Zombie Spores Outbreak

[Kderosa]

Did they change the way germs are handled in the game recently with the new DLC?  I vaguely recall reading something to this effect, but can't find the post.

Here is brave Digster being treated for Zombie Spores, despite being in an atmosuit the entire time he was in contact with the Zombie Spores.  I'm sure this is an animation few players have seen unless you were around back in the days when slimelung was lethal.

When I got the notification that a dupe had contracted Zombie Spores I figured it was a fluke.  No dupe had gotten the disease in dozens of colonies spanning thousands of cycles. I instructed Digster to tough it out and put him on BBQ rations for his trouble.  But then nearly the entire base also came down with Zombie Spores which piqued my curiosity.

So through the magic of the Gravitas Company we went back in time before the great opening of the sporechid mini-geode. Archival photo shown below.

Digster once again dutifully "volunteered" to break into the geode using good engineering practices - only the best naphtha liquid lock and an atmosuit for protection.  He dug out the sporechids, built a gas pump and pumped the CO2 with 4M zombie spore germs into a gas cannister.  Then he carried the sporechids and the cannister to the shiny new biobot facility.

Note the liquid lock and the presence of slime lung germs (we will not speak of why they are still there other than to note their presence was convenient).  Digster planted the sporechids along with a few others that had been dug up long ago without incident and emptied the cannister full of the sweet, sweet zombie spores (why waste?).

 A few cycles later Digster again contracted zombie spores along with the rest of the colony.  It was then that I noticed that even though I had built a Disease Clinic in the Hospital, I had failed to make any serum vials (because it had been thousands of cycles since they were needed - it's like building an ore scrubber - why?).

So, again we went back in time to repeat this insanity.  But before we could do that we had to build a hastily constructed shine bug ranch and place the last of the shine bugs in it.  Then we built a bristle berry farm because we did not need bristle berries to make berry sludge in the new DLC and there was no critter fluxomatic was present on this planetoid.

Many cycles later we had sun bugs and more importantly their eggs which we harvested to make serum vials.

Again, Digster "volunteered" to break open the great geode. but this time he was more closely monitored.

After planting the sporechids and emptying the zombie spores laden CO2 cannister, Digster ran back to the base infecting every ladder he climbed along the way and deposited his atmosuit in the dock infecting the docks which were in the base where unprotected dupes were unwittingly exposed to the zombie spores when they put on or took off an atmosuit.  Disinfecting the docks didn't help much because the damage had been done. The outbreak persisted for about ten cycles with some dupes contracting the disease multiple times after being treated. Luckily I had fabricated over a dozen serum vials just in case.

Here's a screenshot from after the clean-up. See the 7.3 tons of O2 from the docks covered with hundreds of thousands of zombie spores that some poor dupes carried out of the base.  Not sure how to clean that up short of putting it into a chlorine chamber.

 

The dupes also built a suit decontamination station for the first time ever to the left of the cannister (now decommissioned).  It does clean the suits, but boy does it use a lot of water (200 kg) - if you want to convert lots of H2O to PH2O just put one of these babies in front of your docks.

Even more baffling is this:

How did 8.6 tons of refined copper get infected with 189k of zombie spores?

Anyone else have a similar experience recently?

Edited June 28, 2025 by Kderosa

[Simonova]

Assuming the refinery is cooled with water cleaned up from the suit decontamination station, that would be my guess as to how the copper got contaminated; germs in the liquid used to cool a refinery have a tendency to end up on the duplicant operating the refinery, as well as the output.

[Kderosa]

1 hour ago, Simonova said:

Assuming the refinery is cooled with water cleaned up from the suit decontamination station, that would be my guess as to how the copper got contaminated; germs in the liquid used to cool a refinery have a tendency to end up on the duplicant operating the refinery, as well as the output.

That refinery is using petroleum.

The only thing I can think of is that the gas pump I used to pump out the co2 from the geode was made from copper ore.  When that was deconstructed, one of the dupes may have grabbed the copper ore and made copper in the refinery which was contaminated.  I suspect the )2 cannisters were infected similarly when a dupe's atmosuit wore out when he took it off at the dock.  This generates a cannister of 02 which combined with the 7 tons of cannisters that were there which also became contaminated.

