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Reasonably Self Sustained Colony


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So I'm going to sidestep the existing conversation that's wandering around the forums, and hopefully change the intent.  It's an idea that's been in my mind for a while as I try to build a 100 cycle colony that can do whatever you need to afterwards.

The idea for me starts with the question of "What is reasonably self-sustaining?" and moves forward from there.

In the end, I realized it's all about managing dupes and/or time.  Everything else moves from that point.  Without dupes it doesn't matter how much time you spend, because you can't build anything else afterwards anyways, so the first, and perhaps only, consideration for sustainment is dupes.

What are a dupe's general characteristics?  Well, there's the obvious 2 big ones: food and oxygen.  With those two a dupe will survive, if not well.  That's simply assumed.  But if we change the idea to "What else would we consider sustainable characteristics for a dupe?" the topic becomes much more interesting.  It also tends to get bent into interesting shapes when you consider the # of dupes you plan to sustain.  Expectations for 5 dupes is much different than for 25 and again different for 50+, let's go over the top for that, 100 dupes.  Let's use those as baselines for our discussion.

  • Production of 100g/s of O2 / dupe.  So, we need to produce 500g/s, 2500 g/s, and 10 kg/s.
    • We can break this down a little further.  1 deoxidizer costs 550g/s of algae for 500 g/s of O2, and we can assume Electrolizers at minimum can produce (on average) 500 g/s of O2 for 500g/s of H2O.  Deoxidizers cost 120w and Electrolizers can self power, even with an extra pump or two to distribute.  Let's avoid Terrariums for now, they're a special case. PO2 can be consumed by Deodorizers into fresh O2 for 100 g/s at a cost of 133.33 g/s of filtration material.  Let's assume we're not playing games with the slimelung.
    • Deoxodizers: 120w and 550 g/s Algae | 600w and 2.75 kg/s Algae | 12kW and 55 kg/s Algae
    • Electrolizers: 500 g/s H2O | 2.5 kg/s H2O | 10 kg/s H2O
    • Deodorizers: 666.65 g/s Filtration | 3.33 kg/s Filtration | 13.33 kg/s Filtration.
  • Food requires 1.66 kCal / s, or easier 1000 kCal / cycle.  This means 5,000 kCal, 25,000 kCal, and 100,000 kCal. Also, most food will have a cooking component required.  A chef with 4 skill creates food at ~41 s.  That will cost you 2.46 kJ.  Let's use that as a baseline for an additional cost for food.  Let's leave farmer's touch out of the equation, for now.
    • Mealwood requires 5 plants / dupe and is horrible to their psyche.  I don't consider this a sustained food, it's a starter requirement.  Fried Mushrooms and Gristleberries would be our base food stocks then.
    • Fried Mushrooms are my preference for base foods.  2800 kCal / plant, 7.5 day growing cycle, 4 kg / cycle of slime which is in huge supplies for a long time.  To sustain a single dupe requires 2.67 mushrooms.  This means our dupes require (rounded up) 14 mushrooms, 68 Mushrooms, and 267 Mushrooms.
      • 5 Dupes: 56kg / cycle of slime | 7.65 W (power is averaged)
      • 25 dupes: 272 kg / cycle slime | 38.25 W
      • 100 dupes: 1068 kg / cycle slime | 153 W
    • Bristle Blossoms convert to 2,000 kCal as Gristle Berries, grow in 6 cycles, and requires 20 kg/cycle or 3.33 g/s.  Sustainment requires 3 Berries / dupe.  They also incur an additional price of a light source.  They are relatively cheap, but the price will add up.  Let's assume you can build at a nice average of 10 plants/light, which means 1w / plant.  That adds up to 3.6 kJ / plant, which we'll add to our cooking value of 2.46 kJ, so it'll cost us 6.06 kJ... let's round that to 6 kJ / plant for easy numbers, we just want it for reference anyway.
      • 5 Dupes: 50 g/s H2O | ~25W
      • 25 Dupes: 250 g/s H2O | ~125 W
      • 100 Dupes: 1 kg/s H2O | ~625 W
    • All of the 'better' foods require Pincha Peppers.  Wild grown pincha peppers and sleet wheat are typically enough if you reduce usage to only the top tier items for the top tier dupes, and for most of the top tier dupes, you can get away with spamming décor instead.  Only the Exosuit workers would need to be regularly in low décor areas.  This is an area of the discussion I'd like to have some help with, as I'm not sure of the best way to apply the requirements.

Anything else we do is simply upgrades for the dupes, and are typically a one shot cost.  Bedrooms, Eating Halls, nice transit paths, etc... are simply one shot morale upgrades. Morale sustainment can be pretty much made with only a water cooler at preferred areas, and the water cost for these are minimal enough to ignore.  Only our exosuit dupes would require significant entertainments, and that's only if we can't supply upper tier food.  Let's move past that concern for the moment, as only specific dupes would require special considerations.  We'll ignore lavatory/shower needs, as that's water positive and power and heat negative , so it should end up balancing out or require special considerations.

That leaves us cooling as our final concern, to make sure for sustainment reasons we don't die to the heat death of the universe.

