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[Aoi]

There's the 100K challenge, where everything other than your starting biome is 100K. I'm not sure that map is actually possible without taking advantage of various sort of exploity mechanics though. I think there's also a hot equivalent of that one too.

My personal favorite is Minibase, where you get to pick the size of your base. The minimum for a rift rocket is something like 21x37 (which requires the pod deconstruction mod), but good luck with that; I've managed to do it on a 22(?)x55 though.

[Micro102]

There's the 100K challenge, where everything other than your starting biome is 100K. I'm not sure that map is actually possible without taking advantage of various sort of exploity mechanics though. I think there's also a hot equivalent of that one too.

My personal favorite is Minibase, where you get to pick the size of your base. The minimum for a rift rocket is something like 21x37 (which requires the pod deconstruction mod), but good luck with that; I've managed to do it on a 22(?)x55 though.

Yeah those sort of mods are "impending doom is coming you only have so long until you succumb", and I want more of a "crazy obstacles are in your way but with preservation you can overcome them and achieve great things" game. In fact, that sentence was so on-point that I'm gonna go throw it into the "recommend me a game" thread.

[Aoi]

Minibase (or in my case, 'micro'; the default size is something like 40x70) isn't really an 'impending doom' scenario if you know your mechanics and don't intentionally make a map that doesn't have the resources required; it's more about getting the maximum efficiency out of a tiny amount of space, which requires rethinking a lot of standard designs.

There's also Empty Worlds, basically adds exposed space as a biome or makes exposed space the default (but adds extra geysers so you have resources), or GeoApocalypse, which puts 100ish geysers on the map, but neither of these are really challenges.

[Jimmy]

Perhaps I'm simply inexperienced, but I don't see how the 100K challenge is difficult. Heat creation is so universally available it's hard to imagine a problem arising from having the rest of the map being cold. A steam geyser would quickly warm everything up again, wouldn't it?

[Aoi]

Perhaps I'm simply inexperienced, but I don't see how the 100K challenge is difficult. Heat creation is so universally available it's hard to imagine a problem arising from having the rest of the map being cold. A steam geyser would quickly warm everything up again, wouldn't it?

As you noted, the easy way is with a vent/geyser/volcano, since those spew out things at a fixed temperature that trivalizes the challenge... which is why it comes with an option built in to disable them.

The major problem is producing liquid water that's required for advanced research before the cold catches up with you. The longer it takes and the more you dig out, the colder your pocket of relative warmth gets. (Spoiler includes two tricks that make it easy, so don't read it if you want to try it yourself.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've only seen two tricks pull it off successfully-- using corner de/construction to make vacuum to act as a perfect insulator that you can then set up a warm pocket inside of to melt your first few precious drops of water and taking advantage of how buildings function, so you can constantly de/construct tiles around your block of ice until it warms up or faff about with input/outputs. Neither of which I like since they're both take advantage of quirks in the engine.

Edit: Thinking on this further, I think there might be a facepalmingly stupid way of doing it easily. I'll have to give it a shot tomorrow.

[Jimmy]

Ranching some stone hatches would be a pretty solid way to delete the cold, since they can consume general trash minerals and output coal, which can be burned for even more heat generation. This plus a metal refinery seems a reliable way to warm things up, even without geysers.

Oxygen generation is gonna be a pain without infinite water geysers, though there's the option of using lumber via the petroleum generator to produce excess polluted water and dirt too, I suppose, but that's a deep dive in the tech tree to reach.

I guess without geysers, the 100K challenge would be a fairly tricky proposal. Definitely doable, but tough.

[Aoi]

The main challenge is getting liquid water with the geysers disabled. If we're looking at this asteroid from after 1000kg of liquid water can be sourced, then it's trivial.

Hatch ranching is impossible since they die at -30C and doing it without the ranching technologies is going to be an inefficient headache even if you manage to make an area over -30C. Arbor trees won't work since you don't have liquid pH2O in industrial quantities and they need 15C+. Petroleum generators and the metal refinery are blocked by the tech tree.

Oxygen, ironically, isn't a major problem, since, between the guaranteed starting oxylite and the oxygen your dupes produce on their own, you can easily last upwards of a hundred cycles. More, if you reroll your starting dupes to have a loadout designed to be self-sufficient. You will, however, need to constantly expand your base so you have somewhere to put all that CO2 (whether it be gas/liquid dropping down, or solid that you throw to the side), which means you're increasing your area/surface area, so what little heat you've produced is thinner and more easily dispersed into your surroundings.

[Radsoc]

In general I think this is a difficult game, of the type of a classic game. I managed to reach the tear and to achieve sustainability (albeit with some manual intervention), but I doubt I would have made it without a petroleum boiler and a very large buffer of stored fuel. At least it gave me freedom to experiment with various projects. I think I quite unnecessarily wanted dirt so I built an evaporator for polluted water that transported it to the greenhouse. It's kind of Labview the game.

[Jimmy]

I agree that this game is definitely not in the same vein as many modern titles. Klei make games that have cute wrappers hiding brutal mechanics that encourage learning through failure. I thoroughly respect that design decision, and hope they continue this theme for their future releases.

[Jopax]

Speaking of learning trough failing, picked this up recently as it's been sitting on my wishlist for ages and the discount was pretty nice.

First colony was nothing fancy as I was mostly figuring out stuff, was going fine until I tried to get fancy. See I wanted my latrine/shower to dump their dirty water into a natural cave I dug to, before pumping it all out and filtering it for further use. That would've been fine if I also hadn't put a dirty water dumping spot next to them, which obviously needed a mesh floor to be usable for getting rid of any waste water produced elsewhere (mostly algae farms and the one washing up spot).

Anyways, who knew that having an open air septic tank would stink up the entire goddamn base :V

Also sidenote, how bad are coal/wood power generators at pumping at CO2? I really needed to switch since my power usage kinda outgrew the little pedal machine but I'm not sure if I should've separated the thing somehow or started filtering out the CO2 fairly soonish.

[Jimmy]

Given that a coal generator produces 20 g/s of CO2, you could have fifteen coal generators running at 100% uptime before you max out the 300 g/s consumption of a single carbon skimmer. Realistically, nobody runs that many generators constantly. A smart battery and an automation wire are too cheap not to include in a generator setup. You simply can't overproduce CO2 without a lot of oil based infrastructure.

Polluted oxygen also isn't too big of a problem, in my opinion. Sure, it's annoying to have a few pockets floating around, but a few deodorizers should mop it up fairly quickly. Plus, it's still breathable, free oxygen. A tip: instead of dumping into a cave, using a liquid reservoir surrounded by chlorine gas will get rid of the germs in the water, meaning you can filter the water without worries. I had a lot of fun building a chlorine tank for my last base, along with an automation loop to allow clean water to be pumped back into the system, and it was a closed loop, meaning it only cost the 10W power drain of the liquid shutoff allowing the cleaned water to exit the loop.

I'm slowly coming around to using polluted water instead of clean water in my early thermo aquatuner loops. I still need more practice setting up my temperature exchanges for geysers, but practice makes perfect. I plan to tackle optimizing the output of a natural gas geyser to run a 100% uptime dual generator setup, with a single priority feed line drawing for cooking. I'm debating whether it's more efficient to cool the natural gas from the geyser to 40°C before or after pumping. Cooling before pumping costs less resources, but I worry the low thermal conductivity of natural gas will risk overpressure on the geyser before I can cool the previous cycle of gas.

[AlStar]

Also sidenote, how bad are coal/wood power generators at pumping at CO2? I really needed to switch since my power usage kinda outgrew the little pedal machine but I'm not sure if I should've separated the thing somehow or started filtering out the CO2 fairly soonish.

As Jimmy says, coal burners aren't too bad - especially if you hook them up to a smart battery (note: always use a smart battery - massive increase in how long your coal reserves last).

I'd stay away from wood, however - although I don't have the actual numbers in front of me, it's something like 2-5x as much CO2 per electricity produced.

[andrea]

Also keep in mind that CO2 sinks to the bottom in an oxygen atmosphere. If you are in a CO2 crisis, just digging an hole can be a quick temporary solution.

[Aoi]

See I wanted my latrine/shower to dump their dirty water into a natural cave I dug to, before pumping it all out and filtering it for further use.

Also sidenote, how bad are coal/wood power generators at pumping at CO2? I really needed to switch since my power usage kinda outgrew the little pedal machine but I'm not sure if I should've separated the thing somehow or started filtering out the CO2 fairly soonish.

Generally speaking, unless you have some particular reason for it, liquid already in pipes you want keep in pipes/liquid reservoirs because it saves the energy of pumping it back out for later use.

Wood is literally the most inefficient source of power in the game on pretty much all counts, other than dupe-time. Having said that, if you're using it, you're either early game, when dupe-time is more valuable, or desperate for power, in which you'll take anything.

I wouldn't worry about the CO2; unless you tried (and failed) at something fancy, it's unlikely you'll ever hit a truly problematic amount of CO2. And even then, it has its uses.

I had a lot of fun building a chlorine tank for my last base, along with an automation loop to allow clean water to be pumped back into the system, and it was a closed loop, meaning it only cost the 10W power drain of the liquid shutoff allowing the cleaned water to exit the loop.

Assuming you're referring to a sieve loop, you can actually bleed off the excess water (p or clean H2O) without expending energy with just a bridge.

[Jimmy]

Assuming you're referring to a sieve loop, you can actually bleed off the excess water (p or clean H2O) without expending energy with just a bridge.

Nope, I'm talking about setting up a liquid reservoir with a germ sensor on the output inside a sealed room full of chorine gas. Automation on the sensor controls a liquid shutoff that lets the fluid from the reservoir exit the sterilizing loop. If the fluid from the reservoir has no germs, it sends it out.

If you feed your toilet output straight into a sieve, it transfers the food poisoning germs to the polluted dirt as well as the clean water output. With the addition of a chorine tank, the polluted water has no germs when it reaches the water sieve, meaning no food poisoning germs on the polluted dirt and clean water it produces. This means no food poisoning germs on the duplicant that hauls the polluted dirt, and you've got germ free clean water for your base. It's not really that critical, but once you set it up correctly, you can simply forget it and never have to worry about food poisoning germs, all for the cost of a single 10W liquid shutoff.