Mushrooms as main food strategy and the Decor Bomb Farm

[Steve Raptor]

Greetings.

Since EU I have been following the same strategy for morale upkeep.

Meal wood> Bristle berries > stuffed berries and secondary food as BBQ/Pepperbread by farming ice biomes.

Since EU I abandoned mushroom farming due to their inability to sustain the morale of high jobs.

A week ago I decided to look into the matter again, Mushroom farming has serious advantages over bristle berries:

• Very resource efficient, 4kg slime/cycle is a very low amount, and can be manually mined once every a long period.
• High calorie amount
• Greatly reduced base water consumption
• Flexible Temperature range
• No water for agriculture means no need to cool water, means no need for aqua tuners and means a lot less power consumption.

However the biggest drawback is the low morale boost and no synergy into higher tier foods.

So I tried to develop a strategy that can sustain mushrooms as the primary food source through the entire game and tackle the morale disadvantage in a different way.

After some thinking, I discovered a feature that I never used for my 400+ hours in ONI.....Shine bugs.

Shine bug farming is the easiest farming in the game.

They consume extremely small amounts of food and their living conditions are very easy to set.

As of now, I couldn't get the highest decor boost, +12, consistently on all my dupes, especially as my base was expanding with all the new machinery and heavy wires.

So I devised, a what I call, Decor Bomb Farm (DBF), which purpose is to ramp up decor boost to such high levels, that no matter where the dupe goes throughout the day, It will receive a constant +12 Gorgeous decor morale boost.

This effectively covers morale drawback from eating mushrooms.

Below is the design of the DBF.

 

Once Abyss Nymps enter the picture, the decor values ramp up to such high levels, that even if you fill up your entire base with heavy watt wires, the decor bonus won't budge from +12.

The DBF can sustain up to 9 dupes in comfy beds, or 18 dupes in Cots, and since shine bug are so easy on the resource side, several DBF can be built to sustain more dupes.

To maximize the decor boosts, DBF borders 3 bedrooms and a great hall.

In order for the shine bugs to spread around the ranch, the critter feeder+Lamp is placed on the far side.

The bordering floors are made of window tiles to allow the decor to pass, earlier in the game I used air tiles instead.

The base in the picture is a 850+ Cycle base in the EU (no shower boost).

It is sustained by 2 Cool steam vent and 1 NG vent.

It is powered by 2 coal generators, 1 NG generator, 1 excess-SPOM hydrogen generator or a tuned  petroleum generator (which can  power nearly the entire base by itself) which kicks in when my slicksters are running out of CO2.

Since the only water consumers are 2 electroylzers, 1 espresso machine and a single skimmer, water consumption is very low and hot geyser water can be pumped directly into them, which means farewell aqua tuners and water cooling.

This also means that I don't need a lot of pincha pepper plants, I run a tiny farm of 2 pincha pepper plants and harvest some from the wild, those are for the espresso machine and occasional BBQ from the meat gathered by pacu/drecko/hatch farms.

This means the PW water consumption is extremely low, the only consumers of PW are 2 fertilizers that don't work most of the time since I have 20t+ fertilizer.

I also forgot to add that there is no re-creation room in this base, no jukebox or arcade.

In RU, you will have 1-2 astronauts, feeding them omlettes/Frost buns will bump their morale to +30, especially with the new shower buff, so there is that.

This strategy not only makes mushrooms able to carry as the main food source, but it also makes the game much more easier as power,water,PW consumption are greatly reduced as a result, you can sustain yourself with the two guaranteed steam and NG vent in every game easily that way.

 

 

 

 

[SamLogan]

I really like the chamber framed by the shine bug ranch.

[Steve Raptor]

So many views but so little feedback , Did I went too far with this wall of text? 

 

[beowulf2010]

14 minutes ago, Steve Raptor said:

So many views but so little feedback , Did I went too far with this wall of text? 

 

Nope. I'm just at work so it's hard to look at the pictures and see exactly what you did and what I may want to borrow. 

[Lacost]

22 minutes ago, Steve Raptor said:

So many views but so little feedback , Did I went too far with this wall of text? 

 

Nah, wall of text is fine. If you want to improve though it's better to separate your text with the screenshots.

Like here:

6 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

Below is the design of the DBF.

would be the place where I would put the third screenshot.

 

 

I'm just blown away by the +1795 decor. I will have to look into that for myself for my bases. Currently I am decorating everything to achieve an overall average high decor rating but if this shine bug ranch holds up I could save a lot of space. Not even speaking of using Heavy Watt Wires more liberaly.

Does this ranch need a lot of micromanagment?

Would it be possible to sacrifice the +2 morale from bedrooms and let the Dupes sleep directly in the stable? This would allow for a early/midgame build until you have acces to glass/diamond.

[Steve Raptor]

17 minutes ago, Lacost said:

Nah, wall of text is fine. If you want to improve though it's better to separate your text with the screenshots.

