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[Criptfeind]

Well. To be honest, I don't mind sustainability not being a thing, if that's the point of the game! To ravenously expand outward and just gather more and more stuff. Right now it's still early days, so really neither works, you can't be sustainable and you can't really expand out well either (it quickly becomes a pretty massive pain to actually go out and gather resources I've found, it takes soooo much work to dig out areas far away.) I'm not super worried, since it's sooooo early access, I'm sure that such expansion of content is in the cards and I'd be okay with either way that they go. Assuming the game and studio don't burn down or something that is, heh. But yeah, right now it's a bit of a bugger.

[Grim Portent]

I wonder if the best way to achieve longevity at the moment is to try and achieve a certain level of nomadic structure.

It gets harder and harder to gather resources and haul them back to base, especially water if you can't make it flow there on it's own, but it wouldn't be too hard to gradually set up a small base in a contaminated oxygen pocket and move in to renovate the area into a simple new base.

All you really need is a source of dirt, rock, metal, water and algae in the area and you can make it survivable pretty easily, at least for a few days to keep digging and scouting. If you place walls or locked doors behind you it might even be possible to leave some duplicants back in your original base in case the expedition goes tits up. Getting new duplicants to the new base would be awkward, but they move pretty fast and an empty bed would bring them running.

[Neonivek]

Well. To be honest, I don't mind sustainability not being a thing, if that's the point of the game! To ravenously expand outward and just gather more and more stuff.

Yeah, indeed that is one way they could go about it. Most of Diggles is just that.

Though the most important device to that gameplay is immovable so your base is pretty much set in stone.

[Teneb]

I wonder if the best way to achieve longevity at the moment is to try and achieve a certain level of nomadic structure.

It gets harder and harder to gather resources and haul them back to base, especially water if you can't make it flow there on it's own, but it wouldn't be too hard to gradually set up a small base in a contaminated oxygen pocket and move in to renovate the area into a simple new base.

All you really need is a source of dirt, rock, metal, water and algae in the area and you can make it survivable pretty easily, at least for a few days to keep digging and scouting. If you place walls or locked doors behind you it might even be possible to leave some duplicants back in your original base in case the expedition goes tits up. Getting new duplicants to the new base would be awkward, but they move pretty fast and an empty bed would bring them running.

This would make for an interesting challenge run, at any rate. Main problem would be hauling food to the new base.

[Azated]

Despite my recent cheese and whine session, I've managed to get a handle on running a colony, even in the thermal update. I'm up to cycle 130 with no sign of slowing down.

Beware, 9 large screenshots and a scrollbar ahead. Hold your middle mouse button for easy scrolling


Starting from the most complex system (which I've named Sector 3), we have the lowest section of my main colony. This is where I tap into polluted water from a swamp biome and refine into two thirds of my water supply.

Part of it goes into a small reservoir for the showers, which is then outut back into the polluted water.

The second part goes into a single electrolyzer, which pumps oxygen to several vents and hydrogen to the hydrogen tank (more on that later).

The third part goes into my primary access reservoir, which is where my dupes get most of their water. This was one of my original water pools, so it's where I have a shower and two toilets (more on this later also).

You can also see 6 dead dupes on the bottom right. They made a suicide pact while building the generator room and I couldn't dissuade them.

Sector 3

Spoiler: all piping (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: liquid piping (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: gas piping (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: gas levels (click to show/hide)

Next up, we have Sector 2. This is where most of my power gets drained. I have my primary oxygen providing electrolyzers here that receive water from another one of my original water sources that I've had closed for about a hundred cycles. It fills up from bio distiller systems, and a small polluted water pool as a backup that I can easily connect/disconnect if I need to.

There was a small gap between the release of thermal and the current update (from 210199 - 210489) where the bio distillers produced obscene amounts of water and algae. I survived for months on a single distiller for all my water and algae needs, but the current version is back to where it was, making distillers practically useless. As is, I like to keep them there for a bit of algae production, but that's just to cover my terrariums cleaning co2 without taxing my power, which brings us to my saving grace.

You might have seen in the first set of shots that I have 3 coal generators all next to eachother, and all cool enough to work. I spent so long trying to keep a single coalgen cool that I gave up and relied on manual power and the hydrogen generator for almost 100 cycles.

I tried everything, from surrounding them in ice, surrounding them with wheezwort (which was pointless), and layering a small amount of water on the bottom. Eventually I figured I'd try dropping water on them using melted polluted ice. The right generator in the below screenshots sits about 0.7c consistently.

Sector 2

Spoiler: all view (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: liquid piping (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: gas piping-not much to see here (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: gas levels (click to show/hide)

And finally, we have Sector 1. There's not much to see here, except for all the piping and the muck/coal farm full of CO2 for some reason. It was a pain to get oxygen through this area until I used electrolyzers. Now I'm actually worried about overpressurising everything and killing everyone (is that even possible?).

Sector 1

Spoiler: all view (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: liquid piping (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: gas piping (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: gas levels (click to show/hide)

[Xinvoker]

This game is quite addictive even for the little content it currently has. Temperature and piping are quite the probem-generators, and gaming is essentially problem-solving.

[ThtblovesDF]

I sure wish there was some base-wide commands you could set (and define playstyle) like:

"Use any fucking bed, ffs"
"Use any table, etc"
"Eating while hunger is Blow X is priority Y, while Eating above X is priority Z"
The above, for every single need.
"Store anything in everything please"
"Define Home"

I'd also love some kind of automatic plant-picking up maschine or some such...

[EvilTwin]

ptw for the day that being sustainable is actually a thing.

The day has come! Sorry for the necro but starting a new thread felt wrong considering the game is still in Alpha (I think). Picked it up around a month or two ago, it's much better now than you guys have been describing. But let me introduce you to my base first: I have 6 duplicants which have ridiculous skills at this point and am beyond cycle 400 at this point. I don't see anything in the next couple hundred cycles that would just end my current game, except the eventual heat death of this relatively small universe (speaking of which, I have finally broken through to the surface, which the most recent update added^^).

This is the main part of my base, I tried to keep everything as simple and spaced apart as far as possible so I don't end up burning out on the clutter:

Spoiler: Everyone even has their own bedroom, toilet and shower! (click to show/hide)

My farm, where I currently grow Bristle Berries and Pincha Peppernuts and ship them to my kitchen automatically (the dupes only have to do the actual harvesting and some crop care to get a growth speed bonus) :

Spoiler: Only took me a full IRL day to figure out (click to show/hide)

My power station, situated in a cold biome to allow me to worry about cooling it later (I might have to worry about that now come to think of it...) :

Spoiler: Take a glance at that mess of gas pipes in the background, all of them are necessary (click to show/hide)

For those of you who were worried about longterm sustainability of the base, they added geysers now. Randomly strewn about on the map they can help your colony by giving off different gases and liquids. Here's an example of a geyser that gives off crude oil, but beware as it comes out at 326.9°C in this case:

Spoiler: Crude! (click to show/hide)

There's several different types of these, in this map I have two that produce steam at 110°C which instantly condenses into very hot, but clean water, but I didn't see a need to use them as there's another one that produces more than enough polluted water to serve my small colony.

There's also a bunch of critters that look way too cute and that can turn one resource into another, the drecko for instance eats mealwood plants (among other things) and poops out phosphorite for use in farming. They can also be sheared for reed fiber in case you don't want to grow the plants for that.

[Farce]

Man, I really want to play with piping and stuff - make nice, clean water reservoirs, along with not-so-clean ones for dirty water etc, and the same for gas stuff, but my little bases always fall apart before I can get to it.  Air goes bad because of too much CO2, or power can't keep up, or I run out of food, or just -something-.

Guess I should just cheat.

[EvilTwin]

Man, I really want to play with piping and stuff - make nice, clean water reservoirs, along with not-so-clean ones for dirty water etc, and the same for gas stuff, but my little bases always fall apart before I can get to it.  Air goes bad because of too much CO2, or power can't keep up, or I run out of food, or just -something-.

Guess I should just cheat.

Here is my standard research order: Planter boxes to start growing mealwood as fast as possible (sometimes you can even skip making mush bars completely if you find enough seeds at the start), then advanced research and coal generators after, so my dupes can get off the manual ones. I then usually beeline for smart batteries (and everything you need to get them running: brute force refinement and automation for instance) so I stop wasting coal when the generator doesn't need to run. That also reduces CO2 production by a lot, if it's still a problem I just dig a pit for the CO2 to sink into.


I almost never use algae terrariums, they require too much dupe labor and water to be worth it imo. The mealwood can feed a couple duplicants for a long time until you run out of dirt, so I usually only worry about food again once my dupes start to get severely stressed because of the bad food.


But I had ~6 colonies burn and crash in the early game too, you'll get beyond that eventually And yea, cheating is a valid option if you get bored of that.

[ChairmanPoo]

What do you do for oxygen if you dont use terrariums?

[EvilTwin]

What do you do for oxygen if you dont use terrariums?

