Ran out of dirt in the mid-game

[gussmed]

I'm about 50 hours in to my first game. It's been one crisis after another, but this one snuck up on me.

In the early game, dirt was as common as, well, dirt. It seemed like an infinite resource, particularly since the game gives you tools like the compost bin to convert poo into dirt.

My dupes ate a lot of mush bars at the start, which I thought were made out of algae (since they look like pressed algae). I didn't look too closely at the ingredients, so I didn't realize my dupes were eating dirt.

When my algae ran out and I had my oxygen crisis, I moved to mealwood and lice loaves. I thought I was moving off of algae and to an infinitely renewable source of food. Mealwood consumes dirt, but that didn't seem important. I figured the drawbacks to mealwood were the low morale and the effort required to feed it water and dirt periodically.

Once I got a decent sized farm going, food not only stabilized, I had a substantial surplus. I concentrated on staying alive by first distilling slime into algae, and then eventually (with much work) setting up an electrolyzer.

I found a cool steam geyser, so I thought I had infinite water. Except that once it went active, it never produced any more water. It would erupt steam but it seemed to vanish. So I spent a lot of time chasing new water sources to feed the electrolyzer.

I think - but I'm not sure - the problem with the geyser is that there's too much high pressure oxygen in the geyser room. I don't understand why, since I did let most of the air out when I built the pump, and I assume steam converts to water, not oxygen and water.

Anyway, I was mostly occupied with the perpetual water shortage when suddenly the food gave out. I thought it was mostly overheating, it's impossible to prevent your base from gradually warming from one source or another, and I wasn't really in a position to try and figure out some oddball AC system, my dupes were too busy just surviving.

What actually happened is that I couldn't fertilize the mealwood anymore because I was out of dirt. I'm pretty sure I'm completely hosed now, there's no fallback position for food if you run out of dirt.

[FDru]

Well if you need dirt fast, you can evaporate a bunch of polluted water. It's better to run polluted water through a few water sieves though.

I would switch to a different food source though, like berries (only need water, and light which is cheap to provide power-wise, at 8Ws for 8 plants if you use floor lamps).

[Angpaur]

You still can farm bristle berries or mushrooms. Also you can harvest wild sleet wheat or pinchapeppers. You still have options.

[L37]

Thing with this game - you need to anticipate issues and try to solve (or at least start solving) them before they happen.
Algae is limited. You can use it for quite some time (hundreds of cycles with 15-20 dupes) but you have to constantly watch how much you have and prepare alternative oxygen source ASAP, even if you do not want to use it immediately.
Dirt is much more plentifull (to be honest i do not understand how people manage to run out, i used mealwood a lot and still had like 90T left in my last game by the point it became to low quality to be usefull), but still limited. You need to monitor it and again, prepare alternative food sources while you still have time. Producing dirt to use it for mealwood is not really practical IMO, as it is hard to do fast enough, much harder than switching to other food sources.
With water... starting biome has enough to last for quite some time. But you need to be mindfull of how you use it - every other water source in game will require some extra work to use. Do not waste it on mush bars (plant enough mealwood ASAP, mush bars are emergency measure and a sign that something went wrong. You should not have to use them at all). Do not rush research too much, it uses a lot of water and most high-tech things are not immediately usefull. If you conserve it, you should have enough to last you some time, before you find and start using geyser. For geyser - it needs <5kg/tile gas pressure (lower - better) and some way to cool steam down below condensation point.
You have to be carefull with heat too. Use insulation to prevent you base from heating up. Insulated tiles on borders with hot biomes, insulated pipes for hot water etc. If you need fast cooling - find some ice and build ice sculptures. Aslo dig up few wheezeworts and plant them - if you do things right just few wheezeworts should be able to keep your base nice and cool.
For food i generally prefer switching from mealwood to something low maintenance/automatable, like berries (+peppers later) or wheat. There is also ranching, and it can be really nice as it does not require anything apart from few hatches, few rocks and a rancher to start and can sustain your colony both in terms of food and in terms of power, but the downside is - it requires a lot of dupe work/time.

In your current situation with presumably high temperature, no dirt and presumably very little time - you can try mushrooms. Or berries if you can find a place cold enough for them. You can try ranching hatches too, but it will require quite some time before something usefull is produced.

[SKull]

Originally posted by gussmed:

I'm pretty sure I'm completely hosed now, there's no fallback position for food if you run out of dirt.

Yes you are. But not because there aren't alternatives to mealwood, but because you have to prepare for problems and deal with them in advance in this game almost all the time. If something like this sneaks up on you it's hard to recover, because developing alternative food sources takes a little time, during which your dupes will probably starve to death.

1: Harvest wild plants, specifically pepper nuts and wheat from cold biomes. This you can then turn into frost buns, pepper bread and stuffed berries if you have bristle blossoms. The only drawback with this is that the dupes do have to run all the way to a cold biome to pick up wheat grains and then take it to the grill from there.

2: Stock pools with fish. The fish are quite buggy right now, or at least have been for some time, but live just 25 cycles before leaving meat behind for the dupes to eat. Either raw or mixed with pepper nuts into BBQ. More fish = more meat.

3: Ranching. Same as for the fish, more or less, but also provides basic essential materials like coal, plastic, refined metals, phosphorite and reed fibers. By the mid game, ca cycle 100-150, you should be ranching at least hatches+mutations and one or both kinds of dreckos.

