A bunch of things I can't figure out

[Jigsawn]

I'm a new player who has just failed on my third major base - and I need some help before I give up on ONI completely. Although I've already sank a serious amount of time into this game there's still some fundamentals I am clearly missing - mostly because it's not explained in the game and is way too obscure to figure out yourself without delving deep into forums like this - or resorting to Youtube tutorials. For anyone interested I have a new player feedback thread in the Feedback and Suggestions subforum which I will update soon with my latest thoughts.

So there's a number of things I am struggling with:

Polluted Water vs Water with Germs 

I know polluted water is green, and says polluted water when you hover over it with the cursor. So what is "pure water" with germs in it? Does that count as polluted too? If so, what is the difference and why can't I treat it like polluted water? I have ran into problems twice now with having pure water infected with food poisoning/slimelung and had to cordon it off and start a new supply.

 

Killing Germs in Water

So following from that, I can't figure out how to kill the germs in pure water that's been infected. I don't seem to be able to run it through the polluted water>clear water machine. I read on here that chlorine is good for killing food poisoning - so I sealed my corrupted water tank off and pumped chlorine gas into it (above the water surface), joined by another pump which pumped out carbon dioxide only (a vent was emptying the rest of the gas back into the water tank - which eventually flooded the whole chamber. Yet the germ count remained ticking down very slowly despite the water surface being exposed to chlorine. Clicking on the water didn't show any record of the chlorine at all. Was this the wrong idea, and if not, what did I do wrong in the implementation? In frustration I did a search and saw other forum advice that you need to boil/cool water to kill germs - but this is really not made clear in the game, and I have never had access to any way to do that yet (I've only gotten to tier 3 research) and have enough struggles surviving as it is.

 

Base Overheating 

I know this is a common source of woe and it helped in killing my base on the 2nd attempt. On this third attempt I knew to expect it, so built all my farms in the coolest area of the base. I used thermal insulation tiles around power generators and around areas which were bordering hot zones (anywhere where the temperature was starting to go over 30 degrees). On my map that's half the terrain around my base, I don't know if that is normal. Anyway, just like in the second attempt, after around 50-70 cycles all except the inner most part of my base was above 30 degrees - meaning my mealwood wouldn't grow and effectively killing me. I tried the manual fans, but my dupes were too stretched to use them properly and by then it was too late. I had even insulated the farms with insulation tiles and layered the hot bits of them with thermal wall panels - to no avail.

Looking online, it seems this is a big issue with many players and it's way too hard to figure out what the worst heat offenders are. With machines scattered over the base presumably they are giving off more and more heat the more you make, but I try to space them out and keep things like generators on the outskirts and in rooms with insulator tiles. I can't see any way that a player can figure out how to combat this unless they do many many playthroughs or just come online for help. I've looked online for answers and they are all very complex or require a very advanced knowledge of the game.

Most people say to get plants from the ice biome. I've never even seen the ice biome even on the outskirts of my viewable map in any of my three games and my bases have been quite large (I guess for a beginner base) - usually using up most of the temporate biome and digging beyond for resources. I can't ever dig too far out at the stages I've reached because there are too many hazards like massive slime fields, gases or very hot zones. Surely there must be some easier way that I am missing to keep things cool - or do I just have to somehow find the resources to have dupes always riding fans to keep the critical farm areas alive. Any simple advice appreciated - and I think this is a major issue in the game that they need to do a much better job of explaining, or tone the heat difficulty way down in the "early game". Maybe I have just been unlucky with my worlds, I don't know how random the world generator is?

Power Strain and Wire Overloads

From reading online it seems that power strain (yellow wires) just means your wires are taking a load. So what then is causing my wires to overload and break? From online help it sounds like it is the wire is taking too much wattage through it - is that because I have too many generators or batteries hooked up to a wire system?

This third base attempt I had 4 seperate wire systems by the end, each with a few batteries and various generators attached (some with a few bike gennies, some with a coal generator, some with both). I also had the main cables upgraded to the thick wire, with small wires coming off the main wire. No transformers - I haven't tried them in the game yet, but I couldn't see more wattage going through the wires (even the small ones) than their capacity. Is there an alert or warning about when your wires are overloading, and what causes it?