If this new mechanic allows germs to be passed onto and from surfaces this easily, it's going to cause problems since almost no one takes precautions when it comes to germs since they've been so nerfed.

 

[Charletrom]

Can this happen with food poisoning or slime lung? Or just zombie spores?

[Kderosa]

8 minutes ago, Charletrom said:

Can this happen with food poisoning or slime lung? Or just zombie spores?

I was wondering this myself.  I didn't notice any food poisoning issues this run.  I did see some slime lung outbreaks before I put everyone in atmosuits, but I haven't checked to see if the atmosuits are getting slime lung on them then passing it onto other surfaces.

It could be that this is just an issue at high germ concentrations - I was looking at 4M germs in the geode and biobot room.  Ther are 100k in germs in there now and I'll be testing to see if that's an issue.  Maybe if someone has just broken open a slimelung infested biome we can see if it is an issue for higher sling lung concentrations too.

[JRup]

8 hours ago, Kderosa said:

without incident and emptied the cannister full of the sweet, sweet zombie spores (why waste?).

Not without incident. Just manipulating germ ridden debris (canisters, in this case) will get germs on the daring duplicant that did so.  We see this all the time with beginner polluted water/sieve setups that have germy water in them. It's no different.

TL.;DR.: Touch germy stuff, get germy stuff on dupe. To the very least, use wash basins to get clean dupes.

It is as foretold in the sacred archives:

 

[Tigin]

In the March QoL update, boops can now transfer Slumelung/Zombie Spores germs to their internal tank by consuming disease-tainted oxygen canisters. Before it was extremely difficult to contract Zombie Spores as it (mostly) required inhalation from something that was found mostly in CO2, but now boops can easily accidentally infect their own oxygen canister they're about to eat.

[blakemw]

Well, I've commented on zombie spores before and said things like "it's nearly impossible to get infected with zombie spores unless you bottle gas with millions of spores and carry it around your base"...

All you really need to mitigate this is serious hand-washing wherever the canisters are handled, as if they don't have the spores on their hands they can't spread it everywhere they go. Unfortunately because dupes CAN drop canisters mid-route, it's not as simple as just having hand washing right after they pick it up. To be maximally safe you really want to not handle the spores at all unless you can ensure that the handling takes place entirely behind a liquid lock and hand washing.

[Gurgel]

I usually gamma-sterilize these geodes from outside. I have no interest in having to make the spore treatment...

[Pproy]

20 hours ago, Kderosa said:

So, again we went back in time to repeat this insanity.  But before we could do that we had to build a hastily constructed shine bug ranch and place the last of the shine bugs in it.  Then we built a bristle berry farm because we did not need bristle berries to make berry sludge in the new DLC and there was no critter fluxomatic was present on this planetoid.

Many cycles later we had sun bugs and more importantly their eggs which we harvested to make serum vials.

I wonder if a change could be made for the recipe of serum vials? Since with the introduction of different starts, it is more and more likely that shine bugs wont even be native to the asteroids, making so treating a zombie spore outbreak even more tedious. It could keep the steel requirement, but maybe instead of sun bug egg, a new recipe from the emulsifier that requires critters egg and another component?

[Tigin]

15 minutes ago, Pproy said:

I wonder if a change could be made for the recipe of serum vials? Since with the introduction of different starts, it is more and more likely that shine bugs wont even be native to the asteroids, making so treating a zombie spore outbreak even more tedious. It could keep the steel requirement, but maybe instead of sun bug egg, a new recipe from the emulsifier that requires critters egg and another component?

I didn't see any dinosaurs on this asteroid...The Germ DLC lives on!

 

[Kderosa]

13 hours ago, JRup said:

Not without incident. Just manipulating germ ridden debris (canisters, in this case) will get germs on the daring duplicant that did so. 

Every dupe that had contact withe the spores had an atmosuit on. My experience has been that as long as the dupe is wearing a suit, it doesn't matter that their suit is covered in germs.  It would have been a very different story if the dupes were not wearing atmosuits. In fact, I've built this same biobot set-up, cleaned out sporechid geodes, and sporechid oil biomes numerous times in the past, without issue.  Not only didn't the dupes handling the spoechids, all in suits, ever get zombie spores, the entire base did not come get infected.  It might just be a fluke situation or something in the mechanics has changed.

