Symmetry - Base Showcase & Midgame Tips

[QuQuasar]

Symmetry is my ongoing 13 dupe base, currently on Cycle 220. It's still under construction, but I'm past the mid-game and the shape is there. I thought I'd share it and provide a few retrospective tips for the mid-game.

 

 

First of all, see how pretty and symmetrical and diagonally-oriented it is? Don't do that. It's a godawful pain trying to manage the base while you're artificially restricted by your own sense of aesthetics.

 

But if you're an idiot like me and you absolutely must do that, try to build bigger than you need. I could definitely have used more space in my central base area. Meanwhile, those four smallish diamond on the NE,NW,SE and SW are a lot bigger than I thought I'd need, and they proved to be just the right size.

 

So, from the top down...

 

 

This is my passively tamed geyser and the newest facility in the base. I decided not to build my bases pipes out of abyssalite, so I need to cool down the water to room temperatures before I use it. The thing's water is entirely dependant on how many wheezeworts I can find (I have found an anti-entropy thermal nullifier in the far north, but I'm saving it to liquify all the other gases in the map later on).

 

I'm not sure how much water I'm going to get out of it: it pumps on an on/off basis, when the vertical reservoir in the center cools down enough. The hydrogen around the wheezeworts hasn't cooled down yet either, so I imagine that'll help speed it up eventually.

 

Above the base are the water recycling diamonds. On the left, we have the boiler. Germy water is requested from the waste reservoir whenever it gets low, boiled to a germ-killing 78 degrees, and then immediately fed into the water sieve. Since the sieve outputs at an even 40 degrees, it can then be sent directly to the clean water tank. (If they ever fix the sieve to output at the same temperature as it inputs, I'll feed it into the geyser reservoir instead).

 

On the right, the clean-water reservoir. Nothing special, but it's been there since cycle 1: it started life as a natural water reservoir. I'm thinking of turning it into a dedicated oxygen production facility, so my dupes don't have to deal with patches of hydrogen in the base.

 

I never disassembled the mealwood farm: it's a convenient backup if anything happens to the bristle berries and shrooms. Tip for the early-mid game: plant more mealwood than you think you need. Mealwood has extremely low calories for it's volume, so storage containers won't hold much of it, and if anything goes wrong or if you simply print too many dupes without realising it you'll quickly have a famine on your hand.

 

Below that is the center of the base...

 

On the left we've got the 'better food farm'. Bristles on the top, dusk caps on the bottom. The HVAC on top of the diamond keeps the bristles happy. I'm using a HVAC rather than passive cooling because I like being able to automatically switch it off if things get too cool. 

Dusk caps are a great crop, by the way. Extremely hardy, can be fried into a good quality food item, and don't need anything more than Carbon Dioxide. Great to jump to when your Dupes start getting too pretentious for meal lice.

 

In the center is the main base. It primarily uses passive cooling. Tip: while it might be convenient to simply plant your wheezeworts next to your electrolizers, it's *always* worth submersing them in hydrogen. One wort in hydrogen is worth at least 4 in oxygen. It's easy to achieve, too: simply vent it into their space at the lowest point, and leave an airflow tile just below that for the oxygen to escape out of. The hydrogen will over-pressurize the vent before it overflows.

 

The pantry is below the carbon skimmer because I'm lazy and who needs refrigeration when you can hold your breath?

 

The exosuits don't work where they are at the airlocks: dupes get trapped indoors because they never learned to share. I'm planning to deconstruct them and use them on a case-by-case basis instead. Or just never use them at all. Hyper/hypothermia hasn't killed anybody yet.

 

On the right is the Power Tower. You can never have too many drip-cooled transformers. Also, I like the name.

 

 

Down here we've got the industrial diamonds. On the left is our germy waste-water reservoir. I've actually re-filled it several times from naturally occuring polluted water pools, since the boiler requests water from it it faster than the toilets and shower provide it (if you look on the overview shot, you can see that there's a vertical path I use to drop polluted water into it).