Having multiple wire systems was incredibly metal intensive and keeping 4 sets of generators going caused lots of problems, like sections of my base going unpowered at critical times. Again I appreciate the depth of the system but for new players it's incredibly confusing and frustrating to figure out with very poor visibility of where the problems actually lie. What am I doing wrong?

Metal Shortages

In the last two games I have been plagued with metal shortages, usually at the stage I am starting to push outwards into slime/chlorine hot zone territory. This is when I need metal most because I have to make new machines to deal with the new diseases, gases and so on (in the first game I never made it that far). Further metal deposits on my latest attempt were all gold only and deep into the slime zones - I managed to get some of it but not enough - and some buildings seem to require copper or iron instead. I can't start tearing my base infrastructure apart to salvage the metal, and everything I build is essential - aside from 2 long copper fireman poles which I assume is worth the metal cost in increased efficiency? Have I just been unlucky or am I somehow spending metal too much? 

 

Your thoughts and any advice on where I have been going wrong appreciated - I don't necessarily want to be told outright every solution, but pointed in the right direction would be helpful

Cheers

 

[The Plum Gate]

Avoid using water filtration technology unless you just happen to have a germ free supply of polluted water ... at which point you can use the filter - but only feed machines which use ( convert it )..

I generally don't deal with germy clean water, but if I had to..

I generally feed all the stuff with germs to plants. Thimble reed is great way of getting rid of toilet effluent.

I avoid plumbed sinks - and generally go from wash basin to hand sanitizer as soon as possible.

If they use this before they shower, then there won't be germs in the poluted water...if they shower at all.

Despite all my efforts of making germ free lavatories, they still manage to somehow screw up and get food poisoning germs everywhere if there's an outhouse in play.

I have avoided the slime biome mostly... can't really justify the mess for mushrooms in thos update - and gold amalgam is seldom used if used properly.

Seek out iron and you'll surely never need a large farm of pinchapeppers.

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Jigsawn

First off, welcome to ONI

I'll try to answer your questions. I don't know everything but I'm positive people here will help. I'll try to answer the questions one at a time to avoid big walls of text.

Water with germs is germy water or germ infected water, food poison infected water if it's yellow sprinkled in germ overlay or slimelung infected if it's green sprinkled in germ overlay

Note: check out the germ overlay and click on the bacteria. It will show you what inhibits spreading

For example slimelung dies off in oxygen and halfs it's count every circle in pure water

Slimelung - no big deal in pure water. It will die off pretty fast. 

Food poisoning - should die off as well but I'm not sure right now please check in germ overlay, I'll edit if I did wrong . Just don't use the water to prepare food

If your main reserve is contaminated. Look on the map for germ free polluted water and pump it through a water sieve to a save containment so you buy yourself some time

[The Plum Gate]

Oh the mysterious thermal comfort overlay is handy as well... duplicants can handle a wide variety of temperature ranges - it's the plants that need the most attention.

I hate to reference the US system but it's just what I am used to - in O2, dupes are happy between 42f and 104f.

For temperature reference this the high end of sleet wheat and the low end of pinchapepper. They're happy anywhere a bristle blossom can grow but a little more tolerant on the heat.

[Jigsawn]

Cheers. I was fortunate because I still had 2 underwater lakes to tap when my main supply got food poisoning. So my emergency measure was to quickly dismantle all pumps from the contaminated supply, and tunnel out to the other lakes to set up a bottling pump and water pump again. Food poisoning multiplies in polluted water, which is another reason why I was curious. In fact my contaminated supply was ticking down germrate 3% per cycle only (even though technically the water is "clean"). Clean water makes it die slowly, I think. Stuff which kills it according to the game are chlorine, bleach stone, solid (?), gas. However right now the only way I can see to clean it is to wait for 30+ cycles whilst it slowly dies. Or to pump it to a cave with bleach stone in it, where the water touches the bleach stone, I guess ? - and then pump it out again. Maybe that's the only solution.

So if you have clean water with germs in it, is there any building/machine that you can safely run it through without infecting some part of your ecosystem and ruining your base?

[The Plum Gate]

Solid = anything not a liquid or genetic ooze, ie food. So any ore.

Bleachstone will behave like oxylite, for chlorine instead once it is dug up - so store it under water unless you need a room full of chlorine..

