Colony Diary: Project Azathoth

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 500

On Verdana...

I finally decided to stop trying to keep the Intergalactic Uranus III, and have replaced it with the Pluto I. It's launch system is ready to be automated, at least on this end, though I'm still launching it manually for now.

I still haven't solved how I'm going to stop the cockpit from melting when we ship hot metals. I could just put the travellers into atmosuits for the duration of the trip. Could also use the toilet water line as coolant, loop it back to the geyser.

... or I could just use the space radiator mod. I have wanted one of those in the game for a long time.

 

I've also adjusted some critter locations: I've wrangled the wild sweetles and put them on a grubgrub breeding platform, and the cuddle pips are rapidly reaching plague proportions. I'm not sure whether to be amused or annoyed by dupes getting stuck in a hug loop whenever they try to make their way though the pip ranches to build stuff.

 

The goal is actually to decommission the hatch and pip ranch on the left and free up some space to start renovating the central sphere. I'm also in the process of relocating the sleet wheat and arbor tree farm with the same end goal. Never be afraid to renovate!

My two biggest concerns on Verdana right now are igneous rock (I can always just dig more tentacles into the upper crust, but the insulation costs a lot and I'd like to get a sustainable source of it up and running) and the four water sources, which I am not fully utilizing (I could get a lot more crude oil from Persepholin by consolidating my water sources, or I could bring on more duplicants).

 

 

Meanwhile, Persepholin exploded again, this time with high-pressure carbon dioxide. Popped eardrums for days. Probably shouldn't have exposed that vent until after the slickster ranches were up and running. Once they were, though, things calmed down. Those guys eat a lot of Co2: even when the vent is actively erupting it'll only feed 9.8 of them (3.2 consistently).

Part of the problem with organic architecture is that it makes some areas look very busy. You'll just have to trust me when I say this is actually all very simple: three slickster ranches, a hatchery, and enough liquid pipe-filters to make sense of the slurry that's accumulated down here..

 

The top of Persie has also expanded, with two new lettuce beds (one manufactured by dropping sand from above) and a solar/hydrogen power plant. This place has been having brownouts and wire overloading issues for a while now, so this should help.

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 520

So Verd and Persie are doing great!

... and then there's the problem child, Reekista...

 

This place drove poor Lindsay to tears, which might be the first stress reaction I've had in this save, now that I think about it. (Before you go assuming that means I am taking good care of my dupes, keep in mind there's someone scalding themselves or projectile vomiting due to radiation in a dingy back-corridor every couple of cycles).

First it was lack of steel, then it was weird power issues, then I boiled my rocket with hot metal, and now I've gone and overpressurized the steam chamber so none of the volcanoes work anymore.

Volcanoes broke? Understandable have a great day.

Current plan is to heat the place up to run the aquatuner, so the steam can go through the turbines and be deposited outside, thus lowering pressure to [looks it up] 149kg per tile? This's gonna take a while. I'll do some facility upgrades in the meantime.

On the left, I did the math and built a correctly-sized gas battery for the geyser. After the next dormancy the system will output a constant 102.1 g/s, which will give us a continuous 888 W and 75g/s polluted water. Not much, but between offgassing and the morb horde up top (which I still need to harness) we've got at least some sustainable oxygen production.

I'm trying a different approach to aesthetics here: build for function first and add a pretty shell later. So long as I don't go too close to the edges or strip-mine the entire map, I should be able to wrap some curves around it and get something that looks decent.

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 520

Mmmmmmm.... no, I don't think so.

 

Cycle 540

Much better.

 

This minor volcano gives off 714 g/s magma on average, so once this contraption gets going I'll have a steady supply of igneous rock. Hatches only eat 140kg per cycle, so this volcano alone will be able to sustainably feed a whopping...

... three hatches.

Huh.

[QuQuasar]

(Edit) Spoke too soon. I'm going to keep going with Azathoth with a bit of a mindset reset.

