How to radiation sustain mutated crops?

[silverbluep]

Im trying to come up with a nice stackable farm layout for mutated crops; but the concept of needing radiation in a farm is daunting to me. I see couple ways out;

• Plant wheezeworts every here and there. I cannot find that many seeds; especially mid game. It's 1 wheezewort per 8 plants anyway so you can't scale it up to stupid levels like I want to.
• Freeze natural tiles of solid nuclear waste and do wild farms. They are wild farms; not regular. And freezing natural tiles of solid nuclear waste takes too much work. (Granted I use a mod to generate natural tiles; because I would argue that you should be able to in the game; but still)
• Shine bugs. You either need to reactor them or they are inconsistent. Also does not work for exuberant; which is arguably the best mutation right now. Either way; the reason i'm going for mutated farms is to reduce game lag as I scale up food production for the infernal tree anyway; and shinebugs don't help with that. Not to mention you can't see anything through shine bugs once you stack them in a spot.
• Build them into space. I'm thinking this is not going to be super viable once meteor showers become a thing again; and limited space.
• Research reactors. Yeah; they are way too complicated and intense to use just for generating radiation for farms.

I feel like farming would benefit so much from a device that produced radiation using electricity. Right now; the only viable strategy to operate mutated farms is wheezeworts; and they are limited. I rather use wheezeworts to tame geysers instead. Or wish depleted uranium (I think it's an awesome resource; i rather refine uranium ore to use depleted uranium as building material) metal tiles gave useful amount of radiation for farming.

[misotoma]

Or mix depleted uranium with dirt as fertilizer for radiation 

[Primalflower]

3 hours ago, silverbluep said:

Build them into space. I'm thinking this is not going to be super viable once meteor showers become a thing again; and limited space.

I don't think meteor showers are coming back. They exist solely on the regolith planetoid, and solar power's strength has been adjusted to be less powerful than before on the planets most suitable for duplicant life.

That being said, minimum radiation for mutant crops is 25, while radiation from the sky is, by my count, about 22. so it wouldn't work anyway.

3 hours ago, silverbluep said:

Shine bugs.

this is my preferred method. just have little cages of them built in such a way that they're gauranteed to not move and provide ample radiation for crops above and below them.

 

[Sasza22]

There was an ionizing shine bug morph teased in the codex and space biome description. Apparently it was supposed to create more radiaiton. If it gets added it might be a good method of keeping crops irradiated.

[NeoDeusMachina]

6 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

There was an ionizing shine bug morph teased in the codex and space biome description. Apparently it was supposed to create more radiaiton. If it gets added it might be a good method of keeping crops irradiated.

That'd be great, there can never be too many shinebugs morphs (idk why, I just like them little buggers).

[Coolthulhu]

On 9/11/2021 at 6:19 PM, Sasza22 said:

There was an ionizing shine bug morph teased in the codex and space biome description. Apparently it was supposed to create more radiaiton. If it gets added it might be a good method of keeping crops irradiated.

I hate the idea of adding more "responsibility" to randomly moving critters whose effectiveness depends on game speed vs CPU speed.

[6Havok9]

On 9/10/2021 at 10:54 PM, silverbluep said:

Shine bugs. You either need to reactor them or they are inconsistent. Also does not work for exuberant; which is arguably the best mutation right now. Either way; the reason i'm going for mutated farms is to reduce game lag as I scale up food production for the infernal tree anyway; and shinebugs don't help with that. Not to mention you can't see anything through shine bugs once you stack them in a spot.

Shine bugs work just fine if placed under the farm tiles. You keep them there with a water lock so they can't move, and 2/3 shinebugs every other tile are usually sufficient.

In this mockup I use full tiles of crude oil in the bottom layer and 1 kg of naphta in between the bugs. 2 bugs per cage, farm tiles are gold amalgam. There are 30 rads above. On the edges you might need 3 or 4 shinebugs to get over 25 rads. I use two tile high corridors because if you make them one high the bugs will deploy eggs to their right and not under them, ruining everything. Light is not an issue, and you can use the decor/lighting on the floor below. I actually lock the plants in a separate room just below light reach and let the dupes harvest from above through pneumatic doors, so they can benefit from the decor and the lit workspace buff.

For pincha pepperplants you can do as the above but use liquid nuclear waste in the bottom layer. Radiation from the waste will just reach the plant, and a couple bugs will push it over 25. No compression needed, plus pincha grows hot so you don't risk freezing the waste.