It won't disenfect anything but itself in solid form.

[vonVile]

The difference between fresh Water and Polluted Water is polluted is unclean as in it has dirt. Germs are a separate aspect.

The best thing to do is have 2 separate water systems. Fresh water for food and polluted water for bathroom utilities. Dupes won't get sick showering is germ filled clean water, so all you have to do is recycle the polluted water made from Dupes. Make a Polluted Water reservoir that's 10x10 tiles and pump Polluted Water out to a Sleeve to supply your bathroom system that returns to the reservoir. I don't have the exact math, but it'll take at least 400 Cycles to fill the reservoir off a colony of 6 Dupes. Well before that time you should be using the Polluted Water for Pincha Peppers or Fertilizers, which will drain the PW faster than your Dupes can produce it.

When it comes to Slimelung you need to look at your Germ Overlay to see where the Slimelung is to avoid it. If you do have to dig through it, do it is small chunks and don't have the Dupes stay in that area for too long. The germs will slowly die off in Oxygen and very slowly in OC2. The best thing to do is place Deoderizers to get rid of both Polluted Oxygen and Slimelung in a confined area.

As for the Slimelung infected Slime, the best thing to do is make Storage in Polluted Water to block Slime from venting Polluted Oxygen. I like to put my Storage for Slime in my Polluted Water reservoir. The Slimelung in Storage won't spread to the Polluted Water.

When it comes plants I gave up on everything but the Mushrooms. They are the easiest to grow because all you need are; CO2, Slime, and temperature under 95 degrees. So the best thing to do is plant them in the lowest point of your base to allow CO2 to collect. All you have to do is feed them Slime. At some point you will have to make a greenhouse for them where you need Exo-Suits to enter.

[Yoma_Nosme]

Ok how to kill germs

Food poisoning in your water reserve is bad you will have to heat it but this brings other problems. Chlorine on top won't help.

Best thing is to don't get it. Sounds silly but yeah...

Please share what happened. Maybe it's best to help you to don't make this mistake again 

Chlorine can help you with slimelung tough.

When I start digging into slime biome here's what I do and this has worked every time

1. Build wash basins (plural) before dupes enter your base from the biome. That's very important

2. Build a 2 tile deep hole and put a storage compactor inside. Put a bottle emptier on the side and fill it half full with water. Set the storage to slime only and with high priority (like 7). Oh yeah. Build it before the wash basins

So your dupes will dig a chunk of slime and immediately put it inside storage and wash their hands before going inside base

No storage inside base should allow slime!

And use air deodoriser in the slime biome to filter polluted oxygen so slimelung will die off

[Jigsawn]

2 minutes ago, The Plum Gate said:

Oh the mysterious thermal comfort overlay is handy as well... duplicants can handle a wide variety of temperature ranges - it's the plants that need the most attention.

I hate to reference the US system but it's just what I am used to - in O2, dupes are happy between 42f and 104f.

For temperature reference this the high end of sleet wheat and the low end of pinchapepper. They're happy anywhere a bristle blossom can grow but a little more tolerant on the heat.

On my three games so far I have only seen pinchapepper in the chlorine zones and never got close to actually incorporating them, or the chlorine zone into my bases. I've never even seen sleet wheat although I would love to have it! I have only got as far as pumping hydrogen/chlorine into my base to use for machines. 

All my farming so far has been mealwood only, I have farmed bristle brushes but alone they can't be made into anything edible. So it's always game over for me once my mealwood farms start heating up. This game I even moved my whole mealwood farm to a cooler area, but half of it still overcame to heat anyway.

That reminds me of another question:

Pressure 

This is another aspect of the game I can't find any way to visualise. A lot of the time my algae machines reach max pressure, even though I have spaced them out around the base on different floors and often with ladder shafts above them. Pressure also stunts my plant growth but I don't know if it's because my base is too full of gases (is that even possible?) or if it's some other issue. Am I missing something obvious about visualising Pressure in the game? How are players to know how to deal with it? I'm not a scientist, I don't know about how different gases react and what they "weigh", and what to do if an area is over-pressurised.

