A bunch of things I can't figure out

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Jigsawn

you dont need the tempshift plates in your farm, they are probably more bad then good because they could pull in some heat. They work both ways you know

Here are some pictures of my base, i am not too far in because i left it aside for a bit to try a build in debug because i didn't know if it's gonna work.

But i will resume today (it works)

here is what i meant by enclose your base...the tiles are abysalite and i use pneumatic doors to minimize air exchange

you can see wash basins for when they come inside the base so no germs get inside and the "slime storage water hole". I have one of them at every entrance to the base. The water makes it so the slime don't evaporate poluted oxygen and in about 5cycles slimelung has died off

as you can see the deoxydizer started to warm up the air, luckily i found some wheezworts, i will remove them when i get electrolyzer running, they're just temporary.

But i think i will keep the one in the kitchen( i will build it above a pneumatic door that opens when a certain temperature is understept making it so the plant recognizes no floor and stops cooling)

the kitchenwater comes from a water sieve, its 40°C I've used abysalite there as well

Batteries are all moved outside the base (left hand side) behind abysalite

i've used airflow tiles except under the fridge room so CO2 gets trapped making food not spoil.

and last, if you look above the toilet room, i let the dupes carry the polluted water from all wash basins there and dump it inside the pit, then i disable the water emptier, make them mop it up and open the airlock. The yet again bottled germy polluted water falls down and the hatch eats it

I know this may look sketchy but my base has not seen a drop of food poisoned water in all the time, i dont have to store it to heat treat it later and i save minerals instead of feeding it for coal and since i've found the water geysir they will soon have nice toilets

Cheers

[Moggles]

I don't have anything much more to offer as many others have contributed sound advice.

But you said something along the lines of giving up in the OP.

So I just wanted to reassure you that everything you are concerned about or focusing on or trying to find a solution for are the same things every ONI player has done or is doing. These are the challenges in the game. Even if a player knows how to solve an issue, it's still on their mind how and when to solve it in every new colony they start.

If these are things you are having fun with and thinking about then keep at it. That's the fun in the game for me.

 

[Roboson]

If you do end up starting a new base, I recommend using the spawn seed of 8 (yes, just 8). 

It starts connected to a steam geyser (for easy germ killing water and electrolizer fuel, as well for food and basically everything early game).  

Also, it has all it's other geysers are closely clustered together, but are a bit distant if you don't mind digging upwards quite a bit. 

[Jigsawn]

Thanks for all the advice everyone (and quickly!) - muchly appreciated. I think I will give it another go with this newfound knowledge.

I used a hydro farm for my second mealwood farm because I had stored all my dirt at the bottom of my base, and was running out of it thanks to the flooded composters. I had loads of water so it seemed like the easiest solution. But unsure if the hydro farm still uses dirt? Or just fertilizer. Anyway, it worked out ok as a replacement for the the lower farm when that overheated.

Good tip about rotating doors to make hatches - never knew about that.

Question - if I use electrolyzers are they a lot better than algae oxygen buildings? The game needs to be clearer on how good outputs are relative to each other. Also if I start using electrolyzers, a number of you have warned that they will heat up my base. Whilst keeping them open to airflow, how can you stop them from killing your base from overheat - do you have to manually cool them or can you partly insulate the walls around them and that will be enough? Also I see from Yoma's post that even Algae Deoxidisers put out a fair amount of heat - but they are essential so can you just get away with putting them on the edges of your base?

One more question - I kept my dupe numbers low (max 9 by the end). People in other threads talk about 20-50 dupes like its normal. I had enough worries sustaining a low number, but should I have thrown caution to the wind and just added them in. I guess if you are low on oxygen or whatever, then a new dupe will "pay for itself" by helping get the work done to support the increase in population. 

The importance of abysalite I had no idea about. You can build things out of different materials but on first impressions it doesn't seem to usually make much of a difference - I only really noticed it for decor bonuses and heatsink wall tiles. It's easy to miss this vitally important step when insulating your base though - I think they need to make it more obvious. I never would have realised to use abysallite if I hadn't read it here.  