  • Dupes and Critters don't create heat.  They do absorb or radiate it depending on what their spawn temperatures are but that's not something that's easy to measure for, and isn't a consistent concern anyway.  Let's target the base for 77 F/25 C.  It's an easily found number and is in the range of our dupes comfort levels.
  • O2 comes in two forms in our conversation, let's skip PO2 for the moment.  Both of our normal O2 methods are static temperature outputs.  Some references: Oxygen has a Specific Heat of 1.005 j/g, and Hydrogen has a specific Heat of 2.400.
    • Deoxydizers outputs at 86F/30C for O2.  100g of O2 cooled to 25C will require 502.5 W.  The equipment produces 7.5W while it's working, so that's 1.5w more for that, for a total of 504 W / dupe.
    • Electrolizers output at 343.15F / 70 C.  They also produce 6.25 W of heat while running.  With our assumed average of overpressuring per five dupes, that gets us 100g/s O2 \ 12.6 g/s H2 needing to be cooled to 25C.  O2: 4.522 kW, H2: 1.36 kW for 5.882 kW + machine heat for 1.25 w, totaling to 5883.25 kW of heat / dupe.
  • Cooking a food component generates 22.5 w of heat for a total of 922.5 J, and produces a 1kg Ooze item near 210F / 95C degrees.  Ooze has a Specific Heat of 3.470.  We require 2.67 shrooms or 3 berries/dupe.  Using the smallest price for heat, that's 70C reduction/mushroom unit, or 242.9 J/g, for 242.9 kJ.  This brings our cost for food heat to 243.822 kJ, for an average (cooked once every 7.5 cycles) 54.182 W / dupe of heat for food.  Yes, this means the higher calorie foods will make cooling cheaper until the weights are balanced.
  • Our per dupe total comes to, assuming electrolizers and mushrooms, 6.127 kW of cooling required.
  • A single wheezewort, if placed in Hydrogen, can handle 12kW of cooling.  So, 1 wort / 2 dupes.

So, that in theory ends up with what we'd need for basic sustainment per dupe:

  • 100 g/s H2O
  • 2.67 Mushrooms / 3 Bristle Berries using either  
    • Mushroom: 1.53 W  + 17.8 g/s Slime
    • Bristle Berries: 5 W + 100 more g/s of H2Oof power,
  • half a wheezewort to cool it. 

That's it.  Everything else is there to have fun.  A single 'cube' of PH2O with 1000kg of PH2O converted to O2 will supply a single dupe for 16.7 cycles, assuming you run it through sieves. A rough average I personally use per Swamp Biome is 10x10 of PH2O, it's certainly not accurate but it's a starting point.  So, that can supply 100 dupes for 16 cycles, 25 dupes for 64 cycles, or 5 dupes until the ice age.... errr, 220 cycles or so.  My personal dupe target runs between 20-25 normally, so for 25 dupes, I can typically find 2 'cubes' worth early, and there's always 2 or 3 more cube worth once I start digging around.  That's 250 cycles of just PH2O for 25 dupes.  Assuming I've located my 2 steam geysers (Average: 1kg/s) that means I'm only supplementing for 5 more dupes.

Self Sustainment until the ice age isn't my target.  It's just to get myself sustained until I get all the fun stuff done and want to move on to a new map.  Reasonable Self Sustainment can be controlled. 

So, what's your opinion?

 

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I had one just before EU. The remaining issues were that Balm Lilies kept piling up and some other solids did too (metal and stone from comets). Basically, the game is limited by not being able to vent solids into space at the moment. No, there are things that will not melt in any reasonable fashion. What I would need for a infinitely self-sustaining base is a sort-of "waste cannon" were you can dispose of solids into space.

Incidentally, if you have enough wild Sleet Wheat, you can do with less BB and hence less water and cooling, or completely without if you can feed them with Frost Buns or Pepper Bread.

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So many numbers, but I actually read it.

Dupes don't actually ever consume the whole 60kg/cycle. So you get away with less O2. Water is still the most constraining feature.

3 oil reservoirs can make 10kg/s oil/sec at cost of 3kg/s water. Boiled produce 7.5kg/s, so you get a net gain of 4.5kg/s water and 2.5kg co2.

With that you can feed O2 to 45 dupes, CO2 to 75 slicksters for a fair bit of kalories.

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18 minutes ago, Carnis said:

Dupes don't actually ever consume the whole 60kg/cycle. So you get away with less O2. Water is still the most constraining feature.

How so?  Even if there are exosuits, it's still the same amount of O2, and when they catch their breath they're gaining an internal reservoir at 200 g/s breathing heavily.  Unless you're leaning on PO2 diffusion from PH2O?

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58 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

How so?  Even if there are exosuits, it's still the same amount of O2, and when they catch their breath they're gaining an internal reservoir at 200 g/s breathing heavily.  Unless you're leaning on PO2 diffusion from PH2O?

image.thumb.png.0dafc1cdd45ea238e6742c208d3aca8b.png

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@Carnis I don't even... I have to admit I never really look at the reports screen, however since that's obviously something I need to look at, let's see what I've... got... her...e... Wut?! 

Something's obviously not registering in the reports, but that's huge amounts of O2.  That makes almost no sense.

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9 minutes ago, Carnis said:

image.thumb.png.0dafc1cdd45ea238e6742c208d3aca8b.png

I've noticed in my games where I play almost exclusively with exosuits, that the oxygen they use inside them isn't accounted for in the statistics. Might it be the same here?

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28 minutes ago, Capsup said:

I've noticed in my games where I play almost exclusively with exosuits, that the oxygen they use inside them isn't accounted for in the statistics. Might it be the same here?

Not when I tested on my game.  I have no exosuits.  I have some waypoint stations in other biomes that are producing O2 outside of the main base, but they should be included as I've produced that O2.

