sweep tasks be calculated from where the supply bin is and not the debris to sweep but that`s a story for a diferent thread.

Farming balm lilles can be problematic but there are possible designs to keep the chlorne in the right place. Most people just use liquid airlocks as they don`t leak gas and atmo suits so dupes don`t breathe out CO2 inside. But you can try to make a "chlorine pit" with a carbon skimmer at the bottom and just fill it with enough chlorine. Make dupes use ladders to come down there and chlorine shouldn`t leak out.

[suxkar]

Other people have already given you great advice so I'll just add a few things:

1) I strongly suggest developing a "backbone" working class that specializes both in digging and building: this way, when you are exploring building ladders or simply ordering to build stuff in undug tiles they will do both immediately. So give them high priority in excavation and construction. Once you have high enough morale, you can give them operational skills too, so that they will be able to build shipping buildings without having to bother operators (which of course should be another specialized class, along with ranchers, at least one cook, an artist, a researcher and a farmer if you need it).

2) Any storage solution is basically the same since you cannot build a large scale coveyor system for every material (it would make your computer explode). When trying to save fps in the late game, it seems to be the consensus that dropping almost everything (excluding eggs and liquefiebles to avoid issues) in one place with big sweeps and automatic dispensers set to sweep only is the optimal solution.

3) I think it was already said, but I'll say it again just to be clear: dupes will use every kind of recreational building as long as they have the time to do so. Considering their number, if you wanted your duplicants to benefit from every single recreational building you'd have to give them half the day free, which is obviously not desirable. There are topics discussing it, but I would personally suggest jukeboxes (expensive powerwise, but effective), espresso machines (beware, they consume a lot of peppernuts) and water cooler (very simple and efficient). If your dupes are not using them they either don't have the time or they have used it already and the buff hasn't expired (you can see the duration in the duplicant panel).

4) Agree with all that was said

5) People have designed mechanical airlocks using automated doors and pumps but they are overly complicated and tend to mess with duplicant pathing and errands. I know it feels cheesy but liquid locks are very easy to setup and work wonders. In most advanced designs like petroleaum boilers they are basically essential. Later in the game you can build them with viscogel, making them easier to make but more fragile.
Extra tip: duplicants without a suit will exhale CO2, potentially breaking vacuum rooms or contaminating others, even if only passing by with tubes

[Olleus]

Thanks for the input, it's really nice to be getting so much input! I'll think I'll restart now and design things better from the start now, I've made a few mistakes in my current game that, although not fatal, I can't be bothered to try and recover from.

One last thing, how quickly do you grow your dupes? I went up to 20 straight away, but I'm starting to think that might have been too many... On one hand, providing a little bit of extra food/space/oxygen is not that much work on the easy difficulties, and more manpower ought to help. But I think the larger scale made it harder for me to manage things.

[suxkar]

Depending on the map, you should start with plants and/or ranching (typically hatches), then move to wild planting and/or slicksters to make use of CO2 from petroleum generators (if you get them). It's fairly easy to manage food. Oxygen is a little more delicate since the main sustainable oxygen building is electrolyzers. Sure, at the beginning you have O2 diffusers and rust electrolyzers but you will eventually run out of algae/salt, depending on the map. You typically need 1kg of water per 8 dupes if you use efficient electrolyzer setups (Rodriguez eletrolyzer).
At the beginning of the game (100cycles) I tend to get to 10-15 dupes before trying to make things sustainable indefinitely. It all depends on how much algae/rust/salt you have available. Once you have the renewable water output from gaysers, you can get to A LOT of dupes.

[KittenIsAGeek]

12 hours ago, Olleus said:

Actually, the same placement question comes with toilets, is it enough to have near sleeping quarters, or do I need them spread out too?

You only need toilets near where the dupes sleep.  Where they eat and have their recreation should be close by as well.  Dupes (usually) use restrooms only at the end of their shift, or during the 'bathroom break' marked on their schedule.  So if you have 2 toilets and 3 dupes, 2 will use them at the end of their shift before eating and the 3rd will use it in the morning after waking up.  If they have to travel a long way to get to the restroom, it will cut into their recreation time, sleep time, or both.

 

Also, on gas management, you can do some of it just by how you design your base.  For example, if you dig an area above your base, hydrogen will collect there.  If you dig out an area below your base, CO2 will collect there -- assuming you're producing enough oxygen to maintain a decent pressure of it in your base.  This makes it easy to remove the unwanted gasses, since game physics will do half the work for you.  In my current base I have a setup like this to currently handle CO2:

Spoiler

I'm using a nat gas containment room rather than the CO2 because its more clear what's going on here:

At the bottom is a pump that turns on when there's CO2 building up, but it only turns the pump on if there's also suitable air pressure (hence the Atmo Sensor and the Gas Element Sensor).   The gas pump feeds into a pipe that hits a loop controlled by a valve.  CO2 continually circulates in the loop, so only CO2 enters into the loop.  Any other gas (like oxygen) continues past and goes through the second bridge, which takes it up to a vent.  The CO2 that exceeds the valve's pressure limits goes out the bridge on the upper left, eventually feeding into the containment room.

I have the containment room set up so that as long as there's adequate air pressure (Atmo Sensor set to 500g), AND the tank is empty, the pump will kick on and fill the tank.  Gas coming in to be contained first tries to go into the tank.  If the tank is full, then it continues on and goes into the room.  This reduces the amount of pumping that needs to be done when you're using the gas, conserving energy.  

I look at the water/vent trick as a simple one-way valve that would work with normal pressures in real world physics, but some view it as an exploit, so directions to build it are hidden in the spoiler below:

Spoiler

Build an air tile one space from a wall and build a bottle emptier on top so that the liquid empties into the space between the air tile and the wall.  When it over flows, mop up the water on the floor (but NOT from the top of the air tile), destroy the bottle emptier, and build another air tile.  The liquid trapped between the top air tile and the wall is exactly enough to do the trick.  When the gas comes out, the liquid pushes down into the full tile, allowing the gas out, then pops back up to cover the vent, preventing the high gas pressure from preventing the vent form working -- so you need both tiles of liquid.  

 Other ways of dealing with the gasses you don't want is to get rid of them.  A carbon skimmer will turn clean water into polluted water and remove CO2 from your base's atmosphere.  Dasha Saltvines can remove Chlorine, while Hydrogen and Natural gas can be burned.  Deoderizers can turn polluted oxygen into clean.  Other gasses, such as sour gas, aren't as quick or straightforward to remove.