DLC Concept: Oxygen not included spaced out together!

[Holld]

Hello Klei Team and Community!

I ve been a huge fan of Oxygen Not Included since the base game and Spaced Out! I Have 3000+ hours game time in steam However. I propose сoncept paid DLC called Spaced Out Together that introduces official co-op multiplayer, perfectly leveraging SO s structure while finally implementing per-asteroid multi-threading to crush those perf issues once and for all.

Core Concept: Asynchronous Co-op in a Shared Universe.

Personal Starting Asteroids: Each player gets their own fully independent starter asteroid. Manage your dupes, build your base, automate at your pace—no interference from friends! Shared Starmap & Joint Worlds: Explore a common starmap together. Discover joint colonization planetoids where all players collaborate—send rockets, build massive shared bases, or tackle mega-projects like a Dyson swarm. Your Dupes, Your Rules: Every player controls only their own duplicants. This builds directly on SO s one big map with black borders design but makes asteroids truly separable for co-op.

Multi-Threaded Asteroids (The Global Perf Fix): Run each personal asteroid on its own CPU core/thread! Sync only at boundaries: rockets, teleporters, shared joint worlds. Joint worlds and space stay single-threaded but benefit from lighter load since personal bases offload to other threads. This solves SO s biggest pain point—massive clusters no longer tank your main thread. Imagine 60 FPS late-game! Smart Pausing & Pacing: Personal Pauses: Pause your starter asteroid anytime—only affects your world. Others keep ticking! No Pauses on Shared Zones: Joint worlds and rockets run continuously for fair play. Speed Control by Vote: Real-time voting for game speed (1x, 2x, 3x).

Lore-Friendly Multiplayer Sync & Offline Handling: Relativity & Time Dilation: Minor desyncs between personal asteroids are explained by Einstein s relativity— Due to relativistic speeds, your clocks drift slightly until rockets sync them! Offline Player Handling: When a player logs off, their personal asteroid freezes for others with a flavorful message: It seems this object has wandered too close to a black hole—extreme time dilation makes it appear frozen to you! The asteroid pauses simulation for the group until player return. Dupes in Joint Worlds: Offline players duplicants in shared zones automatically path to nearby cryo-chambers, entering stasis until their owner rejoins.

This DLC could significantly increase the game and it can be a solution to the performance problem for most fans of the late stage of the game, without requiring a global change in the simulation calculations.. It would also add additional meaning to cosmetic items. I m not sure how difficult it would be to implement this with the current Unity engine. But I think it could attract a new audience... people like me who want to play in such worlds with their families. English isn t my native language, so I apologize for any inaccuracies.

Edited November 8, 2025 by Holld

[SGT_Imalas]

Any form of multiplayer or multithreaded grid would require a full rewrite of the game.

Not feasible 

[Holld]

2 hours ago, SGT_Imalas said:

Any form of multiplayer or multithreaded grid would require a full rewrite of the game.

Not feasible 

I understand. Perhaps calling such a proposal "DLC" wasn't such a good idea. It should be a separate, new game.
But I think implementing multithreading, with each asteroid simulated on a separate CPU core, is technically simpler than distributing the entire simulation across threads. Although I could be wrong.

[DolphinWing]

I think Away Team has a higher possibility of being realized.

[Xaekai]

I believe one of the devs commented a while ago in the simdll thread that multithreading can't really speed things much up anymore, it was cpu cache swap bound.

Edited December 5, 2025 by Xaekai