Interesting conundrum

[Frustrated]

I have the option of taking a care package of 12,000kcal of barbecue or an 8th dupe who starts out with the Critter Ranching I skill.  The other options are nonviable for me.  I currently have 88k in food (almost all liceloaf) and have multiple dupes who can cook, so I'm currently positive in food production.  My issue is that I've tried taking on an 8th dupe in a situation like this before and my food supply started dropping like a stone.  What would you pick?

[asurendra]

Well, IMHO, 7 dupes is very little. Tasks take ages to complete etc. So in this case I will look how many dirt I have, can I add more liceloafs if necessary. If yes, welcome a new crewmember

[gigamoi]

If you are feeding your dupes with liceloaf then I guess you are still in pretty early game. You may be "food positive" for now but it will most likely not last long. Liceloaf will chew trough your dirt and water in no time, both of which you need for research. You may even be better of eating meal lice raw if dirt is far more plentiful than water now. Heck, even going with gristle berries would be more water efficient and use no dirt at all!

Getting an extra dupe means faster work, but it also means you will deplete resources equally faster so you are still converting resources into work at the same efficiency. It doesn't buy you time in and of itself and sustainability is this game's hidden win condition. The meta game basically consists in postponing colony collapse until it becomes indefinitely stable and the game turns into a sandbox.

[Frustrated]

I actually had to restart my comp, so I wound up losing the choice anyway, but it's nice to have this discussion in a vacuum, should the need arise again.  I was actually leaning towards the 8th dupe, and yeah, I was pretty early on.  I had only just completed building my hydra and was working on priming it when the food situation came to be a problem.

[asurendra]

22 hours ago, gigamoi said:

Getting an extra dupe means faster work, but it also means you will deplete resources equally faster so you are still converting resources into work at the same efficiency

Yep, thats true. However having more dupes means earlier access to all critical skills like mechatronic, super digging etc. Also it makes less real time waiting until all your orders is done. Which is important IMHO. 

Also we usually want our dupes to work as efficiently as possible. Thats means that if we have cook that can feed 10 dupes it should feed 10 dupes. Because when cook ismt cooking, it do other tasks, and its bad in them. So we wasting resources here

Edited January 29 by asurendra

[gigamoi]

Yeah but they have seven dupes which is way more than enough early game and the size of the support system they have to build will also more or less scale with the number of dupe as well. It will matter later as not all systems scale but not right now IMO. I usually run with up to 24 dupes but I once did a moonlet run with about 12 dupes, including 4 to spare for colonization, so a skeleton crew of only 8 by late game so it's very possible. 

Besides, them asking about early game stuff implies that they are not very experienced. Even though it is possible to go faster by taking more dupes, pulling that successfully requires knowing what you are doing which they don't as of yet. Slower resource depletion gives them more time to see the polluted dirt hit the vertical wind tunnel.

[Frustrated]

So I restarted and decided to run Bristle Berries to Gristle berries instead.  I've got 9 dupes now and have a food supply over 200,000 (more than half of it is GB).  Lice does kinda suck, I mark any wild lice and seeds for compost when I see them.  I'm wandering all over the map and have found at least 3 Snow biomes to harvest wild wheat from so I'm progressing quite a lot.  I need to figure out how to burn germs faster and more efficiently, because I'm running out of space and want to start up ranching.

Edited February 1 by Frustrated

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/1/2026 at 3:42 AM, Frustrated said:

I need to figure out how to burn germs faster and more efficiently

I think your first step should be reading the material in your database (the book icon):

For example:

Spoiler

The information in your database tells you everything you need to know about dealing with the problem.

Spoiler

For example, slimelung multiplies in slime and polluted oxygen, but it is killed by oxygen and disinfected with chlorine.  So if you use a deoderizer to convert polluted oxygen to clean oxygen, the slimelung will, over time, die off.  If you put some chlorine gas into a room with polluted oxygen and slime, it will kill off the slimelung.  If you cool the area down below 50F or heat it above 212F, the slimelung will die off.  You can also see that slimelung is killed by liquids.

What's interesting is that you don't need direct material/material contact.  You can pump polluted water into a liquid reservoir that is in a room filled with chlorine gas, and the food poisoning germs will die off.  Someone did a post a while back on this forum for using three liquid reservoirs in a room with chlorine gas to clean 10kg/s of polluted water from food poisoning.  If you kill off the food poisoning from polluted water before you send it to the water sieve, the polluted dirt it drops will not have food poisoning.

