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[Teneb]

Do you use separate power grids? I've put everything on the same grid and I suppose that's my problem with power spikes.

Yes that will be the root of your problem. I keep each early circuit limited to about three machines + generator + large battery.

Generally once you start wanting to hook up more than four big machines to any given set of wires you need a transformer and some heavy cables.

My current set up is a bashed together mess of different circuits though, I've not gotten organised enough to make heavy wires and instead am just using conductive wires (the refined metal ones) and upping my circuits to 2kW on the network. I do plan to make one big network once I can get myself out of a food scarcity issue.

Smart batteries are probably the single biggest improvement I made to my power systems though. They lose power at 1/10 the rate of a normal battery, and can turn off generators when you don't need them on, so the whole system becomes less wasteful and releases less heat. If there is a dupe god it looks like a smart battery.

I forgot Smart Batteries are a thing, because it might as well e impossible to turn off generation when you are at capacity thanks to dupe priorities.

I'd like to stress again to hide all your pipes and wires behind tiles or objects and especially to run heavy wire through non-public sections of your base because holy shit dupes hate heavy wire.

[Trekkin]

So how do transformers work exactly? Where should I place them? Should I spread power production around or have it concentrated?

Transformers work by limiting the total current flowing through them to the output level of the transformer, which in the case of small transformers is exactly the capacity of wire. This serves to separate out circuits from each other, since otherwise the total draw of everything on the circuit is flowing through every wire.

In short, as long as you have power flowing only through one small transformer, you can power as much as you like off one circuit and it will shut down rather than overload. Having more than one transformer on one circuit or a battery on the demand side both risk overload.

I generally put one small transformer on every deck of my base, wired to supply the lights and so forth on that deck from a central gold Heavi-Conductive line surrounded by statuary and paintings. That line, which becomes regular iron ore Heavi-Watt outside the base proper, is plugged into everything I'm using to generate power; I preferentially use renewable energy via multiple Smart Batteries with different active/standby charge levels, which is the main advantage of centralized power production. Assemblies that draw just below a kilowatt (automatic SPOMs, mostly) get their own small transformers, and refineries and so forth get their own big transformers.

[Jimmy]

I've recently picked this one up, and after a few false starts simply understanding the basic mechanics, I've got a good colony going.

I'm currently on cycle 285, and my major project is to clear out the surrounding terrain. I've limited myself to four dupes so as to conserve water and food. So far I haven't done anything too creative with my design except for my bathroom heatsink.

I've got your typical setup for a bathroom (2 lavatories, 2 sinks, 2 showers) and their polluted water feeds into a holding tank. I pump the polluted water from the tank through a water sieve, then the resulting 'clean' water is fed back through two thermo-aquatuners submerged in the polluted water reservoir to dump heat before being output into its own holding tank.

This takes advantage of the fact that the water sieve always outputs clean water at 40 degrees. Thus, if you dump excess heat into the input reservoir, you're creating a net loss of heat in your base.

The result is a polluted water tank that averages 60 degrees, and a clean water tank that averages 15 degrees. I pipe all my base oxygen supply through radiant gas pipes in the clean water tank to chill my air flow, meaning my base is 100% wheezewort free and still going strong while close to 300 cycles.

The only downside is the massive power cost of thermo-aquatuners. 1200 watts each, to be precise. I use five coal generators to supply the system (two for each thermo-aquatuner, plus one for the pumps and water sieve) and I've got a dozen hatches feeding me coal for the setup. It's enough to negate heat issues until I uncover better options.

Still haven't managed to find my map's geysers yet. So far I've only discovered a gold volcano, which I've carefully left buried for later.