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11 hours ago, WanderingKid said:
    • Fried Mushrooms are my preference for base foods.  2800 kCal / plant, 7.5 day growing cycle, 4 kg / cycle of slime which is in huge supplies for a long time.  To sustain a single dupe requires 2.67 mushrooms.  This means our dupes require (rounded up) 14 mushrooms, 68 Mushrooms, and 267 Mushrooms.
      • 5 Dupes: 56kg / cycle of slime | 7.65 W (power is averaged)
      • 25 dupes: 750 kg / cycle slime | 38.25 W
      • 100 dupes: 3000 kg / cycle slime | 153 W
  • I think you got the numbers a bit higher for 25 and 100 dupes? 68 mushrooms x4kg  = 272 kg/cycle? and for 100 dupes it's 267x4 = ~1000kg/cycle, not 3000kg?
  • You're missing something very important in your calculations - omelettes! Critters can have a very big impact on your food math. Considering Balm lilies + dreckos don't require any resources, yet produce eggs + meat(+fiber, but we can't eat/breathe that), you can sustain dupes food-wise only on dreckos - 300-400 dreckos and you're good to go!
    • Another technique is fishing - get a pool with pacus, feed them 1kg algae - mass egg production. Even if you play fair and don't feed them Algae, they sill produce meat, which you can turn into barbecue. I still haven't done the pinch math, but If you can keep pinchas alive that should be very helpful.
  • Another point that you're missing is critter heat management - I saw an example of heating hatches to their boiling point just to use them as a heat sink - they absorb 100kg*specific heat*~50° of heat => they die => become 1kg of meat(heated to ~50°?) - there's your 100kg heat deletion right there - slow-cooked to perfection.
  • Yet another heat point is atmo suits. You can fill them with hot oxygen - dupes don't care. That means you don't need to cool all that oxygen, given that dupes are getting cooked with it in their suit. That will definitely save you a lot of wheezies - if you only cool down O2 for the base that dupes are using during night time, that means 1/12 of your original calculations?
6 hours ago, Carnis said:

So many numbers, but I actually read it.

Dupes don't actually ever consume the whole 60kg/cycle. So you get away with less O2. Water is still the most constraining feature.

3 oil reservoirs can make 10kg/s oil/sec at cost of 3kg/s water. Boiled produce 7.5kg/s, so you get a net gain of 4.5kg/s water and 2.5kg co2.

With that you can feed O2 to 45 dupes, CO2 to 75 slicksters for a fair bit of kalories.

I agree that water is the main concern. That's very nice info for the boilers, I didn't know you can convert oil to water. That means your upper water limit should be oil reservoirs + cool steam vents + other water producing geysers/volcanoes. I'd say 100 dupes should be manageable. I have ~60 now @C180 and I'm wondering if I can make it to 100 and be self sustainable. I just lost one to stupidity(self-walled himself and suffocated in his sleep), but I plan to load and save him - 1 load per 100 cycles should be allowed, given that dupes are so stupid as to wall themselves and just stand there and do nothing?

Actually, a more important limitation might be RAM memory, as I have 8GB and the game is currently using ~5GB, so I'm afraid that if I uncover a larger part of the map the game might start crashing/lagging terribly(it's lagging even now). I've uncovered roughly 45x256 strip of map, so there's ~10 times more? That sure seems like a crazy big map.

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You can always generate more pO2 with morbs. So assuming you use deodizers or liquidize it, you can just simplify that part of the equation.

You did not mention how you get your algae and slime though. So i have to assume you are living "on your reserves", which is not exactly sustainable (long term). If you argue that you can use a battalion of morbs and pufts, then i'd like to see that in action for 100 dupes.

It might also be fair to assume mushrooms, omelettes or even mealwood for rationing. But as soon as you decide to go for bristles, you need <30°C water. And for that you need cooling. And that is the main problem of the other thread you are refering to.

You are basically only counting the cooling of electrolizers and electric grills.

 

You also forgot to mention what you are doing once your pH2O resources are used up and how you are cooling your steam geysers.220 cycles might seem like a long time, but i have seen bases in cycle 2000 already.

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55 minutes ago, martosss said:

I agree that water is the main concern. That's very nice info for the boilers, I didn't know you can convert oil to water.

Here is a 10kg / sec stable oil boiler, rather a bit of work to get to working, but it is semi stable, I would not be surprised if you managed to break a pipe or run out of oil or coal while its running ;). But its buildable, and it supports 10kg/s, with less than 1 kg/s magma consumed.

Its based on @AzeTheGreat's original

working 10kg model.sav

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22 minutes ago, blash365 said:

It might also be fair to assume mushrooms, omelettes or even mealwood for rationing. But as soon as you decide to go for bristles, you need <30°C water. And for that you need cooling. And that is the main problem of the other thread you are refering to.

You only need to cool the plants, not the water you are feeding to them. So running a coolant loop one tile over the hydroponic farmtile and feeding hot water to the plants works.

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2 hours ago, Jackblac said:

You only need to cool the plants, not the water you are feeding to them. So running a coolant loop one tile over the hydroponic farmtile and feeding hot water to the plants works.