For sleet wheat, I'd just go with weezewort. Exuberant sleet wheat is a MONSTER.

[yoakenashi]

There’s also a method described here:

https://oxygen-not-included-guide.fandom.com/wiki/Peculiar_plants
that uses radbolt generator to send randbolts through liquid/water that gets irradiated.

[TeDeum]

8 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

that uses radbolt generator to send randbolts through liquid/water that gets irradiated

It require 70 shine bugs to make radbolts. But, probably still worth it for waterweed, because salt water layer absorbs radiation. I'm going to farm waterweed to feed the tree.

[arvenil]

On 9/13/2021 at 1:27 PM, 6Havok9 said:

Shine bugs work just fine if placed under the farm tiles. You keep them there with a water lock so they can't move, and 2/3 shinebugs every other tile are usually sufficient.

In this mockup I use full tiles of crude oil in the bottom layer and 1 kg of naphta in between the bugs. 2 bugs per cage, farm tiles are gold amalgam. There are 30 rads above. On the edges you might need 3 or 4 shinebugs to get over 25 rads. I use two tile high corridors because if you make them one high the bugs will deploy eggs to their right and not under them, ruining everything. Light is not an issue, and you can use the decor/lighting on the floor below. I actually lock the plants in a separate room just below light reach and let the dupes harvest from above through pneumatic doors, so they can benefit from the decor and the lit workspace buff.

For pincha pepperplants you can do as the above but use liquid nuclear waste in the bottom layer. Radiation from the waste will just reach the plant, and a couple bugs will push it over 25. No compression needed, plus pincha grows hot so you don't risk freezing the waste.

For sleet wheat, I'd just go with weezewort. Exuberant sleet wheat is a MONSTER.

Could you show wider (or rather higher) view to show what you actually described? I'm mostly interested in the pneumatic doors setup.

[TuxSam123]

On 9/10/2021 at 5:54 PM, silverbluep said:

• Research reactors. Yeah; they are way too complicated and intense to use just for generating radiation for farms.

Francis John would like to have a talk with you.

On 9/10/2021 at 5:54 PM, silverbluep said:

I feel like farming would benefit so much from a device that produced radiation using electricity. Right now; the only viable strategy to operate mutated farms is wheezeworts; and they are limited. I rather use wheezeworts to tame geysers instead. Or wish depleted uranium (I think it's an awesome resource; i rather refine uranium ore to use depleted uranium as building material) metal tiles gave useful amount of radiation for farming.

This is where the radlamp comes in. A lamp like device that produces radiation at the cost of electricity and radbolts

[gigamoi]

2 hours ago, TuxSam123 said:

This is where the radlamp comes in. A lamp like device that produces radiation at the cost of electricity and radbolts

Nheee. The device you are proposing genrerates radiation from radbolts, yet, as the devs intended it you get radbolts from radiation. Such a device would be either useless or prone to exploits.

If it were to consume something else on the other hand, that would be balanced.

Depleted uranium is a good idea I think. These days, the uranium centrifuge is kinda useless because depleted uranium is basically a waste which means that you are more or less forced into bees if you want to do anything efficent and sustainable with your uranium. If depleted uranium could be turned into radiation, that would give us two routes to go into to use our uranium. The bee route, which allows you to fully sustain a reactor and gives you tons of heat (aka power) and radiation, but requires bee keeping. And the centrifuge route, which is simpler, still gives of radiations out of the radlamp, but only allows a moderate sunstainable (and optional) use of reactors and thus gives less power.

 

Now, as far as the "lore" is concerned, as I understand it, depleted uranium is essentially uranium 238. IRL, you can't just throw power at uranium 238 alone and get it to do fancy atomic stuff. However, if you throw neutrons at it, it turns into plutonium 239 which, as we all know, is an atomic nucleus that likes to party a lot... And there are such devices as neutron generators that take isotopes of hydrogen and power and turns the whole thing into spare neutrons. So, perhaps we could get radlamps that take depleted uranium, power and hydrogen and gives us a fair bit of rads in return. It would still be simpler than an entire reactor setup but it wouldn't just get us rads out of supposedly inert material. And if you are concerned about what comes of the plutonium afterward, it could even spit very small amounts of nuclear waste, being through a pipe or directly on the ground, just to not make it too easy for us.