[EvilTwin]

If any of you folks would like a seed with ridiculous amounts of water, the seed 1337 is amazing for that. I probably remember wrong and am too lazy to boot up the game right now, but I think it has a water geyser at 95°C, two cool slush geysers at -10°C, a polluted water vent with food poisoning that probably has some sort of temperature as well, two cool steam vents at 110°C as well as a copper and an iron volcano and one chlorine, one natural gas vent for good measure. I think there's a low output liquid carbon dioxide geyser to the bottom right of the starting biome as well but I might be confusing this with another map I played.
If you use all of those to their maximum potential you shouldn't have to ever worry about heat or water, and power can be easily solved by dumping excess water into the two oil wells at the bottom of the map producing lots of crude oil and natural gas once your starting supply of oil is used up.

[Jimmy]

Ugh, I need to remember to build preventative deodorizers when I'm mining out slime biomes. I'm stuck on a loop of slimelung sickness for my sins of prioritizing mined area over safety.

[Aoi]

So I'm fairly new to this, but what's the best way to avoid overheating? I've been using mostly copious amounts of farm tiles to establish Liceloaf as my primary diet, but they start overheating around cycle 100 and the problem keeps escalating. I broke open a cold biome for Wheezewort and to try and route chilled hydrogen pipes through my base (I think that's what some other people recommended? Or did I get that wrong...), but that's barely making a dent in my temperature problems. I suspect it has to do with a a cool steam geyser that I've tapped into since my starter sources are running low, but would funneling it via insulated pipes into an insulated cistern be enough to give everybody heat stroke?

[Mechanoid]

So I'm fairly new to this, but what's the best way to avoid overheating?

The obvious temporary solution is to put all heat generators on one side of the base, and all heat-sensitive objects on the other. Don't have 10 small batteries and a coal generator blasting heat into the air, directly inside your mealwood farm. It's obvious but i've seen it happen before.

Keep a wider margin between your base and the neighboring high temperature biomes. Remember that mining a tile destroys half its mass. 1800 kilograms of sandstone takes much longer to heat up than 2kg of oxygen, and the 900kg of sandstone that's now on the floor only really interacts with the floor's temperature, not so much the air that's around it. Realise that raw metal will conduct heat faster than oxygen can, so having a large copper deposit touching the hot caustic jungle is a bad idea, and it would be preferable to mine it out immediately. The ideal place to put your heat generators is at the top of the starting biome, and the farms beneath the pools of water or near the center of the biome.

Heat rises and cold sinks. Don't dig too far down until you can get insulated tiles between your living and farming spaces, and the rest of the asteroid beneath you. Keep in mind that every single tile will perform heat calculations based on its neighbor, with a bias towards rising or falling based on its surrounding relative temperatures. If there's cold above hot, the materials adjust each others temperatures much faster than if it was hot above cold. Similarly, a series of tiles that look like "Oxygen - Insulated Tile - Oxygen" is only slowing down the heat transfer by 1 insulated tile math calculation; 2 insulated tiles are much better because of this. (a width of 3 tiles of any kind prevent liquid from breaking through due to over-pressure; 2 insulated and 1 regular tile surrouding a 10,000kg water tank won't ever rupture and will be very thermally insulated.)

If you absolutely can not research insulated wall tiles in time (due to finding an active steam geyser point of interest) build a vacuum wall to keep the heat at bay, which is done by removing an orthogonally surrounded tile through exploiting diagonal deconstruction:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 Numbers as build orders for tiles, periods are spaces:
.2.
212 < After all 5 tiles are built, remove the 1
.2.     that tile is now vacuum

Double-wide vacuum space flooring:
5665665 < top of the horizontal vacuum floor
4334334 < remove 4's when 5's above are built
1221221 < remove 2's when 3's above are built
1111111 < bottom of the horizontal vacuum floor
You can shrink the vacuum space to just 1 tile if you want to, but i find this method is generally faster to build or change due to more tiles being accessible diagonally.

