First surviving base, now what?

[jwolfe]

Hey all. Utter noob at ONI but through trial and error (along with finally getting enough plant seeds for a viable farm) I think I've finally gotten to a point where my base will survive the next few cycles.

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198047366558/screenshots/

I'm almost finished converting over to flush toilets and sinks, got liceloaf for days (been feeding all the B.blossoms to the shine bugs I was lucky enough to get) if power's an issue I can shift to Hatch-coal and I'm slowly but surly grinding out the techs.

My problem is, where should I go next. Crack open a new biome for new materials, hunt down a geyser for X resource? Now that immediate needs are met and since I have tons of water along with algae for air, things are kind of in a limbo.

[InstableMonster]

Begin to check how you can automate things long term and explore biomes for materials, all that algae will soon be consumed

[Bokonon]

LOL, what cycle are you on, like 50 or so? Pretty soon things will start to heat up, your oxygen supply will dwindle, CO2 will creep up and start to take over your base, you'll run out of water, you'll run out of algae, your mealwood will get too hot and stop growing, you'll want to add skills to your dupes but not have the morale to cover it, you'll crack open a swamp biome and inadvertantly let slimelung into your base. Man, there's about a hundred things that can go wrong from here. You're way to early to have reached more than a few cycles of viability.

Definitely what you listed, crack open (carefully, check your germ overlay and heat overlay first) new biomes and explore, geysers are a good idea. Explore (again, carefully). And keep researching.

[Kittenpox]

There's still a lot to learn - but welcome to ONI; and congratulations on overcoming the early challenges in the game! ^_^

I like to make my first couple of objectives (once my base is self-sufficient) to be either gathering Wheezewort, or finding Steam vents.
But ultimately, these are your choices to make - and if it all goes bad you can learn from it and make your next colony better prepared. ^_^

[madcow]

Not bad OP.

My only suggestion for that layout is that you will want to have a hand wash station coming from the bottle emptier for the polluted water. Just in case you are dumping germy PW there.

In case you weren't aware of this, if you dump germy water at a bottle emptier, you get covered in germs.

As far as what to do next, you might want to surround the base with Insulated tiles to keep heat out.

[Mod Sloth]

The next step is to get comfortable, forget to check your oxygen overlay for a few cycles, work on other things, water filtration for example. Then suddenly realize your error, switch to oxygen overlay and discover that you have less than 1 cycle to avert the imminent crisis facing your duplicants. Rinse and repeat.

[Hedning]

Renewable food, o2 and cooling. Also oil power.

[jwolfe]

Like I said, first base that I've managed to get this far. As for cycles, I'm in the night of 29.

I have the tech for cleaning water but unfortunately I had one bout of food poisoning at some point and the P.water reservoir is contaminated (though I had put the wash station in beforehand). I've seen it said that FP germs can't survive long in oxygen after passing through and electrolyzer so that option's open.

As for cooling the 'low-tech' suggestion that I saw was to cool down the water tanks by storing ice inside and the piped water cools the base. Similar thing if the map has a slush geyser I suppose.

Though speaking of germs, does storing a liquid in a reservoir (the building) in a chlorine atmosphere still kill infections?

[Bokonon]

Last question first, yes but it takes a little while to remove all the germs. Polluted water with no germs is NOT water and can still mess up things that require straight water. Sieve only converts p-water to water but doesn't remove the germs. Unless you're using germy plain water to cook (mush bars etc) it's no problem to use for anything else, it's ok to use it for research stations, irrigation, that kind of thing.

Problem with cooling with ice is it's limited and you will eventually run out. The ice maker shouldn't be efficient enough to have unlimited ice. You'll have to explore and find other solutions eventually or suffer heat death. It might take hundreds of cycles but it will happen.

[SKull]

Good start! I would recommend exploration. It's fun, you find new things and some of them you will probably need pretty soon. Three main areas of focus:

1: Find more water and try to get it in use. Either geyser water, which is very hot, or polluted water cleaned with a sieve.
2: Build one or two electrolyzers and use the water I mentioned above to feed them, and not the water in your starting biome. This water is cool and you will want it for watering crops later on. Anyway, this will solve your impending oxygen crises for the foreseeable future.
3: Don't get more dupes until you find more food sources. Starvation is a common killer in ONI. This means either meat, wheat from cold biomes and nuts from toxic biomes, which you can mix with wheat/meat for frost buns or barbecue. Once you have either or both of those you can get more dupes too.