[TuxSam123]

18 minutes ago, gigamoi said:

Nheee. The device you are proposing genrerates radiation from radbolts, yet, as the devs intended it you get radbolts from radiation. Such a device would be either useless or prone to exploits.

If it were to consume something else on the other hand, that would be balanced.

You see, my dear friend, this is something that could get fixed very rapidly. You see, now there's only a single type of raidation in game. IRL, there are 3 major kinds of radiation: alpha, beta and gamma rays. I suggest we divide the radiation in, at least, two types. Alpha radiation is the most ionizing of the 3 types of radiation, however has a low penetrating power. The U-238 atom you mentioned is an emitter of this kind of radiation. I believe alpha radiation would cause radiation sickness very rapidly, but would have a low reach. Beta radiation, however, would be more interesting. They would still cause radiation sickness, but at a lower rate than alpha rays. They would, however, have a longer reach. They would be go to source to get radbolts. Now, differently from real life, I suggest the devs add some sort of "decayed radiation", that is, the residual radiation generated by the radlamp and the radbolt engine. They would still cause radiation sickness, and mutate plants, but would be unsuitable for radbolt generation.

[NeoDeusMachina]

56 minutes ago, gigamoi said:

These days, the uranium centrifuge is kinda useless because depleted uranium is basically a waste which means that you are more or less forced into bees if you want to do anything efficent and sustainable with your uranium.

Not really useless, it is a refined metal and you can use it to build anything that requires refined metal afaik. "Renewable lead", basically.

I had a sustainable space mining colony on the water asteroid once. It used centrifuges and uranium from nearby space POIs, a few sage hatches for coal, dirt from pips on the home planet, radiation from the research reactor, etc. It would produce approx. 1 ton of diamond every 10 cycles, could have been more. That's the nice thing with ONI, there are usually more than one way of doing things efficiently and sustainably. Ofc bees would have improved the conversion efficiency from U ore to refined U, but that also comes with additional costs and is not mandatory.

@gigamoi @TuxSam123 I kinda see where you two folks come from with nuclear physics, different types of radiation, etc. Although I do believe it would be great to have more advanced features in some branches of physics, I try to remind myself that ONI is not a physics simulator. I am not sure that overhauling the entire radiation system, adding different types of radiation, changing how those interact with the other mechanics (sickness, germs, ...) would make for an enjoyable and smooth game mechanic. A lot of people find radiation "confusing" as it is with its radbolt mechanics. I am worried that making the radiation system even more complex would perhaps make it exciting for a few select, but perhaps less accessible for the majority of the player base. I have studied nuclear physics at school, I guess I was hoping not having to reopen my old books just to enjoy a video game XD.

[gigamoi]

9 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

 I kinda see where you two folks come from with nuclear physics, different types of radiation, etc. Although I do believe it would be great to have more advanced features in some branches of physics, I try to remind myself that ONI is not a physics simulator. I am not sure that overhauling the entire radiation system, adding different types of radiation, changing how those interact with the other mechanics (sickness, germs, ...) would make for an enjoyable and smooth game mechanic. A lot of people find radiation "confusing" as it is with its radbolt mechanics. I am worried that making the radiation system even more complex would perhaps make it exciting for a few select, but perhaps less accessible for the majority of the player base. I have studied nuclear physics at school, I guess I was hoping not having to reopen my old books just to enjoy a video game XD.

I agree. I think the radiation system itself is fine as it is, But I think there is a gap that needs to be filled between having a full blown reactor and running on wheezeworths.

[6Havok9]

16 hours ago, arvenil said:

Could you show wider (or rather higher) view to show what you actually described? I'm mostly interested in the pneumatic doors setup.

It's pretty simple, it's just a bridge made of doors.

 

Here I also have ladders above because sleet wheat is short, so they walk a little bit faster. Then they slow down on the carpeted tiles, duh. Above 2 tile high plants there would be a simple row of doors. There's no way to access the lower floor.

 

 

Light can reach dupes but doesn't disturb the plants.

 

 

Decor is pretty good. Treat your farmers well!

[silverbluep]

I have been posting replies to this thread but they don't show up. Maybe my browser is bad? Trying again.

