Mid-game power and food generation.

[Cerberus α]

I love this game. However, once my research has finished and I begin the exploration phase. My colonies either fall apart, or hit a brick wall.

I run small colonies, 6-8 Dupes with no glaring netatives.

The problems I run into on a regular basis.

1. Power generation. I would think my problem is having everythhing wired to the same bank of 2-3 batteries and 1-2 power wheels. While trying to setup advanced power supplies like, coal, hydrogen or natural gas, my base cannot generate enough power until I can have hands, or rather feet free power generation.

2. Food. In more than once colony, I have gone from 50k calories available, to less than 10k. I generally rush farms and mealwood plants, keeping roughly 3 per Dupe if the seeds are available for that. I would assume parts of this problem are related to the previous problem of power generation, and my food in refrigerators spoiling.

3. Last game while exploring, I added way too much polluted oxygen into my base due to explotaion I would guess. Is it as easy as a gas pump and removing it?

I do some things well, I think...

1. My bases have never seemingly had a problem with oxygen generation, my primary living area usually in the bright blue.

2. Co2 removal and storage I do well making an area for it to fall into.

3. I have what I think is efficent water useage. A storage area for dirty water, ran through purifiers, to lavatories, showers, and scrubbers, then back into the dirty tank.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I also feel some of what I have "learned" comes from Blitz's youtube channel, I feel I should be taking his videos with a grain of salt as he tends to not explain WHY he's doing what he's doing from time to time.

[AquaX]

You are good except for water. Do not rely on dirty water to survive. Find a geyser and tap into it quick. You will run out of sand eventually and ur base will crash.

Also to prevent massive PO2 contamination to bade, use multi airlock doors in rows in between biome areas. This will prevent leaks from entering.

[Cerberus α]

How do you properly recycle, or dump dirty, water?

[Thorin]

Food: mealwood should be a stopgap until you have enough stable source. You have two options (or mix of them.) Wheat in ice biom, simple and umlimite, but need 20 cycle to generate return (and if you need a first run to just start the large scale farming, you need 40 cycle) or Blossom near (at) the edge of an ice biom, it needs fertilizer or water to get good harvest for sustainability. Wheat has the idebenefit, that you can just leave the seed/food in the cold and get it refrigerated for free.

Power: Either keep a bunch of hatches and feed them some stuff, around two of them can sustain a coal generator working forever, depending on luck and care you can keep dozen or so of them alive. Or go for the natural gas. A geyser gives you 1 (maybe 2) natural generators. A simple fertilizer setup can feed any numbers, just add pulluted water to them (3 fertilizer:1 natural gas generators), the fertilizer makers need 360 watt per generators of 800, even if you add a full gaspump and ga filter, you still get some electricity, or create a bigger setup for better return. You cn also use the hydrogen from the eletrolizers to run the electrolizers and the pump, so you get them for free with a good setup, but you can't rely on that to work all the time.

PO2: best to avoid it in main base, airlocks and a deodorizer around will help. You can just let your dupes breath it slowly, or pump out with a filter, but that needs energy and time.

[AquaX]

Originally posted by -DB!- Cerberus α:

How do you properly recycle, or dump dirty, water?

1st find a geyser. Tap it and make a tunnel so it can funnel into ur clean reservoir or an ice biome.
2nd any waste water from utilities should be dumped into a slime biome, hopefully in an already large polluted water pool.
3rd stick a pump into the polluted water and send it all into the fertilizer makers. Make sure to isolate the room so the natural gas won't escape and mess ur base up.

If you are careful w dupe management, u should never need water filter and water cleaners.

[Cerberus α]

How do you wrangle the animals in the game, I've seen people run colonies around, Morbs, Pufts, and now Hatches?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Hatches are pretty easy. Build around them while they sleep basically.

[AquaX]

Morb and hatches can jump 1 tile across and 2 tiles up. Use that to understand their limits. They cant use ladders. Uf u leave food, that incentufize them to move that way. Pufts always follow PO2. u build fence gates behind them to push them where u want to go w/o killing them. If you got airlock doors, either lock them or keep them remained open. Those can kill puft, morb and hatches too if it has no natural ground under the door. Hatches are more manageable to move if u leave natural tiles around since they like to burrow in those.

[Art1985]

I have a question about power, I have seen info that transformators have bug where they are dumping energy for nothing, but how do I use energy system without them? Without them my wires regularly getting overheated.
I have tried to create isolated power systems, separated for food, message, water production, oxygen production (yes with hydrogen generators oxygen work longer without duplicants involved), but with all this I need too many duplicants and it is becoming impossible to build something far from main base. My colonies does not have any problems with food, stress (not more then 30%) and oxyhen (around 1000 oxygen pressure in main base areas), but at some point nothing being build when I am starting projects far from main base. Even tried to create distant living spaces from main base (for diggers and builders) , but this does not help at all. They are regularly running to main base and assigned projects taking too long to finnish.
And I don't think it is possible to create self sustained colony without manual power generators? So I need some duplicants just for power generators all the time?

PS is there any roadmap for next updates? Really hope that there will be added more options for power managment and for liquid management and cooling.
Would be great if we could stop gas or liquid passing based on pipe saturation, now we only can decrease pipe pressure, but no option to increase it. For example I need max pressure for gas before cooling machines so that they would be cooling max gas in one cycle (gas pipe 500 > create max pressure 1000 (no option to do this in game) > cooling machines 1000 > lower gas pressure to 100 (we can do this right now) > send to multiple gas wents and repeat).

[Thorin]

You should not use hamster wheel after around 40 cycle, except to jumpstart your sytem if it ever stops for some reason.
Use coal if you have hatces, or gasgeyser+fertilizer otherwise.
Energy needs:
1 cooking station (60 W, not need to be always on)
1 or 2 fridge (120 or 240 W)
1 or 2 massage table (240 or 480 W, mostly not in use, so no energy usage)
This is your first circuit, even if everything goes on, no problem
2 airpump (480 W)
1 airfilter (120 W)
1 electrolizer (120 W)
Second cicrcuit, you can make it almost independent with a hydrogen generator
2 airpump (480 W)
1 airfilter (120 W)
3 fertilizer maker (360 W)
Third circuit, or even can be the main line, since only energy users matter for overuse, 1 pump for the geyes, second for the 3 fertilizer (or only one if you put them in the same place), this setup can feed 3 gas generator.
2 waterpump (480 W)
1 or 2 airscrubber (120 or 240 W)
Fourth circuit, for the main water tank and the water geyser, plus the CO2 removers.

And this is all you need for 6-10 dupes You energy need is 3200 if everything is built and in use, you get 2400 from the three gas generator and additional 800 from the hydrogengenarator

[AquaX]

Fridges are kinda bad. Find an area in the ice biome and dump a good chunk of CO2 there, isolate it and build ration boxes in it. Fridges have a bug in which even though it is in a cold enviornment, the game doesnt register that when it is not powered so the food would decay. Doesnt happen for ration boxes.

[Thorin]

yes, you can waste time with walking to the ice biome to eat or spend a minicule power and not waste time to eat. But if you really want to save the fridge power, than just keep a CO2 pocket inside you 20 celsius home biome and keep the food there, it will still get the sterile modifier.

[Cerberus α]

At what point should I separate power grids. Like average cycle.

[Thorin]

When you would go over the 1000 w on regular usage, the power grid should evolve with your colony, first you have one, then split it into two, after that you probably shoul build a main line for the generators and two separate for the users, and when one gets overloaded, shift or split them.

[Cerberus α]

Could you explain that in a little more detail? Forgive me for not understanding.