Starter Guide

[Kabrute]

Start up the game, select your mode of play, right now I prefer standard.  Now selecting your starting dupes determines how easy or hard the first 10 days will be.  I suggest you keep re-rolling dupes until you have one with at least 8 intelligence.  That one duplicant can research the entire tree in 30 cycles by themselves..... And after 30 cycles of research

 

For your other two duplicants, its more about the don'ts than the do's, don't mouthbreather or bottomless stomach right off(wait till your established to take on problem children), avoid narcoleptics and destructives.  Later when you are in a position to mitigate the downsides you can easily accept who ever.
Day 1 is decision making, look around and see where the water is, etc.  My setup has fallen into a consistent structure now for the starting base.

 

Day 1 will be spent starting the tunnels that will become your latrines, housing and initial work area. Installing the pitcher pump and setting the Algae deoxidizer   Keep your air feeds at the end of the tunnel far from the Garden to keep O2 pressure from building up Notice the ledges between areas, the gap and lip is to keep morbs and hatches from crossing from one area to another.  Even without doors this setup prevents the animals from roaming to far Cycle 2 you should have atleast 1 bathroom finished and your beds.  Now build that power wheel, two little batteries side by side and research station and start with batteries, then advanced research, then the first 2 in food.  While your dupe is busy researching finish your bedroom, bathroom, and start that storage bin.  Build the top row first with its own floor, then tear out the floor and build a second row for max storage space. Upgrade as you go.  Be sure to keep your bins set at a 3 or lower, and once you have enough plants set them to a 2  As you will be encountering hatches over the next 10s of cycles I recommend pneumatic door cages, the animals jump up and on then fall in and stay in even if duplicants are actively using the doors.  From what I have seen it takes the act of clicks Open and having a dupe set it to open for the animals to path out...  By cycle 5 you should have gardening researched.  Start on decor next if standard or harder.  Start in on that garden now if you haven't already, dig the first row from both sides toward the middle and lay a row of planter boxes down leaving a gap along the ceiling of the first floor for o2 bleed off.  If you are going to have hatches in a confined space build a compactor over them like this

As your garden grows it will take more co2 to fill and o2 will leak in sometimes  causing food to rot, the extra ceiling space and this compactor setup keep that problem from running away out of hand As the rot pile converts to polluted dirt the compactor just drops it because its not a rot pile anymore   You need a minimum of 1 plant per duplicant plus microbe musher, with harvesting, to feed each duplicant.  3 plants per duplicant with harvesting, without the musher.  7 plants per duplicant to just collect the food that falls on the floor
Spend the next several cycles digging around exploring and finishing your research.  Once your in a position to start building interesting things you can either get creative or tune into the forums for ideas, just remember the game changes and any idea a month old is half likely not to work or still be the same next month It is recommended to have atleast 1 algae burner per 5 dupes at a minimum though when you switch to other O2 sources you will see situations all vary.

Committee.sav

[Zarquan]

Nice starting guide.  That base will certainly carry you to the middle or late game.  However, I have a few additions:

You want to make sure that art is done by a creative dupe, and you will want to bring one in fairly early to improve decor and reduce stress.

If you play on fatalistic, I would do further and say recommend you take an artist with at least 4 creativity in the beginning as well as the scientist, as you will need to quickly get your decor up, and you won't want to count on getting an artist from the printer. 

Also, is one wash basin really enough?  I thought the number needed to match the number of outhouses to ensure that no food poisoning germs escaped.

I also have a nice farm setup which can never get O2 in it unless you mess up, using a CO2 airlock setup.  I even expanded it in to the caustic biome fairly easily.  I also just leave the food on the ground, which doesn't appear to cause any problems.  I extended this farm far to the left and surrounded it with abyssalite.

 

[Kabrute]

Indeed having your art done by a dupe with high creativity increases the speed it gets done and the effectiveness of the artwork.  Also a fair point about the abysallite though I tend to wait to wrap my garden until after my first round of plumbing is done.  Speaking of plumbing.  I have found, personally, that about 1/3 my dupes in sinks is enough to keep them clean, they aren't all in the bathroom at the same time after all

Now that our research is done its time we installed a proper bathroom for our dupes usage. backing this up from the ladder and giving it a door will allow dupes to reduce stress while they relieve their mess.  But toilets make more water than they take in, so your gonna wanna do something with that extra water.  If you've been catching your hatches and herding them up properly then this next step is just a matter of orders and arrangements.

