Oxygen Not Included: Klei space colony sim

I found out that my old game was not cloud saved (guess it wasn’t supported when I played), and that was ~400 hours, so I’m waiting until I completely forget everything before going for it again.

This game is the yardstick I use to compare every automation game. It is, by far, the top of my list of automation games.

I’ve bought the DLC now it’s out of early access and at some point I will get back into multilayer pipeline management and bizzarre heat physics simulator.

Thanks I got and Immediately got hooked even though I’m only at cycle 18.

I played 80+ hours during early access and haven’t touched it since. Bought the DLC during Christmas and am diving back in. This truly is a wonderful game.

I agree a great game. I have not gotten beyond the stage of going to second asteroid yet. The second asteroid is definitely more challenging. I’m curious when people go the second asteroid?

I’ve gone generally around cycle 20-30 after I have a natural gas geyser hooked up.

The problem is that the swamp biome is filled with mud, and not much else. In particular, I have no idea what should do for power there. I’m stuck using manual generators. I’m a long way from getting Exo suits, which will allow me to hook up the oil.

Perhaps sludge pressing the mud for clean water which you can feed into electrolysers to skim hydrogen for generators would work, but sludge presses are not a setup I’ve had to use myself (so far).

Electrolysers are always worth doing if you can afford the water as they take care of both energy and oxygen generation.

It turns out the plug slugs provide electricity but you have to connect a wire to their sleeping places. I think it is ok for a small colony. I’ll eventually I’ll set up a SPOM, but it overkill for two or three guys.

I have, sludge processing is the algae equivalent for that starter biome. You do run out, and it is more labor intensive. But it is cute just watching dupes jump up and down in a wine err mud vat.

I have a bad (good?) habit of restarting a colony each time I get to around turn 100 - I figure out I did something wrong, a new and much better design for some big system (or a few), etc, and just want to scrap the whole thing and and incorporate it from early on. That’s a big part of the time suck of this game - need to exercise more discipline in resisting that urge and instead rebuilding what I have…

Been there and still kind of there :(

I make a separate save every 10 days. This allows me jump back a little or a lot without having to start from scratch. I have a friend who doesn’t care and goes full steam ahead. His base is a mess but he’s having fun and usually gets farther ahead.

While I can understand some inclination for restarts I’m still surprised each time people bring it up so extensively for ONI. It was discussed at least twice in this thread before as well.

I really love ONI. For me it is by far the best colony builder. I greatly enjoy the focus on mechanics and physical interactions. Generally the game systems are robust and slower than in comparable games and you can almost always correct course and rebuild anything in a colony. In a longer game that is actually normal. You will build and then replace food, sleeping, electric, ladder and water systems several times as your colony grows and advances on the tech tree.

If you constantly restart, do you ever get to space travel? They made it notably easier in the DLC and also made it a much more integral part of progression.

Related to this, I tried Against the Storm.
Personally I didn’t like it too much even though the basic game is actually very good. The production chains are neat and there is a good set of “paths”. Individual products have different efficiencies depending on involved buildings, starting resources and random bonuses you get.

I also like the idea of an overarching world. You found many smaller colonies with goals (from a set of choices) in shorter sessions. The result in Storm is however is that you play a similar start (and game overall) again and again. Even in a good colony builder and even with the game’s intentional variance I found that getting old after a few outposts.

For you guys it might be a good fit (alongside the still far superior ONI :P) if you not only don’t mind but actually are driven to restarts.

True confession, I never launched a rocket in ONI.

However, I’m determined to do so in this game. It is much simpler with the DLC.

Plus there is no reason for me to restart this game. I’ve got my Nat Gas Geyser hooked uped. I have a cool sludge geyser (yea) to keep things cool. My second asteroid is started and I’ve got food growing, I just need a second cook for the place.

Plus as an added bonus, I just got some larva eggs so I can start up limited plastics and oil production.
Before I open oil biome on the second asteroid.

While my base is no thing of beauty, it is not a hot mess like most of my previous ones were.

Curious to hear what people’s thoughts are, now that Spaced Out has been well, out, for a while now.
Is it worth it? Does it change the base experience too much? Is it fun?

