Best way to make more algae and oil? Also, I need help with plastic

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

1 hour ago, clickrush said:

Dreckos have a slow reproduction rate and get super old.

Little to no issue. It just means they have a different life cycle and have a slower initial stage of breeding, but you can get a full ranch will before you'd even hit oil. My normal, full drecko ranch puts out eggs at roughly 1 glossy drecklet egg each 1.5 cycles. Also, while having a different life cycle, they still mature at cycle 5 like every other critter.

1 hour ago, clickrush said:

You need to build a ranch with two gas layers (hydrogen plus for example CO2)

So you do that? There's no huge issue in that. Build a stable in a hydrogen rich environment, and pump in some CO2. Hydrogen stays up, CO2 stays down. Both gasses are in abundancy even around the starting position.

1 hour ago, clickrush said:

Meaning you sometimes or even often need to create a vacuum first which takes a long time regardless of the method.

You never need to do that, just have to a bit clever and build the stable in either a CO2, O2 or hydrogen environment and pump in the missing gas. That only takes maybe 5 cycles more work.

1 hour ago, clickrush said:

Also you need a lot of glossy dreckos to catch up with the production of even a single polymer press.

8 glossy drecko's (a full ranch) x 50kg of plastic each cycle= 400kg each cycle. Remind me, how much does a single polymer press produce?

1 hour ago, clickrush said:

In comparison you need a single pump, some wiring and piping and some basic cooling for the polymer press to work. If you want plastic fast and in large quantities you definitely go with the press. Not to mention that you set yourself up for adding a petroleum generator early on like this.

Let me rewrite that factually: in comparison, you need to dig down a long way, set up exosuit docks because your dupes will not be able to deal with 80-100°C, set up power to drive initial machinery, then set up a liquid pump, an oil refinery -which either requires a whole lot of piping to higher up or a duplicant having to go all the way down to operate it- and finally a polymer press. Which needs to be cooled, which is troublesome to do. I tried plopping in a hydrogen rich, insulated environment with a few wheezeworts and it still overheated. That's beyond requiring basic cooling.

What does a glossy ranch need? Catching a few normal drecko's, setting up a ranch with mealwood plants, setting up a second ranch which needs a bit more attention to savely get in and keep in the 2 gasses and after that just waiting for the necessary eggs. After that, rinse and repeat for a second, third,... glossy drecko ranch. I can guarantee you will have much faster access to plastic in that regard than your polymer press.

The biggest advantage being you don't need to go all the way down the asteroid. You can pluck down your ranch at or near your base, go a little bit outside to catch a few drecko's and start breeding. The only minor disadvantage is that it requires a little bit more dupe time overall. An other advantage is that this does not require power after you get the gasses in (and that initial power requirement is a LOT lower than the initial power requirement needed to get the polymer press rolling), meaning instead of pumping that petroleum into a polymer press I can pump it into a petroleum generator for power and water. Another nice little fact: instead of waiting for the polymer press to first produce enough plastic to set up a petroleum generator, I will already have the plastic in hand when I do go down to the oil biome. With that annoyance gone you are much quicker at the point of generating power from the petroleum.
And of course the surplus on eggs, the (very minor) advantage of a source of phosporite, and meat.

[ShadowOfALegend]

i shoved my polymer press next to a AETN and never had any problems and still has enough cooling to keep my supply of O2 and water comfortable for the bristle blossoms

 

and as for the gasses needed once you get a transit tube system in place just use CO2 and H to get the desired results seeing as you're going to seal the room and those glossy dreekos will feel like kings

 

[mazeking]

You don't need a big amount of algae if you use only algae terrariums+deodorizers to produce O2. Like this:
Doors, light and automatic didn't needed you could just unprioritize AT from time to time. All you need to do is just be sure that you dirty water would stay in the room in bottles and no clear water with germs would reach AT's or you would have a infected O2. This system would gave a 2+kg O2 in a second after first emptier of AT and more then that after.

You also could build closed rooms like this in extremal areas (Cl2, H2 etc. even in water) to explore the world. That would give you so much time as you needed to reseaarch and build whatever you want. While you have H2O and some algae that you could bring from pufts.

I didn't even connect my base with coridors just replace a barracks toilet and food around the world wherever i needed for first 300-400 cycles.

[psusi]

5 hours ago, mazeking said:

You don't need a big amount of algae if you use only algae terrariums+deodorizers to produce O2. Like this

Yes, but ATs take a LOT of dupe labor to keep moving the water around, which is why you want to just use an electrolyzer.  You need multiple ATs per dupe to get enough oxygen and they need refilled and emptied every day, which will keep all of your dupes busy with little time for anything else.  Once you're done using those for oxygen and switch to an electrolyzer for that, the only other things you can do with algae are feed pacu ( which eat a stupid amount of the stuff ), and feed sage hatches for coal, which you don't really need much of by that point, leaving you with feeding pacu.  An algae distiller might be able to keep up with feeding a few pacu, if you could feed it enough slime, but you can't.