Thanks for that advice. It really solved some problems in my base.;)

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8 hours ago, martosss said:
  • I think you got the numbers a bit higher for 25 and 100 dupes? 68 mushrooms x4kg  = 272 kg/cycle? and for 100 dupes it's 267x4 = ~1000kg/cycle, not 3000kg?
  • You're missing something very important in your calculations - omelettes! Critters can have a very big impact on your food math. Considering Balm lilies + dreckos don't require any resources, yet produce eggs + meat(+fiber, but we can't eat/breathe that), you can sustain dupes food-wise only on dreckos - 300-400 dreckos and you're good to go!
    • Another technique is fishing - get a pool with pacus, feed them 1kg algae - mass egg production. Even if you play fair and don't feed them Algae, they sill produce meat, which you can turn into barbecue. I still haven't done the pinch math, but If you can keep pinchas alive that should be very helpful.
  • Another point that you're missing is critter heat management - I saw an example of heating hatches to their boiling point just to use them as a heat sink - they absorb 100kg*specific heat*~50° of heat => they die => become 1kg of meat(heated to ~50°?) - there's your 100kg heat deletion right there - slow-cooked to perfection.
  • Yet another heat point is atmo suits. You can fill them with hot oxygen - dupes don't care. That means you don't need to cool all that oxygen, given that dupes are getting cooked with it in their suit. That will definitely save you a lot of wheezies - if you only cool down O2 for the base that dupes are using during night time, that means 1/12 of your original calculations?

This will be out of order.

You're right about the numbers about slime, I transposed something when I was writing.  Thank you, fixed it. 

Critters for heat management is actually ~55C change, as hatch (easiest to spawn) spawns at 15.4C and pop at 70.  It really only helps with heat removal at the highest end of the spectrum, since otherwise it'll balance out about 10C worth of change (reducing a bit of uncomfortable dupe heat) and then not dying.  If you're soaking that heat from other sources, and it's enough to get OVER 70C (Electrolizer will just balance out and not kill them), you're pretty much dealing with heavy industrial equipment running across your Hatches to delivery heat from the steam geysers or other sources... which is getting destroyed by the electrolizer anyway.

The easiest way I know of to implement the technique to remove that amount of excess heat is to stick your hatches into Aquatuned heated water, or the local atmosphere.  This seem excessively overkill until you've run out of wheezeworts for simple cooling, as you can simply do a PH2O boiler + Oil/H2O coolant system for the same power price without all the bells and whistles. 

Heat cooled atmo suits always seemed a bit broken to me, as I would be perfectly fine if the suit's power usage was used to do *something* to maintain the suit's comfort levels, but it's just there to quick pump O2 from the reservoir into the suit, and as far as I can tell the suit doesn't transfer the O2 heat from its reservoir into itself.  It is certainly a heat deletion method, however, and you can pretty much ignore all the heat from the electrolizers if you delete the H2 heat with Hydrogen Generators and O2 heat with Exosuits. 

I didn't include it because there's actually a lot of support infrastructure you need to typically need to get mass amounts of exosuits up unless you're sticking them on every dupe, in which case you end up with a massive movement reduction until all of them are exosuit engineers.  The other reason I avoided exosuits in general was because I didn't want to overly confuse the math nor include any heat deletion when I wrote the post to keep things reasonable.  That post was getting long enough as it is, and if I dug into all the heat deletion techniques it'd be it's own encyclopedia.  However, it's certainly worth making a note.

So, omelets.  I agree about their long term viability, however I believe they require a higher ratio to your staff volume compared to farming.  Some timer points I've stopwatched means that ranching, minus the call, takes approximately 12s for grooming and for shearing.  I find whistling for a nearby critter tends to cost ~10 seconds on well organized pens.  They're staring at you but it takes them a moment to get going.  The more critters you've tamed, the worse this seems to get, but I can't prove it yet.  I'll round it off to 25s for the two events, as there's always a little extra 'driving time' to get over there.

However, omelette math:  Omelettes produce 2800 kCal on 1000g of ooze.  Producing it is most easily done with the 2kg eggs, thus slickster, drecko, and hatch.  All values are assumed to NOT be incubated, as the power cost for incubation is rather high.

I started to get this into a ranching guide, which meant I was missing the point.  The high points:

  • Hatch/Sage Hatches and Stone Hatches work for enough time that I care about
    • Food as source is inverse to the work required for omelettes, and a little shy of meat for BBQ, so I'll use the couple of hundred tons of sedimentary rock as our method of "sustainable enough" instead of doing the mushroom math.
  • I'm going to leave slicksters out as the dupes don't provide anywhere near enough CO2 by themselves to get a ranch up.  That's industrial waste we use to feed them.
  • 1 egg produces a 2,800 kCal omelette.  Dreckos are 9 cycles/egg and Hatches 6 cycles/egg.
  • Each egg requires approximately 25s of grooming each day.  This means a Drecko has a cost (timewise) 225s for each egg, and a hatch has 150s/egg.
  • An egg is almost 3 days of dupe feeding once converted to omelettes.  I'll round it off to 3 days of food for sanity.
  • Our rancher, feeding himself (without egg cracking and cooking) needs to ranch 2 hatches a day, or 3 dreckos a day.  This will cost him 50s for hatches, and 75s for dreckos.
    • This means our upper limit for our rancher supporting a base is controlled by the time to groom.
  • A cycle is 600s.  We currently lose about 1/4 of a cycle with sleep, leisure, and bathtime.  That's roughly 450s/cycle left.
  • A rancher then can support up to 8 other dupes with hatches, or 5 other dupes with dreckos.

So, I agree that omelets are certainly viable, especially if you use chlorine and just feed the dreckos.  1 out of every 6th dupe needs to be a rancher, however, and that's in a perfect scenario.  Realistically I'd say 1 in 5.

