How to make food?

[Nicetree]

Hello everyone

I a pretty new in ONI but i really enjoy it, i'm on cycle 16, the insufficient production is displayed since the beginning of time despite my ****on of algae prod, my base is a so random mess i would give a heart attack to anyone with OCD, my power production is never enough and my duplicants immune system is dropping faster than turkish currency. So basically everything is normal. 

 

But I have a lot of difficulties to find any food, I don't have so many seed (like, 1 or zero blossom seed) and i run with the microbe musher and mush bars. But the onsequence is the dropping of my colony health. 

I have somes plants that are growing, but not fast enough depite the 4 light critters that i traped in the room, and i can't manage to find-produce any seeds (i never saw any sleet weat grain) 

How should i do? I already refused many duplicant because of this problem and in my last cycle my calorie count dropped to zero. 

Thank you very much for helping me!

[SamLogan]

Mush Bar (uncheck it to don't eat it) cooked in mush fry to sustain your mealwood.

After that, go to mushroom then Bristle Blossom.

[hacksaw12]

Uprooting a wild Bristle Blossom will give you a seed. Once you get started, a dupe with the farmer job will increase the seed yield as you harvest. Check the farmer tool tip.

[Xadhoom]

if your dupes are getting sick from food posioning, you need to keep the area where you cook food, only accessable by passing a few water basins.

the most important though, is to make sure you have as many water basins as you have outhouses. like this:

especially since EU upgrade and they all go to the toilets at the same time, if there is less wash basins you risk having dupes not washing their hand and bringing germs to the rest of your base.

i hope you have started with a meal wood farm. its the esiest food to grow at start.

i would also suggest making your meal lice into liceloafs, +500 kcal, and cost less water then mush bars + frying for same quality of food.

only use mush bars + frying if you truly are desperate for food.

this is roughly how i like to start of my food preparation area:

the farm itself can be placed anywhere really. but a small pit near the Musher and grill to store food in is good, it will fill up with CO2 eventually, and that will keep your food from going stale if stored for a long time.

[QuQuasar]

After basic hygiene, a research laboratory and oxygen, reaching semi-sustainable food should be your next big push.There are a few rules for this stage of the game:

1. Dig as fast as you can towards any clusters of buried objects in the start biome.These will be either mealwood seeds, bristleberry seeds, or a few kCals of muckroot.

2. Pierce any garden caverns in the area. Depending on your situation you can either dig up and re-plant the wild plants (makes them produce food faster, but they require fertilizer, which runs out long term) or leave them where they are as fertilizer-free but very slow sources of food.

3. You need 5 mealwood plants per duplicant.Your farm should be in the coldest location you can find in the starting biome, preferably low in the base where Co2 will build up.

At this point you are semi-sustainable and can focus on other matters.Over time you'll want to improve your food efficiency and quality, however. Mealwood needs dirt, which will run out eventually, so...

4. Research agriculture and upgrade to either bristle berries (if you have lots of water) or dusk caps(if you have lots of slime). Cook both of these on the electric grill before eating them to maximize the kCals and food quality(you can use the "Consumables" menu to prevent dupes from eating them raw).

5. Start producing fertilizer, and convert your berry/mushroom farms into Greenhouses with a farming station.This will increase the kCal output without any change in water consumption.

6. Start ranching hatches for omlettes and coal.Build a breeding ranch so you don't risk driving the species extinct by cracking all their eggs.

7. Use a nursery and butchery along with pincha pepper to switch from eggs to barbeque. Stone Hatches feeding on igneous rock are the best long-term solution, although not quite 100% sustainable.
 

[Promethien]

Drecko and Pacu are the best long term meat solutions.

Drecko can eat lillies which require zero resource expenditure beyond set up. Just have to keep them in a chlorine environment (easy).

Pacu eat a lot of algae but all feeding them does is speed up their egg laying. If you leave them alone they produce one egg per lifecycle. So you can set up a tank with one Pacu. Feed it a bunch of algae until it hits the desired population, Then leave them alone and collect the occasional meat that drops when they die of old age.

[QuQuasar]

9 minutes ago, Promethien said:

Drecko and Pacu are the best long term meat solutions.

Fair enough. As it currently stands Pacu tanks would be my step 8, for true sustainability. I feel like it's possible their behaviour might change in the future.

Drecko's are debatable, since they require 33% more ranching time: I consider stone hatches fed by a volcano or an regolith-to-igneous-rock melter to be a better long term solution.