I'm losing interest in this project. The asymmetry doesn't look as good as I'd hoped it would, and the tight spacing and weird shapes are really starting to cost me. Too many little things piling up (Turner puking in the drecko pen, Lindsay locking herself in a rocket and making a mess, plus a whole bunch of things done half-heartedly or without the necessary space to finish them properly are starting to make themselves known. The piping overlays are spaghetti hell). Place is starting to feel very micromanagey.

Might be time to start over and go back to big, symmetrical builds. I'd quite like to try the radioactive ocean, and maybe turn off care packages and teleporters. I'd never done that before.

[Farsight]

the radioactive world is a lot of fun. My current game had 45 saturn traps on it, so my dupes could swim in hydrogen now.

[goboking]

11 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

The asymmetry doesn't look as good as I'd hoped it would

It's far more interesting to look at than most symmetrical layouts, but as someone who builds symmetrically, I understand the pull to do so.

[Primalflower]

aww, a shame! It's real pretty nonetheless. Think you might wanna upload the save?

[tuxii]

I think it's beautiful. When I look at it I see a chubby, peg-legged monster with its hands up with a flower in one hand.

Symmetrical blocky bases are a dime a dozen.

[QuQuasar]

Huh. I didn't know that the radioactive ocean was small even if it was the starting asteroid. I kind of figured all startsteroids were the same size. That's actually really interesting, but not optimal for building. A circle would work, but anything more complicated won't have enough space.

Alrighty then, I might go back to Azathoth, but I'll need a mindset change. Stop trying to keep everything running and treat it more like a fixer-upper. It needs major renovations, but all the resources are in the far corners and we're dealing with a variety of problems: brownouts, meat shortages, running out of rock, etc...

• All the resources are in the far corners, which makes renovations extremely slow. I need to set up some form of storage.
• The hatches are starving, which is causing meat shortages. I still have rock, but when I make it high priority nothing else gets delivered.
• The cooling system isn't keeping up, and to fix it I need to crack open the steam chamber, which will cause all sorts of problems.
• We simply don't have the power to run everything. 5 hydrogen generators aren't enough.

[QuQuasar]

Alright, Imma keep going. Azathoth forever!

Cycle 560

I'm fixing the bases climate control system. It's biggest problem is that the aquatuner was only running for about half the time, thanks to a poorly designed cooling loop.

The work was completed with an acceptable quantity of grievous bodily harm and only one major steam explosion at the very end, when I was deconstructing the gas lock. Success!

I expect the brownouts to be alleviated somewhat when the minor volcano comes online in another 10-15 cycles, but I'm considering supplementing my hydrogen supply by feeding cuddle pips to saturn critter traps. What do you mean I'm a monster, I'm not a monster, your face is a monster.

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 570

The newly refurbished Spirit of Defensive Sputnik IV launches on a hatch-feeding deep space mining mission. It's gotten a fair bit bigger compared to what it was before.

 

I wore out the small petroleum engine it had previously on a series of missions to gather databanks and explore all the nearby starmap tiles. In addition to Verdana, Persepholin and Reekisa, I've located Stinkalin, a marshy asteroid with a tungsten volcano, Hydrial, an oceanic asteroid, and the moosteroid Udderiel, which sounds like the name of an angel whose appearance heralds a weirdly cow-themed apocalypse.

 

I'm starting to reconsider whether smog slugs are worth it. I needed to lock him in the bathroom, since I completely forgot the little jerk would eat my harvested ore and fill the place with hydrogen. I can probably keep using him for deep space exploration missions, but I can't imagine using him for a colonization mission (since I'll need an oxygen pump anyway for the atmosuit docks) or any sort of regular, automated mission (since I need to wrangle him into the rocket). 

[tuxii]

8 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

I'm not a monster, your face is a monster.

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 580

Critter trap go nom!

It looks so happy about it's impending death by asphyxiation.

