Letting Your Base Run, and Run...

[SpocksEars]

I was just curious how many of you let your base run un-attended for long periods of time?

I heard Francis mention it a couple of times. What are the reasons for doing this? How long have you let your base run un-attended? What's your record? What speed do you let in run at? What's the worst thing that's happened after you come back?

Just curious - I'm too scared to do that on a regular basis - I've only done that to see what breaks in the "future" so I can fix it before it happens!

[sheaker]

For me it was up to 10 or maybe 12 cycles on max speed.

Nothing really wrong happened. Few times I had vacuum breaks. BTW my colony was fully developed.

Reason: For me it was usually waiting for volcano dormancy during late game volcano taming or end of dormancy while I was limited by amount of refined metal (and it was needed for any reason like transition from heavy watt to heavy watt conductive grid.

 

I believe I could leave it forever without troubles now.

[Primalflower]

I do it super rarely because rarely do bases ever become self sustaining for me ... Once long ago I left it running overnight and came back to "colony lost"... it was funny because based on my autopsy my colony suffocated itself mere cycles after I left it unattended...

[Gurgel]

I let it run overnight as a regular occasion. Purpose is to see whether it can manage without me (my meta-goal for the game) or to have really slow things like cooling the magma-layer progress.

I think I have let it run unattended up to 2 or 3 days.

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

I've done it on my 3rd run. It was around cycle 100 when everything started to break and i got tilted :D. I was like "**** this, let's see how long they survive on their own" and i went away from my PC to do some housework. Came back after like 5 cycles and to my surprise, they were still living. The colony was in a bad shape before i left, so i expected them to die out. I've kept it going for like 30 more cycles, only doing minimal stuff, just to explore the "difficulty" of OXI. It seemed like they could go on forever, but then i realised my farm started dying, because my base wasn't isolated.

[2tallyGr8]

I let my base run when I have lunch, but I always create a backup before doing so. However, my dupes have never actually died, the closest is when my spom's hydrogen filter failed and started flooding my base with hydrogen. I installed an over flow that dumps excess oxygen (My o2 gas pumps had been blocked up), and no more issues.

[goboking]

I often let my colony run for a while just to stress test the sustainability of it.  My end-goal is always a colony that can sustain itself indefinitely.  This means not just resources, but automation and dupe tasks are all arranged so that the colony can run itself without any input on my end.

[EricS]

Yesterday, I accidentally left the game unpaused when I went out for a walk.  After 100 cycles, the worst effect was that all my rockets had returned and were just sitting there, not generating heat, so my water purification plant that's mostly powered by that heat hadn't been doing much.  Since most of that water went to the electrolyzers to make LOX/LH but the rockets were just sitting there, this wasn't an actual issue in the end.  Other than that, my drecko ranch system requires me to manually flag dreckos for wrangling into the main two ranches to replace those that die from old age, but since I'm sitting on 570 tons of plastic, almost entirely from dreckos, and 4467 reed fiber, also mostly from dreckos, even that was just a barely noticeable speed bump.

 

Then again, I tend to design systems with the idea of "what do I do if this backs up" in mind.  In fact, my electrolyzers are all just below space to make mass dumping of oxygen easier.  I've got close to 10 million calories of surf and turf, but that ran fine on autopilot.

[Hjoyn]

It can be nice to build up resources from farms that aren't super fast. I'd recommend the Critical Notifications Pauser mod if you want to try letting a colony run, it should save you from the really bad stuff, or at least delay your doom until you get back.