Sharing my successful self sustained outbreak base

[manu_x32]

EDIT:

• sharing save file in case in can be useful to anyone: Outbreak real game 3.sav
• There's many mistakes I wouldn't do again, like letting chlorine flow in slime biomes to try to kill the germs, or build an overly big natural gas geyser/fertilizers power plant. I would also most likely stick to mealwood and mushrooms, the rest costs too much water.
• the colony is now up at 12 dupes.  But I stopped playing a while ago to prototype a bunch of devices in debug mode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5_o5UAnUxu58DlCLTtTVA?view_as=subscriber

 

Hey guys,

as requested in another thread, I'm sharing my self sustained base. It's my 3rd attempt on the outbreak update and I think I finally nailed it. 

Small colony, only 10 dupes, self sustained energy, water, oxygen, and high quality food. The only thing missing is renewable phosphorite to feed pincha pepperplants, but it's apparently not yet possible to produce phosphorite by other means than digging it...

The screenshots are not very high resolution, don't know how to do better than regular screen captures in debug mode, to get as large of an area as possible. I can make zoomed in snapshots of specific areas if needed...

Quickly, some of the things I remember that helped me:

• growing the size of the colony very slowly
• keeping a lean base, optimizing space so that dupes don't have to walk far away to get their job done. I used to build bigger bases with smaller independent rooms, but I find this style way more effective.
• not hitting too much into slime biomes early game
• Keeping stress low with massage tables and decor items 
• switching to electrolizer oxygen early, and getting most of my early game power from their setups. Single gas pump mechanical filter setup similar to electrowheeze but larger and cooled by cold water radiators instead of wheezeworths. I always have trouble priming electrowheeze so I prefer this setup which is super easy to prime and cool down.
• keeping the base clean with lots of wash basins in a row in key areas, and eventually ore scrubbers before them.
• living on meelwood for a long time, before starting to switch to higher quality food.
• Keeping the base sealed with hermetic 3 door systems, where the middle door has not tile under it.  This design works like a charm to keep gases from going the other side.
• Making a chlorine storage room for food and compactors very early. Better than co2 to keep food fresh and germ less without having to power refrigerators. This will also kill any remaining germs on the digged items that are brought in the base and that don't get completely cleaned by ore scrubbers. Used bleach stone in compactors to fill the room at first, but found a chlorine geyser very early which is more effective to fill it at a decent atmo level.
• Building a compact and effective med clinic pretty early to be able to got through parts of the slime biomes for useful resources like gold amalgam and first steam geyser, while being able to cure dupes effectively as they get sick. You have to lock them in the clinic with a door so they get cured quicker. You change permissions on the door as they get sick.
• Not building any heavy watt wires early game and never built them inside the core base. all my elec systems were originally little <1000w independent systems that power parts of the base and that have a couple of batteries and hamster wheels to feed them. you can still see the legacy of all that in the base, but the hamster wheels are not used anymore, just kept them in case. Same goes for coal generators that were used in mid game, but I don't use them anymore. Hydrogen generators and the natural geyser power plant are now the main energy source for everything. Heavy watt wires run outside the base between all the small independent systems.
• Building outhouses and algae deoxydizers along my explorations routes to have dupes be way more effective.
• finding a first steam geyser very early. Cooling water with a weezeworth waterfall system.
• Finding a second one not very late, and it was situated in a cold biome. Very lucky with this one, cooling water is pretty much free. I think they did a fix so that generated maps now have more geysers close to the start point.
• keeping big builds like a natural geyser/fertilizer power plant for much later in game

 

Comments very welcome, cheers!

 

[manu_x32]

2 more screenshots for the curious.

Some of my dupes are very sick from going in a slime biome recently, that's why I only have 12% immune system.  But I can cure that quickly.

 

[Darkarma]

That's small? Sheesh. Then again I usually switch to a new map around cycle 50 because I build myself into a wall.

Nice base.

[DotZip]

Aw that's a pretty good base that you have here. I see the type of electrolizer build you use, it's not based on a glitch ? I might change to this type eventually.

I also found out that the main cause of problem in this game is ourselves. Trying to build too quickly will force the dupes into unpleasant and full of germs areas. The best is to start a base with toilets and cleaning basin, beds and fresh water + dump basin. At this moment, you should be around day 10 with 3 dupes, and being able to keep food for another 20 days I think. Then draw straight lines up down left and right avoiding slimelung. And before any big expeditions to go get steam geyser or chlorine geyser, make a clear list of objectives and most importantly avoid rushing !