[Yoma_Nosme]

Thermal

What I do and plum has mentioned it already. Look at the thermal overlay and start pulling in insulated walls or regular abysalite walls along the border of green to yellow. This will help to avoid heat creeping slowly in. And try to keep batteries outside the base never mind the extra resource for cables. Batteries just heat like crazy. Same goes for coal generators

@Jigsawn

Could you provide a screenshot of your base. I think the pressure question would be answered best with some do-and-don't

I guess your base is "crammed" up with walls and you lack some airflow tiles or you overuse metal doors but I can't tell without a picture

 

[Kasuha]

41 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Polluted Water vs Water with Germs 

Polluted water is a different "element" than clean water. It has lower freezing point and higher boiling point. It cannot be used for purposes where (clean) water is expected just like clean water cannot be used in machines that expect polluted water (sieve is the only exception I know of). Presence of germs is additional attribute - machines processing either water will accept it both with and without germs and then the output may contain some of germs that came into the processing. For instance fertilizer synthesizer will break if you send clean water to it but it will work just fine on polluted water both with and without germs. 

45 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Killing Germs in Water

Germs are only dangerous if your duplicants consume or inhale them. They consume them if they eat infected food and they may infect it if they carry it while they're covered in germs. Inhalation may come from breathing germy polluted oxygen in swamp biomes or released from infected slime, or if you use infected algae in your deoxydizers. Regarding germy water, the best approach here is just to not use water to make food. AFAIK all other uses of the water are fine even if the water is germy. Another option is to wait till the infection dies off, or to warm up the water until it dies off. But since a lot of the game's challenge is about battling heat, warming up your water pool may not be a good idea.

49 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Base Overheating

My approach here is to not let the base warm up in the first place. Since heat goes up easily, it's better to build cold parts at the bottom and push all hot parts to the top - farm at the bottom, all batteries, computers, wheels, grills, even storage compactors at the top. Then the bottom of your base may stay cold even though the top has already warmed. The final solution comes when you employ electrolyzers to generate oxygen - you need to cool that oxygen anyway, so you cool it to comfortable level and fill your base with it. At the same time push all heat generators out of your base and keep them in places that are hot anyway.

53 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Power Strain and Wire Overloads

The yellow color of wires does not mean any danger. You can freely ignore it and just pay attention to the tooltip that appears when you place mouse over wire - actual and potential draw is the important part. The load is applied on any part of continuous wire, even if it's a dead end with nothing hooked to it. If there's a bit of wire that can't take the total load, it can start breaking. Use single type of wire for the whole circuit, use transformers to transfer power from heavy wire distribution grid to your local 1 kW or 2 kW subgrids on standard or conductive wire, respectively. Don't pull heavy wire through your base, your duplicants won't like it.

57 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Metal Shortages

The only answer here is, if you feel shortage of anything, go out and mine it. Don't build complex machinery, just necessary access paths and ladders. Don't overdo metal refining, only refine what you really need. You don't need to have conductive wire everywhere, two 1 kW circuits in standard wire are as good as one 2 kW circuit, you may only need one more transformer to keep them both fed.

Expanding through caustic (purple) and ice (blue) biomes is safe, slimelung germs are only in swamp (green) biomes and you can avoid these for the most part of early and mid game. You only need limited amount of gold amalgam in early/mid game for heat resistant machines (geyser taming) and some can always be found on germ-free boundaries of slime biomes. 

[Jigsawn]

Thanks for the pointers folks. My germ infested water wasn't a dealbreaker in this game because I had backup water supplies. So you can really use germ water for showering in? That sounds crazy to me!

As for polluted water I had a nice little system where all my polluted water from all sources was going into a manmade tank and then filtered through the filtration machine before pumping out nice clean water. The polluted dirt from the machine went to my compost piles.

I am curious as to whether water in the game is ever "lost"? If I am using water on plants, oxygen etc-  a lot of it is going through my dupes and coming back out as polluted water, right? So then am I on the way to having a self-replenishing water supply with my method of cleaning polluted water, or will it run out eventually? I don't really want to know the exact optimal way to do it, I can figure that out myself, but curious to know if it's possible to have a self sufficient water loop with just polluted water > clean water.

How did my water get infested with germs? Because I didn't realise that placing pipes means the block "in front" of the pipe gets destroyed in the process. So I accidentally opened a big hole right in the bottom of my lake - and guess what was underneath... my compost heaps - DOH. Red alert managed to tile up the compost heap room in time before the whole base was flooded but by then my lovely lake was full of germs! Won't be making that mistake again (though I said that in attempt 2 and flooded my base in exactly the same way!).