[thewreckedangle]

[KittenIsAGeek]

10 hours ago, Nicetree said:

Hello everyone

I a pretty new in ONI but i really enjoy it, i'm on cycle 16, the insufficient production is displayed since the beginning of time despite my ****on of algae prod, my base is a so random mess i would give a heart attack to anyone with OCD, my power production is never enough and my duplicants immune system is dropping faster than turkish currency. So basically everything is normal. 

Well, the oxygen thing has several factors involved.

1. Deoxodizers and Electrolyzers only produce when there is low pressure.  Thus, as long as pressure is sufficient, no oxygen is going to be produced.
2. Duplicants sometimes breathe from other sources.  Polluted O2 from the swamps, Oxygen from Oxylite, etc.

This means that your dupes can use more oxygen than you can produce, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're running out of oxygen.  Check your oxygen overlay (F1).  Everywhere in your base that is blue is good. If its red, it needs work.  If you've got too much carbon dioxide in your base, dig down deeper.  The CO2 will settle down low and oxygen will replace it.  If you've got too much hydrogen (from electrolyzers), dig up.

1 hour ago, QuQuasar said:

Fair enough. As it currently stands Pacu tanks would be my step 8, for true sustainability. I feel like it's possible their behaviour might change in the future.

Lately I've been having troubles keeping my pacu alive.  I can't produce enough algae and my aquariums keep dying out without giving me any eggs.

[QuQuasar]

37 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Lately I've been having troubles keeping my pacu alive.  I can't produce enough algae and my aquariums keep dying out without giving me any eggs.

Dying out? 

According to my understanding of Pacu, that shouldn't happen: even when glum and overcrowded, each one should lay a single egg before they die. So the population should sustain itself even if you don't/can't feed them.
 
I'm currently working on a pair of Pacu tanks myself, but I'm not in a position to confirm the above yet(am still slowly filling the tanks from a water sieve. I'll only have wild pacu in them until the water level reaches the food dispenser)

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, QuQuasar said:

Dying out? 

According to my understanding of Pacu, that shouldn't happen: even when glum and overcrowded, each one should lay a single egg before they die. So the population should sustain itself even if you don't/can't feed them.
 
I'm currently working on a pair of Pacu tanks myself, but I'm not in a position to confirm the above yet(am still slowly filling the tanks from a water sieve. I'll only have wild pacu in them until the water level reaches the food dispenser)

Yeah, that's what I thought as well. I even used the sandbox to paint a couple of pacu in to my tank and watched them age and die without laying an egg.  I might try restarting and see if that fixes the problem.

[Mariilyn]

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Lately I've been having troubles keeping my pacu alive.  I can't produce enough algae and my aquariums keep dying out without giving me any eggs.

The expecting status will stop the reproduction progress completely; pacu eggs from an overcrowded area need to be taken out and brought to a different room as soon as they are laid.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, Mariilyn said:

The expecting status will stop the reproduction progress completely; pacu eggs from an overcrowded area need to be taken out and brought to a different room as soon as they are laid.

Yeah, overcrowding and expecting is not the issue.  They're starving before laying eggs.

The wild ones in pools in the slime biome also died without laying eggs.

[Nicetree]

Thank you everyone for so much answers, and tips, you are awesome! 

I saw that fried much bars are acceptable, but did'nt realised that you could forbid a source of food (t'is a bit simple to see though, dummy me) 

But  lot of "parameter mechanism" aren't instinctive at all in ONI, I spent more time figuring out how to put a setting than to understand the games mechanism itself (the priorities settings for instance, every day I discover a new/simpler way for ordering them) 

I didn't realized that you could dig up wild plants for seeds, I was too afraid to loose any source of food !

The base garden thing will be a problem because my garden is high in my base, i thought that plant would need a lot of O2 and warm temperature and very few CO2

Water is kicking my but because sources are either very far below or above, bu i suppose i will build a artificial tank filed with tiles and hope that the transportation will not pollute the water. 

I'm also very shy for digging, and don't have the reflex to put tiles on walls  and roof (and floor...) So yeah another thing to settle 

 

Anyway thank you very much, i didn't read everything quqasar at the ranching part because i want to discover those thing by myself and see if i can manage this part alone, but thanks a lot! 

