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[Teneb]

Also, afaik you cant turn oxygen into water.

Was under the impression it was, but I guess I was wrong.

[etgfrog]

So I have been playing for a bit. I've recently found out how good abyssalite pipes are when compared to sandstone insulated pipes. Its enough that I can send air at 75 C and it arrive 100 tiles later at 74.6 C to get cooled off in the cold zone. I ran into a heat problem because I tried to send the water from a cool steam vent across my base to pipe it into the showers. It caused most of my base to heat up to 40 C and there doesn't seem to be any extra morale bonus for having hot water going to the showers. I am halfway through recovery though, went from 150k calories stored to 30k before I got the farms cooled down enough for them to work again.

Well...part B as to why heat was an issue. Bringing hot items like regolith back to your base will cause that storage to radiate heat.

[AlStar]

Cycle 109 of my colony and everything's falling apart! 

I managed to solve my water crisis through a combination of refining polluted water and finding a geyser, but I never should have uncovered that volcano - I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to deal with the crazy heat the thing puts out - it's caused most of my farms to shut down, and my total calories have been plummeting. Then, to top it off, I've apparently explored too many slime biomes without enough hygiene, because half my dupes have come down with slimelung (all at once, no less) which is just exacerbating the problem, since all my mushrooms (the only crop that's still reliably producing) are all going dormant from lack of fertilizing.

I may have to give up on this world and restart.

[Chiefwaffles]

Yeah, sounds like you're screwed.

If you find a volcano, your best bet is to insulate it as much as you can. As for slime biomes, slimelung dies in clean air so if you make sure to keep enough sinks and a ton of deodorizers between you and the biomes, you should be good. Just watch out for the low immune warning and keep those dupes out of the biome until their immune system recovers.

[Majestic7]

What is your design philosophy like in this game? Do you plan ahead to add various pipes and stuff later from the day zero or rebuild extensively? I'm asking because in Dwarf Fortress I plan from the day one for defenses, water channels and whatnot I add later. In this I've found myself doing things ad hoc and it ends up everything in a mess later due to power lines getting overpowered etc.

[Radsoc]

Succumbed to the literal heat death too, but it was because of my ignorance. All my farms died. Performed an experiment with a metal smelter in series to clean water, that burst pipes due to phase transitions (crazy mechanics), just below the farms

My only annoyance with the game is that you can't create pressure chambers for purification purposes due to the game not using Pressure-Temperature phase transition lookup tables.

[Grim Portent]

I've been doing things mostly ad hoc, I try to follow a general room plan of 4 tiles high and 24 long, rooms stacked on top of each other and about 3/4 rooms width to the main colony, but it's very much thrown together with new extensions being crammed into natural holes or odd shaped rooms being wedged into the colony for specific uses.

Drecko farms, cisterns and CO₂ sinks tend to be in all sorts of odd spots because I design them to take advantage of natural features, and that's resulting in me trying to cram a slickster farm and oil refinery in the CO₂ sink below my colony.



I'm nearly at 500 cycles, so I'm doing something right. Got a set up to chill my oxygen as it's piped into the colony, two steam geysers and a water geyser, an oil well I've not tapped yet, a glossy drecko farm, a puft farm, shine bug farm, two sage hatch farms and a smooth hatch farm, a fledling slickster farm. Sitting at 9 dupes at the moment, 14 dead ones, but they died some 300+ cycles ago.

Having a dirt shortage of all things, which is leading into a food shortage, but so far I've been holding it off.

[Chiefwaffles]

The thing is in ONI that you get 100% material refund for anything you deconstruct. But in my opinion, labor is far more valuable than resources. You can theoretically rebuild your entire base, but the sheer amount of time spent doing so will most likely result in you dying from something else entirely.

In my opinion, the most important thing to plan ahead in is heat. Once you start noticing actual negative consequences of heat getting into your farms/living areas/etc., it's probably already too late. Avoid pumping hot water/gas throughout your base willy-nilly unless you're using insulated pipes, keep heat-generating objects away from the most temperature-sensitive parts of your colony, and always be looking for more wheezewhorts.

Also something to consider is power. The 1000W limit on the basic wires is fine early game, but starts becoming killer as soon as you start dabbling in the midgame. It's fairly easy to adapt a transformer system into an existing powernet, but in my opinion you should at least consider planning ahead in the start of the game so no one power net will reasonably go over 1000W at any point.

[Radsoc]

Yes power is something to plan ahead. Transformer room, cable shafts and so on.

[Majestic7]

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

[Teneb]

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

I usually place them between the power generators and the batteries, especially since the heavy cable is extremely bad for decor.

[Grim Portent]

Transformers should be wedged in whereever you need to protect a circuit really. Anytime one branches off from the heavy cable trunk you need to protect it or it'll cost you in the long run.

Early on I keep power generation spread out, most stuff is run by it's own personal hamster wheel rather than an actual generator, with a swap to coal once things get too big to spare a dupe just to run.

You're looking at 1 wheel for research stations, 1 for a pump and sieve to run a bathroom, 1 for a kitchen and some lights hooked up to one system and illuminating algae terrariums early on in a simple stacked base. That's about as much as I feel can really be operated by one dedicated operator while still leaving them time to help out on other tasks.

Later on I start piece meal replacing the old generators with coal ones and trying to consolidate it all into one place. If it's all in one area it's easier to collect the waste products and try to counteract/contain the heat produced. A sealed chamber can have radiant gas pipes run around it to pull heat away and either try to dump it into wheezeworts or some other use/disposal method.

[Majestic7]

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

[Teneb]

Even if you keep all your batteries together, you'll still want to split the cables coming from them.

[Grim Portent]

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.