As long as you put more material in the line than your equipment can use, then feeding them inline keeps everything topped up constantly.  Coming out of your equipment your going to want the lines to start seperated then merge, like the top rail above.  It comes from the toilets, and goes to the sieve.  Since the sieve outputs at 40c all of the piping here is abysallite, which is why I wait to wrap the garden.  Once plumbing is done I start wrapping the sides of the base facing the hot zones with a lining of abysallite tile.(abysallite wont transfer heat and tiles have low mass). 

As you can see from this thermal map, my own garden has no need for abysallite for a while, but the housing is up against a hotspot and so is my future power tower.  Consequently that is where we are routing our excess pwater.  You can choose to make power or air with your excess water, at this time I'm choosing power as I plan to use that excess power to step up to refined goods The nat gas will power my base while the coal will become part of mobile plants like the refining station I intend to post up in that cold biome in the bottom left corner there.

If instead you need air, then adjust the sieve output like so,

This will keep the toilets line full and only send extra water down the line to wherever else its needed, mind you this is filled with food poison so its best you don't cook with it.

[GrindThisGame]

Good starting guide.

I used to pick one dupe that was great at learning and use that for all research. Now I don't focus any single dupe for research. I try to get all dupes equal chance to level up their learning stat, often to 5+ for each dupe. This will make them all level up most skills faster and it's better for longer games. That trade-off is slightly slower research for overall better skilled dupes.

I also build 2 toilets and 2 wash basins right off the bat. This prevents the chance of any food poisoning getting out.

I try to avoid large open spaces inside the pressurized base or else the oxygen you make just kinda floats up and away.

[Kabrute]

 I've run a few Einstein squads, rerolling dupes till everyone was atleast an 8 in intelligence with no major negative traits, and it was a decent start.... maybe a cycle or two faster than this one getting up and running, but after 300 cycles I couldn't tell the difference in performance between those dupes and any but the freshest faces., so to be honest I suppose it would all come down to preference.  I have seen people posting about sustainable bases by cycle 100, and others questioning it like its impossible.  With 30 cycles to research done, that leaves 70 cycles to build the equipment needed.  For a newbie this would be impossible but for any veteran player with an idea of whats needed and where it should go, predigging massive areas is really just laying the ground work for the big installations that are going to drive a thriving Dupe city, like the lovely fertilizer feedback loops

CO2 output is being dumped over the garden for now, excess pwater that does not get converted to clean water for toilets or use as air is now being converted into power, the conversion tower is self powered.  The wheels got it started but I will be switching it over to just batteries shortly as it produces exceedingly little excess power, just enough to keep itself going forever .  Which means that expansions to the tower will need to power the added fert makers but not need more power for pumps, just build inline in the same towers for the makers and the power , this would run forever if I had an atmo sensor on the pump but until the refinery is finished its running at a constant and making the tower cost a little power each day :/

Since the base is still quite young and not able to supply all of these systems self sufficiently just yet we will help it out with a few choice pumps

 

and with that added fluid we can begin to expand our processing size, and thus our power output.  Mind you we are still running purely on the Natural Gas, I'm using mechanical filters to save the power cost, it would take atleast a single filter set to natural gas to replace this quick little setup.  That would replace 1 fert maker in the power tower if you were trying to copy and calculate those differences. Except I just found a door leeching power off that circuit so theres your filter. I thought it should have been 4 ferts gp and lp. smh.  For every 3 fert makers we get running, we can fuel another gene, each gene will power 6 fert makers with a little extra, so I can reasonably maintain 6 fert makers and that roving pump on one gene forever... The first gene is running 3 fert makers, the gas pump, and the liquid pump inconsistently For now 100% uptime is more important than getting it exactly minmaxed with throttling etc, all of that can come later if you choose.

By bringing the fertilizer makers online in stages and letting the gas pump determine how much power is generated you get a system ultimately regulated at 500g/s by the pump, and that will keep roughly 8 genes running full time if the pump has enough pressure.  Thats gonna take 25-30 fertilizer makers, roughly speaking.  25 is the exact, 30 to keep the pressure high enough for the pump.  I have 12.......planning on building one final bank to feed the 5 genes on the right.  360g/s created, 300 consumed that should result in a clogged line of natural gas from the pumps and a fully powered base