[Maxposting]

Dig For Muckroots and seeds , Prioritize Research : 1 ) Super Computer 2 ) Plumbing 3 ) Lightbulbs 4) Farms ( Until Hydroponic farms )

Make the plumbing and lights sets fast , dont connect lights to the main power source so it doesnt waste , about time you set up half the farms make the lights connected

[Xadhoom]

4 hours ago, Nicetree said:

 

I'm also very shy for digging, and don't have the reflex to put tiles on walls  and roof (and floor...) So yeah another thing to settle 

 

the only place you really need to build walls, floor and roofs are in your main base. outside of you base you are fine digging stuff out. the reason you want walls, floors and roofs in your base is to get the room bonuses, if you look at top right of the UI you find a room overlay. its nessicary to use rooms to make your dupes feel comfortable, else their morale will be low.

just a minor thing, a regular tile has +25% movement speed, metal or plastic tiles has +50%. so in some cases it can be worth it to build a floor for faster movement.

 

[greggbert]

I find fried mushrooms are a great source of food and they require no water and less labor than liceloaf.  Just put them in the bottom level of your base.  They must be completely submerged in C02, so if you have a skimmer or a terrarium or a pump that's getting rid of C02 put it one level above the mushrooms.   The one catch is that they need slime, which you should store in a separate airlocked sealed room adjacent to your mushroom farm on the opposite side of the farm entrance (so dupes won't go through the slime room)

The slime storage will produce polluted oxygen but it's easy to manage that by bringing the ceiling down almost to the floor so your dupes can't actually stand next to the slime storage.  Above the slime storage build a single airflow vent with an O2 purifier on top of it.  The polluted O2 will rise, get purified, and supply your base with a tiny bit of oxygen.

 

[Sasza22]

7 hours ago, Nicetree said:

The base garden thing will be a problem because my garden is high in my base, i thought that plant would need a lot of O2 and warm temperature and very few CO2

The plants list their requirements. Basic plants like mealwood and bristle berry grow in both Oxygen and CO2. The main fear is temperature. At the edge of your starting area the temperature rises fast (F3 for temp overlay). If it goes over 30^oC the plants stop growing. Best put your farm in the middle of your base and keep all machinery far away (machines produce heat). Later insulate the room to keep the heat away and use wheezeworts for extra cooling.

 

7 hours ago, Nicetree said:

I'm also very shy for digging, and don't have the reflex to put tiles on walls  and roof (and floor...) So yeah another thing to settle 

A good strategy is to mine out most of the starting area. It will give you a lot of muckroots for early food and some random hatches that you can kill in emergency to prevent starving (althrough hatches are best kept alive for ranching and they don`t spawn outside of the starting biome). There are also seeds you can dig out which should help as well. There isn`t really much downside of diggin the staring area unless you get a dupe trapped with no oxygen.

 

7 hours ago, Nicetree said:

Water is kicking my but because sources are either very far below or above, bu i suppose i will build a artificial tank filed with tiles and hope that the transportation will not pollute the water. 

Transport of any kind won`t pollute your water. Maybe you can get some germs in if you use a pitcher pump with autobottling on and dupes won`t wash their hands but germs don`t multiply in clean water so it shouldn`t be a problem.

[Grimgaw]

8 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

There isn`t really much downside of diggin the staring area unless you get a dupe trapped with no oxygen.

There's in fact one major downside. Digging it halves the amount of nice 20C material (thermal inertia), meaning you'll overheat WAY quicker.

[Flydo]

On 19/08/2018 at 4:54 PM, Nicetree said:

Hello everyone

I a pretty new in ONI but i really enjoy it, i'm on cycle 16, the insufficient production is displayed since the beginning of time despite my ****on of algae prod, my base is a so random mess i would give a heart attack to anyone with OCD, my power production is never enough and my duplicants immune system is dropping faster than turkish currency. So basically everything is normal. 

 

But I have a lot of difficulties to find any food, I don't have so many seed (like, 1 or zero blossom seed) and i run with the microbe musher and mush bars. But the onsequence is the dropping of my colony health. 

I have somes plants that are growing, but not fast enough depite the 4 light critters that i traped in the room, and i can't manage to find-produce any seeds (i never saw any sleet weat grain) 

How should i do? I already refused many duplicant because of this problem and in my last cycle my calorie count dropped to zero. 

Thank you very much for helping me!

at the beggining don't dig out the natural plants you will find, this one give you extra food for free, let you the time to create a viable system