Am I missing something or is the Aquatic start very tiresome?

[Szczuku]

In order to do, basically anything, I need to start farming aquatic plants + the rubber tree, but to do that I need wide farms, and to make them I need pearls. So until wild clams start producing I can't do anything and even then domestic clams will take 8 cycles to start producing.

On top of that managing water was one of the more annoying aspects of any ONI early game and in the case of this dlc it is 10x worse. How am I supposed to build stuff if there's so little dry space? I cannot build a  classic base since expansion is made hard by huge amounts of salt water everywhere. And early game is, well, too early to be able to manage all of those liquids, even with the 2 free hydro generators adding some extra power for pumps

[sakura_sk]

Embrace chaos~

[Twiki]

I found it to be one of the easiest starts. As long as you don't disturb the plants and fish, you get free o2, pearl, food, etc to start and keep your base running. Minnow gives you a free gasket, and it's pretty common to get more through the printing pod after. Even heat is barely an issue for a long time, with so much liquid mass to sink it into.

The main thing is to build upward, so you're not dealing with keeping the ocean out too much. Beyond that, I didn't even use the hamster wheel this run, which is rare. Probably my biggest challenge was stopping myself from trying to jump straight to my endgame base before I had some temporary food/survival stuff built.

[KittenIsAGeek]

21 hours ago, Twiki said:

I found it to be one of the easiest starts.

Yeah.  Gotta be careful here and there, but the only thing I started farming right off was clams.  By time I could actually use rubber, I had plenty from the two wild trees near my base and enough perl to plant a couple more in a farm.   I had to actually fence Beakons away from around flue coral to keep my base from over pressurizing.

[Gurgel]

Agreed. It is an easy start, because most things just work without you even making them work. I am kind of enjoying that it is not a struggle and careful planning is not needed, but I am looking forward to getting something hard form the lab or from the next addition again. 

[Simonova]

Unusual levels of included oxygen

[Babxbba]

As they said free wild oxygen, almost free (you only need to find the gaskets) electricity, easy early temp management. You must explore, and it is easy to do too being every pool of water a easy highway for the dupes, that have a great breath underwater too.

It's true that you don't have pearl until...don't remember wild clampumat with cycle have their first production cycle done but at least 20-30 but you can do many things before that, and you can survive without problems. You can even rush to search for pips and begin wild planting very early.

[Pproy]

On 6/23/2026 at 6:51 PM, Simonova said:

Unusual levels of included oxygen

 

2 hours ago, Babxbba said:

As they said free wild oxygen

See, im on the fence on that one. On one hand, I agree that oxygen is almost given for free here. But, on the other hand, im so happy that I dont have to rely on a SPOM for oxygen production. I really appreciate that the dev are exploring alternative for oxygen production.

2 hours ago, Babxbba said:

almost free (you only need to find the gaskets) electricity

That one though, I agree. While I dont share the opinion that tidal geyser are that tedious in term of space management, I find that they are too much of them and are to easy to "tame". To the point it trivialise energy production in the early game. I feel that they could use a maintenance cost for running them. 

Edited June 26 by Pproy
Fix a phrase where I put a double negative by mistake

[Babxbba]

1 hour ago, Pproy said:

That one though, I agree. While I dont share the opinion that tidal geyser are not that tedious in term of space management, I find that they are too much of them and are to easy to "tame". To the point it trivialise energy production in the early game. I feel that they could use a maintenance cost for running them. 

I agree with you in this, they are too many and makes electricity too easy to have, even later in the game. And gasket are really easy to make, even if you don't want to go for rubber it's easy enough to rush towards abyss biome to have free plastic from wild tublia.

 

[SkunkMaster]

The wide farms can be made with any glassy material. You could make some glass and use that, or just dig down and find some diamond. 

No real need to use pearls specifically...