sustainability tips for newcomers

[Sicclee]

Stuff I've learned with my first few colonies:

there are few things you really need to plan for early if your colony is going to be fun and sustainable. That's water, power and food.

1. your infinite water supply will come from geysers. The water comes out hot, you'll need to cool it in order to avoid overheating your base.

2. your infinite power comes from coal. Hatches (the creatures that are found burrowed) produce coal after eating resources left around. 

3. your infinite food supply comes from bristle blossoms. this is the only plant that you get seeds back from after consuming. 

Water-

Geyser water is hot. you can pump it with a pump made of gold, and you can use it if you want, but bringing so much heat into your base is not a good idea for a lot of reasons. I use water for: cooling machinery, cooking supplemental mush bars, oxygen and toilets/showers > fertilizer. That's a lot of heat spread all throughout my base. There are a few legit ways to cool down the water, search the forum for ideas. Just remember, you should plan on setting up a water cooling system within your first 100 cycles if you want to avoid headaches later. 

Power-

this one is easy. You can usually find at least 8 hatches in a reasonable area around your starting point. The most important thing to keep in mind is, your life will be way easier if you move them to one location early rather than keeping them where they're found. A centralized hatch farm ensures feeding and coal collection is quick and routine. A few other things to remember: Hatches will burrow back into natural tiles during the day. Make sure there aren't any natural tiles accessible to them to maximize their coal production. Also, you can kill them. I turn off the 'combat' skill for all my dupes immediately so that doesn't happen. Lastly, the coal is only infinite if their food source is infinite. You'll need to plan ahead to make sure you have a sustainable food source for them (a lot of people use frozen carbon dioxide I think, but you can also make dirt, sand, fertilizer and some other stuff sustainably.

Food-

Mushbars and meal lice is your typical early/midgame food source. In order to get a blossom farm going you'll need 3 things: seeds (from uprooting existing blossoms), a cool environment (more on that later), and fertilizer. There are 2 ways to get fertilizer... via polluted water, or polluted dirt. I use both. My colony of 9 dupes has 2 outhouses, 2 lavatories, and 2 showers. I produce more than enough fertilizer for their food supply. 

Temperature control-

Maintaining and reducing temperatures is the hardest part of the game for me hands down. If you plan your base for different temperature zones, you're going to have a much easier time late game. Some things to keep in mind: Batteries may not seem to produce much heat, but everything adds up eventually. Store them in a separate area from everything else. Most other heat producers (generators, namely) should be water cooled and kept separate from the living area. Once you get a central air system going, avoid pumping hot air into your living space. This is best controlled with a cool water supply, but insulated pipes, proper room for air to flow, and good routing will help as well. Also, you'll want to maintain a cold area (below 32*F). This is help out a lot, especially with the blossoms, creating ice, and storage. Because here's the thing, even if the area you are about to build in is a cozy 60*F, if all the supplies you are building with are 90*F, you can kiss that cozy climate goodbye. 

 

I may update this later, but good luck!

[Risu]

7 minutes ago, Sicclee said:

2. your infinite power comes from coal.

Your infinite power comes from Duplicants.
 

[Left4twenty]

I had difficulty when I was starting out with balancing my use of deoxydizers and terrariums to maintain good pressure within my base. Probably because I wait to build terrariums, building a carbon sink to fully immerse the terrariums in high density of carbon dioxide so they work as much as possible.  I had one colony where this backfired catastrophically.  Taking on three new dupes in a row (I normally do one every few)  tipped the pressure balance between the sink and oxygen above.  My oxygen pressure plummeted, and carbon dioxide essentially burst up out of the sink to normalize the presser in my base.  4 dupes died that day..

[MoMuffins]

So the lesson learned is not take on three dupes in a row unless you can handle the gas load.

[Sicclee]

4 hours ago, Risu said:

Your infinite power comes from Duplicants.
 

My dupes are far too classy to run like rodents all day, what with the toilet plunging and stress vomiting. 

[Lifegrow]

I used to rely on manual generators, nowadays i'm too lazy and just plonk down a fresh coal gen or two per circuit

[TheDukeOfDirty]

The easiest sustainable power seems to come from a hydrogen generator actually.  If you use electrolyzers, when they make water into oxygen they give off hydrogen (Since water is hydrogen and oxygen!)  This hydrogen will naturally float to the top of your base where it can be pumped into a hydrogen generator.

The ice biome contains plants which cool air.  You can build air/water pipes in the cold rooms around those plants to cool the air running through them.  You can also pump hot air into the room and then pump the cold air out the other side with another pump.

[TheDukeOfDirty]

The setup looks like this: 

[Vilda]

5 hours ago, TheDukeOfDirty said:

The easiest sustainable power seems to come from a hydrogen generator actually.

