There are some entertaining moments to the game. My starting water was already running out and rather than reroute everything to a new location. I thought why not move the mountain to Mohammed.
I was a big ass 60+ tile pool of water above my location, twice the size of my starting pool. Also right below my starting pool there was another 2 1/2 tile deep and 12 tile wide pool. (I hate shallow pools cause pump inputs are 2 high)
So I thought maybe lets drain the big pool into my starting pool combine it with my shallow pool into one big pool. It required some micromanagement and prioritization to create a one tile wide snaking path down the map. Build a ladder to build a tile than deconstruct the ladder and finally close the hole with another tile.
Needless to say everything didn’t go swimmingly (pardon the pun). I do remember a moment when this wall of water was crashing down, and me yelling at Devon, "I don’t give a shit that you are sopping wet. I put two exclamation points on the order to build the tile for a reason . I don’t want the ranch flood put your fingers in the dike!! But overall it worked fine, even if every dup got soaking wet. Now I have 9x10 pool of 22-3C water. Plus the old water pool is perfect location to store the water from the new “cool” steam Geyser. Line it with insulating tiles. and locate the super computer near it and some pincha peppers which don’t care about heat right?
Exactly – the entertainment value for this game comes in two places for me.
One is in the planning and execution of some new (often crazy) way of handling a problem: relocating water, tapping a geyser, dealing with heat, etc.
The other is when something goes wrong, despite my careful planning. One of my relatives once gave me the wise advice not to DIY anything plumbing-related.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it seems like it makes sense. You will not believe how much trouble you can cause yourself.”
I did not believe him, to my regret.
ONI lets you learn this wisdom in a safe and “entertaining” way.
I tried using “Dig” to clear enough room so my guys could get to water, since I figured water was important to survival, but they did nothing with the water. Do I have to build plumbing from the water?
I didn’t see any options to build anything, except base tile, so I extended my base tile all the way to the water, which unfortunately flooded the starting basing tiles because water suddenly climbed upwards toward the base tiles, and the game suddenly went into super-fast mode by itself. Does this mean my first game should be abandoned? I guess I shouldn’t dig toward water next time.
Poor Devon. I guess he was not a “quick-learner”…?
Pincha Peppers do care about temperature though. They need to be above 35C (and below 85C), which means that irrigating them with a starter pool of polluted water at ~25C will not work in the long run. I often irrigate Pincha Peppers with my surplus contaminated toilet- and bathwater, but it has to be heated before sending it to the plants. I would like to suggest that you assign Devon to this nasty smelling task, to let him learn a lesson!
Worth noting that unless there are easy exploits that bypass many of the systems, the Chick Parabola doesn’t really apply to a simulation game such as this this, which is PvE. The parabola applies to games where the AI is inadequate to counter you, which is just about any single-player strategy game.
Yes, to use water in the early game, build a pitcher pump above a body of water. It needs to have open access to water below it, but the pump itself works as a bridge so you can cross the space.
Your guys don’t need to drink water, though they will do so for a morale bonus if a water cooler is built. Water from a pitcher pump is needed mainly for research at the start. You also need it for wash basins (under the medical tab) which you should build next to your outhouses and set the direction so your dupes use the sink after the outhouse.
When you get plumbing you’ll start to use a pump to pipe in water to flush toilets and plumbed sinks, but you’ll still need water from the hand pump for research.
There does not appear to be a bonus for excessive morale. I think it does affect how quickly stress comes down but I’m not sure since I rarely let my guys get stressed. Keeping morale reliably above the requirement from skill is all that matters.
Liceloaf seems like a waste of water. I went quite a while with my guys eating just meal lice. Berries are also too water intensive so I go straight for mushrooms once I either need the morale or meal lice harvesting starts to consume too much time. Once I’ve dug out a swamp biome and have lots of slime, and I have researched the auto-sweeper, I build a mushroom farm.
I also try to leave cold biomes intact for the free sleet wheat. Dig paths to all the naturally occurring plants. Since unless you let in PO2 the wheat won’t rot you can let it naturally accumulate behind a locked door and make occasional runs to grab it all at once (to save on your guys travelling halfway across the map to get 1 sleet wheat grain).
One more food tip. If the printer offers you a pip take it. They plant seeds and create wild plants (except sleet wheat it seems). Leave a wild pip in an untiled area with a bunch of seeds and you can create wild plant farms.
Their ability can also be used to get the required plants to make an area a nature reserve.
Oh darn just passed one up. I went to the wiki and got the impression since it eats Arbor trees which I don’t have. At least I don’t think I have forest biome, it would starve. Will it plant any time of seeds?
Edit: Duh just realize if I don’t tame it, I don’t have to worry about feeding it, but will still plants seeds.
No, Devon is my super star, he got Neural implant which gave him +10 strength which works nicely with his digging and building skills. Plus he ultimately did build the tile that kept the ranch from flooding and did it pretty damn quick.
Oh I’m not giving Pincha peppers cold water. My plan is to take the water from the “cold” steam geyser room (its currently about 45C) ship it to very well insulate tank- co located with batteries and generators, Then run the water through an Electrolyzer, use the hydrogen to make electricity and also make heat to warm up the polluted water tank. Only after the water has got to at least 70 or 80 will I give to the peppers (and also the supercomputers). As added bonus the heat from the Electrolyzer and Hydrogen generator will heat up the separate polluted water, hopefully killing any germs.