[jwolfe]

My intent for the moment in regards to food is to carve out a couple of stable areas for hatchs as currently I don't have the right minerals to make a shine bug lure so they have to stay in the original. The bugs can run a B.blossom farm (and/or solar later) while the hatchs can keep me in meat, eggs and coal.

As for water, I've got one good sized lake I'm draining, two more close by (And I want to drain them as well considering they're in the way of further construction!) with polluted water further out.

Though in regards to the electrolyzers from what I understand, I'll want to seal them up and have gas filtering to grab the hydrogen and throw it into a generator while the O2 goes to the base.

[Kittenpox]

Originally posted by jwolfe:

Though in regards to the electrolyzers from what I understand, I'll want to seal them up and have gas filtering to grab the hydrogen and throw it into a generator while the O2 goes to the base.

Correct. The Electrolyzers won't produce enough hydrogen to power the whole thing (certainly not if you're using gas filters anyway), so you'll either want to use fancy architecture or an external power source.
That type of setup also can generate a little bit of heat over time - and since it's all contained without external air flow, you'll eventually want a way to cool it down.

But again, how you choose to do this (or if you want to find alternative workarounds that don't rely on tackling the problem head-on!) is entirely up to you. :-)

[SKull]

Originally posted by jwolfe:

Though in regards to the electrolyzers from what I understand, I'll want to seal them up and have gas filtering to grab the hydrogen and throw it into a generator while the O2 goes to the base.

Yes, exactly. But you want the electros to get off the algae since that's a much more limited resource in the early part of the game, and realistically the first thing you run out of. Hydrogen is just a bonus. But you gotta have electros running before you run out of algae. And after that you don't really need algae anymore, and can use it to breed fish and things.
You'll know if you're too late btw. The diffusers will stop running, O2 pressure will drop and the base will fill up with CO2 until the dupes can't breathe and then die.

I think we've all mistimed this transition once or twice, so odds are you will too. But that's a good thing. Being told what to do by me is fine. Knowing why you should do it from personal experience is better.

[jwolfe]

Admittedly a lot of my future building will depend on what I find in the nearby zones.

Originally posted by Kittenpox:

Correct. The Electrolyzers won't produce enough hydrogen to power the whole thing (certainly not if you're using gas filters anyway), so you'll either want to use fancy architecture or an external power source.
That type of setup also can generate a little bit of heat over time - and since it's all contained without external air flow, you'll eventually want a way to cool it down.

Sure it's won't be a net positive but at least I'm burning the hydrogen and not letting it build up. Of course if and when I find that Thermo-Nullifier that's been mentioned I'll probably start feeding the generated hydrogen into it.

[LuckyN13]

I always do a hydrogen farm like this to automate my oxygen
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1826329828

I'll pump my whole base with this oxygen and pump other biomes and tunnels I'm exploring too.
This set up is self-sustaining so long as theres water nearby and the oxygen doesnt become too dense where the vents get blocked. I'll just keep pumping it into dead rooms and random biomes to keep the generator running.

It runs on 960v of power, so it basically only sustains itself. You just need a dupe to step on the treadmill for 5 seconds to prime it, and once it starts running it'll never stop unless the water or air stops flowing.
I have a secondary generator room set up for powering things around my homestead, this set up is strictly to generate oxygen only.

[jwolfe]

Originally posted by LuckyN13:

I always do a hydrogen farm like this to automate my oxygen

I'll pump my whole base with this oxygen and pump other biomes and tunnels I'm exploring too.
This set up is self-sustaining so long as theres water nearby and the oxygen doesnt become too dense where the vents get blocked. I'll just keep pumping it into dead rooms and random biomes to keep the generator running.

It runs on 960v of power, so it basically only sustains itself. You just need a dupe to step on the treadmill for 5 seconds to prime it, and once it starts running it'll never stop unless the water or air stops flowing.
I have a secondary generator room set up for powering things around my homestead, this set up is strictly to generate oxygen only.

So two Wheezeworts to cools the systems and the electrolyzers feed the generator. Though I've noticed that compared to previous versions, the wheezeworts need Phosphorite to keep going. Can you generate that stuff or is it a limited resource you mine?