 

[Mr.Trueba]

23 hours ago, minespatch said:

So I've figured out rooms and plumbing but now I'm confused by two things: Algae and oil regeneration.

So I know I can make alternative algae with that slime machine but if there was a way to make algae naturally with the environment, what should I do?

How do I find or make oil? I want to make plastic but that machine keeps breaking if I place water in it.

Look, this is my construction to produce plastic.

Let me explain.
The oil enters the refinery to make petroleum, from there it goes to the metal refinery but just before entering the refinery, I use a bridge to send the oil to the power generators, so that when the generators pipeline is full, the remaining oil enters the metal refinery.
And in the end the metal refinery I use for everything, to make steel, tungsten and the rest, so my polymer presses work all day.
With the plants and the cooling machine the environment cools the polymer presses, and the petroleum generators never exceed 75 degrees of temperature.

All my base is connected with plastic tubes and one part has a plastic floor and stairs.

It's my past base, but I remember how I did it. If you want I'll give you the file so you can see it or I can help you with any further questions you may have.

[minespatch]

14 hours ago, Djoums said:

Setting up a polymer press is definitely more straightforward but it doesn't give you more plastic than a full drecko ranch.

I'll just do both. Need the plastic for ranching and dupe beds sooo....

[RonEmpire]

It really depends on your play style.  I find doing the ranch easier to do.  

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

2 hours ago, minespatch said:

I'll just do both. Need the plastic for ranching and dupe beds sooo....

Yes, of course. Plastic is still rather difficult to get in huge quantities in a relative short period. And ultimately, both the polymer press and the glossy drecko ranch are resource limited. It depends on much plastic you are planning to use.

[BlueLance]

19 hours ago, clickrush said:

In comparison you need a single pump, some wiring and piping and some basic cooling for the polymer press to work. If you want plastic fast and in large quantities you definitely go with the press. Not to mention that you set yourself up for adding a petroleum generator early on like this.

So.... how many cycles until you start getting your first bit of plastic? Also sorry but dreckos output wins by a long shot, I have 1 rancher, 16 Glossy dreckos, I have no random heat to deal with, or hot plastic, or complicated setups, no pumping systems to the oil biome.

Yes they have a slow reproduction rate which means it might take you like 20 cycles to get a full stable, but once its full it doesnt matter XD

3 hours ago, minespatch said:

I'll just do both. Need the plastic for ranching and dupe beds sooo....

 

3 hours ago, RonEmpire said:

It really depends on your play style.  I find doing the ranch easier to do.  

Doing both is fine, and as Ron said it is down to your playstyle, but i also prefer ranching, so much quicker IMO, plus free meat and lime

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

28 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Doing both is fine, and as Ron said it is down to your playstyle, but i also prefer ranching, so much quicker IMO, plus free meat and lime

Oh, I forgot about the lime! Not unimportant.

[BlueLance]

1 minute ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Oh, I forgot about the lime! Not unimportant.

Also i completely agree with your points above, but yeah lime is important but you can get a quick boost later in the game once you are able to mine it in the oil biome.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Just now, BlueLance said:

Also i completely agree with your points above, but yeah lime is important but you can get a quick boost later in the game once you are able to mine it in the oil biome.

Thanks! I really, really love the content from the ranching upgrades. Klei did a very nice job with those. It needs tweaking regarding the pacu's, but misskicking one ball in the ballpark isn't too bad.

[minespatch]

5 hours ago, BlueLance said:

but i also prefer ranching, so much quicker IMO, plus free meat and lime

That's why I want plastic in the first place, to Ranch.

Once I get my ranchers and proper stables, I can make a puft farm to get those cute green pufts. That's my goal at the moment. If I get further, I can do gassy moo ranching but I really wanted pufts.

[clickrush]

@ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy I think our different perceiptions of what is more practical comes from our playstiles. Like the first thing I usually do is set up a sealed off living area with a mushroom farm and exosuit entrances for all my dupes, then I dig into all 4 directions setting up ladders, poles tiles, storage etc. My dupes only run around in exosuits after cycle 60/80 or so. At this point I start the piping for oil and possibly nat gas so I can produce petroleum, plastic and all the refined metal variants quickly.

[mazeking]

20 hours ago, psusi said:

Yes, but ATs take a LOT of dupe labor to keep moving the water around...

I can't agree. 2-4 seconds once in a 3-4 cycles for all 4AT's isn't much. And you could just switch them off when 1200kg of pollyted water in bottles on the ground.