Slime I am learning to deal with - Slimelung killed my 2nd base because I didn't realise how dangerous it was. But I was starting to deal with the slime biome in this 3rd attempt when my heat problems became too bad. This time knowing the danger of slime, I was prepared. I set up a little airlock room to enter the biome, with a sink inside. Then inside the slime biome I had a few slime>algae machines and some of those little air purifiers.

Finally, thanks to looking online last time I died from slimelung, I knew about the importance of ore scrubbers, so I had two set up behind the algae machines to clean anything heading out of the biome back to the base. I also set up a load of storage for slime and algae only, only accessible after going through the ore scrubbers. This all seemed to be ok - my base was hygenic and so my dupes could mine the biome slowly and the purifiers got rid of the slimelung in the air. The airlock prevented any from getting into my base. However then I had to worry about oxygen in the slime biome because the airlock prevented any from getting in via the base. So I built the oxidiser in the slime biome, but messed up because I forgot it also outputs hydrogen. Next time I do that, I'll have to put a gas pump to get rid of the hydrogen or it will soon become fatal.

Although heat was the main problem in this latest run, I also had big algae shortages. I was still only using algae machines for oxygen - in the past I found that the oxiders used waaay too much water. However I didn't manage to get into the slime biome fast enough - by that point my algae was already critically low, and my slime>algae machine couldn't make algae fast enough to keep up with demand. I guess in future I will have to have a few oxiders and manage the water drain instead.

13 minutes ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

Thermal

What I do and plum has mentioned it already. Look at the thermal overlay and start pulling in insulated walls or regular abysalite walls along the border of green to yellow. This will help to avoid heat creeping slowly in. And try to keep batteries outside the base never mind the extra resource for cables. Batteries just heat like crazy. Same goes for coal generators

@Jigsawn

Could you provide a screenshot of your base. I think the pressure question would be answered best with some do-and-don't

I guess your base is "crammed" up with walls and you lack some airflow tiles or you overuse metal doors but I can't tell without a picture

 

Thanks. Yes my thermal overlay was mostly greenish/yellow. Batteries in the base is probably a main culprit then. I did use insulated walls from quite early on, but didn't seem to help.

Pressure-wise, yes I imagine its all the enclosed rooms. How do I take a zoomed out screenshot of the base - you folks seem to be able to zoom out further than I can? Maybe it's because I'm on the lowest resolution?

[Yoma_Nosme]

Use mesh doors inside your base to allow airflow. And airflow tiles 3-4 piece per floor should suffice just spread them out a little...

I think I know what's another problem. You said you can't zoom out a whole lot. I think that's because you haven't dug out too much. Dig some floors downward so the co2 can fall down. This should help with pressure a fair bit and solve maybe the zoom issue.

Screenshots with print screen button on your keyboard

[Jigsawn]

8 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

My approach here is to not let the base warm up in the first place. Since heat goes up easily, it's better to build cold parts at the bottom and push all hot parts to the top - farm at the bottom, all batteries, computers, wheels, grills, even storage compactors at the top. Then the bottom of your base may stay cold even though the top has already warmed. The final solution comes when you employ electrolyzers to generate oxygen - you need to cool that oxygen anyway, so you cool it to comfortable level and fill your base with it. At the same time push all heat generators out of your base and keep them in places that are hot anyway.

The yellow color of wires does not mean any danger. You can freely ignore it and just pay attention to the tooltip that appears when you place mouse over wire - actual and potential draw is the important part. The load is applied on any part of continuous wire, even if it's a dead end with nothing hooked to it. If there's a bit of wire that can't take the total load, it can start breaking. Use single type of wire for the whole circuit, use transformers to transfer power from heavy wire distribution grid to your local 1 kW or 2 kW subgrids on standard or conductive wire, respectively. Don't pull heavy wire through your base, your duplicants won't like it.

The only answer here is, if you feel shortage of anything, go out and mine it. Don't build complex machinery, just necessary access paths and ladders. Don't overdo metal refining, only refine what you really need. You don't need to have conductive wire everywhere, two 1 kW circuits in standard wire are as good as one 2 kW circuit, you may only need one more transformer to keep them both fed.

