Help increasing the base size

[Yuvraj]

I been playing this game from last three days now, I managed to expand my base about 6-7 floors now i'm very close to slime areas, and there is also natural gas building up, i Don't know how to deal with slime without killing my dups from germs and how do i get rid of natural gas? 

[KittenIsAGeek]

OK, this is both a simple and complex problem that mostly deals with gas management.  Each type of gas has a particular density that can be used to help manage them.  Hydrogen drifts up, carbon dioxide drifts down, oxygen hangs out in the middle.  There are postings on this form that detail the particulars, but for this situation we only need to know that oxygen hangs out in the middle.  Unfortunately, this also includes polluted oxygen, which we'll deal with later.

OK, so since oxygen is the gas you want in your main base, you can manage the other gasses by putting pumps at the top and the bottom of your base to remove the gasses you don't want.  These can be as simple as a single always-running gas pump or as complex as a system with a gas element sensor and multiple filters to sort the gasses.    Your management solution can also be as simple as piping the gas to another room or sending it to where it will be used.  You currently have a problem with natural gas so a good solution would be to pipe the natural gas to a natural gas generator, where the natural gas is turned in to power for your base.

The slime biome has the added difficulty of slimelung germs to deal with.  To prevent illness, you should not dig straight into a slime biome, but instead use airlock doors to keep it separated.  Deoderizers on the 'clean' side will prevent slimelung from spreading into your base.  The dupes that go into and out of the slime biome will be breathing a lot of germs.  So you'll either want enviro suits or dupes with strong immune systems.  Never EVER send a "Biohazardous" dupe into the slime biome without protection.  

Another good tip is to find somewhere to store the slime WITHOUT bringing it into your main base.  A couple of storage lockers surrounded by deoderizers work great at preventing the spread of slimelung.  Also, the moment you start digging in to the slime biome, put some sort of oxygen supply in that area.  This will drastically reduce the amount of polluted oxygen your dupes are breathing and reduce the chance of their immune systems becoming compromised by slimelung.

So, in summary:

1. Isolate the living area of your base with airlock doors or other methods.
2. Pumps at the top and bottom of your base can be used to get rid of unbreathable gasses.
3. Different gasses have different uses.  Learn how to use the various gasses and you won't have problems with them building up in your base.
4. Slimelung is BAD.  Filter polluted oxygen into pure oxygen with deoderizers (or other methods) BEFORE it gets into your base.
5. If you don't have environmental suits, don't let dupes with weak immune systems (biohazzardous) go in to germy areas. Ever.

[Glassyfo]

Simple solution is to use a pump and filter to get the natural gas out. Make sure you have a water lock or something similar at an exit so the gas doesn't come back in.

As for slime lung, just limit dupe exposure to it to a few seconds at a time and you're golden.

[Gurgel]

For slime, put deodorizers everywhere and your dupes can go in there without protection. Just keep an eye on their health.

[thejams]

Just to make it clearer - deodorizers convert polluted oxygen to clean one, slimelung slowly dies off in clean oxygen.  So use deodorisers and algae deoxydizer when expanding to keep the air clean O2.

Slime is best stored in chlorine which will quickly kill off all slimelung.  If the chlorine is kept at a pressure of 1800+ g/tile, the slime will not emit polluted oxygen.  Bleach stone can be used to create chlorine where needed.  Something like this can safely store slime without offgassing or slimelung (first create vacuum, then build compactor and put bleach stone in, wait ~2 cycles to get 1800g chlorine per tile, then store the slime)

Exosuits should be a priority.  I find it easiest to create a single entry point into the base and setup all my suits there.  To speed up exploration, it helps to have for example restriction to only 2 dupes with high dig/build skills to go outside.  Set their priorities to dig/build higher.  Mark exploration digs/build with higher priority than base jobs.  This will cause the 2 dedicated dupes to go out and never turn to come back, while the rest chug inside the base.