Personally I think the obscurity and lack of tutorials for of a lot of these mechanics (most of all heat insulation, but also germ water, electronic circuits, the importance of farming) are really bad for new players. Hopefully by release it will be a lot more accessible. I really don't have a problem with the complexity and depth of these systems, in fact it's great. I just think they need to be communicated a lot better and the difficulty curve smoother. The standard difficulty should have less heat and food worries from the start for example, and give you time to ease in the mechanics and teach the fundamentals without failing from the getgo. Then they can have harder difficulties/world spawns for players who know the mechanics better, like you guys. Heat, water, germs, etc can make it as hard as you like. Its so frustrating discovering you have failed a 20 hour run due to a basic fundamental you didn't know from the start - and you shouldn't have to come to a forum or wiki to find out what's wrong. This sounds like a rant, but I understand the game is still in Early Access so I do understand these things will improve. I hope that the game doesn't end up like Don't Starve where a lot of getting anywhere in the long term relied on looking up the internet or wasting hundreds of hours to figure out obscure mechanics.

[Yoma_Nosme]

I get why you are confused and i believe many would like tutorials but game is still "early development" i am guessing they will implement this later.

But keep your spirit high, it's a learning curve, at first you'll fail hard but you get up and fail some more till you get the gist

Deoxidizer placing is not so important, the oxygen they output is in a good temp range (but i have to admit i dont know exactly) best placement i think is under your living quarters, mind you can hook them up to a pressure sensor set to 1200-1500g so they don't run all the time, this is very helpful

You can always look things up in the forum, there are many very great builds for basically anything

Speaking of good builds, the electrolizer i don't know how to link posts but there is a recent post from Saturnus titled "Yet another self powering electrolizer" or somthing like that, maybe someone else would be so kind and link it, or you just look it up in the forum which is in my opinion extremly well designed

Or, from Arash70 another recent post "little oxygen generator" , his post is not so sophisticated as Saturnus but you can see a learning curve inside his posts that may proof helpful to new players

Yes electrolizers provide hydrogen and Oxygen but a high temperatur, and cooling is essential

You can cool it actively, pumping the O2 through thermo regulators (AC Unit) every regulator provides 14°C cooling, or passivly with wheezworts or radiators ( liquid pipes(made from igneous rock or granite) with cool liquid in the background, absorbing heat from the Oxygen) or a mix of both, but I think i cant go to much into details here.

Oh yeah, and abysalite. VERY USEFUL. Best used for outside walls of your base and to pump out water from the steam geyser (pipes from abysalite). otherwise you transport hot water through your base and you get the same effect i described above (radiator) but warming stuff not cooling. Keep in mind, use abysalite if you want to keep things thermaly separated (either hot or cold)

A last tip for this post, things in this game interact. Hot geyser water goes in abysalite tiles to the electrolizer and gets broken down to hydrogen and oxygen. The same water you pipe through yet again abysalite tiles to your toilets and showers is used by dupes and they produce polluted water. Then you take the polluted water and pipe it to a water sieve to get 40°C pure water (edit)OR to fertilizer makers and it gets "deleted" and you get fertilizer and natural gas. then you use the gas to make power, the gas generator produces polluted water, CO2 and energy. you take a part of the energy to fuel carbon skimmers and some hot water to deal with the CO2 and get some pollutet water again which can go to fert makers or a watersieve to get clean water

 

@Jigsawn

here are the two threads i've mentioned

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/86721-little-oxygen-generator/

 

hope it helps

[greggbert]

Polluted Water vs Water with Germs 

polluted water and water are two different liquids.   Hold your polluted water aside until you almost run out of clean, then come up with a good way to clean it.  Clean water with germs is not polluted  water.

Killing Germs in water 
At the end of each cycle, check the germs in your clean water tank.  If they decrease, you can ignore them.  If they increase, you need to try to find out what's adding more germs and deal with it.  Most of the time germs decrease in clean water tank.