Like here:

would be the place where I would put the third screenshot.

 

 

I'm just blown away by the +1795 decor. I will have to look into that for myself for my bases. Currently I am decorating everything to achieve an overall average high decor rating but if this shine bug ranch holds up I could save a lot of space. Not even speaking of using Heavy Watt Wires more liberaly.

Does this ranch need a lot of micromanagment?

Would it be possible to sacrifice the +2 morale from bedrooms and let the Dupes sleep directly in the stable? This would allow for a early/midgame build until you have acces to glass/diamond.

Oh, I'm new to the forums and still learning how to format things properly.

How can I for example do some thing like this? :

[Text]

[Picture]

[Text]

[Picture]

The options just let me upload a bunch of files at once.

 

The only interaction the ranch requires is to swap the food from time time to breed higher tiers of bugs.

For example, when I want to advance to the next tier, and feed them pepper breads, I set the feeder to accept 5 kg max, priority 6.

1 pepper bread = 1 KG/cycle food for a shine bug.

At the same breath, you might need to do some population control (E.g. commit murder to avoid "Expecting") if you want to speed up a new type of bugs, egg crackers are great for this, you can use them to filter out unwanted eggs away from the ranch.

The first tier of shine bugs...that is..shine bugs...are not so great, the next tier, Sun bugs give you a +50 decor in a 7 radius, so best to start with those and then breed them further when you feel like it.

Basically it goes like this:

+50 Decor  7 radius  sun bug until abyss bug (all those in between, are completely the same, different name).

+80 Decor 7 radius abyss bug

+200 Decor 8 radius radiant bug

However one you reach radiant shine bugs, the farm turns to be "Set it and forget it".

This farm can support 8-9 bugs, so at max you can get, by bugs alone, 200*8=1600...add canvas+briars and you push above 2000.

You can build cots inside the ranch, but instead you can create the first middle bedroom and place you dupes there, it has enough room for 6 dupes.

But in general, the crazy decor boost outweighs by miles the loss of 2 morale, especially when you run up to 16 morale jobs.

 

The corridors are best filled with canvases to boost morale further.

[Lacost]

27 minutes ago, Steve Raptor said:

Oh, I'm new to the forums and still learning how to format things properly.

How can I for example do some thing like this? :

[Text]

[Picture]

[Text]

[Picture]

The options just let me upload a bunch of files at once.

 

There is an option to insert image URLs in the top bar of the text box (to the right of the smiley). This alllows you to do this Text --- image --- text editing.

[Steve Raptor]

5 minutes ago, Lacost said:

There is an option to insert image URLs in the top bar of the text box (to the right of the smiley). This alllows you to do this Text --- image --- text editing.

I see, but this seems to not have the option for direct upload (E.g. directly from desktop).

[Alfons100]

Yeah, Shinebugs are fun to reach ludicrous decor levels. Use glass tiles to spread the prettiness over multiple rooms.

I just wish we had automatic Incubation and some better Ranching methods so it isnt as micro-managy as it is now. 

[Djoums]

22 minutes ago, Steve Raptor said:

I see, but this seems to not have the option for direct upload (E.g. directly from desktop).

Use "Drag files here to attach, or choose files..." under the textbox, then drag&drop the uploaded image somewhere in your message.

[Steve Raptor]

2 minutes ago, Djoums said:

Use "Drag files here to attach, or choose files..." under the textbox, then drag&drop the uploaded image somewhere in your message.

Ah, Perfect! thanks!

[hpongledd]

Does someone know if there is an higher morale boost by decor then 12? Also something above "Gorgeous Decor"?

[Lacost]

On 3.9.2018 at 10:24 PM, Steve Raptor said:

You can build cots inside the ranch, but instead you can create the first middle bedroom and place you dupes there, it has enough room for 6 dupes.

But in general, the crazy decor boost outweighs by miles the loss of 2 morale, especially when you run up to 16 morale jobs.

Unfortunately, Cots are conflicting buildings in stables so there goes that idea...

[Nitroturtle]

Love the asthetics of the shine bug ranch.  I too discovered that by always ensuring max decor bonus, I could easily survive on mushrooms.  Initially I had moved on to other food, and then after maxing out decor realized I didn't really need my dupes to be 40+ moral.  They are still 25-30 even with mushrooms as their main food.

My approach to the decor issue was a little different, however.  I spread out everything outside of my base considerably more than I had previously.  Nearly every building has 2-5 tiles on both sides free without interfering with my main travel ladders.  Every extra tile is then either airflow or mesh, and has as many paintings or statues that can fit.  Both of these buildings can by built for nearly free, considering the abundance of raw minerals.  Overall it does kinda look a little stupid (I wish there were more than ONE genius sculpture) but it definitely gets the job done.  Spreading everything out has also had the benefit of making running pipes very convenient.  Here's a screenshot of my decor overlay: