The Biodome Puzzle

[Rexxer]

I have been utilizing this trick for awhile, but I noticed no one has yet published info on this feature/glitch/exploit on the forum. It's a very useful trick since it allows building biodomes much more compactly. Without knowing this feature, you will likely be hampered in building exactly the design you want.

Basically, biodomes although seeming circular and symmetrical, they are not, at least when it comes to positioning doors. Here is a summary of this "secret menu" feature:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777181054
The orientation of the biodome is most noticeable in the position of its internal harvest panel which is an equilateral triangle oriented with one point pointing toward the active middle door:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777181425

[LazerRay]

I do the simpler approach and only connect Biodomes from the bottom, that way I have access to all 16 slots per dome, since each door on the sides removes the related slot.

I can have up to 5 of each plant type and 4 empty slots across 4 Biodomes with this build style, my current base has the 4 domes but I currently don't have the resources for the last two plant types.

[Krash Megiddo]

This helpful. I've been rotating the biodomes 90 degrees to attach the door in the front where I want it, but didn't know why I had to do that.

[Kazuma]

Note that 'diagonal band' can appear to be oriented properly for the topical purpose in TWO positions of the cuboid, so you have 50% probablility of not needing to dismantle buildings because of 'damn, the biodome faces the other way'.

[Barmy Nimrod]

I have messed around with so many configurations of this, looking for the easiest way to quickly harvest the plants. Honestly, in the end you have to point at the middle thingy from somewhere to activate the harvester. I visited a base once that I thought was the quickest and produced the most harvest. They put the domes on top of the cubes. You look up, harvest and go to the next cube. Looked horrible but was efficient.

At one time you could remove the door, plant in all the pots and put the door back and didn't lose the extra plants. I don't know if that still works.

I gave up on the efficiency part and went for the aesthetics of the design. It really doesn't take me that much longer to harvest in this base. Look left harvest look right harvest walk to the next junction. Go around the whole thing clockwise.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2594598868

[Krash Megiddo]

Originally posted by Uranium235:

I have messed around with so many configurations of this, looking for the easiest way to quickly harvest the plants. Honestly, in the end you have to point at the middle thingy from somewhere to activate the harvester. I visited a base once that I thought was the quickest and produced the most harvest. They put the domes on top of the cubes. You look up, harvest and go to the next cube. Looked horrible but was efficient.

At one time you could remove the door, plant in all the pots and put the door back and didn't lose the extra plants. I don't know if that still works.

I gave up on the efficiency part and went for the aesthetics of the design. It really doesn't take me that much longer to harvest in this base. Look left harvest look right harvest walk to the next junction. Go around the whole thing clockwise.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2594598868

What do you use all those harvested crops for? The only one I need on a regular basis are frost crystals for glass production.

[Barmy Nimrod]

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

Originally posted by Uranium235:

I have messed around with so many configurations of this, looking for the easiest way to quickly harvest the plants. Honestly, in the end you have to point at the middle thingy from somewhere to activate the harvester. I visited a base once that I thought was the quickest and produced the most harvest. They put the domes on top of the cubes. You look up, harvest and go to the next cube. Looked horrible but was efficient.

At one time you could remove the door, plant in all the pots and put the door back and didn't lose the extra plants. I don't know if that still works.

I gave up on the efficiency part and went for the aesthetics of the design. It really doesn't take me that much longer to harvest in this base. Look left harvest look right harvest walk to the next junction. Go around the whole thing clockwise.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2594598868

What do you use all those harvested crops for? The only one I need on a regular basis are frost crystals for glass production.

LOL, I'll keep it short. I'm a manufacturer at heart. I created a production operation to craft 100 stasis devices or fusion igniters in one session. This base produces all the plants in one harvest. Except Mordite and Faecium, I extracted them from the ground. After only three lots, I broke the bank and never produced any more.

This was build in my early days of playing. I've learned a lot since then and wouldn't even consider building something like that again. But, it was a lot of work and I really like how it looks. I just can't bring myself to delete it. I have deleted all the other resource bases though.

[Krash Megiddo]

Originally posted by Uranium235:

LOL, I'll keep it short. I'm a manufacturer at heart. I created a production operation to craft 100 stasis devices or fusion igniters in one session. This base produces all the plants in one harvest. Except Mordite and Faecium, I extracted them from the ground. After only three lots, I broke the bank and never produced any more.

This was build in my early days of playing. I've learned a lot since then and wouldn't even consider building something like that again. But, it was a lot of work and I really like how it looks. I just can't bring myself to delete it. I have deleted all the other resource bases though.

Yes, definitely don't delete that masterpiece! You never know what HG will change in the future to make multiple production runs worthwhile.

[Rexxer]

Originally posted by LazerRay:

I do the simpler approach and only connect Biodomes from the bottom, that way I have access to all 16 slots per dome, since each door on the sides removes the related slot.

