DarkMaster13

There's nothing wrong with the game having an easy mode.

All maps have huge deposits of phosphorite in toxic biomes. You aren't going to be burning through those during the time you'd actually be using an weezeworts. By that point, you'd have had plenty of time to move onto other cooling methods. Weezes are for early to mid game cooling or when you need minor cooling in one place. A method to get less power intensive and more permanent ice maker effect. They're great for keeping farms cool, countering any heat getting past insulated tile, and on the entrances to hot biomes to cap the heat. A single weeze only needs a dupe to come by ever three cycles, all plants that need it are fertilized every three cycles. Even in the late game, weezes are still extremely useful for spot cooling. So what do you use weezes for? You use around half a dozen of them to do environmental control around your base and farms. You do not use them for large scale industrial operations. You will need to use a more complicated cooling system for that. Which is better design, since they were just a set and forget system with no input costs or by-products.

World trait: Some oxygen included - Asteroid includes random oxylite deposits. Game name: Changed to 'Avoiding Heat Death Simulator'. AHDS

Guinea banana: So it's a sort of slickster/oxyfern plant. High pressure is a good idea for a farming challenge. It means the player will need to either use atmosuits or take popped eardrums. Or fully automate the farm and wait for the plants to drop (you can get around that by making them take a very long time to drop). It should maybe be used on a plant that doesn't generate gases, though consuming them is fine. Oxyferns tend to create very high pressures on their lower tile, so the wilted plant could potentially pressure itself without needing to be in a separate chamber. The player will need a high-pressure vent in that case, which requires plastic. Granaloe: Since it produces oxygen it suggests that the player would want this sitting in a pit so the oxygen can get up into their base. They could also pump the oxygen out of the room. The plant sounds like it would be fairly comparable to lettuce for growth difficulty, maybe a slight step up. You don't have to worry about temperature, like sleet wheat or nosh sprouts. Though it needs to be fairly valuable if it consumes natural gas. If this amount is quite low, shouldn't be too much of a problem. The generator uses 90 g/s for 800 watts, so I'd aim for something closer to 4-8 g/s for a domestic plant (1-2 g/s for wild). Oily moss: I don't think there's should be too many gas eating plants, especially not natural gas. Unless the intention is that this plant doesn't actually reduce your power output, since you can just burn the hydrogen. Instead this is something you can use to get plastic from natural gas at the cost of the polluted water and a bit of power? That's probably fine then. Icy lily: I actually like this one a fair bit. An alternative to balm lily that also does some cooling. Cooling you actually have to counter or else it will freeze the water it's sitting in. Tricky to strike a balance between it giving too much cooling value and being so low that it's ignored. Maybe keep it's growth band fairly limited? Between -20 and +10?

The one real bad thing that I think food poisoning should do is make dupes require more food. It doesn't have to be a huge amount, say an extra 250 kcal per cycle, but something that can becomes a problem for you the longer you take to address it. I have found that it's extremely annoying to avoid if you're using germy water outside of your toilet system. So much so that I usually delete the germy water with thimble reeds just so I don't have to deal with it. If it's exposed to anything that the dupes interact with, it quickly gets on everything and someone's always going to get sick. Trying to use a contaminated water geyser as my chief water supply was the first thing that made me actually get a medical dupe in my last dozen bases, just so I could make a supply of curative tablets. The negative stamina is actually pretty annoying, since it will make your dupes fall asleep during the day and get the sore back debuff. This isn't game ending, but you're losing a lot of labor time so long as your dupes have food poisoning.

If that's the case, could it be used as an excuse to make all heavii-conductive wire out of diamond? Now that it's a 50 k wire, there's a legitimate reason to want to upgrade to it and have it be another step for industry. Unfortunately, I don't think that's enough to exhaust the oil biome supply of diamond so you'd actually need to produce it yourself. Drill bits are the only other practical use of diamonds I can think of, which doesn't fit the game anywhere.

I'd like to add it would also be nice to have more uses for diamond than just heat transfer and as a glass substitute. That would also make production of diamonds worth while. More industries means more opportunities for puzzles to solve.

