Power shortage, thoughts?

[Neotuck]

58 minutes ago, Jumpp said:

Also? If you're in a power crunch, it may be time to give your power use a good going-over. If you haven't done it in some time, there may be a fair amount of waste. If you're running any filters, consider replacing them with element sensors and shutoffs.

careful when running element sensors and shutoffs, if your pipes have a backup they don't work and will start sending wrong elements down a pipe

same problem also happens during a power outage

58 minutes ago, Jumpp said:

If you have any cooling noodles that are pump-driven, maybe replace it with a reservoir (free built-in pump.)

so is a pipe bridge, and much cheaper 

[Jumpp]

20 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

so is a pipe bridge, and much cheaper 

I'm sad to learn that that still works. I remember doing that back in the early days, and it always felt cheaty.

[Neotuck]

Just now, Jumpp said:

I'm sad to learn that that still works. I remember doing that back in the early days, and it always felt cheaty.

simply put, anything with a green arrow on a pipeline is a pump

[crypticorb]

14 minutes ago, Jumpp said:

I'm sad to learn that that still works. I remember doing that back in the early days, and it always felt cheaty.

It's odd that bridges work in this way, and not at all intuitive for new players, but it is heavily ingrained in the core game, and has been a core part of gameplay since the earliest stages of piping. I doubt it's ever going to go away, much like the one-element-per-tile rule, it has been a core element of ONI for so long that removing it would break/ruin far more elements of gameplay than it would fix.

For comparison, it's like complaining that everything in Minecraft is purely cube oriented, and all blocks are cube shaped, even if they should be round. It's been a core part of the gameplay that it can't be changed, and the vast majority of the playerbase would be worse off if it were altered.

[Jumpp]

Makes sense. And I can't explain why a free pump in a bridge feels cheaty while a free pump in a reservoir does not. (Maybe it's the expense/size of the reservoir?)

Talking about what feels cheaty reminds me of when I used to play Nethack. There was a sort of shorthand players would sometimes put in their .sig (a block of text that's automatically appended to one's posts in the then-common discussion forums) that'd detail a player's willingness to employ a variety of questionable play techniques. These generally weren't interesting to anyone but the writer, but they gave one a clear sense of the great variety of opinion out there among the players. Everyone's got their weird lines they will and won't cross. For instance:

- I don't use infinite-storage schemes.
- I use pumpless noodles, but ONLY if driven by reservoirs.
- Even in my in principle non-debug "honest" games I run in debug mode and will use teleport to recover unsightly bits of material from inside sealed-off machines.
- If it's late in the cycle (and I'd therefore lose a bunch of work by restoring from the morning save), I'll use teleport to rescue dupes from suffocation due to careless job-queing.
- I shamelessly exploit the heat-destroying properties of water sieves, while hoping that someday they "fix" it.
- I shamelessly restore from earlier saves when things go wrong.

[Saturnus]

19 minutes ago, Jumpp said:

Talking about what feels cheaty reminds me of when I used to play Nethack. There was a sort of shorthand players would sometimes put in their .sig (a block of text that's automatically appended to one's posts in the then-common discussion forums) that'd detail a player's willingness to employ a variety of questionable play techniques. 

There are no questionable play techniques in ONI. None. End of.

ONI is a single player game so whatever way you want to play is perfectly fine. It's not a competitive game. Truth of the matter is that because the game is still in early access I'd strongly encourage people to use as many exploits as humanly possible. It is only then that we can get them fixed and have a more balanced and exploit free game in the long run.

[Jumpp]

Nethack, too, was [er, is] a single-player game. Nevertheless, players had widely varying views about the legitimacy of different techniques.

I polypiled vigorously, trained my pets to steal, wished for artifacts, and would read the source code to learn the meaning of messages that I didn't immediately understand.

Another player might eschew polypiling but gleefully commit the objectively heinous sin of saveloading. These ethical standards were personal and idiosyncratic, but existed nonetheless without being grounded in a principle of fair multiplayer competition.