2 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I usually gamma-sterilize these geodes from outside. I have no interest in having to make the spore treatment...

The easiest way to deal with the spores in the oil biome is to make an opening with a liquid lock and send in a slickster or two until they have breathed in all the infected CO2.  Then everything is safe to handle.  Occasionally, one of these pockets gets broken open by mistake and the spores get out.  The spores will die out if they are in oxygen, but will linger if in CO2.  Regardless as long as the dupes are always in atmosuits, exposure to airborne germs has never resulted in sick dupe.

6 hours ago, blakemw said:

All you really need to mitigate this is serious hand-washing wherever the canisters are handled, as if they don't have the spores on their hands they can't spread it everywhere they go.

There is a fully plumbed bathroom a short distance from the entrance of the base which the dupe would have gone to since it was break time.  The only surfaces that had surface germs were the atmosuit docks.  Nothing else in the base had any surface germs.  And the CO2 cannister the dupe was carrying was not covered in germs, though it did contain CO2 with germs, but that was opened up in the biobot building. What the screenshot shows is the O2 cannisters that are expelled when a dupe drops a worn suit at the docks.  No dupes touched any of these cannisters, except maybe a Boop had come along and fed from them, as someone else suggested.

[Kderosa]

In an effort to get to the bottom of this, I ran a few experiments.

Trial One: I send a dupe (in an atmosuit) into the biobot chamber which has 46k of zombie spore laden CO2.  Dupe comes out with zero surface germs. Not surprising.

Trial Two: I send in a very brave dupe (in an atmosuit) into the biobot chamber and instruct the dupe to drop the suit. No surface germs and no exposure since the dupe is holding her breath in the CO2.

Trial Three: I have a dupe relocate 7 tons of O2 cannisters with surface germs a short distance. The dupe gets contaminated with surface germs, but doesn't become exposed to the germs.

Trial Four: I have the same dupe covered in germs take off his atmosuit at which point the dupe gets surface germs on himself.  I suspect thjis is how the dupes become in contact with the germs which is needed to contract the disease.  Note.  The same transference happens at atmosuit docks which is how your entire base can come in contact with there germs which are now in breathable O2.

Trial Five: I allow the dupe to go about his day whereupon he spreads the surface germs to every building and material he comes in contact with.

As someone else has pointed out, you can remove the surface germs from the dupe by having the dupe wash their hands (both wearing a suit and not).  And, of course, the decontamination station will clean off the dupe as well.

Buildings can be disinfected manually with the disinfect command or automatically when the germs reach a set level,

Items can be disinfected by placing the item in a chlorine room much like your deep freezer will remove food poisoning rom food if you fill it with chlorine and are careful not to let the freezer get so cold that it liquefies the chlorine.

I do not believe that a dupe can contract zombie spores or slimelung  even if they are covered in surface germs; they have to breathe it in by being in 02 or PO2 that is infected with the germs. So, if they are in atmosuits, they are fine as well as if they are in CO2 or some other non-breathable gas.

The problem occurs when they take off their suits (such as at an atmosuit dock) which will transfer the germs to their bodies or when they come in contact with a building or item that has surface germs and they are in a breathable atmosphere.  This is especially bad when there are very high levels of germs, such as in the sporechid geode or biobot room with freshly released CO2 having 4M germs.

So how can you make your base safer from this sort of outbreak.

1.  It's probably best to make medicine packs and serum vials and fill your hospital buildings with them just in case.  For slimelung this is easy and optional. For zombie spores, it's a real PIA because shinebugs are few and far between on some planets and you have to morph those shine bugs into sunbugs and then harvest the eggs without letting the sunbugs go extinct by overharvesting.

2. Put a buddy bud in a flower pot near your atmosuit docks.  This will fill the air with floral scent germs at high levels which will kill off slimelung and zombie spore germs that have managed to get into the O2 around the dock from contaminated suits, but as you can see the dupe will still be covered in surface germs once they remove a contaminated suit.