 

 

Ruby is back with the hatch feed valuable minerals, so let's do the hatch feeding math.

• 140 kg/cycle * 16 hatches = -2240 kg/cycle
• 16 tons / 10 cycle round trip = 1600 kg/cycle
• Minor volcano = 713.89 g/s = 428 kg/cycle

So we still have a 212 kg/cycle shortfall. Hatches are expensive.

I've yet to tame the flooded volcanoes, though. I'm tempted to do so...

But I think I'd rather turn these ones into a petroleum boiler. They're quite high on the map, close to where I'll want the rocket fuel.

On the other hand, these will produce way too much heat for counterflow petrol boiling, and it would be a waste to let them flood themselves. Maybe they are best used for hatch feed.

[QuQuasar]

I'm working on a colonization rocket next, and I'm actually quite proud of this design. I ended up utilizing every single tile in the spacefarer, without a single one to spare.

It supports three duplicants with the great hall, barracks and washroom bonuses, with completely automated waste gas filtering, climate control, and a built-in battery to save rocket height. It's also possible to forgo the +1 barracks bonus and make one dupe sleep on the carpet in order to fit in a hamster wheel and free up even more rocket height.

About the only concern I have is the lack of radiation shielding on the bedroom. Ren will be fine, but for Ari and Steve it would probably be a good idea to bring along a couple rad pills.

[tuxii]

Ren that's not the part of the ladder bed you're supposed to sleep on! 

[ALCRD]

3 hours ago, tuxii said:

Ren that's not the part of the ladder bed you're supposed to sleep on! 

Pretty sure you meant "Ari" :P Ren is sleeping properly tucked in his bed.

[QuQuasar]

I'm still in design mode. This time looking at optimizing ranching time.

 

I've never actually played with incubators before now. I know they can be automated, but they always seemed like a huge waste of power and space to me. It simply doesn't matter how fast an egg hatches: what matters is how many you make, and that you wrangle them into a production ranch when they grow to adulthood. 

That's why my solution was the cuddle cube:

But this solution has two problems. One is lag. I'm not too worried, but it never hurts to reduce lag.

The more important one is dupe time, and that I am worried about. Ravenous hunger means twice as many ranchers, twice as many farmers, etc. Trussing and carrying the newly grown critters a few tiles costs them a fair bit. Getting Turner to cook didn't cause any immediate problems, but sending Nails to Reekista for a few days on top of that absolutely destroyed my ranching capacity.

So, what are my options?

I *could* put the drowning chamber inside the nursery, where only the adult hatches can reach it. This would be a fairly effective solution... for hatches and divergents. And nothing else.

I'm not beaten yet, though. Drecko's and pips don't jump as babies, so if we want to add their eggs to the system, we can do this.

Okay. Good. It still doesn't work for fliers, or slicksters, or pokeshells, but it covers everything I'm currently ranching at Verdana. It would definitely reduce the ranching workload.

 

Or alternatively... I could play with incubators for a bit. I'm probably reinventing the wheel here, but... the goal is to detect when a duplicant is hugging the egg, leave the power on long enough for the dupe to finish, then turn the incubator off for 600 seconds while the 'lullabied' buff exhausts itself, right? I can't use weight plates if I want cuddle pips in the incubation room, so... here's a circuit for that.

 

And once we condense all that into a compact little block, it becomes a 3-wide tilable design.

 

Still a little bit ugly, though. It'll fit in better on a 5-high floor.

 

There we go. I like it!

 

So, the question remains. Incubators, or slaughterhatchery? 

[sirloxley]

Can Cuddle Pips even reach eggs in incubators? Otherwise I am using (powered) incubators to repopulate my stables, with the timer sensor (50s green/600s red), which is less precise but I can accept a missed cycle of lullabied.

Surplus (and the eggs) ends up here

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 600

The Spirit of Defensive Sputnik stopped by Persepholin to refuel on it's way to continue exploring further to the east.