[Neotuck]

28 minutes ago, Jumpp said:

II can't explain why a free pump in a bridge feels cheaty while a free pump in a reservoir does not. (Maybe it's the expense/size of the reservoir?)

I bet it's because reservoirs feel like water towers used in real life

Water towers don't use pumps because they rely on gravity to pump water throughout the towns they serve

Unfortunately gravity has no effect on the contents of pipes in this game

[Saturnus]

@Jumpp Difference is Nethack is a finished and released game. ONI is not. The only way we can get a balanced, exploit free and as bug free game as possible when it is finally released is to exploit the hell out of it now and find all those bugs.

I would feel I did the community a disservice if I didn't actively spend time of digging out bugs, finding exploits, and maximizing the crap out of them.

[Jumpp]

Okay, yeah. That's a really good point and a significant distinction.

[Neotuck]

12 hours ago, phod said:

I took some time last night to dig cracked tiles to see if I could find any hatches. I don't know where they went, but I didn't find a single one. I imagine they're all stuck together somewhere and I just haven't found them. I don't see any reason they'd have died. 

Thanks again for all the comments and reading material. I'll pick an option once I get through all of this information.

Do you know how to breed stone hatches?

finding one hatch is enough if you have a Rancher

Start by feeding it sedimentary rock, this will increase the hatches chance of laying a stone hatch egg

once you got some stone hatches switch to feeding them igneous rock, it's the most common element in the map so you should have tons to spare

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

On 14/11/2018 at 9:13 PM, phod said:

Since they've added dirt as a requirement for fertilizer synthesizers, are they still a useful / sustainable way to create some natural gas?

 

No, they aren't. You'd need 9 of them to keep one natural gas generator fully operational.

Couple of things you can do:

-Get engine tune ups for your generators. A 50% bonus is very handy when you have power shortages.

-Use petroleum generators. Usually the oil biome holds vasts amounts of crude oil so you can run dozens and dozens of cycles without worrying. Also, both the oil well and the oil refinery produce roughly enough natural gas to support one natural gas generator each. Make use of those synergies.

-Build 2-3 full size hatch stables to get more coal, so you can run coal generators without burning outright through your reserves.

-Automate your power generation. I myself have my whole active power generation tiered: between 75-90% smart battery charge I have my natural gas generators running. Between 50%-75% I have my petroleum generaturs running, and between 25%-50% I have a whole battery of coal generators running as emergency power supply. I also have hydrogen generators, but those are constantly running.

[phod]

Hello again everyone

I manged to find some time to play, and I made some progress. I still have not found any hatches. To keep things rolling, I set up a room for petroleum generators right by my NG storage tank, and when there's enough NG in the room, it pumps it into storage. I plan to move my oil refinery in there as well. I wasn't aware just how much NG those buildings produce. Always learning. I will need to look at cooling that room a bit, but I have lots of options there.

I have made a habit of going for smart batteries and atmo sensors early on, and I do use the tiered system ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy suggested. That's all in place and working, though I admit there's room for improvement. I put the atmo sensors above my algae deoxidizers to conserve power and algae. I leave them there later in the game as a safety backup in case something goes wrong with the electrolyzers.

Lastly, I added two new dupes, for 11 total. Both of them had very low athletic skills, so I made a special room just for them with hamster wheels set at high battery levels. It's a little extra power, and both are over level 5 athletic skill now. I still have more than enough oxygen, and a new electrolyzer system ready to be hooked up when needed. Food is still increasing, up to 1.3mkcal now, I'll probably just turn off production for a while.

It looks like the power shortage isn't an issue any longer, using suggestions from everyone here. I was able to keep steel production going through most of it, and I now have more than enough to protect the entire top of the base. Next time I start fresh, I'm going to focus more on ranching, it's not usually something I do much of, aside from fish for egg shells.

Thanks again for all the info and ideas, I appreciate it very much. Now, off to work.