3. This means you should put sinks or a decontamination station before your docks preferably outside the base to prevent the contamination from happening in the first place. And I suspect you'll need multiple sinks because a dupe will run right them if they are all being used. This is especially important if you have bionic dupes because a large amount of O2 cannisters will form at the armosuit checkpoint whenever a dupe takes off a worn suit.  If that worn suit has surface germs the surface germs will contaminate to 75 kg of O2 that also drops which will then infect the entire pile of O2 cannisters.

Any other suggestions?

 

Edited June 29, 2025 by Kderosa

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, Kderosa said:

The easiest way to deal with the spores in the oil biome is to make an opening with a liquid lock and send in a slickster or two until they have breathed in all the infected CO2.  Then everything is safe to handle.  Occasionally, one of these pockets gets broken open by mistake and the spores get out.  The spores will die out if they are in oxygen, but will linger if in CO2.  Regardless as long as the dupes are always in atmosuits, exposure to airborne germs has never resulted in sick dupe.

The oil biome is simple: You can usually just block-crush oil and CO2 in there and get no germs whatsoever outside. 

[Kderosa]

Just now, Gurgel said:

The oil biome is simple: You can usually just block-crush oil and CO2 in there and get no germs whatsoever outside. 

I do that as a last resort.  But it can be time consuming.  And sometimes the sporechid prevents making the block from the diagonal if the sporechid requires digging up which cannot be done from the diagonal. 

If slicksters are nearby, I often can just did a tile or two to let them into the pocket and give them a cycle of two to vacuum it out killing the sporechid and germs.  Then I dig out the sporechid and proceed to strip mine the area as per usual.

 

Or, as I've shown above, if the germ concentration isn't too bad, the biome is sealed off, and your dupes are in atmosuits, you can just strip mine any sporechids that are inaccessible to the slickster vacuum.  The germs won't transfer to the dupes. Eventually the germs spread out and die off slowly.   

[Curry MAMA]

Why did you decide to transport carbon dioxide in a gas canister in the first place?

If a dupe carrying a contaminated object drops the object during a break, it is not clear who will pick it up, and if the dupe who picked it up is not wearing an Atmo Suit, it is natural that the contamination will spread.

From the beginning, we should have transported the carbon dioxide using a pump, pipes, and gas vents, rather than transporting it in a canister. Before that, we should have dealt with all the zombie spores on-site and let them breed again near the Biobot Builder.

[Kderosa]

37 minutes ago, Curry MAMA said:

Why did you decide to transport carbon dioxide in a gas canister in the first place?

Because the biobot facility is on the opposite side of the map from the geode. It would have been a lot of piping. 

37 minutes ago, Curry MAMA said:

If a dupe carrying a contaminated object drops the object during a break, it is not clear who will pick it up, and if the dupe who picked it up is not wearing an Atmo Suit, it is natural that the contamination will spread.

Pretty sure the canister of CO2 didn’t have surface germs on it at that point since it only had contaminated gas pumped into it. What I think happened was that the act of opening the canister put the surface germs on the dupe. So there was no issue dropping the canister and even if that happened all the dupes wear atmosuits outside the base. It’s cycle 573. 

37 minutes ago, Curry MAMA said:

From the beginning, we should have transported the carbon dioxide using a pump, pipes, and gas vents, rather than transporting it in a canister. Before that, we should have dealt with all the zombie spores on-site and let them breed again near the Biobot Builder.

The biobot facility requires that you pump CO2 full of zombie spores into it to create the biobots. 

[Curry MAMA]

28 minutes ago, Kderosa said:

The biobot facility requires that you pump CO2 full of zombie spores into it to create the biobots. 

So I say, why not just grow Sporechids near the Biobot Builder?

There's no need to transport polluting carbon dioxide.

Edited June 30, 2025 by Curry MAMA

[Kderosa]

51 minutes ago, Curry MAMA said:

So I say, why not just grow Sporechids near the Biobot Builder?

There's no need to transport polluting carbon dioxide.