[psusi]

15 hours ago, mazeking said:

I can't agree. 2-4 seconds once in a 3-4 cycles for all 4AT's isn't much. And you could just switch them off when 1200kg of pollyted water in bottles on the ground.

I don't know how you think it works alright.  In my earlier games I tried running only ATs and I quickly found that my dupes were so busy filling and emptying them, they didn't have time left to grow and cook food.  One here and there is fine, especially in new tunnels, trying to run the entire colony off of them is just too labor intensive.  And where did you get 2-4 seconds?  It takes like 5 or 6 seconds just to empty the thing, then they have to carry the polluted water and drop it off in the polluted water basin, then pick up more fresh water and deliver it.  And switch them off?  If you can afford to switch them off and not run out of oxygen, then you built too many in the first place.

[PhailRaptor]

14 hours ago, psusi said:

I tried running only ATs and I quickly found that my dupes were so busy filling and emptying them, they didn't have time left to grow and cook food. 

While my position aligns closer with yours, I feel the need to knit-pick here.  If there is clean water on the floor where the Terrarium is built, the Terrarium will suck it up on it's own.  It is quite easy to eliminate the filling time from the use of Terrariums.

[SchlauFuchs]

On 9/20/2018 at 3:09 AM, Djoums said:

That's ~530Kg of plastic per cycle for a full stable. Now in practice you don't get perfect scale growth but it's safe to assume you're getting at least half of it, for more than 300Kg of plastic per cycle. Similar output as a polymer press running 24/7, power and oil free.

Isn't the shearing station consume power?

[PhailRaptor]

1 hour ago, SchlauFuchs said:

Isn't the shearing station consume power?

It does, yes, but it will only be running for a very short time any given cycle.

[psusi]

21 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

While my position aligns closer with yours, I feel the need to knit-pick here.  If there is clean water on the floor where the Terrarium is built, the Terrarium will suck it up on it's own.  It is quite easy to eliminate the filling time from the use of Terrariums.

Oh really?  I did not know that.  They still must be emptied though and you have to get the clean water there and then have it laying on the floor, which upsets dupes when they walk through it.

[avc15]

Oil: one thing.

There's an advanced way to make oil reservoirs self sustaining. If you're cooking oil directly instead of using the refinery, your generators will produce more pwater than the amount of water your oil well needs. Just pump the waste water through a sieve.

But, cooking oil directly into petroleum is a bit advanced.

Algae:

It's really hard to make algae, s you eventually need to switch to electrolysis. But, if you want more cycles do do it, you can get by on slime for like the first thousand cycles on most maps.

I suggest digging out all swamp biomes near your base. Slime converts itself gradually into oxygen, you just have to deodorize every last bit of it to get the germs to die off. Build deodorizers *everywhere* and set clay storage to a very low priority. Make sure air can flow in freely to your base from outside, and make sure your shifts are set up so only ~2 dupes are sleeping at a time (important for natural airflow designs)

You'll get some extra algae in the process, but you'll find yourself using much less of it. And if you are cleaning the PO2 thoroughly enough & being conservative enough with excavations (you have to do them gradually to control dupe immunity) your dupes won't get sick. First time you try it, if a couple dupes get sick, no big deal. But you can learn to do it without any of them getting sick at all just by distributing dig & build priorities carefully, and slowing down how fast you excavate.

[Sasza22]

9 hours ago, avc15 said:

I suggest digging out all swamp biomes near your base.

The funny thing about algae is that swamp biomes aren`t the best source of it. There is a lot of it there but it`s in small pockets and to get a large amount you need to mine out the entire biome. Most of the algae there is in the slime anyway. And mining the biome leads to getting slimelung everywhere.

Now caustic biomes tend to have huge chunks of algae in them. All in one place. Mining that out is less risky and can be done easily early game. I found that i`m usually getting more algae from the caustic biomes with much less effort. The only issue is that not all the biomes have the algae veins so you have to rely on luck to find a big one.

I think getting algae from swamp biomes is a kind of trap for players in the early game before they can protect their dupes and base from slimelung or utilize the slime.

[avc15]

3 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

The funny thing about algae is that swamp biomes aren`t the best source of it. There is a lot of it there but it`s in small pockets and to get a large amount you need to mine out the entire biome. Most of the algae there is in the slime anyway. And mining the biome leads to getting slimelung everywhere.

The reason to dig out swamps is to switch from algae as an oxygen source to slime as an oxygen source. You are right, you only get a little algae. I said that too

Please read my comment again

It's quite straightforward to control the slimelung germs. You just have to deodorize everything, and have some restraint about how quickly you dig. In this way you can delay *needing* a switch to electrolysis up as far as cycle 1000 depending on how many dupes you have.