Better steel production....?

[Iriswaters]

Short version of the question:  How the heck do people come up with enough steel to cap off space?!?!  I'm closing on 1000 cycles and have covered less than 10% of it and am pretty sure space is going to eat me before I can manage to block it off.

Long version:
I am fairly new to the game, but have history with similar things, and am really getting into it.   At some point in an early play through I became enamored of the idea of max difficulty.   First seeing if it was even possible to survive(it is) and then getting into the idea of it, the degree to which it makes some of the existing challenges far more real.   More of an actual challenge.  In fact, I feel like other than the dietary one all they really do is take existing meant-to-be-challenging components that in normal mode feel very trivial and make them real.   Playing normal I never felt a need for ore scrubbers or vitamins, as sickness was really never that big a deal.  

Anyway, point is I am doing things somewhat out of order I think.  I'm busy condensing sour gas, but still have not fired a single rocket.   In fact I have been avoiding space.  Partly because it looks like you need max morale characters to do rocketry and I just .... can't.     But mostly due to steel.

This I really don't get.   I have a sizable hatch farm.   I have a bunch of shiny dreckos that I used for early plastic(I really should get around to making actual plastic from petrol, lol).  I have a pacu farm that I try to keep up on, killing off extra pacus so they don't consume every last ounce of algae in the universe all at once.  

But it takes 5 pacu eggs to make 100kg of steel.    Or 10 hatch eggs.  And the buggers stop popping out eggs as soon as there are like 5 at a time.   This means that a sizable pacu farm, without a ton of automation to make it function with perfect efficiency, ends up in practice popping out 100kg only once every few cycles.  And you need 10s of thousands of kgs for bunker tiles.

Now I am sure there is some way to mechanize this to perfectly optimize lime production, but even if you did it feels like it would take forever,   And the need for that in order to prevent the degree of fiddly micromanagement of farms needed to even produce a tiny crop is distressing.  

I feel like I am missing something?  People talking about getting out to space early, about finishing their bunker tiles in a few hundred cycles, and I am just wondering How?   At this rate I feel like I won't be done by cycle 2000.   And that leaves me wary of even approaching space.   But I have breached it, and it is busy slowly eating my asteroid....

Am I missing something?

[suicide commando]

First off, you're forgetting another source of lime.. Fossils.

if you dig out the oil biome, you'll have more than enough fossils to produce enough lime for steel so you can pretty much cover the entire top as well as have some left over for a rocket.

When it comes to producing lime from eggs, I find a HUGE fishtank ( like 20 * 50 tiles at least ) to be very useful.

All you need to do is put fish in, begin feeding for 20-30 cycles, this will jump start them into a breeding frenzy, after that, all you need to do is collect eggshells and meat. I put some autosweepers in the tank for that myself.

 

[Saturnus]

You know there's large deposits of fossil on the map, right?

[Iriswaters]

Hmm.

Yeah, I knew about fossils, but hadn't realized they were that effective.   I will switch over my efforts into that direction for now.   Eggs are being a very unsatisfactory. 

While I am here, does anyone know how to deal with broken POIs?   This is kind of in the way and I've got nothing I can do with it.   There is no way in and no means of accessing it in any way, but meteors can fly through it.   :/

 

[suicide commando]

You should be able to get in from the left, if you dig out that bottom entry tile.

 

[Craigjw]

About the large fish tanks, how do you collect the egg shells with the sweepers at such depths without submerging the sweeper.  so far, I've been creating fish tanks of about 4x20.

My current play through, I've managed to break into space at around cycle 220 and capped it off by building sacrificial huge thick tracts of maffic rock tiles from end to end.  In the mean time, the fossil I am mining from the oil biome, I'm using with the Rock crusher to turn into lime and with that, creating the steel to slowly start capping off the asteroid safely.  As I've capped it off before cycle 250, all the top most biomes are still completely intact and sealed from space and all the surrounding matter isn't super heated! 

