Critique my planned out Survival Base

[Nemisis311]

I am currently planning out my first major long-term survival game, and am trying to plan for the best possible run I can give myself. I ran and tweaked this around in a test world as I went for 200 cycles. Does anyone see any issues in either layout efficiency or something that may bite me in the butt later down the road?

The plan is 6 dupes and everything in a very separate, distribution style world layout. I debated adding in a vacuum chambered insulated wall to the outside world, but I don't know if it's really necessary. I am going to be changing around the ventilation incoming after I get air conditioning set up in survival.
 

Spoiler

 

[JukedByLife]

Not sure if this will be an issue, because I don't know how the automation is laid out, but the rail system exposed to gas will rot food if it sits too long.

[crypticorb]

I like your design, but I can spot a few things that can be improved:

1. You can create a better waterlock by simply creating one of these, it's just as good as your design and the doors can be removed afterwards for vacuum thermal barrier.
   Spoiler

   

    

2. I can't tell what the fridges on the left are doing, but they don't need to be powered if they're in chlorine.

3. You have an incredible amount of exosuits, and only one exit. You might want to consider an exit at every cardinal direction, with a separate exosuit bay each.

4. I wouldn't place bridges for every exosuit dock, as this will prioritize the first one over all the others, then the second if the first is full, etc. This means that if there's ever a minor interruption in the oxygen supply, only the first couple suits will be functional.

5. There's currently zero need for a medbay, none. There's no associated bonus, and if the toilet and food aren't always available in the room, the dupes will go walking anyways.

6. You don't have any space for tube transport, which seems a flaw in the layout.

 

I'm very much interested in your design for the food storage, I'd like to see the shipping overlay for that, and the automation if you could. I also can't see what the point of the automation surrounding the research buildings is. The only really big problems with your layout is the lack of expandability and restriction on space. There's no lack of space in the home biome alone, and the entire asteroid gives enough space for a sprawling base of 50+ dupes if you desire, no need for compactness.

[Nemisis311]

17 minutes ago, JukedByLife said:

Not sure if this will be an issue, because I don't know how the automation is laid out, but the rail system exposed to gas will rot food if it sits too long.

I have it set to receive into a chlorine filled storage, which puts spoiling at 0% and covers in case they ever manage to make with food poisoning. The top rail comes from the kitchen, bottom goes into the mess hall. The receptacle is in co2. Unfortunately I couldn't think of a solution for the one tile not covered in the wall. I attempted a clock sensor set to only allow a single packet of food through a day, but even that built up over time, as it was usually around 9kg food (for only 6 dupes). Ingredients will be stored in a separate room, but I haven't figured out how I'm going to do that without spoiling in travel yet.

[crypticorb]

8 minutes ago, Nemisis311 said:

I have it set to receive into a chlorine filled storage, which puts spoiling at 0% and covers in case they ever manage to make with food poisoning. The top rail comes from the kitchen, bottom goes into the mess hall. The receptacle is in co2. Unfortunately I couldn't think of a solution for the one tile not covered in the wall. I attempted a clock sensor set to only allow a single packet of food through a day, but even that built up over time, as it was usually around 9kg food (for only 6 dupes). Ingredients will be stored in a separate room, but I haven't figured out how I'm going to do that without spoiling in travel yet.

Use this method to keep your food output receptical from being exposed at all. Dupes will still be able to access the food fine, and it'll save space.

You can use the automation dropper technique for food, or simply use the drop of water in front of the output receptical in your construct.

You can prevent food from spoiling by running the shipping rails through tiles, never exposing the food to oxygen or liquids.

[Nemisis311]

30 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I like your design, but I can spot a few things that can be improved:

1. You can create a better waterlock by simply creating one of these, it's just as good as your design and the doors can be removed afterwards for vacuum thermal barrier.
     Reveal hidden contents

   

    

2. I can't tell what the fridges on the left are doing, but they don't need to be powered if they're in chlorine.

3. You have an incredible amount of exosuits, and only one exit. You might want to consider an exit at every cardinal direction, with a separate exosuit bay each.

4. I wouldn't place bridges for every exosuit dock, as this will prioritize the first one over all the others, then the second if the first is full, etc. This means that if there's ever a minor interruption in the oxygen supply, only the first couple suits will be functional.

5. There's currently zero need for a medbay, none. There's no associated bonus, and if the toilet and food aren't always available in the room, the dupes will go walking anyways.

6. You don't have any space for tube transport, which seems a flaw in the layout.

 

I'm very much interested in your design for the food storage, I'd like to see the shipping overlay for that, and the automation if you could. I also can't see what the point of the automation surrounding the research buildings is. The only really big problems with your layout is the lack of expandability and restriction on space. There's no lack of space in the home biome alone, and the entire asteroid gives enough space for a sprawling base of 50+ dupes if you desire, no need for compactness.