There are also inherent traits with the various diseases.  For example, food poisoning does absolutely nothing if its in the air.  It doesn't infect things by contact and the dupes won't get sick off it.  So you can send water with food poisoning to an electrolyzer and not worry about it.  Slimelung, on the other hand, only affects a dupe if it is airborn.  Thus if you keep your air pressure high enough to prevent off-gassing, you can dig out areas of slime without much risk of exposure. 

Edited February 19 by KittenIsAGeek
redundant words were redundant and needed redacting.

[Frustrated]

So...one thing I've noticed is that the best places to find germless slime are near snow biomes and geysers.  Intense heat and intense cold.  So, I've tried dissolving the abyssalite barriers between snow and swamp biomes and...sometimes it works.

 

In terms of food poisoning, I have a closed fluid loop involving my showers, lavatories, sinks and carbon skimmers that is separate from my other water sources (especially the cistern where I pump water to irrigate my crops.  Even so, I've still experienced dupes getting food poisoning and wondered why.  Food poisoning doesn't transfer onto dupes who take a dip in germ-infested water and then to crops like that, they have to be a part of the water that gets used for the actual irrigation.

[KittenIsAGeek]

4 hours ago, Frustrated said:

I have a closed fluid loop involving my showers, lavatories, sinks and carbon skimmers that is separate from my other water sources (especially the cistern where I pump water to irrigate my crops.  Even so, I've still experienced dupes getting food poisoning and wondered why.

So, on your closed-loop system I'm assuming you have a water sieve to turn polluted water into water.  It is important to know that a water sieve does not remove food poisoning from the water.  This is not a problem for 'grey' usage like showers, washing hands, and toilets.  Also, the polluted dirt emitted by the sieve will have food poisoning germs.  So it is a good idea to have a sink to wash hands in the entry to the room with the sieve.

It is also important to know that "Mush Bars," even if they're made with pristine dirt and water, will have food poisoning germs on them.  That means that storing the mush bars or moving them to the grill for frying will put food poisoning on your dupes hands, which can then get transferred to the food your dupe eats.

Finally, a dupe that gets germs on their hands can contact-transfer it to other areas, such as ladders and machines the dupe uses.  After setting up proper sanitation, I like to hit the spray bottle icon and drag it over everything.

 

5 hours ago, Frustrated said:

Food poisoning doesn't transfer onto dupes who take a dip in germ-infested water and then to crops like that,

Correct.  However, if a dupe uses contaminated dirt to fertilize the crop, then the germs will transfer.  Remember the polluted dirt from the sieve on your closed-loop sanitation system will have food poisoning on it.  When you throw it into the compost pile, it will result in dirt that has food poisoning germs.  When the dupe grabs that dirt, the food poisoning will transfer to their hands, and when the dupe uses it to fertilize the plants, those contaminated hands will transfer it to the crops.  The same thing happens with bottled polluted water.  I don't think that irrigated tiles transfer food poisoning to the crops, but I haven't used it in food crops for quite some time.  I know it doesn't transfer to thimble reed's "Reed Fiber."

[Frustrated]

Huh.  Didn't realize that about the sieve dirt and with the composting.  It's probably because I compost every single rot pile and bit of polluted dirt I come across (I mean...they do it normally anyway.  Now I'm wondering how to circumvent that.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/21/2026 at 9:26 AM, Frustrated said:

Now I'm wondering how to circumvent that.

So, the whole polluted dirt/clean dirt issue is a challenge.  It would be a lot easier to manage if you could dictate which batch of material was used in which project.  For example, using food-poison contaminated dirt in your research is no problem as long as your dupes are washing their hands.  Using that same dirt to fertilize  your bristle blooms, on the other hand, can be a bit of an issue.

My solution changes depending on the world in general.  In some bases, having the dirt is more important than anything else, so I'm always using the compost pile.  In other bases, I use the polluted dirt to feed pokeshells, and I set up a sweeper in the room with the sieve to ship the polluted dirt directly to them without dupe interaction.  In another base, I use a cold storage room to kill the germs before it gets sent to the compost pile.  

In one base, I have sinks set up so that the dupes can't cook or eat food without first washing their hands.  That base has a LOT of polluted air, dirt, and water, so it was unrealistic to get stuff clean.  It was easier to get the dupes clean before they handle food.

[Frustrated]

I guess my colony is lucky, or I did something right.  The food poisoning is kept to a minimum here.  I've only had two or three dupes come down with it so far.  As I said, I keep the water that flows to and from the showers, sinks and lavatories in a tightly controlled loop that runs from one reservoir that doesn't connect with anything else except the one water sieve that filters the pH2O output.

 

Maybe if I ever manage to get Sanishells, I can clean that loop, but I don't want to make the effort of running everything through a cold loop or bring too much heat into the base with an aquatuner or tepidizer.

Edited February 25 by Frustrated