Expanding through caustic (purple) and ice (blue) biomes is safe, slimelung germs are only in swamp (green) biomes and you can avoid these for the most part of early and mid game. You only need limited amount of gold amalgam in early/mid game for heat resistant machines (geyser taming) and some can always be found on germ-free boundaries of slime biomes. 

8

Thanks for all the info. I did have my farm at the bottom in this latest base, but it was fairly close to the hot (chlorine) biome so maybe that eventually seeped through, even though I used insulated walls. Perhaps when I removed the insulated floors in the farm rooms to make farm tiles (after planter boxes) that let too much heat travel through the farming areas. I will screenshot it later.

Wires I will have to load up the save and see if I had any extra load I might have missed. There must be some then. In future I guess I will have to try transformers. Is it a good idea to have seperate wire systems around the base - surely using just one wire loop will overload like crazy (pretty sure this is what happened in my second base, which had wire fails all over the place).

Mining, yes I was doing as you suggested. Maybe I was just unlucky with where things were placed. I didn't even get to refining metal in this attempt because my metal was so limited. Perhaps I wasted too much on building the fireman poles. Can you build wire from any metal, or just copper? I was having problems finishing off buildings/wiring because of copper or iron shortages.

Is the caustic biome the chlorine one? In my latest game it had very little space to manevuer, full of huge hydrogen and chlorine pockets. It was also really hot - like 30-50 degrees. Presumably sending your dupes in there is suicide? I guess if you want to expand into those kind of areas you'd have to pump the gases out to a holding area first. If I try again, maybe I'll get there one day!

[Yoma_Nosme]

9 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Perhaps I wasted too much on building the fireman poles. Can you build wire from any metal, 

Is the caustic biome the chlorine one? In my latest game it had very little space to manevuer, full of huge hydrogen and chlorine pockets. It was also really hot - like 30-50 degrees. Presumably sending your dupes in there is suicide? I guess if you want to expand into those kind of areas you'd have to pump the gases out to a holding area first. If I try again, maybe I'll get there one day!

You can build them from any metal. Best would be iron you get from caustic biome.

Your dupes will be fine 50°C is no big deal

[Kasuha]

6 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Is the caustic biome the chlorine one? In my latest game it had very little space to manevuer, full of huge hydrogen and chlorine pockets. It was also really hot - like 30-50 degrees. Presumably sending your dupes in there is suicide? I guess if you want to expand into those kind of areas you'd have to pump the gases out to a holding area first.

Yes, caustic/chlorine/hydrogen/whatever. They're safe, don't worry to send your dupes there, they can hold their breath for quite a while, even in chlorine. Just build an airlock in the way so the gases and heat don't spread to your base too fast.

9 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Is it a good idea to have seperate wire systems around the base - surely using just one wire loop will overload like crazy

Start with one hamster wheel, battery, research table and deoxydizers. Then build another hamster wheel, battery, and massage table. Two to three <1 kW circuits with one hamster wheel each are fine in early bases, just make sure the machinery only uses power when it does something useful, don't let your pumps to send gas forward and back, for instance.

11 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Can you build wire from any metal, or just copper?

Any of available metal ores, you just need to have some of the ore mined. Copper is only available in the starting biome and it is better to save it for structures you build in the base as it comes with decor bonus.

[The Plum Gate]

51 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

On my three games so far I have only seen pinchapepper in the chlorine zones and never got close to actually incorporating them, or the chlorine zone into my bases. I've never even seen sleet wheat although I would love to have it! I have only got as far as pumping hydrogen/chlorine into my base to use for machines. 

All my farming so far has been mealwood only, I have farmed bristle brushes but alone they can't be made into anything edible. So it's always game over for me once my mealwood farms start heating up. This game I even moved my whole mealwood farm to a cooler area, but half of it still overcame to heat anyway.

That reminds me of another question:

Pressure 

This is another aspect of the game I can't find any way to visualise. A lot of the time my algae machines reach max pressure, even though I have spaced them out around the base on different floors and often with ladder shafts above them. Pressure also stunts my plant growth but I don't know if it's because my base is too full of gases (is that even possible?) or if it's some other issue. Am I missing something obvious about visualising Pressure in the game? How are players to know how to deal with it? I'm not a scientist, I don't know about how different gases react and what they "weigh", and what to do if an area is over-pressurised.