 

 

[manu_x32]

5 hours ago, Darkarma said:

That's small? Sheesh. Then again I usually switch to a new map around cycle 50 because I build myself into a wall.

Nice base.

I started very small and got bigger very slowly.  It's still a pretty compact base compared to what I used to built. The core areas: sleeping, food making, toilets, showers, water source, are all very close together.

[manu_x32]

4 hours ago, DotZip said:

Aw that's a pretty good base that you have here. I see the type of electrolizer build you use, it's not based on a glitch ? I might change to this type eventually.

Thanks!  I don't think this electrolyzer design is based on a glitch, separating hydrogen this way is pretty common. I got my inspiration from this pretty good thread:

 

Took one of Kasuha's designs and made it open and cooled by cold water radiators.

 I love water radiators, It's my main goto design for cooling areas, or warming areas with hot polluted water, like my pincha pepperplant farm.

[Grimgaw]

Most glitches use the 'one element per square' mechanic. This one is no different.

It's a touchy topic though. What people consider exploit in single player game is subjective.

[BlueLance]

It is kind of an exploit but also kind of real, In real life you can have a blanket of certain gasses which will obstruct other gasses, So in that term it is reallistic, but in other ways If you have 1g of Hydrogen it fills an entire tile and stops any other gas taking over unless the pressure is vastly different. 

So yeah it is touchy, its half real and half and you are totally right it is down to each player what they believe it is.

[Saturnus]

Something that is based on how the game mechanics works is by definition not an exploit. So using the gas/liquid mechanics to your advantage is totally vanilla. However, when something is used in a way it's not supposed work and is likely to be corrected at some point then it is an exploit. An example of the latter is that as long as you don't have consumers directly connected to it regular wires can carry an infinite amount of power. You don't need heavy watt wires for anything other than connecting to an aquatuner.

 

[DotZip]

The ones who blame glitches are the ones who worked around the original problem without using them, they feel hardcore because the challenge is superior. They feel their work should be rewarded by dev team erasing the glitch (which kills the glitched build of other players) and be able to feel superior to the others.

What is important is not "is it good or bad ?" but "Am I pleased enough with my work without having to look and compare with the neighbour's work ?".

I really feel the gaming community should hang on together, share designs, comment, help, etc. All that without having the need to be better than others, especially on a single player game

[brummbar7]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

 and is likely to be corrected at some point

That's kind of hard to judge in a lot of cases.  For instance is leaving mechanical airlocks unpowered (but still having them operate at the same speed) a glitch?  They've been that way forever, Klei has had plenty of opportunity to correct it.  But they don't.  Is turning off beds so your dupes work 24/7 a glitch?  Been that way forever, should be simple to correct, but doesn't get corrected.   At least they finally corrected the no-floor airlock doors thing.

But I agree with the general point.  The single-tile fluid/gas mechanics I would guess have nearly 0 likelihood of ever changing.  So it's idiosyncrasies can't really be considered a glitch.  Using a mechanic in an unintended way, yes.  But that's a large part of the fun for a lot of people I think.   I do wish polluted water would instantly change clean water touching it to polluted, and that water less than the 'soaking wet' amount would evaporate.   But those are things that I am rather doubtful Klei will bother changing.  So I don't really consider them a glitch. 

[manu_x32]

I hope they will keep some of those said "exploits".  It's fun to be able to come up with inventive solutions to problems, instead of only relying on fully legit systems provided by the game. It makes the game more interesting. I've had a good share of of my fun with this game, using debug mode to try to invent new systems, and then trying to build them in real games.  For example, being able to build mechanical pipe filters is awesome, and I hope they keep that exploit.  A great reward for people who try to find alternate solutions to regular filters that cost energy.

[Cilya]

I don't really like exploiting the way gases are emitted from the electrolizer. The reason is that using electrolizer in other way leads to interesting gameplay as well. I really like the way having several gases in your base requires to care about the airflow in your base. Hydrogen rising, Carbon Dioxide falling, if you use some airflow tiles but not too much (to keep a decent decor value without putting statues everywhere) at the right position, the gas will naturally flow through your base. And if you planned thing carefully, you will be able to catch all the hydrogen at the top of your colony and all the carbon dioxide at the bottom. If you add the constraints from the heavy watt wire (you needs them, but to keep the decor malus away, you need walls and doors but no airflow tiles) you have a nice building challenge. There is a bit less of a challenge if you use these kind of exploits. However, every player have to choose which challenges he wants to face and which he doesn't want to, of course.

[Whispershade]

4 hours ago, Cilya said:

I don't really like exploiting the way gases are emitted from the electrolizer.

