You can do Mars now. Just have to do a minor edit to your save file. Well, you can play on Mars at least. There’s no actual scenario yet. But that does sound good :)
Caved and bought it. I’m having a great time so far after 3 hours. You really need good faith for the first two hours as a player to figure out what’s going on and get used to the control scheme, but after that it’s all good.
I have a manual solar panel connecting to a couple of machines in vacuum, the portable oxygen barrel in a sealed room, and then my latest project is making an airlock. I’m trying to do it with zero engineering experience and as little use of the wiki as possible. So far I have the two airlock doors and an active vent connected by pipes to inside the sealed room with the oxygen. So I am able to pressurize inside the airlock, but can’t depressurize without just opening the outer airlock door. I’m sure there’s stuff I am missing I will check out soon, but at least it works!
Can someone ‘in the know’ link me to a tutorial or guide (text or concise video) that goes through oxygen production, pressurization, and filtration? I need help on the entire chain to get good air in the base. I kept trying my own homebrew solutions that always failed for various reasons, so I started looking at tutorials on youtube and the ones I found weren’t what I was looking for.
Honestly I figured it all out by trial and error on my own. There’s an official Discord that’s full of helpful people though if you care to join up in there. But also, atmospherics is one of the hardest things.
Hmm, well it is my preference to do that.
Currently, I set up a gas room that has a furnace, two active vents leading to two filtration units, which filter out oxygen and nitrogen respectively and then pipe their stuff to the main room of the base which features two portable tanks on connectors. It didn’t really work out. Dumping a whole stack of oxite into the furnace gave me very little air sent to the tanks and the pressure of the main base room was only like 7Kpa.
Need to figure out what’s wrong.
Early on I just threw oxite and water ice on the floor and let them melt to pressurize the place. Then later I setup an atmospheric unit for each of the six gases and would separate them each into their own tanks. And then had a mixer setup that would take the exact ratio of oxygen and nitrogen that I dialed in, heat/cool it, then pressurize the base with it. I never got to adding in CO2 as well, but there was no hunger when I was playing either so I didn’t really have to worry about growing anything. That’s a much more pressing concern in the newer version :)
The Discord is helpful for asking specific questions when they come up. So I guess I didn’t learn it ENTIRELY on my own. But I didn’t follow a tutorial or anything. Just fiddled around with the various parts and thought things out, then asked in the Discord when I had specific questions.
Hope this helps!
Thanks, I think my problem was either dropping it in the furnace instead of the floor, and/or not mixing/pressurising the gas that reaches the tanks in the main base. Will try again!
Eventually I built a sealed room just for ices. So it had a chute on the exterior that you would dump all your ice into when you were coming back from a mining run, and the chute would then dump it all into a sealed room. Then inside the base there were controls. You could pump a bit of warm base air into the sealed room to get the ice to melt, and there was a pressure indicator showing the kpa inside the gas room to verify that the ice was melting. Then once the pressure stopped going up I just pumped the contents of the sealed room into my filtration loop and it would get separated into tanks like everything else. The dropping it on the floor approach is primitive but it works for things like oxygen and nitrogen. You’re going to have to figure out how to pump all the water off your floors if you melt ice. And you definitely don’t want to be melting volatiles in the open air like that unless you like exploding. So it’s a temporary solution that you’ll want to soon improve upon :)
And yes if you’re trying to fill a tank full of something, you usually want a volume pump close to the tank to compress everything out of the feed lines into the tank. Otherwise the tank will just equalize pressure with the pipes and it’s much harder to fill it that way.
That all sounds good, thanks. This is the problem going into the game with zero intelligence in chemistry or engineering. Yet, this is also what makes the game so engaging for me, because I feel like I am learning things as I play. That’s also the main reason I loved Kerbal.
So what is the impression of the addition of hunger?
This video is staggering:
I haven’t yet learnt how to make a greenhouse and produce food, so I turn hunger off in the options. Generally I think it’s a good idea though, producing food in space is a really interesting part of survival out there!
Yeah, I think the starvation loop is too tight for noob/moon start. And it does seem like the greenhouse is your only option. Perhaps there needs to be some sort of organic thing you can mine to keep you going.
Mining food would be a huge immersion-breaker. I think they just need to lower the rate of hunger and provide more food at the start (noone would travel to the Moon/Mars with only a few candy bars in hand!). Maybe they could even make a tutorial that shows you how to make food, but that would go against their design philosophy (sarcastic there).
Yeah you are right. Perhaps a jug of nutrient paste for the journey. That could last you a while.
Anyone play this lately?
Yeah. They’ve been adding tons of really cool stuff lately. Like, really good patches multiple times per day most days. :D
Have they improved the fiddly UI yet?
Uh, some. You can mouse control most of it, but still a little wonky
They added mouse controls which pretty much lets you bypass 90% of the input heavy way they were doing it before. Just drag and drop stuff now if you prefer. It’s neat!
So I see that this is on sale again. I’m interested, but resisting. I’m afraid it’s too granular and requires too much micromanagement, and the learning curve seems impossibly steep. Anyone want to push me one way or the other?