The space where the current water lock is just until I get to tube transport, then I'm turning it into a tube access.

The fridges are in a chlorine room, not powered (symbol just vanishes in alt-s). It's excess food storage that goes to the meal hall co2 pocket.

My last game I had 2 exits both with exosuits and it was a headache for me. I either had to let them come in even if there wasn't a spot, and they'd just drop the exosuit on the ground. Even with the docks set at P9 they would never auto deliver them, I had to constantly manually select it. Then I set it to only be allowed if there was space in the dock, then I had dupes coming out one door, someone else would come in and put their suit in the slot, so the dupe that just left would have to go all the way around to the other side of the base to come back in.

I'm not entirely sure of the med bay mechanics, it was a room and said less likely to spread disease so figured I'd build it  =P Is there something better I should do instead?

I have it intentionally bridge prioritizing the exosuit docks. I wanted to make sure that at the start at least 1-2 were ready to go. Once they fill they're always all full. I suppose one way or the other doesn't make any difference, unless there's a downside at the beginning.

I kind of wanted to go intentionally small and compact this run I always end up doing about 12 dupes and a base way bigger than I need, then get annoyed my building designs are a do-as-I-go mess. Just going for something a little different.

The food layout and storage really is just a combination of ideas other's posted here in the forums. The only automation is the clock that I attempted to have only the right amount of food come through at a time. But because it's 6 dupes and a single packet is always like 8kg of food, it ends up stocked up anyways.

This is just the rail coming from the kitchen, goes straight into the chlorine storage. I plan on having a separate room for ingredients.

I'm not sure what the dropper technique is but I'll look it up.

The tile in the one wall between chlorine and mess hall shows refrigerated but not 0%, so I'm not sure what amount of time that gives.

oh, and for the automation. One is a temperature sensor connected to the lower right co2 pump system. If it gets too hot (or if co2 builds) it will pump and take warm air to cooling and bring back in cool air.

The research station is just a 10 second filter on pressure plates that activates the weezewat on an auto door on a 45 second buffer.

And the last automation is just my mess figuring out disco lights for the jukebot lol.

[tzionut]

Very nice. The question is why you have 2 showers and 3 toilets + 3 sinks? If you planing to make 3 shifts you will have 1 sink and 1 toilet for nothing, if you are using 2 shifts one dupe will not shower. 

Also ( i might have an obsession) but where is your fishes? Why refuse to let your dupe have a nice pacu view from the bed when it goes to sleep. Instead of counting seeps he can count pacus.

[crypticorb]

25 minutes ago, Nemisis311 said:

My last game I had 2 exits both with exosuits and it was a headache for me. I either had to let them come in even if there wasn't a spot, and they'd just drop the exosuit on the ground. Even with the docks set at P9 they would never auto deliver them, I had to constantly manually select it. Then I set it to only be allowed if there was space in the dock, then I had dupes coming out one door, someone else would come in and put their suit in the slot, so the dupe that just left would have to go all the way around to the other side of the base to come back in.

I always managed 4 exits and never allowed any breaches between them, so there was never a possibility of a dupe exiting one exosuit bay and entering into another. Saved a lot of headache, and any time I had to pump or ship materials from one section to another, I had a wall that gasses/liquids/rails passed through.

25 minutes ago, Nemisis311 said:

I'm not entirely sure of the med bay mechanics, it was a room and said less likely to spread disease so figured I'd build it  =P Is there something better I should do instead?

Since there's no associated bonus or effect with the room, you can just plop a med bed anywhere. I'd stick it with your research stations.

25 minutes ago, Nemisis311 said:

The food layout and storage really is just a combination of ideas other's posted here in the forums. The only automation is the clock that I attempted to have only the right amount of food come through at a time. But because it's 6 dupes and a single packet is always like 8kg of food, it ends up stocked up anyways.

This is just the rail coming from the kitchen, goes straight into the chlorine storage. I plan on having a separate room for ingredients.

I'm not sure what the dropper technique is but I'll look it up.

The tile in the one wall between chlorine and mess hall shows refrigerated but not 0%, so I'm not sure what amount of time that gives.

Here's the dropper technique, it's fantastic for fully automated critter replacement in ranches, dropping hot materials into coolant, infinite food/ingredient storage, basically anything where you need a shipping system to drop the food as an item back into the world.