8 hours ago, blash365 said:

You did not mention how you get your algae and slime though. So i have to assume you are living "on your reserves", which is not exactly sustainable (long term). If you argue that you can use a battalion of morbs and pufts, then i'd like to see that in action for 100 dupes.

It might also be fair to assume mushrooms, omelettes or even mealwood for rationing. But as soon as you decide to go for bristles, you need <30°C water. And for that you need cooling. And that is the main problem of the other thread you are refering to.

You are basically only counting the cooling of electrolizers and electric grills.

 

You also forgot to mention what you are doing once your pH2O resources are used up and how you are cooling your steam geysers.220 cycles might seem like a long time, but i have seen bases in cycle 2000 already.

As I mentioned, I consider this a 'reasonably sustainable' base.  I'd say my target is in the 500 to 600 cycles range.  After that, you're just treading water waiting for something to happen.  There's more than enough slime on most maps for that.

As mentioned below, you can avoid having to cool your bristles.  I use valves personally, I'll have to try that water loop technique some time.

That's correct, I am limiting what I'm counting for cooling, as everything else is equipment heat and not involved in sustaining the dupes.

I feed my steam geysers via insulated pipes directly into the electrolizer.  Bye bye heat concerns.  It tends to balance out with the extra water needed comes from reasonably cooler sieves, but it's all insulated.  I'm only worried about the outputs that the dupes need to care about.

7 hours ago, Jackblac said:

You only need to cool the plants, not the water you are feeding to them. So running a coolant loop one tile over the hydroponic farmtile and feeding hot water to the plants works.

I've only used valve controls for keeping water temperature under control.  Could you show me an idea of what you're mentioning with pics or more detailed information?

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8 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

I didn't include it because there's actually a lot of support infrastructure you need to typically need to get mass amounts of exosuits up unless you're sticking them on every dupe, in which case you end up with a massive movement reduction until all of them are exosuit engineers.  The other reason I avoided exosuits in general was because I didn't want to overly confuse the math nor include any heat deletion when I wrote the post to keep things reasonable.  That post was getting long enough as it is, and if I dug into all the heat deletion techniques it'd be it's own encyclopedia.  However, it's certainly worth making a note.

I wouldn't consider atmosuits that hard to make. Besides, you're talking about long term sustainability, so the assumption that we're at C500+ should be reasonable => infrastructure should be there + dupes should be trained = exosuits make sense for me. I don't like their heat deletion aspect, but that's ONI reality

8 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

So, omelets.  I agree about their long term viability, however I believe they require a higher ratio to your staff volume compared to farming.  Some timer points I've stopwatched means that ranching, minus the call, takes approximately 12s for grooming and for shearing.  I find whistling for a nearby critter tends to cost ~10 seconds on well organized pens.  They're staring at you but it takes them a moment to get going.  The more critters you've tamed, the worse this seems to get, but I can't prove it yet.  I'll round it off to 25s for the two events, as there's always a little extra 'driving time' to get over there.

However, omelette math:  Omelettes produce 2800 kCal on 1000g of ooze.  Producing it is most easily done with the 2kg eggs, thus slickster, drecko, and hatch.  All values are assumed to NOT be incubated, as the power cost for incubation is rather high.

I started to get this into a ranching guide, which meant I was missing the point.  The high points:

  • Hatch/Sage Hatches and Stone Hatches work for enough time that I care about
    • Food as source is inverse to the work required for omelettes, and a little shy of meat for BBQ, so I'll use the couple of hundred tons of sedimentary rock as our method of "sustainable enough" instead of doing the mushroom math.
  • I'm going to leave slicksters out as the dupes don't provide anywhere near enough CO2 by themselves to get a ranch up.  That's industrial waste we use to feed them.
  • 1 egg produces a 2,800 kCal omelette.  Dreckos are 9 cycles/egg and Hatches 6 cycles/egg.
  • Each egg requires approximately 25s of grooming each day.  This means a Drecko has a cost (timewise) 225s for each egg, and a hatch has 150s/egg.
  • An egg is almost 3 days of dupe feeding once converted to omelettes.  I'll round it off to 3 days of food for sanity.
  • Our rancher, feeding himself (without egg cracking and cooking) needs to ranch 2 hatches a day, or 3 dreckos a day.  This will cost him 50s for hatches, and 75s for dreckos.
    • This means our upper limit for our rancher supporting a base is controlled by the time to groom.
  • A cycle is 600s.  We currently lose about 1/4 of a cycle with sleep, leisure, and bathtime.  That's roughly 450s/cycle left.
  • A rancher then can support up to 8 other dupes with hatches, or 5 other dupes with dreckos.

So, I agree that omelets are certainly viable, especially if you use chlorine and just feed the dreckos.  1 out of every 6th dupe needs to be a rancher, however, and that's in a perfect scenario.  Realistically I'd say 1 in 5.

I think you didn't follow the link on omelettes I had, I made all the calculations, here's a picture from the ONI biology thread:image.thumb.png.3a41d51c1579277d460d19baf070ebbd.png

BTW feel free to suggest other columns if you need them, I can easily make other calculations from this that I didn't consider useful. Note that I assumed grooming to take 30 seconds/critter on average, so that's close to your calculations. Also, you can make a very large room that isn't a stable and just spam many dreckos in there, as long as they're trapped(water locks / island) and just release them every 5-6 cycles for feeding so they don't starve.(or reload the game and the timer gets reset to 10 cycles - oops?)