I am also going to build some fish tanks, which I will use to supplement the fossil steel.   A useful thing to note about the fish, when you have a tamed fish, soon as you feed it, it will start to starve as soon as you stop feeding it. 

The trick is, to have a breeding tank, which has 3-5 tame fish, which you will feed some algae.  When eggs are hatched from this pool, transfer to a secondary huge tank, which has no food source in at all.  The fish in the stock tank, while you don't feed them, they won't starve.  Soon as you feed any of the fish in the stock tank, they will start to starve and will die before laying new eggs.  I know it's all wrong, but fish farming sucks balls.

Here's a good post discussing the auto fish farm.  My personal favourite design from this is on page 3 by QuQuasar.

 

[Angpaur]

7 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

About the large fish tanks, how do you collect the egg shells with the sweepers at such depths without submerging the sweeper.  so far, I've been creating fish tanks of about 4x20.

Last game update allows to submerge sweepers. I use mine underwater to collect meat and eggshels and are working well.

Regarding fish breeding - there were also some changes on that matter. You can no longer feed fish just a minimal amount of algae to keep it alive and happy for whole 25 cycles. When I tried to limit the algae my pacus started to starve and their reproduction rate was halted.

[Craigjw]

Just now, Angpaur said:

Last game update allows to submerge sweepers. I use mine underwater to collect meat and eggshels and are working well.

You have to be kidding me!  Sweeeeet.

[Iriswaters]

14 minutes ago, suicide commando said:

You should be able to get in from the left, if you dig out that bottom entry tile.

 

Nope.   It's been dug out a few times.   I have had a dupe stand in the door.   The bit of regolith that's there now is from a meteor flying -through- the POI and showering the area with debris.  

[Craigjw]

Just now, Iriswaters said:

Nope.   It's been dug out a few times.   I have had a dupe stand in the door.   The bit of regolith that's there now is from a meteor flying -through- the POI and showering the area with debris.  

Did you deconstruct the Steel doors, they look to be on the left hand side.

You can deconstruct the walls if you really want/need to.

[Iriswaters]

There were no doors by the time I got there.   And no, I cannot deconstruct the walls.  They are in shadow.   Everything is in shadow.   I am fairly certain that the entrance was destroyed by meteors somehow, due to only having partly formed during a shower.   Without an entrance, you can't access the walls of this kind of POI.

[Craigjw]

Maybe it's not the Gravitas lobby, the lobby normally appears with normal visibility.  Other POI's appear shadowed out, if it is one of these, there could be a door elsewhere, have you explored all sides?

Worse case scenario, save your game, switch to sandbox mode and reveal that part of the map, just don't re-save your game in sandbox, you'll not be able to go back to survival mode

[Saturnus]

Build a floor underneath. Find out where there's a hole in the roof. Construct ladders over that hole. Trap a dupe on the ladder. Deconstruct the ladder so the dupe falls into the FoW space. That usually solves it.

[SakuraKoi]

1 minute ago, Craigjw said:

Maybe it's not the Gravitas lobby

Speaking of which (and indeed, it is not). 1800 kg Steel can be pilfered from it. The 4 windows are and the door is made out of Steel, don't mind if I do~

[Craigjw]

With some POI's, they have 2 doors, one of which is only an exit, you can try as much as you like to bio scan this door, but it won't work, try finding the 2nd door.

Not being the gravitas, using sandbox will not work.

[Iriswaters]

35 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Build a floor underneath. Find out where there's a hole in the roof. Construct ladders over that hole. Trap a dupe on the ladder. Deconstruct the ladder so the dupe falls into the FoW space. That usually solves it.

That work, TYVM!

Though I ended up doing the ladders before the floor and nearly ended up killing my dupe.   Lol

 

[Craigjw]

perhaps the bio scan door was destroyed by the meteors, which caused a game logic issue, preventing dupes to pass.  This sounds like a bug to me.

[fishpear]

Dig the fossil underground and smash them into lime. Those lime will make your enough still to cover at least 70% of the sky.

Later, rush to build a rocket with a cargo bay and fetch the steel from sky (about 400kg steel per launch).