The reason people developed wacky ways to setup their electrolyzers is to prevent gas destruction and make sure they're getting the proper amount of hydrogen that it says in the tooltip. Otherwise there is no specific gimmick that works particularly with the electrolyzers and there are a host of setups to setup airflow to each person's preference.

I personally like to thermally seal up my electrolyzers in room pairs and pump the oxygen at 1k packets through a series of 3 regulators to get a very consistent habitable temperature. Electrolyzers emit gas at 70c. They are arguably not intended to just be deposited in your base

Letting hydrogen float freely around one's base is also TERRIBLE design if one considers the fact that hydrogen isn't highly combustible around oxygen in game, when it presumably should be and could potentially be interpreted as an exploit.

[DotZip]

No such machine like this electrolizer would be considered as efficient in the real world, people wouldn't even bother to build it.

I build one in the middle of my base, and let it run freely. This is a terrible machine, start stop start stop... I'm working as an automation engineer in industry, and I can tell you that is not the way a machine should run.

 

The electroliser should always "run". It'll get more unefficient if you put it in a small sealed volume as in this case, even with a pump, the volume will be filled quickly and pressure going high really quickly. Consequence is that machine should get hotter because of the internal pump requiring more power to keep its nominal speed, then get broken if not stopped before.

 

But on the opposite, in a wide space with some airflow tile, air in the atmosphere should get around without blocking the machine easily. The air pressure required to eventually block the output of this machine would kill the dupes way before the machine stops.

In my opinion, the electroliser works oppositely as how it would in real world. In the game, it works better in a closed space with one pump rather than in the atmosphere.

 

 

How to get better ? 

Apparently, the earth atmosphere volumetric mass at 0 altitude is around 1.225 kg per cubic meter (per tile).

All the oxygen pressures, breathing requirement, exhaling C02, have to be optimum at around 1.2-1.3kg/m3. And going down: air will be too thin to breathe normally (that's already like this).

But going up: the pressure as an independant value, will be more and more dangerous up until dupe would require some kind of suit or will be injured in it (it'll kill in air, CO2, natural gas, water.. everything that's too pressurised).

And the electroliser should have a pressure output thats 2 to 5 bar (atmosphere is around 1bar). This way it could get always air out, and not being blocked. The "blockage" will have to be set by us, trying to avoid overpressurising the base.

 

Dreaming too much ?

Klei even could create safety valve that will (when pressure goes over a set value on creation) release the excess of pressure out. Adding the limits of terrain as a real "comet ground" with temperature close to 0°K and being able to push this overpressure out of in the space (and "out of our map").

We could be able to put these valves down of our base, it'll push the CO2 out in priority because it would be the first gas in front of the valve...

 

 

 

[Cilya]

I'm not convinced by the definition of "exploit" relying on the differences between the in-game behaviour and the real-life beahviour. For me, it doesn't make any sense. There is not a single thing in-game that works like in real physics. And I don't believe it was ever an objective from the developers to design a realistic game.

I prefer the definition given by someone above, which consider what was intended by the developers. There are two ways to sort gases in-game: the gas filter and the gas weight. If the game designer intended this behaviour of the electrolizer, allowing to sort the output gases, he would probably have chosen to use output gas pipes instead.

But again, the definition of "exploit" is irrelevant. The game designer is not one to define what is fun or what is not. Its job is to find what may be fun for most of the players. You may not like what he has chosen and prefer to use an exploit than to play like he defined the "normal" way of playing. Rather than thinking in terms of exploit, I prefer to think in term of game mechanics. What mechanics do I get and what mechanics do I lose when using an exploit. Since everyone has a different liking of each game mechanics, its completely normal that the choice tu use or not use an exploit is completely personal.

[DotZip]

There is a level of intuitiveness required for a game to be "enjoyable". If you can't understand how it works, you'll get bored and leave it. In a "science" type game, we try to follow science rules according to the capability of the game itself. And as in the real world, we can make a link between some parameters in the game that works like the real parameters. By understanding that link, we are able to mimic the science from real world, apply it in the game, then make it work. 

Starting from this point, trying to make the game rules closer to the reality rules is just me trying to get more happiness and reward out of it.

If developers didn't want the game to look real, they would have made the water red and boil at 46.9°C, or dupes with 5 eyes and breathe hydrogen.

 

Exploit or not, this machine is not working how it is supposed to. The outfeed air pressure of any pump related electrically powered machine is unlikely to be under 4 or 5 bar. Sent in an atmosphere that's 1bar, gas should get out.

But tihs is according to the game capabilities. Which now deals with volumetric mass and not with pressure.

[Dracian]

Impressive base, I'm really far from that point...