Regarding space concerns, the map is ~100k squares and you need them mainly for food .. /12 for happy critters =10k critters at most... so omelette-wise you're looking at 2500 dupes upper limit - not really a problem.(of course disregarding structures and rooms that will "eat" from that space, but even 1/25th should be enough, which is pretty realistic.

You should disregard egg hatching times - if we have enough critters, they will produce enough eggs, so hatching speed is not important. Besides, we're breaking most eggs for omelettes, hatching matters only for keeping critter population, and having an incubator(or 5) means we can hatch them relatively fast.

I haven't thought about energy needs, but given we get a huge amount of power from hydrogen, and there are also nat gas and oil, it shouldn't be a problem to generate enough power so dupes don't need hamster wheels.

Another option that we didn't discuss is Pacus. In theory they're expensive(140kg Algae/day...Wuuut?). In practise, however, they can be happy with as little as 1kg Algae per meal(limit feeder to 1kg => use sweeper+container nearby). Therefore, if you make a big pacu pond, you could be much more space efficient + time efficient, since fishes don't require grooming. And 1kg Algae/fish is infinitely more than 0kg of food for dreckos, but you can consider pufts+morbs and the extra space you need for pufts. 1 Puft feeds 15pacus, so ~1 extra square/fish ... that means pacus+pufts are even more space efficient than dreckos.(not sure if morbs need space though? I think they don't, but I haven't played around with them yet)

So from my point of view, if you combine Hydrogen generators + atmo suits + omelettes, you're left with water. You can even disregard cooling for the most part, just make sure it's not boiling hot in the dupe's bedrooms and machines aren't overheating. Since you're destroying heat with 70-80° Electrolyzer water, you can use that as a heat sink before you feed it to electrolyzers. That means you can soak quite some heat there(I'm lazy to do the math). Moreover, you have water sieves and polluted water that can be heated and recycled at 40°, so heat deletion shouldn't be a problem in the long run. And if you need cooler air/water than 40° - aquatuner+ thermoregulator should work.

 

 

 

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9 hours ago, martosss said:

I wouldn't consider atmosuits that hard to make. Besides, you're talking about long term sustainability, so the assumption that we're at C500+ should be reasonable => infrastructure should be there + dupes should be trained = exosuits make sense for me. I don't like their heat deletion aspect, but that's ONI reality

That's a fair statement, however even once I have exosuits I still personally tend to use them in a limited fashion.  I should probably stop doing that, but I most likely won't.   I do expect exosuits to get a balance pass eventually, but that's not going to happen any time soon I reckon, so that's moot.  So, I concede the point that the suits negating the majority of heat concerns for atmosphere and food.  The power cost is minimal for charging suits and pumping O2 into them.  The math is still accurate for anyone who isn't investing in suits until later in the game, but there is a way for *reasonably sustainable* to remove the costs almost entirely.

9 hours ago, martosss said:

I think you didn't follow the link on omelettes I had, I made all the calculations, here's a picture from the ONI biology thread.

BTW feel free to suggest other columns if you need them, I can easily make other calculations from this that I didn't consider useful. Note that I assumed grooming to take 30 seconds/critter on average, so that's close to your calculations. Also, you can make a very large room that isn't a stable and just spam many dreckos in there, as long as they're trapped(water locks / island) and just release them every 5-6 cycles for feeding so they don't starve.(or reload the game and the timer gets reset to 10 cycles - oops?)

You're right, I didn't. I saw it a while ago when you made it, but it doesn't really help me make plans.  That's mostly because I don't consider the eaten food components to be of value, so there's a lot of it I don't worry about.  # of Ranchers supporting # of dupes is pretty much the only component that I need to work with.  The other concern is if you're trying to avoid needing to do ranching, so there's tame vs. wild values I consider.   Tamed + Groomed gets you more eggs, Wild + ungroomed has a stable population that you can manipulate for meat.

I should mention I do try to avoid exploitive methods, so I don't consider a game reload to fix starvation to be a valid method.  By using enough clocks there is apparently a way to setup a 6 cycle timer (I haven't sat down and understood it yet) so that's a valid approach.  Offsetting starvation seems like a mistake on the developer's parts, but I don't know if they plan to patch it so I'm agreeable that can be a concern for continued sustainment.

I'm not considering room size.  While I personally prefer to set them up with a breeding pen and then simply auto-wrangle them into their new homes, there are a number of approaches for setting up the pen size.  Some are easier than others, but I'm just as likely to give each rancher a home right next to his working area as I am to use some waterlock technique of maintaining the pen in large volume in a small space.

9 hours ago, martosss said:

You should disregard egg hatching times - if we have enough critters, they will produce enough eggs, so hatching speed is not important. Besides, we're breaking most eggs for omelettes, hatching matters only for keeping critter population, and having an incubator(or 5) means we can hatch them relatively fast.

Hatching is mostly important to keep your meat drowning on schedule, but I generally agree.  One you've got the cycle figured out, it'll maintain itself without any input.  Now, if we could just get massive egg storage to behave so we can manage to take them back OUT of containers automatically to naturally incubate, that'd be just great.

9 hours ago, martosss said:

I haven't thought about energy needs, but given we get a huge amount of power from hydrogen, and there are also nat gas and oil, it shouldn't be a problem to generate enough power so dupes don't need hamster wheels.