Finally, many cycles in the future. I plan on building a Metal refinery and cooling it with oil. The oil will get super hot . 300 or 400C, so I’ll run the oil pipe into the hot water tanks causing them to generate steam which will power steam turbines and destroy a lot of heat.
I know I’ll have to build everything out of Gold Amalgam and I’m sure there is all kinds of other stuff.I have forgotten about. But how does the plan sound?
Right now I have to figure out a way of cooling the super hot oxygen from the Electrolyzer, but it doesn’t carry that much heat.
That sounds like an excellent plan. An one that I have to admit, that I went through at least 10 cooked, suffocated, drowned and starved colonies to arrive at something similar.
In other news, I finally managed to get The Great Escape last night. It took forever to liquefy enough hydrogen from the two Electrolyzers I had planned for the purpose. So I hooked up a geyser instead, and of course the geyser then went dormant for 50 cycles. But eventually, Travaldo was launched towards the Temporal Tear, and I could go to bed (criminally close to 02:45) with a sense of accomplishment.
You don’t need to wait until you can get oil to set up a metal refinery. Polluted water is a fine coolant for producing gold and getting started on things that require metal. No fancy cooling loop is necessary either. My first refinery just used a pump up from pool of polluted water and drained back into it.
Breeding smooth hatches for an initial supply of iron is also a good strategy as smelting it produces so much heat.
There are moments in this game when I build something, fire it up, things work as I hoped they would and all my planning is validated.
This isn’t one of those.
I posted earlier the hot steam vent I found. Seeing that it was going to output at 500C I wisely realized I couldn’t just drop a steam turbine on top of that. Too much heat would be released by the turbine. I’d have to manage the temp of the steam somehow. I whipped up a solution where I’d contain the geyser and put on top of it a separate chamber to boil water for the turbine. To manage heat transfer between the two I put rows of metal tiles with mechanical airlocks between them. Once the upper chamber reaches the desired temp, automation opens the doors and the vacuum created stops the transfer of heat.
I get this all built a few cycles before the geyser ended its dormancy. Hot steam began to fill the chamber. I got the trapped gasses out of the top of the chamber by doing a little de- and re-constructing the tiles in upper right corner of the geyser chamber (with only minimal scalding of my dupes). It takes some time but the upper chamber gets up to temp. The turbine is activated. The doors open so things don’t get too hot. They close again as the boiler temp drops. Things are working perfectly. I feel the unbridled glee of free energy.
Then the geyser chamber over-pressures. Oops, right, that heat comes with a ton of steam and it’s never going to be at a temp where it condenses and I can just pump the hot water out, as with the cool steam vent I captured earlier. I planned what to do with the heat, but not the steam itself. Now I’ve got two rooms full of steam that’s just under the temp needed to drive the turbine and an idle generator.
Thank you for this clarification of the Chick Parabola. While I don’t mind people adopting the term to whatever situation they feel is appropriate – really, at this point, the Parabola belongs to us all – my original intent was absolutely the AI issue you’re talking about.
And by the way, you guys’ posts about this game are simultaneously exciting and discouraging. This seems like such a cool game, and probably a lot deeper than Klei’s other titles, but it also seems like the sort of thing that requires an engineering degree. The posts by @Thrag and @Therlun with images of their bases are, well, dizzying.
I have done no real math. The most I’ve done is things like noting that electrolyzer says it creates 888 g/s of O2 and that my guys consume 100 g/s, so I should keep it to 8 guys until I can build and supply a second. I do look at the numbers and compare, but there has been no real math.
So while no degree is required, for maximum enjoyment it does require that kind of gearhead mindset that enjoys figuring out how systems work and interact. Rather than an arc of figuring things out and then competing against the AI in those things, it’s all figuring things out. How do I do something? Now how do I do it efficiently and/or at scale? Or how do I utilize this latest resource I just found? I do liken the game to the coolest possible version of “Radio Shack’s X in 1 electronic project kit” toys, for those old enough to be encouraged or discouraged by that reference.
The in game encyclopedia is good, but the tutorial seems lacking so I can’t say it’s the most accessible game. It does require reading some intro guides and tabbing out to consult the wiki at times.
Also those images are mid to late game, things do start simple and build up. Plus while resources are limited, they are abundant enough that you can set your own pace and build slowly.
Just seconding that no real math is necessary. I’ve only played using back of the envelope guestimates as above - how many plants do I need to feed one dupe, etc. That play style is pretty standard in the genre (e.g. RimWorld), so take that for what it is.
You do eventually get a very good grasp of the specifics of these mechanics, but it’s from osmosis rather than pages of hand done calculations. The various interactions and balances are bound to sink in after a few hundred hours.
I’ve been studying your screenshots in an effort to understand the confusing interface. This is the only screenshot I found which shows the resources that my little people are collecting. Sorry, I’m still on the phase where I’m trying to figure out how to build a single thing, so I was curious if I just missed where on the confusing interface it was keeping track of the resources my little guys were collecting when they were digging tunnels. Looks like you activated an overlay of some kind which shows the resources on the right side of the screen. I take it that means that resources aren’t really all that iimportant, since they’re not shown in the already busy interface by default?
