(Help) Surviving Max Difficulty

[BombermanBart]

Hello people.

 

Can someone help me? I'm struggling in cycles 15~30 on Max Difficulty + All Achievements, I simply cannot provide enough food for my colony, even having 2 dedicated Cookers and 1~2 assistants. I'm feeding them Mush Fries (but I'm doing Ranching as soon as possible) and also rushing a Hydra, but I think I don't dedicate enough time in the early game for Ranching (even tho I start with a Skilled: Critter Ranching 1 Dupe) and I enter a loop where my dupes always starve and I can't produce enough food!

 

If anyone could help me, just with some suggestions I would appreciate a lot. This new way of playing is making me look at ONI at different eyes (in a good way), but I'm not skilled enough, but I don't wanna give up!

[blakemw]

For max difficulty you want highly optimized mush bar production in Spaced Out (use radiation to kill the germs) or Mush Fry in classic (Mush Fry is far more labor-intensive than Mush Bar so try to avoid it, Mush Bar takes 40 seconds to make and gives 800 kcal, Mush Fry takes 90 seconds to make and gives 1050 kcal, there's no comparison in terms of labor efficiency and the dirt and water doesn't matter because you're transitioning to meat).

By highly optimized I mean you want the Pitcher Pump, and next to it the Microbe Mushers, and a storage of dirt, in Spaced Out you want some Shine Bugs locked in there to zap the germs.

To optimize it even more, you want this production to happen between the bathrooms and great hall, and leave the food on the floor, so dupes will poop, grab a mush bar/fry off the floor, and then eat it, totally minimizing running around and superfluous delivery errands.

You can also use door restrictions to only allow certain dupes to do long errands outside "the base", like literally just lock the cooks inside the base so they can't wander off and steal errands from the digger/builder. Though this isn't such a big deal on small Spaced Out planetoids where distances can't be that long.

Depending on what you are aiming for with "max difficulty" there is much which can be done in terms of the seed. What you really want is a nearby source of clean water, meaning either the Water Geyser or Cool Steam Vent, and ideally it's above your base so you can gravity-feed the water down. The Microbe Musher and Super Computer don't care if the water is hot, in fact you should prefer to pitcher pump hot water for these buildings and just leave the cool water pools for emergencies. The white and yellow waters which require processing are much less ideal, even if they are cooler.

Naturally a hydrogen vent is also a huge advantage.

I'd suggest if going for just max difficulty settings, just play on a seed with good geysers/vents. If you literally want it as hard as possible, play on a seed which doesn't have the good geysers/vents nearby. 

[BombermanBart]

So, I did only Mushbars + Locking the Cookers and it did work fine eventually. I had some struggles with energy and oxygen, and even tho I'm somewhat safe about those things. It's cycle 27 and I only have 12 Pip Eggs and 2 Hatch Eggs (My Hatch Starved for 3 Days because I thought they could eat Igneous Rock!). I'm playing on the Folia Asteroid and idk if I can ranch enough critters to achieve Carnivore, I'm planning going full ham with ranching, but idk if I have the cycles to do it. Any tips? Do you think this is salvageable?

[blakemw]

23 hours ago, BombermanBart said:

I'm playing on the Folia Asteroid and idk if I can ranch enough critters to achieve Carnivore

Definitely one of the harder maps to do Carnivore on, but it's not all bad because you have Divergents.

The best source of meat in the game is Shove Volves, but the second best is Sweetles laying Grubgrub eggs, this is because Grubgrubs drop twice as much meat as Hatches, and Sweetles lag eggs 50% more frequently than Hatches and twice as frequently than Grubgrubs. So Sweetles can increase in population very quickly thanks to their high reproduction, and if you get the Grubgrub chance high enough then in the ideal case this setup would produce 2.66x more meat per critter than Hatches!

Of course you can't get 100% Grubgrub chance on Sweetles, so it's not going to quite this good, but even if Sweetles lay only Sweetle eggs it's still 66% as much meat as Hatches, and you only need like 20% Grubgrub chance for Sweetles to be beating Hatches and it only gets better from there. And honestly, some Sweetle egg chance is desirable because it ensures an ample supply of replacement breeder Sweetles.

So the goal should be to get ranching Sweetles as quickly as possible to build up their population, and using Pips to plant some Splindly Grubfruits so the Sweetles can then boost their Grubgrub egg chance. Also once you've beaten Locavore, which doesn't take long with max hunger - it's basically 200 "duplicant cycles", so with 4 duplicants it'd take 50 cycles, you can just plant Grubfruit in farm tiles.

(Also incidentally, Sweetles can be starvation ranched and actually lay 2 eggs per lifetime when starvation ranched! For Carnivore you want to feed them, but this helps demonstrate how insane Sweetles are as breeders)

[cyberwarlord]

On 11/22/2023 at 3:54 AM, BombermanBart said:

So, I did only Mushbars + Locking the Cookers and it did work fine eventually. I had some struggles with energy and oxygen, and even tho I'm somewhat safe about those things. It's cycle 27 and I only have 12 Pip Eggs and 2 Hatch Eggs (My Hatch Starved for 3 Days because I thought they could eat Igneous Rock!). I'm playing on the Folia Asteroid and idk if I can ranch enough critters to achieve Carnivore, I'm planning going full ham with ranching, but idk if I have the cycles to do it. Any tips? Do you think this is salvageable?

Don't forget to dig up all the hidden items. You could still uncover a few more critters. I often forget myself an start to panick on the harder Asteroids -_-'. 

This is the type of playthrough that can end on any given cycle for the first 100 days, way more fun. Lost a colony from co2 in the beedroom on day 60ish. Poor dupes never woke up.

[melquiades]

This might be just me, and the way i play, but i like having a decent footing before expanding, and having trouble with food early on means for me that I have accepted too many dupes.

It is ok not to rush all the projects you want to make, having a bigger workforce means you need to provide for them, but there is nothing really rushing you.

[BombermanBart]

Later reply to topic, but I was playing around a bit on The Desolands and got to cycle 50+. Even tho Carnivore is possible, I'm thinking to restart because of a couple of points:

1. I did not ranch Stone Hatches, only regular ones, making sustaining 32 hatches impossible.
2. My only water source was a CSV next to my base, making it overrun with 30~40°C oxygen (also because of Hydra)

Even tho for problem 2 I can run and make an ATST combo, the hatch problem is a great issue when you notice that I need a reliable food source after Carnivore. Exploring space is a good idea, since now I've enough resources for it. But the knowledge that I've gathered shows that even thought my map is really good, it works best for a regular playthrough, not a Carnivore one, since the geysers/volcanoes avaliable really dictate how you will manage resources. I can share later what I've learned, some good strats to get going.

Edit: It seems you cannot get a Cool Slush Geyser or Cool Salt Slush Geyser. Either Carbon Dioxide Geyser or Frozen Core for cooling or ATST speedrun!

[The Plum Gate]

How many dupes?

I usually only have 4th around cycle 20...