So I don't like the solutions posted other than irradiating salt water for waterweed farm. That's genius. I'm going to be doing that for the infernal tree. (Too many shinebugs slow the game; liquid 2 tile locks are finnicky to make and sustain, not to mention hard.) Also francis john is francis john; he makes videos to supplement his living; obviously he is going to go for bombastic projects. But setup research reactor for 10 plants is a bit excessive.

I like depleted uranium; you can build things with it and is thermally insulating (as far as refined metals go). I really think we need a radiation lamp. I like this use for it; and generally having a reason to not go the bee route. Also; as a physicist; the radiation in this game is very unrealistic. But so is the entire game so im good with the current version. (Other than radioactive contaminants being a germ; that needs to be removed.)

[lee1026]

Research reactor actually applies radiation to a surprisingly large region. If you haven't tried it yet, I would suggest giving it a shot. The mutations (well, some of them, anyway) are so powerful that you shouldn't need too many plants to really knock food production out of the park.

[Jann5s]

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

Research reactor actually applies radiation to a surprisingly large region. If you haven't tried it yet, I would suggest giving it a shot. The mutations (well, some of them, anyway) are so powerful that you shouldn't need too many plants to really knock food production out of the park.

Any tips on which mutations to try first?

[silverbluep]

9 hours ago, lee1026 said:

Research reactor actually applies radiation to a surprisingly large region. If you haven't tried it yet, I would suggest giving it a shot. The mutations (well, some of them, anyway) are so powerful that you shouldn't need too many plants to really knock food production out of the park.

I think the whole setup of a research reactor is a bit too much; even for 25 tile radius. I think radiation lamps are the future with this; hoping in gets added to the game some time soon.

[KonfigSys]

I believe it is the (last) major thing that needs to be addressed by Klei. 

I tried various solutions and I did not like any. 

The best one would be the wheezeworts if there is a way to acquire them rather than hoping to get with a very small chance from the printer. I suggested an option to re-introduce the bio-module for rockets to bring seeds and animals from space POIs (like in the vanilla game).

Shine bugs = low FPS.

A nuclear reactor just for farming is a kind of awkward. 

If Klei decides to keep it unchanged, there is an outdated (yet) mod to remove the 25rad requirements or some modders may come up with radioactive tempshift plates or something. 

 

 

 

[6Havok9]

Duplicate 

12 minutes ago, KonfigSys said:

I believe it is the (last) major thing that needs to be addressed by Klei. 

I tried various solutions and I did not like any. 

The best one would be the wheezeworts if there is a way to acquire them rather than hoping to get with a very small chance from the printer. I suggested an option to re-introduce the bio-module for rockets to bring seeds and animals from space POIs (like in the vanilla game).

Shine bugs = low FPS.

A nuclear reactor just for farming is a kind of awkward. 

If Klei decides to keep it unchanged, there is an outdated (yet) mod to remove the 25rad requirements or some modders may come up with radioactive tempshift plates or something. 

 

 

Duplicate wort seeds them. It's like savescumming when you get new printables!

I'm 100% gonna do it. I've got 3 wheezewort in this asteroid.

[KonfigSys]

8 minutes ago, 6Havok9 said:

Duplicate 

Duplicate wort seeds them. It's like savescumming when you get new printables!

I'm 100% gonna do it. I've got 3 wheezewort in this asteroid.

I know about it but I generally do not use. I think it should be an in-game option rather than using savescam.

[TuxSam123]

On 9/15/2021 at 10:01 AM, NeoDeusMachina said:

 

@gigamoi @TuxSam123 I kinda see where you two folks come from with nuclear physics, different types of radiation, etc. Although I do believe it would be great to have more advanced features in some branches of physics,

Hmm, maybe it just needs to be simpler. Let's do it like this: There will be two kinds of radiation, alpha and gamma rays. Alpha rays are the ones used to generate radbolts. They are emitted by the Research Reactor, Wheezeworts, Shinebugs and Space. Gamma rays are the radiation generated by devices and radioactive decay, such as the Radlamp, nuclear waste, depleted uranium and the Radbolt Engine. Both the radiation kinds can mutate and cause radiation sickness, but only the Alpha rays are suitable for radbolt generation.

On 9/15/2021 at 1:17 PM, 6Havok9 said:

 

 

Light can reach dupes but doesn't disturb the plants.

This is, most likely, a bug.

[6Havok9]

50 minutes ago, TuxSam123 said:

This is, most likely, a bug.

It's a bug indeed! It's a grubgrub.