Base overheating
1)  Keep your base in a cool biome.  At the beginning of your game, pick the coolest part of the starting biome that's where your base will sit.  As you grow keep your base within those boundaries and reinfoce the boundaries by building insultatd sandstone tile or abyssylite.
2) Put your batteries above the top of your base with insulated tile underneath them.  If possible also put your water purifiers up there also, but in a pinch they can go in a different corner of your base with insulation between that and the main base
3) Create a sattelite base in a cold biome and put the following machines in there:  Electrolyzer, CO2 Scrubber, Natural Gas Power Plants, Metal Refinery, Petroleum Refinery, Plastic Maker.
4) Plop down wheezewarts in parts of your base/farms that are not the right temp.

Power Strain and wire overloads
I use a simple system here, some disagree but I think it's the best.  Use heavy watt for all generators and all batteries.  Obvioulsy these will be outside your main base perimeter, preferably on top so the heat  can rise.  Then attach a transfromer and run all your consumers off the transformer.  When that circuit gets to about 800-1000KW create a second transformer and second circut and re-wire your base to distribute the load between the two.  They should not connect with each other except at the transfromer/heavy watt circuit.  Like brances of a tree where the heavi watt nework is your trunk and one transformer for each branch.  Repeat as needed, putting all generators and batteries on heavy watt (trunk) and all your consumers on the other side of a transformer (Branches).  There are more efficient was to do this but this one is quick and easy to understand.

Metal Shortages
There is tons of iron in the biomes with the coal and algae and the large pockets with chlorine and hydrogen.  Create an airlock at the vertical center when you hit one of these pockets.  Then just walk your guys through and mine the stuff.  They'll hold their breath while mining you'll get tons of algae, coal and iron.  You can also put an algae deoxidizer in there and push the hydrogen up and chlorine down, creating a nice little corridor in the middle for your dupes to walk through.  Don't be afraid of Chlorine and hydrogen.  They are harmless.   They dont hurt your dupes, it is easily pushed up or down by algae deoxidizers (which you can disable after the pump some air in there).

[Jigsawn]

Hello all, back again with a new base.

Although it's gone much better this time thanks to the advice on here, I've run into some of the same problems.

For this question I wanted to concentrate on just one - all my water system is contaminated with large amounts of food poisoning. How best to deal with it, and do I even need to? My dupes are still on 100% immunity and wash their hands/shower regularly. The food poisoning is only dying off in tiny quantities from the main water tank.

From the posts above I understand that it's only food production that I need to worry about with regards to using poisoned water.

There are a bunch of polluted, germ-free water lakes I can tap into around my base. Should I set up a separate water system using the lakes for food production (after converting to clean water of course), and keep the rest of the base running off the exisiting germy clean water? If so, how can I force my dupes to only use the germ-free water source when preparing food?

If I want to purge the germs entirely from the system, from the posts above I think I have a few options:

- heat the water to kill off the germs (probably a bad idea as it will heat up my base)

- somehow draw off small quantities of water from the system and dump it in un-germy water where it should die off fairly quickly

- maybe somehow get chlorine into liquid form and pump it into the water tanks, then pump it out again via a filter?

Finally, how did my water supply get contaminated in the first place? I'm guessing that dupes with food poisoning used the toilets, that germy water from the toilets went into my polluted water > clean water filtration system - but the germs remained and were carried out with the clean water in the process?

Cheers!

[Kasuha]

10 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

For this question I wanted to concentrate on just one - all my water system is contaminated with large amounts of food poisoning. How best to deal with it, and do I even need to? My dupes are still on 100% immunity and wash their hands/shower regularly. The food poisoning is only dying off in tiny quantities from the main water tank.

 

As long as you don't use germy water for cooking (mush bars, liceloaf) you should be safe. It's ok to irrigate with it, even if they bring the water in bottles - the germs from the water don't get on plants. I don't think they can live through electrolysis either.