I can have up to 5 of each plant type and 4 empty slots across 4 Biodomes with this build style, my current base has the 4 domes but I currently don't have the resources for the last two plant types.

That's both slower AND it uses twice as many building components since you can't actually harvest while running through without breaking stride. Using the bottom method you must stop and look up to harvest...therefore it's much slower.

[Rexxer]

Originally posted by Kazuma:

Note that 'diagonal band' can appear to be oriented properly for the topical purpose in TWO positions of the cuboid, so you have 50% probablility of not needing to dismantle buildings because of 'damn, the biodome faces the other way'.

You can always add doors to see which orientation the biodome is in first, then carefully rotate the "screwdriver" cuboid in the proper direction "X" number of turns. The main problem doing so is that depending on how your scroll wheel is tuned, it could turn the cuboid 180 degrees rather than 90. That's a particularly annoying issue when positioning storage containers, too.

[Rexxer]

Originally posted by Kazuma:

Note that 'diagonal band' can appear to be oriented properly for the topical purpose in TWO positions of the cuboid, so you have 50% probablility of not needing to dismantle buildings because of 'damn, the biodome faces the other way'.

Right, half the time you don't have to make any change in orientation at all. It's usually with direction turns that you have to be careful, or if you randomly rotate the scaffolding cuboids by accident. As mentioned above, you can peer into the biodome and actually get a sense of its orientation because of the relative position of the harvest panel which is an equilateral triangle. It's orientation points to the valid door connections, but because it's equilateral, you first have to check its orientation by placing doors, then thereafter track the harvest panel:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777181425

[Rexxer]

Originally posted by Uranium235:

I have messed around with so many configurations of this, looking for the easiest way to quickly harvest the plants. Honestly, in the end you have to point at the middle thingy from somewhere to activate the harvester. I visited a base once that I thought was the quickest and produced the most harvest. They put the domes on top of the cubes. You look up, harvest and go to the next cube. Looked horrible but was efficient.

At one time you could remove the door, plant in all the pots and put the door back and didn't lose the extra plants. I don't know if that still works.

I gave up on the efficiency part and went for the aesthetics of the design. It really doesn't take me that much longer to harvest in this base. Look left harvest look right harvest walk to the next junction. Go around the whole thing clockwise.

You can have both efficiency and looks, since the closest packing usually also looks the best. And I agree, the kind of farm with cuboid hallways underneath both looks bad, is slow (because you can't run through, you stop, look up, run to the next), and worse, it also uses twice as many (or MORE) building components....all of which deduct from your global construction total.

The fastest harvest by far, before they nerfed it, was the overplanting ability of biodomes in the Prisms (and prior) update. Then you only needed ONE biodome for everything....infinite plantings by adding and subtracting doors.

The current fastest harvest is a run-through type, like the farm example in figure 2, as you never have to stop...just keep running and harvest as you run-through. In that particular example I didn't try for some cool aesthetic, but one can easily see that string theory could be used to create designs that were both aesthetic, compact, and a single path (ie. string), so a visiting player would never get lost or get bogged down with an inefficient harvest run.

[Rexxer]

Also, in case some are wondering what all this is about, it's about how to directly connect biodomes rather than use space wasting corridors between them. In order to directly connect biodomes, you need to have a door on each biodome facing one another, so it's important the biodomes are oriented properly so a buildable or ACTIVE door position on each dome is facing one another, AND, the subsequent door positions are in the right direction so you can continue a line of biodomes, or turn a corner:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2133730821
The underlying cuboids are only used to position the biodomes, and each biodome is exactly 4 cuboids from the other. After the biodomes are properly positioned, the cuboids are removed, leaving only the connected biodomes.

[mbrowne999]

Originally posted by LazerRay:

I do the simpler approach and only connect Biodomes from the bottom, that way I have access to all 16 slots per dome, since each door on the sides removes the related slot.

I don't get this. I always plant in the doorway. it works fine. I add the plant with the door in place, I haven't tried placing the door on top of the plant so don't know about that.

[LazerRay]

The doors remove the plant spot and in turn will delete the plant in it, it has been like that since No Man's Sky had bases you could build.

[Rexxer]

Originally posted by LazerRay:

The doors remove the plant spot and in turn will delete the plant in it, it has been like that since No Man's Sky had bases you could build.

No they don't. Ever since Frontiers, there are no obstructions at all for most building additions or subtractions. If you've noticed, throughout all of construction building now, things don't conflict. You can add, overlay, or delete materials everywhere without affecting adjacent matierials. I use the reduction in building collisions now to smash supply depots together, so you can have a huge bank of 20K storage in a tiny space.

Prisms was the last update with the old construction system which blocked building things out of order, requiring building order knowledge to get some things done.