Spoiler

The basic concept is the shipping arm will try to grab the food from the lower shipping receptical, and attempt to move it to the top loader. The simple automation loop on the right disables it for 0.1s every 3s, forcing the arm to drop it. The food will fall out of reach of the auto-sweeper, and be accessible to dupes. A dupe can reach the food under that 1-tile gap with a tiny water lock.

You can use this setup to store an infinite amount of food, ingrediants, or even use it for other materials such as slime dropped into cold water or chlorine. This setup doesn't rely on storage compactors at all, so space is never an issue.

I've heard that excessive amounts of items on the floor will cause some lag, but after hundreds of cycles I never noticed this made any difference.

Buffer set to 3s, Filter to 0.1s

 

[Nemisis311]

18 minutes ago, tzionut said:

Very nice. The question is why you have 2 showers and 3 toilets + 3 sinks? If you planing to make 3 shifts you will have 1 sink and 1 toilet for nothing, if you are using 2 shifts one dupe will not shower. 

Also ( i might have an obsession) but where is your fishes? Why refuse to let your dupe have a nice pacu view from the bed when it goes to sleep. Instead of counting seeps he can count pacus.

Mostly because I ran out of space and am ok with 1 dupe getting the short end lol. In the map seed I'm doing this run in, there is a water geyser so close that I cannot build out more than like 28 space from the printer without touching it. That's the only reason it's 8 dupes and not 8 with a slightly bigger build, and I wanted symmetry, so I'm limited at that width. omg windowed fish tanks, that's great.

13 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Since there's no associated bonus or effect with the room, you can just plop a med bed anywhere. I'd stick it with your research stations.

Here's the dropper technique, it's fantastic for fully automated critter replacement in ranches, dropping hot materials into coolant, infinite food/ingredient storage, basically anything where you need a shipping system to drop the food as an item back into the world.

  Reveal hidden contents

The basic concept is the shipping arm will try to grab the food from the lower shipping receptical, and attempt to move it to the top loader. The simple automation loop on the right disables it for 0.1s every 3s, forcing the arm to drop it. The food will fall out of reach of the auto-sweeper, and be accessible to dupes. A dupe can reach the food under that 1-tile gap with a tiny water lock.

You can use this setup to store an infinite amount of food, ingrediants, or even use it for other materials such as slime dropped into cold water or chlorine. This setup doesn't rely on storage compactors at all, so space is never an issue.

I've heard that excessive amounts of items on the floor will cause some lag, but after hundreds of cycles I never noticed this made any difference.

 

I avoided putting the med beds too low because I don't want them laying in the sometimes building CO2. I may extend down everything one more row, move med beds down, and make 2 bathroom rooms instead of one, giving everyone a shower  . That'd let me also move research out of the CO2 zone.

And that dropper idea is awesome! I'm so paranoid about water seals though lol, I'd be afraid the chlorine would escape.

[crypticorb]

19 minutes ago, tzionut said:

Very nice. The question is why you have 2 showers and 3 toilets + 3 sinks? If you planing to make 3 shifts you will have 1 sink and 1 toilet for nothing, if you are using 2 shifts one dupe will not shower. 

Also ( i might have an obsession) but where is your fishes? Why refuse to let your dupe have a nice pacu view from the bed when it goes to sleep. Instead of counting seeps he can count pacus.

I've seen a few fishtanks integrated into bases on the forums lately and it made me incredibly jealous, enough to completely start from scratch and gut my habitual base design to make sure dupes had a fish tank between rooms.

It's also a handy buffer for keeping things cool, so it's awesome looking and practical.

3 minutes ago, Nemisis311 said:

Mostly because I ran out of space and am ok with 1 dupe getting the short end lol. In the map seed I'm doing this run in, there is a water geyser so close that I cannot build out more than like 28 space from the printer without touching it. That's the only reason it's 8 dupes and not 8 with a slightly bigger build, and I wanted symmetry, so I'm limited at that width. omg windowed fish tanks, that's great.

I avoided putting the med beds too low because I don't want them laying in the sometimes building CO2. I may extend down everything one more row, move med beds down, and make 2 bathroom rooms instead of one, giving everyone a shower  . That'd let me also move research out of the CO2 zone.

I'm not sure why you aren't simply having a small sinkhole at the bottom right for crap gasses.

Sure, it'd break symmetry a bit, but it would allow you to utilize that entire floor without worry of suffocation.

[Nemisis311]

4 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I'm not sure why you aren't simply having a small sinkhole at the bottom right for crap gasses.

Sure, it'd break symmetry a bit, but it would allow you to utilize that entire floor without worry of suffocation.

Do you mean just like a 3-4 deep 3-4 wide drop in the bottom? Not a bad idea, I can do that and set up co2 up in it.