I did do that if you look closely at the screenshots. 
 

why waste 4 million zombie spores? 
 

of course next time, I’d just use a canister emptier to empty the canister since it didn’t have any surface germs. 

[Curry MAMA]

15 minutes ago, Kderosa said:

why waste 4 million zombie spores? 

What happened as a result of doing that?

[Kderosa]

1 hour ago, Curry MAMA said:

What happened as a result of doing that?

I learned a bit more about an unintuitive mechanic which I’ll use take advantage of in future play. That’s how we improve 

[blakemw]

9 hours ago, Kderosa said:

Pretty sure the canister of CO2 didn’t have surface germs on it at that point since it only had contaminated gas pumped into it.

I'm not sure the game even makes a distinction between germs inside and on a canister. Like that is how we think of things IRL, but in terms of game mechanics canisters aren't really a thing, it's more like dupes carry around a jelly blob of the gas or liquid.

[Kderosa]

9 hours ago, blakemw said:

I'm not sure the game even makes a distinction between germs inside and on a canister.

Let's find out.

Step A: Find a new sporechid geode loaded with zombie spores and prepare to break in,  Liquid lock in place.

Step B: Break in, dig up sporechids,  and build gas pump. Notice how no germs are on the exiting dupe.

Step C: pump out CO2 with zombie spores.  Notice how only the gas pump is getting the gas spores transferred to it as surface germs. 

Step D: Mission completed.  Zombie spores are all contained in a gas cannister.  No germs on any other building except for the gas pump which the dupes automatically disinfected.  No chance of exposure to any dupe during this entire process.

Now comes the risky part - ejecting the CO2 cannister.

Trial 1: CO2 cannister ejected with no surface germs.  Only the CO2 within contains germs.  The dupes carry it to the biobot building, empty it via a cannister emptier into the biobot chamber and no germs are transferred to any building or dupe during this process.  Mission successful.

Trial 2: CO2 cannister ejected but this time is covered in surface germs.  The ejecting dupe is also covered in germs. This would lead to a base-wide outbreak once the dupe returns to the base.  Any dupe that comes into contact with the cannister would also get covered in germs. Mission failure.

Trial 3: same as trial 2.  Cannister and dupe both covered in surface germs.

So, what have we learned.  There appears to be a bug in the simulation. Maybe there are too many germs in the cannister - 25M for the simulation to handle/

I have no idea.  But I do know that if germs can spread from the gas within the cannister to the surface of the cannister even though germs are not transferred from the air to the dupes normally, then they should be a way for the dupes to disinfect the cannisters easily.  Right now they can't. I believe raw ore can be scrubbed with the ore scrubber to remove 480k of germs, but how about other materials which I have shown above can also get surface germs and can't be disinfected easily short of constructing a chlorine chamber.

[Tigin]

1 hour ago, Kderosa said:

Trial 1: CO2 cannister ejected with no surface germs.  Only the CO2 within contains germs.  The dupes carry it to the biobot building, empty it via a cannister emptier into the biobot chamber and no germs are transferred to any building or dupe during this process.  Mission successful.

I don't quite follow this part as it's not consistent with what I observe. Dupes picking canisters regardless of "source" always transfer germs from the canister to the dupe as surface germs.

1 hour ago, Kderosa said:

but how about other materials which I have shown above can also get surface germs and can't be disinfected easily short of constructing a chlorine chamber.

You can use a Decontamination Shower for this, but it's of questionable value as that will also place the Zombie Spore germs into the polluted water. If the polluted water ever off-gases into Polluted Oxygen then that very well will infect your colony.

[Kderosa]

1 hour ago, Tigin said:

don't quite follow this part as it's not consistent with what I observe. Dupes picking canisters regardless of "source" always transfer germs from the canister to the dupe as surface germs.

Yes. That’s what happened when there was surface germs. However, the first time I emptied the canister from the canister filler it did not have any surface germs on it. And so there were no surface germs to transfer to the dupe. Could be a bug. I have no idea. 

 

1 hour ago, Tigin said:

You can use a Decontamination Shower for this, but it's of questionable value as that will also place the Zombie Spore germs into the polluted water

The one and only decontamination station I’ve ever built did not create polluted water with germs in it when I used it. I checked.