Hmm, buck naked and screaming back in? If there are complications that is what doctors are for! That’s about how I send them out early game. ;) I avoid having the traits for either a poor immune system, or the increased bladder frequency on those dupes.
I play survival but on normal settings there. Germs aren’t too bad now (there was a time in alpha). The swamp, ice, salt and hotter metal biomes are fine to poke in for exploration. You are going to want to get atmo suits though for the biomes further out, and to protect them if working around a hot vent. Though I may send them to a steam vent right next to my base before atmo suits because I need to contain it now due to heat and just rotate them through triage cots.
I tent to keep the dig/ladder out fairly simple to avoid pathing issues. Though I think some of the worst ones are now fixed.
Later use tubes, and atmo suits. They go potty in them. Its not pretty.
I am finding this very useful so far (just reading it at work, not putting it into practice - and with so many games out right now, I probably won’t for a bit).
I’ve never tried to set up a camp in another biome. Since you’d need to get everything there, including oxygen, it seems like a real hassle. I just live with the fact that at some point the “Long Commutes” message is going to have a permanent place on my screen until I can afford transit tubes.
You can prepare a little for entering slime biomes. You can start giving your guys vitamin chews early on. You can first tunnel into a nearby hot biome with balm lilies and grab some to make medical packs that will cure slimeling. Though slimelung seems just to be an annoyance and not deadly, so you don’t really need to do either of these.
I usually try to find a chlorine pocket above where I want to enter the swamp. I’ll dig out a pit just inside the airlock to the swamp area and then dig up to the chlorine so that it fall into the pit. I put storage containers in the pit. The chlorine will kill any germs off things put in the containers. This is where I store everything I put from the swamp biome until it is germ free. I also put a bottle emptier above the pit and drop in just enough water to cover the base of the storage containers and prevent slime from outgassing.
I have been exploring all the adjacent biomes without atmos suits. My guys don’t seem to mind short stints in temps up to 50C. Now that I found an oil biome, which is >70C, I’m starting to craft some atmos suits and an O2 supply for them (or I was until Rebel Galaxy Outlaw put a complete stop to my colony’s progress).
I don’t think it spells it out in the tutorial messages, which seemed minimal and I generally ignored having played the game in beta. To the game’s credit it does say under the encyclopedia entry: “Chlorine is a natural germ killing element in it’s gaseous state”.
So, after a few restarts, I think I’ve gotten a handle on the early game. Have the latrines set up with the sploit-water lock, compost, bottle dumper. Two hamster wheels + two jumbo batteries + two oxygen diffusers. Have a research station and super computer. Farm tiles are growing. Mushmasher mushing out mushbars.
Where do I go from here? A more reliable source of power? Actual plumbing?
Perfect, thank you. Plumbing looks rather intimidating, but eager to give it a go. Coal power seems pretty straightforward, bury that sucker deep I’m guessing.
Plumbing can be done in many ways. I started out just dumping the polluted water in a pool, and then it is also pretty straight forward to do. More complex setups with filtering, in order to preserve clean water, can always come later. Coal power generates some heat and CO2, which will eventually have to be handled. But in my opinion, ONI is all about learning from catastrophic failures, and I won’t rob you of the pleasure of both cooking and suffocating your first many, many bases.
It’s not an immediate problem if you start in the temperate biome (which has lots of water), but I suggest you secure a large source of water or build a system that allows you to do so. Like a basin that can capture polluted water from the swamp biome.
You need water for research, oxygen and food. And with regards to food, switch away from mushbars to liceloaf asap as mushbar’s calorie to water rating is terrible. In that same vein, replace lifeloaf as well once you explored out more.
Also, the toilet plumbing system should be self contained. This keeps the food poisoning infested water away from your regular water supply and will slowly create water for you (toilets generate 11kg water per flush).
Ok so I have a coal generator up and running, have 20 tiles of mealwood, and started the plan for my closed loop washroom area, but I’m getting super anxious about oxygen. I have two diffusers going, and a decent stockpile of algae, but I know it won’t last.
What’s the best way forward re: a reliable/sustainable source of oxygen?
Splitting water with electrolyzers is the basic sustainable (water or steam from various geysers) option.
It will require some construction, gas management and will generate a good amount of heat. The resulting oxygen also has a relatively high temperature so makes base heat management even more important.
High end electrolyzer systems are pretty efficient and decently high performance. At max utilization (slightly hard) a single electrolyzer can create O2 for eight dupes. The hydrogen you also get from it actually makes the whole process slightly energy positive if you burn it.
You can get pretty far on algae. I’m now 145 cycles in, recently moved up from 6 to 8 dups, and I’ve still got 70t of algae to run my four algae oxidizers. To keep gas pressure mostly even across the living part of the page I have one on either side of the main base area, one at the bottom center of the base, and the fourth is below the base providing some O2 pockets for my mining operations down to the oil biome. After burning down an entire adjacent swamp biome algae is plentiful.
A good thing to start on early is ranching as it takes a while to pay off. You want to breed glossy dreckos for plastic and smooth hatches for iron (since smelting iron produces more heat than you can handle early on).
My algae oxidizers are constantly getting the max pressure exceeded notification. Is there anything I can do other than dig out areas to fix that?
I also have 7 algae terrarium, which I thought I was being clever on by having a drip irrigation system and making sure they were located next to my polluted water disposal area. But it doesn’t seem to work like I thought
You only have 8 dups at 145 cycle, geez I have that at 20… I must be doing something wrong.