[crypticorb]

Just now, Nemisis311 said:

Do you mean just like a 3-4 deep 3-4 wide drop in the bottom? Not a bad idea, I can do that and set up co2 up in it.

Precisely like that. All you'd need is a gaseous sensor set to oxygen placed at the top of the pit, a NOT gate, and a pump. Works great for pumping anything not oxygen out and away for processing.

[avc15]

You may already know the following things.

- With 6 dupes if you put them all on different shifts you can manage with 1 toilet & 1 shower (aside from medbay)

- Your bedrooms: the tooltip is slightly misleading, but you don't actually need exactly 1 bed per room. it's *at least* 1 bed per room. So to save a little space, if you want, you could take out the doors separating them into individual bedrooms.

[Nemisis311]

12 minutes ago, avc15 said:

You may already know the following things.

- With 6 dupes if you put them all on different shifts you can manage with 1 toilet & 1 shower (aside from medbay)

- Your bedrooms: the tooltip is slightly misleading, but you don't actually need exactly 1 bed per room. it's *at least* 1 bed per room. So to save a little space, if you want, you could take out the doors separating them into individual bedrooms.

I just prefer them working together. Unless there's some numbers reason why individually is better, then reason > my opinion lol.

whhhaaaaattttt??? all this time I've been doing individual bedrooms because it says "single comfy bed".

[avc15]

well let's see if this is actually still the case, before I go making claims.

... yup, they still haven't changed it. Tooltip needs reworded, IMO.

But think about it literally, there IS a single comfy bed in each of these rooms. And another, and another.

Just slightly misleading.

[SackMaggie]

17 minutes ago, avc15 said:

well let's see if this is actually still the case, before I go making claims.

... yup, they still haven't changed it. Tooltip needs reworded, IMO.

But think about it literally, there IS a single comfy bed in each of these rooms. And another, and another.

Just slightly misleading.

Do they get Bedroom bonus ? Because What I do is put one bed in one room as you say.

And another thing I found out was "Lavatory + Shower  = Wash room".

Spoiler

 

[avc15]

Just now, SackMaggie said:

Do they get Bedroom bonus ?

I just showed a screenshot. It has bedroom bonus.

[tzionut]

This is what i do in my previous base

In my current game In the green area will be my future fish tank whit glass tile, the red area will be individual bedrooms, shower, toilet and sink

 

[SackMaggie]

Just now, avc15 said:

I just showed a screenshot. It has bedroom bonus.

I mean It count as a room but dupe actually got bonus in their stats ?

[Nemisis311]

I altered some things, which resulted in going to 12 dupes instead of 6 lol. That's fine though, I think the ability to have more will be funner than having to constantly shifting peoples jobs around because I don't have enough.

The cooked food storage is pushed out to make room for more mess tables, every dupe now has a shower lol, and I removed the sick bay. I also removed the doors between the beds for decor. If they change it in a future patch it gives me the space to re add them. I didn't re-add all of the research and a few med beds to the bottom and left, but that's where they'll be.

I'm still on the fence about making a second exit. My past experience didn't enjoy it, but if I don't allow them to loop around from one side to the other then it may work out; so I left space on the right for an additional exit point option.

I really wish the sick bay gave a bonus to speed of recovery, as it stands now it's pointless to use it. And an aspect of the game that's pointless shows a flaw in that system in one way or another.

 

Spoiler

 

[Neotuck]

17 minutes ago, Nemisis311 said:

 

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Are you sure those are bedrooms? they look too big for the room bonuses 

[Nemisis311]

1 minute ago, Neotuck said:

Are you sure those are bedrooms? they look too big for the room bonuses 

They most certainly are not! lol thanks for pointing that out, I didn't even double check when I put them back together. my wash room as well, I'll make sure to plop some doors down in them.

[clickrush]

I usually build crafting areas such as a kitchen with more decor in mind since there will be someone there working alot or even full time.

[Neotuck]

5 hours ago, clickrush said:

I usually build crafting areas such as a kitchen with more decor in mind since there will be someone there working alot or even full time.

I also like to leave one space for wheezies next to grills, they get hot fast

[crypticorb]

7 hours ago, Nemisis311 said:

You can easily bring that food storage back into the base by adding something like this:

By suspending the water cooler, it'll be unusable, but it'll still give the great hall bonus. Dupes will always use a recreational rooms buildings over the great hall building anyways, I've tested this.

The conveyor unloader is still accessible by dupes, I checked, and the water droplet forms a perfect waterlock, so long as dupes never pee on the floor there. Easy to set up, too.

You could further improve your CO2 pit by using airflow tiles covering it, thus allowing you to use that floorspace.