Honest question, has anyone ever gotten from the starting level to rockets and space travel without assistance?

[Izzy248]

Ive been playin ONI since early access, and not to toot my own horn but...i suck lol. If Im being completely honest. Partly in fact due to my OCD in that I have to have things set up a certain way otherwise I will scrap everything and start completely over the minute things start getting the inkling that crap is hitting the fan. But Ive never made it THAT far in the game without resorting to debugs to some degree, or altering the difficulty to make the settings more accommodating. Ive even seen a handful of dedicated ONI lets players with some insane builds and homesteads, but almost none of them have a series where they legit start from scratch and up to those high end points. Its almost always jumping into the video and immediately they have this insane thing in their base or just showing off how some contraption works. So Im wondering, with vanilla settings, and no help, has anyone ever gotten from the start of the game up to rockets and such? Just so I have a glimmer of hope of achieving this one day lol.

[Majestix]

Of course. It's not that difficult. You are wrong about pros not showing the process. Watch some Brothgar or Francis John playthroughs. Watch Brothgar's Oasisse series, for example. Or GrindThisGame for very beginner friendly explanations. 

[sakura_sk]

Ehmmm..  Would a glimmer of hope be the 1000-1500 hours of play mark...? Because I think around that time I started not caring much if everything was falling apart and focused only to find if a specific build worked in order to rebuild it in the next colony.

[Fyrel]

Yeah have made it through to space without having to resort to any debug mode, difficulty edits or mods.

It wasn't in any of my early playthroughs, plenty of failed colonies which I had to learn from my mistakes,

First time I managed it I concentrated on a fully automated base, then hollowed out the map and didn't make it to space till around cycle 1100.

[Sasza22]

I did that maybe twice in the base game. Usually i kept restarting before i got there but i remember a pretty advanced base i made which i played to about 650 cycles at which point it started getting really laggy (jet suits are to blame). Most important thing for me was stabile progression through important stepping stones.

1. Basic food stability for about 12 dupes.

2. Access to all biomes without gas and water spilling everywhere.

3. Tapping into oil for resources and more power options.

4. Robust power system, capable of running a smelter and advanced recreation stations without overloading.

5. Electrolizer setup to replace algae and rust.

6. Cooling for crops - i really didn`t need it before but it might be different depending on map. I still ended dumping the heat into my septic tank full of germed polluted water.

7. Steel production using petrol as coolant then burining it in the generator.

8. Bunker tiles on the surface, scanners and a telescope. I tried making a setup to dig the regolith above it before opening the doors so it won`t overheat but honestly now i`d rather just put bunker tiles above and use it at 30% efficiency as it can work with tiles open to the left and right.

9. Finally first rocket. First time around i ended manually dumping hot regolith into water untill it turned into steam. Took a while but worked.

I finshed on the petrol rocket with liquid oxygen but got too annoyed with pipes braking all the time and started over.

Anyway it`s important not to rush the lategame just do stuff step by step keeping an eye no stuff that might break in the process. I eventually ran low on power as well so watch out for that.

[SharraShimada]

Its not that hard... If you pay attention to what your dupes do, and avoid certain things (like digging a massive area, so dupes get stuck, suffocate and die...) its rather easy. 

I do use sandbox mode now and then though, because i´m lazy, and for me, that´s fine. I dont want to play on normal speed and have overwatch on everything my dupes do. I tell them to do, and then come back later. And yes, this result in problems sometimes. Thats when i switch to sandbox mode on, and fix it. I could do it without sandbox, but thats kinda boring gameplay then for me.

[TheMule]

20 hours ago, Izzy248 said:

Ive even seen a handful of dedicated ONI lets players with some insane builds and homesteads, but almost none of them have a series where they legit start from scratch and up to those high end points.

Francis John on YT has a lot of playtroughs, from cycle 1. He cuts out (or fastforward) the most boring parts, and sometime completes minor tasks off screen but he always shows the relevant parts.

As far as I know, every content creator does that to some extents. I've never seen anybody skip from the start to endgame.

[suicide commando]

I've gotten to space many times, although I have never played on the highest difficulty. Even without mods it's far from impossible. The way I like to do it, is to take it slow and methodical.
First I set up the intial colony, which uses algae/rust for O2 and mealwood as food source, this allows for a colony of 5 dupes, these 5 then do the research and begin expanding the base. Once I have a good water source, the SPOM goes up, bristle blossom farms are built, support systems for this are put in place.Then we can expand the colony to 8 and later 12 dupes. These go on further exploring the map, setting up exosuits and go into the oil biome. Then it's time to set up main power and get some industry off the ground. By this time, my drecko farm will have yielded plenty of plastics, and my shine bug farm will have loaded up one or two of my shine bug power plants, so I have plenty of power for my base's normal needs.

Petrol refineries will go up to get the initial bit of petroleum, so I can use that as coolant for my metal refineries which will use steam turbine power from their own heat. ( Check out brothgar's videos, he's where I stole that idea ).

Once steel production is up and running main power becomes a priority, for this a petroleum boiler is a good, but there's plenty of other options for this. From there, it's up to space biome, setting up the bunker tiles/doors and supplementing my power with solar energy.

The final stage is building the rockets + infrastructure and heading out into space.