Algae deoxidizers until the algae goes low, then I build a fancy self-powered electrolyzer setup which just has to be fed water from a steam geyser. The electrolyzers produce enough hydrogen in addition to the oxygen to power themselves and some pumps via a hydrogen generator if you use automation to turn the generator on and off based on stored power.

[Farce]

I always try to dig a couple big dumb water tanks for fresh and polluted water.  I guess now that I think about it, what kills my colonies is that I end up putting too much work into that before I have sustainable everything-else.

That and I like to take every Duplicant I can get.  Apparently that's a bad idea.

I always have trouble with food, too.  Even with a good cook cooking just takes so damn long, and apparently I need to baby the hell out of my farms or else they won't be a viable sustainable thing?

[EvilTwin]

I always try to dig a couple big dumb water tanks for fresh and polluted water.  I guess now that I think about it, what kills my colonies is that I end up putting too much work into that before I have sustainable everything-else.

That and I like to take every Duplicant I can get.  Apparently that's a bad idea.

I always have trouble with food, too.  Even with a good cook cooking just takes so damn long, and apparently I need to baby the hell out of my farms or else they won't be a viable sustainable thing?

Big dumb water tanks are cool, but they do take a lot of work. I usually put that off until all the basic needs of the colony are met (semi-stable oxygen supply, enough food stockpiled or reliably growing that I don't have to micromanage that all the time, enough decor that my dupes don't spend all day on the massage tables etc). Just leave space for them.


Taking every duplicant is a challenge in and of itself. If you look at the algae deoxydizer for instance, it produces 550 g/s of oxygen. Unless they have the Mouth Breather or Diver's Lungs traits, dupes consume 100 g/s of oxygen. So if you want a lot of time to set up everything properly, 5 dupes is the limit, otherwise you'll have to build a second deoxydizer, which takes up an additional 120(?) W of power, so you may need a second coal generator too depending on what else you want to run. Then you'd also need bigger farms and more cooks, which require more resources and power and so on. It's definitely possible to take on a lot more dupes early (Brothgar on Youtube made a challenge out of it, adding 3 duplicants every 3 days with the sandbox menu), but at some point it just becomes very very hard.
I know it's hard to resist taking on more dupes, but you can always lay out new constructions with the game running instead of paused, so you don't have to wait as long IRL for them to get things done.


By babying your farms do you mean micromanaging? That's not really necessary if they're set up right, you could for instance have them in a sealed room with only CO2. Most plants grow fine in CO2, the dupes won't breathe it away so pressure will be relatively stable and it'll also prevent other gases from flowing in and messing up your food production. At that point you only really need to keep an eye on their temperature and grab some wheezeworts from a cold biome if it becomes a problem. You could also calculate in advance how many duplicants your farms can supply or vice versa how much farm space you need for X amount of duplicants, but that's a whole other topic...
If you have surplus food to stockpile, always use ration boxes or unpowered fridges in a CO2 or chlorine environment. CO2 and chlorine are considered sterile, so the food will never go bad, and you don't even have to use power for that.


TL;DR: life becomes a whole lot easier the less dupes you have to manage.

[Farce]

By babying I mean I have to like... care about their temperature and stuff.  I've never gotten to the point that I can farm anything besides mealwood, because I tend to fall apart before I can expand into the biomes outside of the nice, uncomplicated little 'copper and algae' area around the start, and there don't seem to be any plants beside mealwood and a couple bristles that I don't bother with there.

But mealwood... like, I tend to plant every one I get, but I end up not having enough.  I guess that's down to the whole 'taking every Dupe I can' thing.  I think I end up having atmospheric problems with them sometimes too, though it's been awhile since I've played a straight game so I can't actually say what particularly I had mess up with them.  Probably low pressure or something.

I did play a cheaty game just now though and man, even that's hard.  I mass mined out a giant area to just build whatever in, and managed about a day and a half after building a water/polluted water tank, a coal power plant, and atmospherics area (including a CO2 tank, a 'mix' tank, and an oxygen tank, with filters and such to move them about and carbon scrubbers to deal with CO2) and was running an experiment to figure out how temperature worked when I got an alert saying my Dupes were melting on account of it somehow getting to 140 F in the colony.  I've never actually had to deal with temperature before so I'm not sure what to do with it.

Like, the experiment was that I built a little bunker up on the surface and was pumping water through a big radiant-pipe array in the vacuum.  It seems like that reduced the heat by a couple degrees, but I don't think it was losing temperature enough to deal with cooling a base running at 140...  I guess it's either hydrofans or just using the ice biome as a heatsink?

I want to centralize my air stuff, so part of that would be temperature control too I guess.  Is that like, uh.  Actually doable?