Another option that we didn't discuss is Pacus. In theory they're expensive(140kg Algae/day...Wuuut?). In practise, however, they can be happy with as little as 1kg Algae per meal(limit feeder to 1kg => use sweeper+container nearby). Therefore, if you make a big pacu pond, you could be much more space efficient + time efficient, since fishes don't require grooming. And 1kg Algae/fish is infinitely more than 0kg of food for dreckos, but you can consider pufts+morbs and the extra space you need for pufts. 1 Puft feeds 15pacus, so ~1 extra square/fish ... that means pacus+pufts are even more space efficient than dreckos.(not sure if morbs need space though? I think they don't, but I haven't played around with them yet)

The electric power is relatively meager for supporting a dupe.  I wanted to include it mostly so it was there as a known factor and not this random 'thing' over here that it's not worked out on.  Unless you're incubating eggs (which I would recommend only doing for a starter stock) or doing some really strange things with transit tubes, your dupes should never require more than a single coal generator or two.  Your hatch ranch can certainly handle that.

Pacu are mostly a secondary meat and shell source for me.  They shouldn't be compared to omelets because their timers for feeding would kill you unless you use some drastic tricks, like those that you mention.  I'll be honest, I haven't done the math with Pacus because they seem horribly broken still and was waiting for them to get a balance pass before I really toyed with them.  I've stuff a few in a pond and started the horde with a single fish worth of feeding, but other than that I have to admit to a lack of experience with them.

10 hours ago, martosss said:

So from my point of view, if you combine Hydrogen generators + atmo suits + omelettes, you're left with water. You can even disregard cooling for the most part, just make sure it's not boiling hot in the dupe's bedrooms and machines aren't overheating. Since you're destroying heat with 70-80° Electrolyzer water, you can use that as a heat sink before you feed it to electrolyzers. That means you can soak quite some heat there(I'm lazy to do the math). Moreover, you have water sieves and polluted water that can be heated and recycled at 40°, so heat deletion shouldn't be a problem in the long run. And if you need cooler air/water than 40° - aquatuner+ thermoregulator should work.

In general, an aquatuned PH2O Boiler and using H2O, PH2O, or Oil as a radiator for the majority of your bedrooms and/or your machinery will cure most of your concern for the low, low price of two NGGs + electrical engineer.  Could probably get away with two coal generators for the same price.  Just stage it to each area, let it get to local temperature, and then add in the next one.  Technically the frozen petro generator will pretty much supply you with all the cooling you could ever hope for.

Thanks for working through this in depth with me, @martosss.  I realize now when I wanted to have this discussion, I needed to use more specific expectations for 'reasonably sustaining'.  In particular, I realized I missed a particular idea: By cycle 500, I expect a base to be done, gone, and buried, having done everything it ever wanted to do.  The reasonably self sustaining part was just supposed to get you to the point where you could do everything else.  I'll need to reconsider the template of the idea.

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Out of curiosity, I decided to do the math for Stuffed Berry, BBQ, and Pepper Bread in a farmed field.  Leaving out the heat, as you can stabilize the majority of it with insulated tiles and valves to feed the units, it should simply require it to be set and forget for temperature. 

First, we have to consider the food volume/dupe.  Each of the thee big foods produce 4000 kCal each, so it feeds a dupe for four days.

Next, we have to consider the time to produce each ingredient.  I'm going to ignore power and phosporite.  The power is typically minimal and there is quite literally so much drecko poop and phosphorite on the map if you're running out there's a completely different problem. 

Sleet Wheat's an odd duck.  The 18 sleet wheat really only 'easily' fits in to Frost Buns.  Also it's wild growth lifecycle is 72 cycles.  So wild, you get two harvest every 150 cycles or so for round numbers.  We're going to have to figure the ratio based on the simple growth information.  Additionally, dirt is currently annoying to generate without taking polluted dirt and coercing it into dirt via composting.  However, using a recent save that has been taking dirt continuously until I moved to alternate farming, I'm sitting at 173 TONS of dirt.  That's enough to fertilize 1,900+ wheat plants.  I think we'll be okay.

I will also assume we are not trying to 'beat the system' with mostly starved creatures and allowing our egg production (with delay) to produce drowning targets.  Wild critters *can* be used for food production, but you're basically limiting yourself to your starting stock due to the very minimal 'new creature' volumes available, and it's currently very difficulty to differentiate between an old and a young creature.  Newborns and adults create the same amount of meat (3200g) and drown in ~15 seconds.  Dreckos are absolutely *not* smart about being put in for a dip.

 

Pincha Peppers: 4 peppers in 8 cycles for 210 kg PH2O, or 58.33 g/s PH2O.  For reference, that's almost an entire Nat Gas Generator's water, and 13 pincha plants or so for a Petroleum Generator.

Bristle Berry: 2 berries in 6 cycles 240 kg of water, or 66.66 g/s.

Sleet Wheat: You get 1.8 recipes (you need 10 for each recipe) every 18 cycles.  This costs 360 kg H2O / 33.33 g/s, and 90 kg of dirt / 8.33 g/s. 

Meat: Drecko meat is basically free, it just depends on how many ranchers you need to support it once you're up to farm size.  With a 1/5 ratio for eggs, we can double that for meat after some incubation time.  So, each rancher can support 5 other dupes worth of meat. 

Now we end up having to associate a bunch of these things together.  I'll do it in single recipes.