 

Out there: I found another asteroid, Chillista, a tundra asteroid with an iron volcano. Might come in handy for sustainable steel.

And right on cue, the colonization rocket Apollo XI is fueled up and ready to go. Still waiting on a full container of oxylite and berry sludge, but otherwise we just need to pick a destination and select a crew.

 

On the destination front, our options are "the one with a tungsten volcano", "water for days", "Moo's!" and the cold one I mentioned earlier.

 

Other points of note:

I expanded the berry farm, rebuilt the laboratory/workshop, and laid out the plans for an automated incubator bank. Much as I like the idea of an automatic murderhatchery, it's probably better to keep the lag down and turn the newly hatched critters into meat asap. Incubators it is.

 

Also, Saturn critter traps are comically powerful. That's 12 kg of hydrogen per tile right there.

 

 

 

[QuQuasar]

I'm impressed with how well this worked.

Sure, there are cheaper and simpler ways of doing it (as sirloxley noted, a timer would probably be fine), but there's also something really satisfying about watching the lullabied buff run out, the incubator turn itself on, a rancher come along to hug the egg, and the incubator turn itself off again.

I do still have some lingering distaste for the fact that this means there will be hatchlings and pipsqueaks in the production ranches, though. It doesn't sit right with me.

Also, I finally worked out why I kept finding bloody carbon dioxide in my hydrogen pipes. My enthusiasm for smog slugs is draining rapidly.

[sirloxley]

On the incubators, since you are already running mods, there's also this: Smart Egg Incubator mod (Link)

[QuQuasar]

9 hours ago, sirloxley said:

On the incubators, since you are already running mods, there's also this: Smart Egg Incubator mod (Link)

Nah, that's not my style. Automating the incubators is a fun engineering challenge. A mod to negate that would subtract from the game.

[QuQuasar]

Cycle 610

I've decided not to do any colonization for the time being and refocus my efforts on the home base. It's time to solve the hatch feed problem for good.

 

Cycle 620

The vacuum seal in this area gave me no end of trouble. I understand how the sour gas got in, I'm using a petroleum liquid lock, that only makes sense. What I don't understand is how the oxygen got in after I repaired the lock.. Not polluted oxygen, mind you. I'd understand if I'd accidentally dug some slime or something. Just regular oxygen.

Didn't stop me working in the area, though. Close enough is good enough when it comes to vacuum.

Once the bulk of the magma is crushed, the remainder can be solidified with obsidian tempshift plates and Ruby can go in to analyze it before it erupts again. Dormancy not required.

 

Cycle 630

Alright, I think we're ready to kick this disaster-pile off and start harvesting some glorious hatch chow. Ellie's just putting on the final touches, so everything should be ready to pipe the water in.

Here we go...

[QuQuasar]

How?

How can there possibly be steam there?

[QuQuasar]

Magic teleporting steam notwithstanding, the machine is working as designed. My only concern is that we might lose some material output if the lower volcano ends up being flooded by the upper before the magma can be extracted. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything to do about it short of dismantling the whole machine.

The outputs are

• 1.18 kg/s (lower) +
• 1.31 kg/s (upper) +
• 0.71 kg/s (previously tamed minor volcano) =
• Total of 3.2 kg/s or 1920 kg/cycle. 2.02 kg/s or 1212 kg/cycle

Still a bit short of the 2240 kg/cycle we need for the two hatch ranches, but we might be able to make up that shortfall with an automated mining rocket. The rocky asteroid field in the area has a max of 73.6 tons. 80% of that is rock (igneous and sediment), and space POI's regenerate between 1% and 2% of their matter each cycle, so that's somewhere between 580 kg/cycle and 1160 kg/cycle.

As a bonus, since the field is only 5 tiles away and only has solids, we can do it all with a small petroleum engine and save on fuel. Yay! More rocket interior design!

(Edit) Scratch that, this isn't going to work. The lower volcano is overpressuring. Going to need to find a solution.