Plants: What separates the guinea banana plant from dusk caps? If it just consumes CO2, then it's largely just something that makes the game easier. You just plop down as many as you can for free carbon skimming and free food. It should require either some irrigation or fertilization with a material that's either in limited supply or requires manufacturing to create a production line for the food type. Alternatively, make it something that you cook with something else to get a useful food and requires sufficient CO2 per ingredient to cause problems. Any opportunity for a new puzzle to solve is an opportunity for more fun. The granaloe plan runs into the issue of natural gas being something that is extremely valuable to the player and if in limited supplies they usually have to spend on the gas range first. If you increase the supply of natural gas to compensate, the player just gets huge amounts of free power. The plant has to compete with the best power source in the game and I can't see a situation where you'd grow it without having a huge surplus of natural gas. Unless the intention is to use it as a power free way of scrubbing natural gas in your base from a flatulent dupe or from the new biome. It's basically a dasha saltvine in that case, an early way to delete an unwanted gas rather than venting it. Except that if you capture this gas, you can get a bunch of electric power with minimal waste out of it. I'd recommend making it at least consume something less valuable for other uses or make the plant really good and require some sort of extreme environment for an interesting puzzle. For example, requiring a steam atmosphere creates an entirely new puzzle to solve to farm it.

Like this. All but the right most bin are filled with 200 kg of ice and are regularly refilled whenever they melt. The rightmost bin is ice at max capacity, refilled when it gets low and is used to supply the other bins. Warm water is added to the system when the overall level gets too low. Note this is an older setup, my current one has the water pump in the far left side with more ice bins filling up the whole bottom. I don't use an air pump to remove the CO2 and let it flow out with airflow tiles.

Pepper bread? Yes they are, tofu and spicy tofu. You have to cook sleet wheat grains and nosh beans to eat them.

If you're on a sandstone start, it's a great idea to plant as many Bristles as you can around the printer pod as soon as you have hydroponics just for the labor savings. Don't bother cooking them.

Yes, you turn the labor cost into a power cost instead. You can also make the plants completely labor free by waiting an extra 4 cycles between harvests and letting the plant drop it's crop on its own, if you're willing to pay extra resources. However that requires the mechatronics engineering skill and by the time you have that the value of dupe labor changes dramatically. It's also pretty far on in the game, past the point where experienced players would be concerned with food types and new players probably won't use auto-sweepers at all. This guide is most useful early on and might be something worth adding to other guides or the assistant.

There are useful sources for the resources needed for the various food types in the game, but nothing relating to the labor costs of them. So I made my own spreadsheet trying to roughly estimate how much each food source costs in dupe labor to feed your colony. This is only looking at foods that are made exclusively with crops. Also not including pickled meal, since it doesn't change the Kcal of the meal lice, just gives it a longer shelf life. Firstly, for those who don't know it takes 10 seconds for a skill 0 dupe to harvest a plant and 45 seconds for a skill 0 dupe to cook a meal. Extra time has been added to each of these to try and account for travel times for the jobs. Second, while each increase in agriculture and cooking skill gives a work speed increase of 5%, which means at skill 20 it takes them half the time to finish the job, the information here assumes that all jobs are done with skill 0 dupes. That said, it is worth noting that no dupe will ever be able to cook on a grill or oven without at least +2 cooking skill and over time everything will get more efficient as your dupes gain athletics skill. Plants that require fertilization will have a dupe come by every 3 cycles to deliver 3 cycles worth of fertilization to the plant. It only takes the dupe a couple seconds to pick up and drop off the fertilization, but usually there's some travel time involved and dupes will pick up enough to fertilize several plants at once so it's estimated to have an average time of 7 seconds per fertilization. We will also be assuming that any plant that requires irrigation will be inside a hydroponics farm, so it doesn't have to be fertilized twice. The longer it takes between harvests, the less labor dupes need to spend on harvesting the plants and moving the crop to and from storage or the kitchen. The total labor time is the sum of the time it takes to harvest the plant, fertilize the plants, and cook the plants, calculated in seconds / 1000 Kcals. Spreadsheet with data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y4I1GvFLBzCMGHsXjA-wddyxH5QXh2UhAR-8iOzoBRA/edit?usp=sharing The clear winner right away is raw bristle berry. That's because it's the only item here that requires no fertilization. Once it's in hydroponics, the only thing dupes need to do is harvest it. Lettuce also does surprisingly well, considering on the surface it looks like it would be a very demanding crop. However waterweed actually consumes very little water and bleach stone for its Kcal, the only real downsides being a short shelf life and taking up a lot of storage space. Berry sludge is the only cooked food that actually beats out a raw food for labor costs, which is mushrooms (also the most expensive raw food to grow in labor costs). Otherwise cooking food always costs more labor than not cooking, though it also almost always costs less resources to use cooked food instead of raw food and always gives better morale.

Irregular oil and burried oil traits can still cause that. Verdante is just garunteed to have those. Swamp biomes are a sure fire way to prove you're not on arboria.

Ice biomes aren't exactly rare, but they cannot appear nearby the starting biome. You'll have to cross at least one biome layer to find them. If you're on Verdante, there should be swamp/slime biomes nearby your start and scattered oil biomes with oil resovoirs in them. If you don't see either of these, then you're definitely not on Verdante.