Stuff Berries:

  • A stuffed berry requires 2 berries and 2 pincha peppers. 
    • A pincha plant produces 1 pepper every 2 cycles (averaged). 
    • We need 4 days of pincha growth to match our 12 days of berry growth (6x2). 
    • So the cost for the recipe is 140 kg PH2O + 240 kg H2O / 6 days.  We need to produce one every 4 days, so we need to add another recipe to the cost.
    • Dupe cost: 210 kg PH2O | 360 kg H2O, over 6 days...
    • 58.33 g/s PH2O | 100 g/s H2O
  • Pepper Bread requires 10 Wheat + 1 Pepper
    • Sleet Wheat produces 18 wheat every 18 cycles.  That's 1 grain/cycle.  That means we farm up enough grain every 10 cycles for a loaf of pepper bread on average.  5/9s of the plant cost is 200 kg H2O, or 33.33 g/s H2O.
    • That informs the pincha pepper to require 2 cycle of growth every 10. Or 1/5 of its production cycle.  Pincha will cost us: 42 kg PH2O, or 8.75 g/s PH2O per recipe.
    • Our recipe is based on being eaten once every 10 cycles, we need to eat it every 4, so everything goes up by 2.5.
    • Dupe Cost: 21.875 g/s PH2O | 83.33 g/s H2O |
  • BBQ
    • The easiest ratio to get from this is you need one pincha plant every 2 cycles for the recipe.  This feeds 2 dupes in that cycle.
    • We need to drown one drecko for the recipe.  We will organize our ranchers (for now) to figure out how many dreckos they need to upkeep to keep that ratio going.
    • With our ratio previously figured on grooming rates to egg requirements, one rancher can provide 6 eggs (including himself) that will eventually birth into some meat.  So our rancher ratio is 1/6 of a rancher, since each recipe produces 2 dupes of food for 2 cycles.
    • Dupe cost: 21 kg PH2O / 17.5 g/s  | 1/6 of a Rancher's schedule.

Is it just me, or is BBQ fricking broken?  Also, it seems odd that Pepper Bread costs less H2O and PH2O per dupe.

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4 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

Thanks for working through this in depth with me, @martosss.  I realize now when I wanted to have this discussion, I needed to use more specific expectations for 'reasonably sustaining'.  In particular, I realized I missed a particular idea: By cycle 500, I expect a base to be done, gone, and buried, having done everything it ever wanted to do.  The reasonably self sustaining part was just supposed to get you to the point where you could do everything else.  I'll need to reconsider the template of the idea.

I'm not sure this is easy to do in 500 cycles with more dupes. I'm currently playing with many(60+) and even at cycle 180-ish I've only discovered ~1/10th of the map(256x45 strip). However, I could imagine that things can go faster once you set up the proper infrastructure. Currently I use sweepers in a very limited fashion, but I can see their huge benefit, so probably rebuilding the farms with automation will save a lot of dupe time that can be spent digging/building. But even if dupes aren't very busy, it's still hard to uncover the map as the swamp biome is full of slimelung that needs to be dug relatively slowly. Now I started clearing it faster with massive digging expeditions, but you can't push too much or dupes get ill. Also expanding up/down is a hassle with all the gasses suffocating everyone - a few pockets of Chlorine+ Hydrogen and dupes are rendered useless until you build a pump to vent gases away.

And regarding the ice biomes - I personally explore them rather slowly - let the (polluted) ice melt so i get 100% of the water(water is gold) and unfortunately kill most plants in the process there, since they can't survive the rising temperature.

That means sleet wheat is out of the question. I'd say the other top quality foods are all too expensive, given that omelettes cost 0 water(again water = gold).

Oh, and BTW, even though I mentioned all the exploits with starving creatures, I also consider them exploits(in particular - 1kg feeding for pacus and reseting timer for starving). But even without using those, you can still keep pacus for free meat, given that you're making barbecue(just wait until they hatch an egg and die => collect meat), or feed dreckos Balm lilies and get eggs.

For me the 10 cycle starve bug is just an added bonus, since I rarely play more than 10 cycles at a time without saving and loading(you can imagine how many things you can do with 6 dupes ... now multiply that by 10 ...). I still have a bristle farm with my glossy dreckos and a balm lily farm with the regular ones. However, currently 16 plants/8 dreckos works fine. But even if I'm forces to have 2.5 plants, normal dreckos are still relatively easy to maintain since you can  spam many balm lilies for free( i have tons of seeds, just not enough space to make farms).

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12 minutes ago, martosss said:

But even if dupes aren't very busy, it's still hard to uncover the map as the swamp biome is full of slimelung that needs to be dug relatively slowly. Now I started clearing it faster with massive digging expeditions, but you can't push too much or dupes get ill. Also expanding up/down is a hassle with all the gasses suffocating everyone - a few pockets of Chlorine+ Hydrogen and dupes are rendered useless until you build a pump to vent gases away.

I haven't had too much trouble with slimelung unless I just sit in it, but I also spam deodorizers and sink nearby compactors into polluted water to keep the slime from offgassing too much.  I also move my PO2 into the local cold biomes, as it kills slimelung with a vengeance and gives my dupes a place to 'layover' that's healthy, if a bit chilly.

For the digs, I recommend avoiding using ladders and do a climbing dig.  Go up or down two with miners only, and let them work their way down with a vengeance.  It creates space for the ladder builders and you can move much more quickly through the environments.  If possible, try to dig above slime that's going to fall into the polluted water below.  Never give it a chance to attack!  Slime is the enemy!  DROWN IT!

For example, Cycle 82 and I'm in the oil biome below, have a few ice biomes raided, and know where most of my geysers are.

bCzdpmp.jpg

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