I practically move into the hot biomes with algae terrarium, patience, and occasionally brute force.... once O2 forms a band of breathable air I can work with, I go all out through it. 

I think the important thing is having several directions you can go in to allow energy neutral processes to aid in explorations.

I admittedly rely on algea for the first 100 or more cycles, only setting up electrolyzer of in having to brute force an area or needing the initial top-off on suits.

Now about pressure.

You can rotate the pneumatic door and it will act as a floor piece. An early game airflow tile.. you can't build on it, but it makes a good substitute..

Now about that.. gasses don't like ladder holes. They generally prefer two tile wide gaps or more, dupes can jump.

So I usually set my dexoydizers up near ladderways where the colum of vertical space is unimpeded.

Co2 always builds up in the lower right corner, so you can make room for it and store for food there as well. Prepare to abandon exploring the lower right until a later time. 

Despite chlorine being hot, it's s very poor conductor, so they will not get heat stroke in it - it's the hydrogen that's a bother. And it's notable that the primary gases there have opposite tendencies - hydrogen will drift up and left, chlorine is like co2, down and right on top of co2.

Note co2 and chlorine are poor conductors, so they will not adequately transport heat to or away from buildings..

You'll actually want to avoid using the continuous que on machines. As this often creates unnecessary heat.

Getting atmo switches on your doexydizers is pretty critical for avoiding heat as well as waste - i generally set mine to 1100g and put the sensor about 10 tiles above the unit.

Its better to overpressurixe the base and vent a little o2 - but not UP, out to the left and right. Holes in the top of the base are good for dealing with hydrogen infiltrations, but are otherwise problematic.

 

[Hanro50]

<Germs>
Generally you're going to have to deal with slime-lung and food poisoning. Polluted oxygen and water is different from normal water and oxygen as if you think about it it still has some rather nasty stuff dissolved and mixed into it that would make it dangerous to consume if it didn't already contain a ton of germs. "Clean" water that is free of say free of dirt and whatever else you duplicates add to make it polluted can still contain germs however.

As for dealing with germs, generally its advice to not use germy water infected with food poisoning if you're still feeding your colony with lice-loaf and much-bars as the germs in the water can transfer to it and cause your dupes to get sick. However it seems to be harmless when fed to a Electrolyzer

As for slimelung...I wouldn't advise feeding that to your Electrolizers as it might put slimelung into the air...causing your dupes to become sick, its also kinda deadly... 
 

<Killing germs>  

Slimelung dislikes clean oxygen and will die out pretty quickly if you make good use of a few deodorizers.
Food poisoning hates heat.

<Heat death> 
You've got three culprits when it comes to this. Your Electrolizers who always output oxygen at around 40 to 50 degrees(not sure)
Machinery 
Geyser water (Which can reach around 70 to 80 degrees depending on how much you use!)

Cooling options:

wheezeworts, segmenting thermal areas in your base(dupes can live in anything under 50 degrees), aquatuners, heat-deletion, thermal regulators and the ever trusty hydrofan   
 

<Power>
Rather run a few extra transformers if you're not prepared to check the remaining load capacity of a circuit. Each circuit can take 1000w(basic wires you can use from the start) of strain before things start breaking and if you're using basic wires then I advice to not connect more then one transformer per circuit. If you do then you'll start to see your circuit breaking. For reference a massage table and pump can draw 240w, so you can add around 4 to each circuit before things start melting, a ceiling lamp draws 10w so you can run around 100 per circuit (assuming nothing else is connected to that circuit) before things start melting. If you've connected a lamp(10w) and a massage table(240w) to a circuit then you'll have 750w of capacity remaining on that circuit.(1000w-240w-10w=750w) 

<Note>
This took awhile to type so some, if not all, of the thing's I've said may already be said

[Olimar]

27 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Pressure-wise, yes I imagine its all the enclosed rooms. How do I take a zoomed out screenshot of the base - you folks seem to be able to zoom out further than I can? Maybe it's because I'm on the lowest resolution?

 

Someone had posted about this shortcut a few days ago.   I had no idea that was there.    Hit ALT+S for screenshot mode.   All of the UI is gone though.  Not sure if you can toggle with the UI still there.