It is a nice addition, and while I didn’t really go beyond the first few asteroids, it does give you some more concrete goals than the base game, which I needed.

The general problem with ONI, that I have is I’m just not careful enough designing my systems, especially for edge cases. So at some point, the toilets get backed up, and the plants run out of water. The gas leaks and my living and kitchen area gets flooded by Natural gas, or Chlorine. I get frustrated and rage quit.

I have hundreds of hours into ONI at this point. It scratches a very particular systems-building itch, but as Strollen notes, if/when things go wrong, it can cascade and kill hours of accrued playtime if you’re not able to fix it (and/or if you don’t view that task as “fun”).

I really, really like the open-ended nature of the problem-solving you can do in the game – do you want to just put together a barely-functioning pile of jank to get to the next thing? You’ll have to keep a close eye on things if you do as Things Can Go Wrong Quickly. Do you want to carefully optimize and automate each system as you go? This takes longer up front, and is more fiddly but then can free your attention up for elsewhere. Or maybe you just want to copy known builds for certain problems (like one of the community’s “SPOM” designs) and move on to other parts of the game. Or just play in sandbox mode!

Any of these are fine, but like many sandboxy games, this is more of a toy box than a game. Spaced Out adds some more defined goals, if you want to pursue them, but it also adds what feel to me like a little too much in the way of fiddly systems – in principle I like the idea of the self-contained rockets and multiple asteroids, but in practice it feels like a few too many plates to spin for me. But that’s OK – you can play the game with the new stuff but with the original-style large asteroid if you want to.

One thing that might not be clear from the screenshots and marketing is it’s really not an emergent story / character-driven game – the individual characters (duplicants), while not interchangeable, don’t really generate stories the way Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld or the like do. I mean, they do (“DAMMIT MARIE WHY DID YOU JUST WALL YOURSELF INTO THE CLEAN WATER RESERVOIR AND THEN PEE???”) but not nearly to the same degree.

Still, though, if you like building large systems and dealing later with the emergent consequences of your earlier choices – and eventually building the domain knowledge to plot a path through series of systems-builds in the face of randomized-but-configurable environments of varying levels of challenge – this game’s got you covered.

I’ve had ONI for a while now, but I’ve only played one session (before spaced out was released). That’s why I’m hesitant to get the DLC because I’m worried about not being able to enjoy the original “base builder” style gameplay - but it sounds like you’re saying that even with the DLC the core of the original gameplay is intact?

Yes! But also, you can and probably should play the core game for a while and decide if you actually want “more” – because that’s what the DLC offers. There are some changes to the starting setup in the DLC (that you can disable if you want), but fundamentally it’s the same game with different and more toys in the toy box.

Thanks for the info :D

I think the difference between ONI and the more conventional fare is what constitutes life support.

In other colony builders life support tends to be a farm and some walls. Maybe some weapons. The rest is just gravy. You can obviously tune the difficulty by picking a more difficult biome, or gimping yourself with more difficult colonists, but it really just adds a couple of more points to the to-do list.

In ONI life support is everything. It’s water, it’s power, it’s gasses. Maybe the walls part is a little easier, but you still need the farm.

That makes it by far the most oppressive colony sim I’ve played. Which isn’t a criticism, I really like that it constantly feels like I’m in a race with collapse, and I enjoy that challenge, but I do understand how that would turn someone off.

Unless you’re doing one of the more novel builds, what you get out of making an efficient layout is you buy time before things start getting really bad, and that has compelled me to restart at least twice.

Much more so than other colony builders, I’m constantly aware that time is ticking. But with each restart I know a little bit more, and I’m a little more aware of the traps, and my colony is more efficient, so at least to me that seems like a perfectly good reason to go that way.

Just got back into ONI yet again, so naturally I pulled up this thread. This is a really good way of explaining ONI and its appeal relative to other agent sims.

Like I played a LOT of Dwarf Fortress back in the day and I loved it… but once you know what you’re doing it was (and remains) almost trivially easy to make your fort completely impregnable and self-sustaining. Any pressure you feel is necessarily self-imposed. ONI’s design wherein you’re solving one problem right around the time another rears its head is quite different and IMO a lot more rewarding.