Sustainable? Weeell, depends on the amount of geysers and duplicants. Effective? Hell no. It can not run continuously when hydrogen is low, but when it is high, it burns it without regards for battery charge. And even if it says it gives 800 W you have to realize, that the net power is at most 560W - because you have to run a pump and filter for it to work. It gets mitigated a little with more generators but not much, because a filter slows the flow such that it barely feeds 2 generators. It gets worse the further you progress thanks to non deterministic simulation we have now.

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, Vilda said:

Sustainable? Weeell, depends on the amount of geysers and duplicants. Effective? Hell no. It can not run continuously when hydrogen is low, but when it is high, it burns it without regards for battery charge. And even if it says it gives 800 W you have to realize, that the net power is at most 560W - because you have to run a pump and filter for it to work. It gets mitigated a little with more generators but not much, because a filter slows the flow such that it barely feeds 2 generators. It gets worse the further you progress thanks to non deterministic simulation we have now.

You can use a mechanical filter eliminating 120W of energy consumption. Mechanical filters are especially suited for this purpose as flow rate is low but constant making sure that maximum flow rate is unlikely to be exceeded and the feedback loop is constantly being refreshed.

[Abercharr]

i have 36 dupes and rising and i only use hamsterweels and 2 Hgens that i manually fill when the H is gathered top!

heat is a big thing and i avoid coal-gens as its the worst heat source after the geysers , remember that heat IS the thing that will kill you ( food cant grow )
 

• tip for food is to use both plants in different places in your base that have more/less heat so you have a backup when one fails (always have the X2 food that you consume if you want to survive)
• tip for energy ,use hamsterweels and don't overextend with batteries (use the one with high athletics for hamsterweels only)
• tip for efficiency use 2 main stereotypes for dups, the ones that are good in athletics and digging gathering and the ones tinkering repairing not all dups have to do every job
• tip for picking dups , i personally love learning its by far the most prized ( for me ) stat , with str second as it cant be trained with an activity yet and its generally useful to pick up more.
• tip for heat , use the cold biome to your advantage building near it the devices that produce much heat

Ps. don't spend too much time learning tricks the fun is to find them yourself failing miserably and then starting again little better!

[Kasuha]

2 hours ago, Vilda said:

Sustainable? Weeell, depends on the amount of geysers and duplicants. Effective? Hell no. It can not run continuously when hydrogen is low, but when it is high, it burns it without regards for battery charge. And even if it says it gives 800 W you have to realize, that the net power is at most 560W - because you have to run a pump and filter for it to work. It gets mitigated a little with more generators but not much, because a filter slows the flow such that it barely feeds 2 generators. It gets worse the further you progress thanks to non deterministic simulation we have now.

If you have enough batteries in your circuit, you can put a valve before the hydrogen generator and set it up to generate almost exactly the power you need - the batteries will keep slowly charging up or discharging and when they get near either limit in a few cycles you nudge the valve a bit to send it the other way.

I also use much larger hydrogen collection area so I have things set up so that it only pumps hydrogen and stops completely when it starts pumping another gas - the filter sends its "anything but hydrogen" output to another filter which is turned off. So when something else than hydrogen enters the pump, the filter and then the pump will clog and stop using electricity. When that happens I switch the pump off, enable the second filter to empty pipes, then disable it again and let the hydrogen collect for a while before turning the pump on again. I have three separate circuits fed by hydrogen from single pump and their combined consumption is less than what one electrolyzer can produce (but slightly more than what it actually produces, getting rid of excess oxygen is a challenge).

[Sicclee]

8 hours ago, TheDukeOfDirty said:

The easiest sustainable power seems to come from a hydrogen generator actually.  If you use electrolyzers, when they make water into oxygen they give off hydrogen (Since water is hydrogen and oxygen!)  This hydrogen will naturally float to the top of your base where it can be pumped into a hydrogen generator.

The ice biome contains plants which cool air.  You can build air/water pipes in the cold rooms around those plants to cool the air running through them.  You can also pump hot air into the room and then pump the cold air out the other side with another pump.

H gens are really only useful for getting rid of Hydrogen. I'd love to see them implemented better, but was it stands now, my H generator chews through all the H from 5 electrolyzers. That's not nearly as efficient as the other means of power production. 

[Vilda]

4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

You can use a mechanical filter eliminating 120W of energy consumption. Mechanical filters are especially suited for this purpose as flow rate is low but constant making sure that maximum flow rate is unlikely to be exceeded and the feedback loop is constantly being refreshed.

I seen a post about that and it looks unstable as hell. And as something that shouldn't work at all but does