 

In the same diamond we've also got the HVAC system (no longer required, since wheezeworts in hydrogen are awesome) and the slime/bleach stone storage. Always store your slime in the same container as bleach stone. It saves so many hassles.

 

On the right the is the industrial refining area, which is currently out of coolant and inoperable as a result. I'm not sure where all the water went, actually. Does the metal refinery actually use up water, or is there some water loss bug I don't know about when it comes to drip cooling systems?

 

And finally, this mess: 

 

It's based on this guide, and produces a not-insignificant amount of electricity from a steam geyser (visible in the overview shot, right hand side) and a natural gas geyser (far below the base). Took forever to set up, and its an ugly mess, but after a few false starts (mostly related to the carbon skimmers) I managed to get it to work.

 

The place still has a ways to go before end-game. I need to start making plastic, work on getting the other crops to grow, pump oxygen into the diamonds, and generally clean the place up. But I'm quite happy with it so far.

[Cypher-7]

Great write up on your base, thanks for sharing, lots of good ideas in there.

 

[QuQuasar]

And here's the completed base Symmetry, as of Cycle 375.

 

 

The exosuit docks have been moved to the external shroud, where a few water locks keep the atmosphere from escaping. Eventually I'll filter all the other gases out and just leave oxygen inside the shroud, ala. Yorktown (though only the inner base will be climate-controlled). I also have exosuits for the fancy industrial complex to the right, cooled by a hydrogen pipe radiator: it loops around to an anti-entropy thermal nullifier in the south-east.

 

I think my info about cooled petroleum and natural gas generators outputting cooled water might have been wrong: they heat up fast when I turn them on. Luckly, I don't need to run them 100% of the time (and couldn't even if I wanted to. Dupes gotta sleep). I only put the Dupes on refining when I need to top up the batteries.

 

Speaking of sleeping, I'm gradually replacing the cots with comfy beds and the ladders with plastic ladders. I suppose I could keep going, convert everything over to plastic and refined metal, but I'll likely lose interest before then.

 

To the left, I've extended the farms to support area's of pincha pepper, thimble reeds, sleet wheat and balm lily's. My farming efforts haven't gone great, if I'm honest: I accidentally built the insulation out of igneous rock early on and have spent the last hundred cycles trying to cool the thimble reeds (immersing them in carbon dioxide seemed convenient, but the downside is that they're near impossible to cool).

 

I've converted the upper-right diamond into an enclosed oxygen generator, which has the added bonus of being a net power gain. That's nearly exhausted my primary water reservoir and I've had to pump water up from the backup reservoir in the SE, but that's mainly because I've been trying to feed the exosuit docks. Once those are full and the electrolyzers are no longer working full-time, I expect the water reservoir to fill up again. I'm still sorting the oxygen purity out, though: there's some hydrogen in the top of the living area I'd like to pump out, and some natural gas at the bottom.

 

Here's a few overlays in an imgur album, if that's your thing: https://imgur.com/a/WunQn

 

And finally, the only screenshot I have from the earlier days of Symmetry. I took it because there's something adorable about this tiny crop of bristle-berries, grown by shinebug light. This is where the comfy beds are now:

 

[eggsvbacon]

Neat, can you post the save file so I can look at materials for some stuff you did?

Trying to get the creative juices flowing to deal with future heat planning, like the geyser encasement you did there, what are the tiles made out of that have the wheezlewart on it?

[QuQuasar]

23 minutes ago, eggsvbacon said:

Neat, can you post the save file so I can look at materials for some stuff you did?

Trying to get the creative juices flowing to deal with future heat planning, like the geyser encasement you did there, what are the tiles made out of that have the wheezlewart on it?

Sure thing.

 

Mostly it comes down to abyssalite or gold amalgam when I want good insulation, igneous rock when I want cheap insulation, and granite or wolframite when I want heat transfer. I put wolframite Tempshift Plates behind the granite if I'm really serious about getting the heat through the wall, like in the geyser reservoir.

Symmetry.sav