Vertical vacuum wall:
DEFG < remove F when tile above it is built
9ABC < remove A when E above is built
5678 < remove 7 when B above is built
1234 < remove 2 when 6 above is built, etc
1111 < starting floor
obviously just rotate the build order 180^o for building downwards

You can even integrate a water-lock into these designs to prevent gas infiltration and do work inside the vacuum... HOWEVER, do not send a flatulent dupe to do these jobs, or your vacuum will be filled with natural gas, destroying the perfect insulation the vacuum provides. Don't send a slow dupe either, or they won't ever finish the job. The tiles don't need to be insulation, but if you decide to change the tile type you'll have to rebuild the vacuum tiles. Remember: Any orthogonally connected tiles will transfer their heat to the other -- Diagonal tiles don't.

edit - The ultimate solution to heating problems, however, is to research automation, liquid storage, and the aquatuner, then setup a cold-water cycling pipe in your base to keep your dupes comfortable.
As a side note however: Never ever use the special thermal-adjustment clothing, as they don't work as you would expect. Sweaters increase insulation which means they take MORE time to change temperature (even standing in liquids!) but they do still change temperature. Cool vests remove insulation on a dupe which means they'll immediately become hypothermic or heat-stroked if they step in a puddle for too long or stand near an active space heater.

[Trekkin]

So I'm fairly new to this, but what's the best way to avoid overheating? I've been using mostly copious amounts of farm tiles to establish Liceloaf as my primary diet, but they start overheating around cycle 100 and the problem keeps escalating. I broke open a cold biome for Wheezewort and to try and route chilled hydrogen pipes through my base (I think that's what some other people recommended? Or did I get that wrong...), but that's barely making a dent in my temperature problems. I suspect it has to do with a a cool steam geyser that I've tapped into since my starter sources are running low, but would funneling it via insulated pipes into an insulated cistern be enough to give everybody heat stroke?

Check the temperature in your hydrogen return pipes; if your adventures in gas cooling went anything like mine, it has probably long since reached ambient temperature. Gas pipes' 1 kg/s flow rate effectively limits what you can do with gas cooling, particularly at -30 C or so like you've probably got in your frozen biome. Liquid cooling, by contrast, is working with 10x the flow rate, and plain water is perfectly suitable for the kind of temperatures you want. (Piping the return water into a room full of hydrogen and wheezeworts is, provided it doesn't melt, a good way to cool it down, though.)

In general, though, the best way to cool your base in the early game is to control heat generation and leakage in from the surrounding biomes in the first place, along with passive cooling (read: put temperature-insensitive things in upper rooms) so that the heat you do get is contained. Once you get into the midgame you can consider doing things like aquatuner/sieve loops to just eliminate a lot of process heat or maybe finding an anti-entropy thermo nullifier (AETN), and there are some heat-negative power plant designs out there -- although for whole-base cooling to 20 C, a self-powered oxygen module (SPOM) is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to go provided you can keep the pressure in the base down.

In the short term, have you considered piping your geyser water through your frozen biome to cool it? You could even drip it onto (clean) ice, if you want.

[Sergius]

PTP

[Sanctume]

Question: Does buying Oxygen Not Included include all those add-ons, or are they separate DLCs? 
I see it on sale on steam often, but I am not sure if all the rest are included.

[Trekkin]

Question: Does buying Oxygen Not Included include all those add-ons, or are they separate DLCs? 
I see it on sale on steam often, but I am not sure if all the rest are included.

There isn't any DLC; the named upgrades are just how Klei presents their updates to the game. It's all one thing.

[Teneb]

Question: Does buying Oxygen Not Included include all those add-ons, or are they separate DLCs? 
I see it on sale on steam often, but I am not sure if all the rest are included.

There isn't any DLC; the named upgrades are just how Klei presents their updates to the game. It's all one thing.

Pretty much this. The little shorts they release every now and then are also great.

[Sergius]

It's the development roadmap. Pre-release alpha and all that.

I have to say I've been playing this for ages and it has felt like a finished game for a while now.

