No real need for fresh water? [SPOILERS]

[Esdot]

So, after realizing that my Musher was consuming all my water, and I could survive just as well on uncooked Meal Lice, I now have basically 0 fresh water consumption.

* Run a water purifier to turn dirty water into H20 for Hydrolizers, basically gives you unlimited air. One Purifier can feed 2 Hydrolizers, for like 240w. You never really run out of dirty water...So 1 dupe on a hamster wheel can provide unlimited O2 for about 9 others. 

* To run all showers etc, you can prime the pipes with a bit of clean water, and then just purify the waste water sending it back to the showers.

At this point my water consumption is effectively zero with a colony of 12+. After an initial ~500kg to prime the pipes I haven't used any water at all.

This seems a bit game breaking. Shouldn't drinking water be a thing? Am I missing anything the "pure" water is really needed for?

Such a waste

[Oozinator]

9 minutes ago, Esdot said:

 Am I missing anything the "pure" water is really needed for?

For the fire sprinkler system for example! When hydrogen is igniting, burning your colony to ashes, because you used polluted water for the sprinklers..  Nozzles could get stuck, with dirtparticles from polluted water.
 

[Botaxalim]

40 minutes ago, Esdot said:

Run a water purifier

Zero water, but you need count sand usage since they limited in the long run

Unless we have decent method heating dirt convert to sand, in that case we need dirt production mechanism

[Swat__Raptor]

I think the game will get more difficult with each additional update, more features and things to be concerned about, like higher food requirements, raising animals,  growing fish in your pools of water and maybe growing alage.

 

So I'm not really surprised that the game is not really difficult in its current form.

[Esdot]

Its pretty dang difficult imo! It's just this one exploit is a little unfortunate. To balance it out, they could just have the Hydrolizers emit germs, or gunk up and constantly break down. Or, you know, have the dupes drink water!

I also just realized, that when living totally off of meal lice, it seems slightly more waste water is emitted than is being consumed by the toilet system, so I think meal lice provide a small amt of free polluted water in addition to  food, which can just be fed back into your hydrolizers.

[Esdot]

At least I found one useful purpose for all this water,  heatsink

[GreatGameDota]

Sand won't last forever but there's easily enough sand to allow to survive until your bored with the colony.

[brummbar7]

2 hours ago, Esdot said:

so I think meal lice provide a small amt of free polluted water in addition to  food

Toilet visits in general produce more polluted water than they use of fresh water.  It's not meal lice specific.  

It is indeed true that there is a very out of whack food situation right now.  I'm hoping that it's going to get a serious revamp sometime soon, as it's pretty much killed the impetus for most farming.  You don't even need showers btw.  Grimy does little or nothing, so best to just let em run around dirty, and not waste time showering constantly.

[Byste]

Food's in a bit of a dumb spot right now and I think it's obvious they've got changes planned.

• fertilizer is ONLY used by sleet wheat
• sleet wheat is the hardest food to domesticate but doesn't make the highest quality foods
• finite phosphorite means you can't domesticate pincha peppers forever
• low food quality only imparts a mild stress debuff that doesn't scale with how much it falls below dupe expectations
• meal lice requires 0 input or care besides harvesting every 3 days
• Germs in water or fertilizer/slime/phosphorite fed to crops get deleted (?!)
• The resources required to feed dupes pepper bread and stuffed berries is insane. A strict diet of 1 stuffed berry a day means that PER DUPE, you need 8 bristle blossom plants and 11 pincha peppernut plants, which needs 640kg water and 385 kg dirty water irrigation PER CYCLE, respectively. That's per dupe!! We can only get so much renewable water from the game... This was hard enough to achieve back in the ag update when we got tons of geysers, and no change was made when we got limited to only 2 steam + 2 natgas + 1 chlorine.

There's also waaay too much sand on the map, and it's true that showers do jack s**t ("Grimy" has no real effect on your dupes).

Personally, I just try to play as if some of these issues were fixed. That means:

• I never use a water purifier, only use sand for air deodorizers and eventually I try to switch off of those too
• I let my dupes shower
• I switch off of meal lice diet as fast as possible. I forage for sleet wheat grains to make frost buns, I start a dusk cap farm as soon as I get a natgas generator running, and I get a bristle berry farm going as soon as I domesticate a steam geyser. I also start a pincha pepper farm as soon as I get the chlorine geyser
• I make an effort to actually cook some stuffed berries. I run with 12 dupes, I make enough stuffed berries to feed 3 with stuffed berries per day. I can get this higher once I lower my dependence on electrolyzers, but for now this consumes water at about the same rate as I can produce it from 2 steam geysers.
• Eventually I plan to heat treat my polluted water so it's germ free before sending it to my plants. For now I take advantage of this

I think a nice solution to the pointlessness of fertilizer is allow it to be applied to any crop. Plants grown from fertilizer treatment get a +1 to food quality, and dishes that use different ingredients get +1 for each one (so pepper bread and stuffed berries get +2 from fertilizing both crops).

[MidnightSteam]

Here's something you can do to make the game much more exciting. Go to your StartWorld.yaml file and comment out the lakes.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\OxygenNotIncluded\OxygenNotIncluded_Data\StreamingAssets\worldgen\subworlds

Enjoy your new game

[MidnightSteam]

5 hours ago, Esdot said:

Am I missing anything the "pure" water is really needed for?

Hehe. You need it early for one thing and one thing only.

[SusanMcO]

Using the electrolyzers for exclusive O2 has the issue with overheating your base eventually

And wow. taking out the lakes ...just no water until you find a geyser?

[Coolthulhu]

50 minutes ago, SusanMcO said:

just no water until you find a geyser?

Cold biomes, crying dupes, later also water purification.

[SusanMcO]

13 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Cold biomes, crying dupes, later also water purification.

Ahh, the tears of my dupes as a water source, I love it!  *is not evil, really*

[vonVile]

On 10/25/2017 at 12:59 PM, Esdot said:

* To run all showers etc, you can prime the pipes with a bit of clean water, and then just purify the waste water sending it back to the showers.

You don't even need to prime. Just build your plumbing system to a PW reservoir with tiny amount of PW for a Liquid Pump to take to a Purifier and the Dupes will do the rest. Just have the Spout over the Pump. My PW reservoir is 10x10 and it takes about 400 Cycles to get it full from recycling PW. Before that time I'll be using PW for other stuff like Peppers and Fertilizers, so it'll never get full. If done correctly you'll lowly drain your PW supply faster than you can produce. One time I had it around 85% full and before I knew it it was empty in under 50 Cycles.