 

The other way is to enable cheat/debug mode.  Which you can play while zoomed out,  but can nuke your performance.

[The Plum Gate]

5 minutes ago, Olimar said:

 

Someone had posted about this shortcut a few days ago.   I had no idea that was there.    Hit ALT+S for screenshot mode.   All of the UI is gone though.  Not sure if you can toggle with the UI still there.

You can go into any overlay while one screenshot mode - f12 will take a steam screenshot.

All the F buttons will work in this mode and you can zoom out as far as you like.

Actually I ocasionally play in this mode since I'm so used uses to the hotkeys...but this is sort of like driving at night without your headlights on and inadvisable.

[Jigsawn]

Ok cheers folks, here's a load of base screenshots, hopefully you can see where my heat/pressure issues stemmed from. Note that this base is basically game over via starvation/oxygen defiency. Main issue was heat ruining farms, then lack of power due to wiring issues, dupes being too busy to make power whilst solving other major problems, algae and coal about to run out. Note that stress and medicine were top notch in this run, I didn't even need massage tables thanks to lots of art, plants and lighting my base a lot. 

Screenshot Below - Top of the base. Mealworm Hydro farm on left is too hot (I only just built an emergency fan there). On the right is the slime biome airlock/decontamination system I mentioned. I was just making a hydrogen pump at the top right to get rid of the oxidiser output.

Screenshot below: Middle of base. Firemans pole runs for whole base, ran out of metal for left side. All rooms have doors but set to open to save time - I only close if someone needs locked out. On left is my polluted water tank where all polluted water flows, then its pumped into a filtration machine and fed back into the tank. At the bottom right is my poisoned water tank flooded with chlorine, the new main lake is to the left just out of shot. At the bottom centre is the start of the main farm surrounded by insulated tiles. All too hot now. Note that the meal prep room above only really has a micro musher active at all times, the rest isn't usually used.

Screenshot below: Bottom of base. My main farm - when it overheated I made the hydroponic farm at the top of the base instead. The ugly mess of white is heat wall tiles which have never got round to being constructed. It turns out I don't think it actually effects plants anyway, only buildings. It's hard to see but all the farm walls are insulated tiles, though the floors are just farm tiles. Bottom right is a coal genny in insulated tiles. All purple zone surrounding the bottom here is above 30 degrees so I tried to insulate the edges a bit. Yes I know there is a bit of polluted water in my main tank on the left, it got in there when I had to rearrange the piping system. The water pump in the left hand lake feeds into all my toilets, sinks, hydro farms etc. A Co2 scrubber below the farms deals with Co2 that falls down here, though there was chlorine down there too - the culprit turned out to be some bleachstone I'd missed by my coal genny.

Screenshot below: Below base. This is all hot area - 35 degrees plus. CO2 scrubber at the bottom (I was mining metal there) deals with Co2 that falls there, plus the vent there pumps out co2 from the failed chlorine water tank experiment. However this whole shaft is mostly full of natural gas (dunno where that came from), chlorine, some hydrogen and some co2.  To the top left that weird little chlorine cave has a pump in it which goes to my ore scubbers (the chlorine cave is sealed off by double airlock from the base, out of shot).

Screenshot below - heat distribution around hydro farm. Still too hot on the left even after adding insulation and wall tiles.

Screnshot below: heatmap around main farm - all too hot to grow.

Wiring system is straightforward, the base is split into roughly quarters with each quarter having either a coal generator or two/three hamster wheels. Each quarter also has two big batteries. Still getting overloads on my systems so in future hopefully a transformer will solve those woes.

[travaldofan]

btw u don't need to feed mealwood with water

[Jigsawn]

5 minutes ago, travaldofan said:

btw u don't need to feed mealwood with water

For the hydrofarm? If I didn't run pipes through them, I got an error icon and missing water message when I clicked on the tiles.

[Hechicera]

Use the regular farm tiles for meal lice, as they don't require the pipes.

[Amara313]

You don't want to put machinery in your main base - section it off somewhere with insulated tiles to keep the heat away from it.  That's probably your main problem with heat death there.  And if you want to put in an insulated farm, then you need to cool it down inside before your plant in it.  It's a good attempt - just keep your machinery out of your base.