Ideas of what to do now...

[JesusOnEez]

I enjoy the beginning of this game and usually follow this usual path.

Toilets > Water > Power > Research > Farming Meal Lice > Polluted Water Handling > Longer Term Oxygen Generation (Electrolyzers)

Once I have all that out of the way, I tend to go for the niceties such as Cots/Beds/Med Bay/Coal Power/Toilet, Sink & Shower Plumbing

By that time I'm coming to the edges of the starting biome, I'm relatively stable for the time being with perhaps 6-8 dupes. I'm faced now with either entering a slime biome or the biome filled with hydrogen/chlorine gas deposits.

I'm wary of going into these, despite knowing how to create various different basic air locks (water lock or simple pump with gas filter solution).

I get to this point often and start struggling to find things to do. I'm not really sure how to handle entering a slime biome what with polluted oxygen and slime covered in germs, I'm not sure how to deal with chlorine and hydrogen in that sort of biome...I guess setting up eco suits is the obvious thing, but other than digging around, any suggestions on what to do? What do you do when you have that early stability for food and oxygen?

[Oozinator]

3 hours ago, JesusOnEez said:

I get to this point often and start struggling to find things to do. I'm not really sure how to handle entering a slime biome what with polluted oxygen and slime covered in germs,

Easy pompeezi^^
Research deodorizer and dig a corridor to the slimebiome, build a door to the clean area (more doors help) and spam deodorizers in that corridor.
Make a small submerged storage locker area with high prio, to store slime.
When immunity drops <85% , use doorpermissions for the sick dupes, to lock them out of the dangerzone...
Dig out small parts at once.

[ColBBQ]

Hydrogen/Chlorine is easy, Just dig a large room to pump the gases in while oxygenating the area you want to go into.  ONce you're done, you can reverse the process to preserve environment in there without the needed stress.

[watermelen671]

Or just do what I tend to do, dig around the place until you're ready to finally go in. 

[Gehn]

I often try to spot a path I can dig through the biomes to try to search for an Ice Biome as my first target, because I want those wheezeworts! This is not always possible, I'd say maybe half the time it works out. If I can't avoid the slime/chlorine, or if I've already collected my worts and now it's finally time to deal with the slime, first thing I do is dig into a cavity that has tons of chlorine in it. I put a few storage boxes in there, sweep only, and hold everything except liquifiable - priority 9. Then I start digging into slime sources and immediately sweeping all of the infected ore/dirt/slime/algae - this gets brought to these chlorine storage boxes. Chlorine gas coming into contact with Slimelung kills it super super quick. Like a couple cycles max and everything will be slimelung free, then pause slime mining, let them empty the chlorine boxes by dumping everything on the ground - they'll now filter all the clean stuff into your normal storage.

 

Rinse/repeat. It seems like the Chlorine gets used up by this cleaning process, so usually once I get settled I set up a room outside of my base for these chlorine boxes, and then I'll pipe in more Chlorine gas if I need to refresh the cleaning power.

 

This is the super low-tech, manual intervention way to deal with slime. I'm still learning the game and plan to try more automated/compact solutions for dealing with slime, such as this idea from someone on Steam/Reddit:

 

 

This guy has some guides, maybe you'll find some ideas of things to try!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1359728437

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1359110726

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1362621368

[suicide commando]

The most important advice, already given here, is to take it slow. Set up your airlock, begin digging, and immediately set up deoderisers so polluted oxygen gets cleaned up, second, ensure that the slime swept up asap and stored in a submerged box. This way, you will be able to dig your way into slime biomes without much trouble. clean O2 kills slimelung, and underwater boxes ensure that you don't get any new pO2 being created from the slime you dig up.
Dupes that are losing immunity you can keep out of the place with door permissions so they won't catch actual slimelung either. Digging into a hot biome first means you'll have access to balm lilies for vitamin pills to recuperate infected dupes. In this case, just an airlock and some insulation on the edge of your base will keep the heat out for the most part, and you can let lilies grow in the wild, submerged in chlorine so you don't need to set up any farms and whatnot for them, but get the stuff you need for vitamins anyway. You don't need much unless you go nuts on the slime biome digging and everyone gets seriously sick.

Work your way through them into an ice biome and start getting those worts for SPOM and general base cooling. If you've done things right, you should have a pH2O tank in your base as well by now, so you got plenty of that to feed to reed fibers and get what you need to make exosuits.

Once you got a SPOM or 2, and a bunch of exosuits, you're good to go to anywhere you'd like, as your dupes will be protected from just about anything except swimming in lava for extended periods of time.

When you get to this stage, everything else becomes pretty easy, and you can start thinking about renewal of your resources and bigger machines to provide you with all the things you need, like massive fertiliser maker setups to provide you with tons of NG for power, NG power plant that will produce thousands of kilowatts for your base to consume and get rid of all the damn wheels all over the place, and big honking machines that will produce what-have-you like LOX makers, oil boilers etc.

 

[JesusOnEez]

All great advice thanks! Just one question. What's a SPOM?

[Denisetwin]

18 minutes ago, JesusOnEez said:

All great advice thanks! Just one question. What's a SPOM?

SPOM = Self Powered Oxygen Module  I use @Saturnus version, be sure  to make the two changes at the end of the thread so that it will still work in Ranching.  I also loop the hydrogen back around and use a bridge at the end of that loop connected to the input of the hydrogen so if the loop is full, the excess will bleed off into my storage, but if the loop is not full it will keep circling available for the generators to use. 

 

[JesusOnEez]

Lovely. Thanks!