[Aoi]

Check the temperature in your hydrogen return pipes; if your adventures in gas cooling went anything like mine, it has probably long since reached ambient temperature. Gas pipes' 1 kg/s flow rate effectively limits what you can do with gas cooling, particularly at -30 C or so like you've probably got in your frozen biome. Liquid cooling, by contrast, is working with 10x the flow rate, and plain water is perfectly suitable for the kind of temperatures you want. (Piping the return water into a room full of hydrogen and wheezeworts is, provided it doesn't melt, a good way to cool it down, though.)

In the short term, have you considered piping your geyser water through your frozen biome to cool it? You could even drip it onto (clean) ice, if you want.

So running pipes filled with with water in a hydrogen/wheezewort room, then running that chilled water through my base would be better for cooling than gas? (And presumably, there are even better liquids for that out there, that would be a bit more difficult to obtain at my point.)

I've actually been dripping it into my post-sieve reservoir to cook off the germs. Now that I think about it, a dual-chambered polluted water reservoir that gets cooked pre-sieve would probably work out better, since the sieve output is at a fixed temperature, as I recall... Does the frozen biome actually stay cold? I feel like its been warming up, considering I have to mop up my entrance every ten cycles or so.

The obvious temporary solution is to put all heat generators on one side of the base, and all heat-sensitive objects on the other. Don't have 10 small batteries and a coal generator blasting heat into the air, directly inside your mealwood farm. It's obvious but i've seen it happen before.

Heat rises and cold sinks. Don't dig too far down until you can get insulated tiles between your living and farming spaces, and the rest of the asteroid beneath you. Keep in mind that every single tile will perform heat calculations based on its neighbor, with a bias towards rising or falling based on its surrounding relative temperatures. If there's cold above hot, the materials adjust each others temperatures much faster than if it was hot above cold. Similarly, a series of tiles that look like "Oxygen - Insulated Tile - Oxygen" is only slowing down the heat transfer by 1 insulated tile math calculation; 2 insulated tiles are much better because of this. (a width of 3 tiles of any kind prevent liquid from breaking through due to over-pressure; 2 insulated and 1 regular tile surrouding a 10,000kg water tank won't ever rupture and will be very thermally insulated.)

edit - The ultimate solution to heating problems, however, is to research automation, liquid storage, and the aquatuner, then setup a cold-water cycling pipe in your base to keep your dupes comfortable.
As a side note however: Never ever use the special thermal-adjustment clothing, as they don't work as you would expect. Sweaters increase insulation which means they take MORE time to change temperature (even standing in liquids!) but they do still change temperature. Cool vests remove insulation on a dupe which means they'll immediately become hypothermic or heat-stroked if they step in a puddle for too long or stand near an active space heater.

...Yeeeeah. Obvious! Right. I didn't realize how much heat coal generators put out until I tried setting one up to power a thermoregulator... and the setup ended up exploding under its own heat. Whoops.

So extra-thick insulated walls on any hot storage... and shove 'em off to the side. Got it!

Why the liquid storage and an aquatuner? Wouldn't running it straight through work out?

Those clothes sound terrible, relative to their name. Thick clothing and thin clothing would be a clearer name. Cool vests sound like this on Amazon.

Question: Does buying Oxygen Not Included include all those add-ons, or are they separate DLCs? 
I see it on sale on steam often, but I am not sure if all the rest are included.

No DLCs, though if you don't have Don't Starve already, you may wish to look at Steam's Klei autobundle; my recent purchase basically pegged Oxygen Not Included at the historical low, plus an extra 3$ for all of Don't Starve+DLC, including the newest one.

[AlStar]

Does the frozen biome actually stay cold? I feel like its been warming up, considering I have to mop up my entrance every ten cycles or so.

It spawns that way; but after world generation, the only thing keeping it cold is the tons of ice and snow, the weezeworts, and the fact that it's surrounded by thick bands of an almost perfect insulator.

If you pump enough heat into it, it'll melt.