13 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

If I want to purge the germs entirely from the system, from the posts above I think I have a few options:

Probably easiest way is to stop routing germy polluted water to your water sieve, deconstruct and rebuild the sieve to get rid of rest of the germs stored in its internal polluted water reserve, and wait till the rest of the germs in clean water dies off. To get rid of germs in polluted water, you can heat it up using tepidizer and then send it to sieve while still hot (use insulated or abyssalite pipes), the sieve will take care of the heat in that water and since it doesn't contain germs anymore the resulting water should be also germ free.

15 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Finally, how did my water supply get contaminated in the first place? I'm guessing that dupes with food poisoning used the toilets, that germy water from the toilets went into my polluted water > clean water filtration system - but the germs remained and were carried out with the clean water in the process?

Polluted water coming from lavatories, washbasins or sinks always contains germs. If you pass that water through the sieve, the germs stay in it.

[Jigsawn]

Thanks Kasuha. Do you know of a way I can force the dupes to use an uncontaminated water supply for food production only?

The tepidiser seemed like a good option, but if you see my other thread about overheating woes, you'll see that I didn't want to add any extra heat to already hot water.

At the moment my polluted water is coming out of waste pipes and being dumped in a central polluted water tank. That water is at a temperature of about 30 degrees. The air around it is a bit higher. I thought it was the water causing this, screenshot of the tank area below (the central tank is the one below the dupe fabricator):

 

That polluted (germy) water is fed to my Sieve which is placed at an isolated, insulated room below the bottom of the base. However when clean comes out of the sieve, the pipes say it is up to 40 degrees in heat - so I assumed it was the Sieve heating the water. Am I wrong in saying that?

Here is the pipe layout around the Sieve (there is a second sieve to the left but it's currently un-used, not enough water flow to reach it). Note that the very first bit of water pipe coming out of the Sieve reads 40 degrees:

Now here is the temperature overlay for that area:

 

Note the contents of the pipe are hotter than the air around it, the 40 degree temperature remains in the pipes until it's pumped out into my clean water tank, where it seems to cool a few degrees (probably because that's situated in a cooler area of the base).

All my pipes are granite, I haven't been able to mine enough abysallite to even think about starting to upgrade the piping system - and in doing so I'd only end up starving my base of water when doing so

[PhailRaptor]

3 hours ago, Jigsawn said:

Thanks Kasuha. Do you know of a way I can force the dupes to use an uncontaminated water supply for food production only?

The easiest way to go about that is to simply stop using Water in cooking.  One of your big goals when setting up your colony is to establish a long term viable, and scaleable, food supply.  This is not Mealwood, because it requires Dirt to fertilize.  While Dirt is renewable, that ability doesn't come till late game.  You should be endeavoring to switch to Bristle Blossoms.  Now that they don't need Fertilizer to grow (only the Farming Station does that now), Bristle Blossoms are now the mainstay food source.

More importantly, cooking with Bristle Berries doesn't require any water, which means germs in your water is no longer relevant.

3 hours ago, Jigsawn said:

That polluted (germy) water is fed to my Sieve which is placed at an isolated, insulated room below the bottom of the base. However when clean comes out of the sieve, the pipes say it is up to 40 degrees in heat - so I assumed it was the Sieve heating the water. Am I wrong in saying that?

Here is the pipe layout around the Sieve (there is a second sieve to the left but it's currently un-used, not enough water flow to reach it). Note that the very first bit of water pipe coming out of the Sieve reads 40 degrees:

[screenshot]

Note the contents of the pipe are hotter than the air around it, the 40 degree temperature remains in the pipes until it's pumped out into my clean water tank, where it seems to cool a few degrees (probably because that's situated in a cooler area of the base).

That's because of fixed temperature outputs.  The Water Sieve will always output the clean H2O at 40 C.  No exceptions.  In the same way, when you switch to Electrolyzers for Oxygen (and Hydrogen), it will always be 70 C.

[Jigsawn]

Cheers PhailRaptor. Bristle farm is in the works, once my heated water problem is sorted (see other thread). I'm also hoping to kill off the germs with hot water using a new aquatuner setup. Cooling solutions hopefully will be tackled soon for my electrolyzers and sieve (also covered in other thread).