4: Grow bristle blossoms in hydroponic tiles. You don't need too many, perhaps ten or so. Just enough to make a few stuffed berried on the electric grill. These can also be planted in glossy drecko ranches because the dreckos will eat blossoms right off the farm. Shine bugs also like them.


Mealwood only is short term for the start of the game, and you should move away from it as soon as you can. Just destroy early farms and keep as many as you need. My usual food setup at cycle 150 is:

1: Ten mealwood plants and ten bristle blossoms inside a ranch for glossy dreckos. You can have normal dreckos inside until they start laying glossy drecko eggs and then evict them if you just want to ranch glossy dreckos. Primarily critter food, but some will get farmed by the dupes for food, particularly early when you have few dreckos.

2: As many fish as possible, usually at least 30 as close to the base as possible.

3: Nut farms somewhere hot and sometimes sleet wheat somewhere cold. Keep in mind that the wheat needs dirt too, so this is not a good option if you're low on dirt and trying to get off early mealwood. I also recommend farming nuts combined with a ranch for regular dreckos, since they can eat them. But you get plenty of both the wild, so try to conserve wild plants when exploring. And make sure you set them to auto harvest.


But you have to explore I think, That's the key to a stable midgame food supply. The wheat is fantastic, and the sooner you discover a plant the sooner it will begin autoharvesting itself slowly while you do other things. The wheat will stack up, and making your way to an old plant you discovered early on can be a bonanza of frost buns.

[gussmed]

I'm not sure how I ran through all my dirt either. I wasn't really watching it because I didn't think of it as finite, like water or algae. I'm sure there are a variety of things that tripped me up, like not moving to flush toilets early, eating mush bars during emergencies, etc.

I've got a small pepper farm, and I've used it to make the occasional pepper loaf or barbeque, but no sleet wheat. I honestly don't know how you farm sleet wheat, since it requires water AND 5 degree max temperature, and getting water that cold without it freezing in pipes seems impossible.

My oxygen plant is in a cold biome, but I've been using the wheezeworts I found in my water-cooling facility. I built it because I thought I was going to use lots of really hot water from the geyser. While that never materialized, the water sources I did find were all warm to hot, so I needed cooling to avoid killing my plants.

I never did get the water cooling system working well. The basic design is a small holding pool with two pumps controlled by temperature sensors, where one pump ran water through some radiant piping and back to the pool, and the other pumped the water out once it was cold enough. That stopped working when the waste heat raised the local temperature too much.

I tried to switch to an aquatuner, and I couldn't afford the power (1200 watts!) and when it did run, it quickly overheated. I don't know how to shed the waste heat it produces. The tutorials I could find on it all assumed resources I don't have, like oil.

I don't understand how you use ice sculptures effectively for emergency cooling. I tried it a couple of times, but the sculptures melted (of course) and the flooding suffocated the plants. Maybe if I'd pre-built some sort of system where the water would collect in a pool and get pumped away or something, I guess.

Wheezeworts are obvious cooling tools, but since you only get a few and they don't reproduce, I get the impression they're a stopgap, and you're supposed to find other methods.

I started ranching late, so I only have 3 hatches, which aren't enough to contribute meaningful eggs of meat.

I've got a bristle berry hydroponic farm, but it's not growing because of my perennial water shortage, and they're not getting enough cool water.

[FDru]

I don't know how some people manage to not run out of dirt. Doesn't matter how much I dig up, if I'm using anything that requires lots of dirt it's going to run out in less than 300 cycles. It's why I always transition away from mealwood immediately and never grow anything that requires it. Dirt reliance as a long-term strategy just doesn't seem viable.

[SamuraiJones]

Whew, lots to discuss... Yea, this game's all about managing crisis. Ideally you see em coming, although realistically that's mostly about playing the game a few times. If the colony dies, it's not the end of the world. Not alot of initial colonies survive.

My biggest piece of advice -- grow slowly. Fewer dupes consume resources slower.

Originally posted by gussmed:

I'm not sure how I ran through all my dirt either. I wasn't really watching it because I didn't think of it as finite, like water or algae. I'm sure there are a variety of things that tripped me up, like not moving to flush toilets early, eating mush bars during emergencies, etc.

Dirt runs out fast after you get out of the starter biome. Honestly, the small efficency gains you can get with your plumbing and kitchen will never be enough to compensate.

Originally posted by gussmed:

I've got a small pepper farm, and I've used it to make the occasional pepper loaf or barbeque, but no sleet wheat. I honestly don't know how you farm sleet wheat, since it requires water AND 5 degree max temperature, and getting water that cold without it freezing in pipes seems impossible.

Both wheat and peppers are very thirsty... for water efficient food, berries are the way to go. If you look at the calories, peppers don't actually contribute anything, just improve the quality. It is possible with enough power and automation to grow wheet, but it's more work than it's worth imo... i just forage for peppers and wheet even in my advanced bases.

Originally posted by gussmed:

I never did get the water cooling system working well. The basic design is a small holding pool with two pumps controlled by temperature sensors, where one pump ran water through some radiant piping and back to the pool, and the other pumped the water out once it was cold enough. That stopped working when the waste heat raised the local temperature too much.

I tried to switch to an aquatuner, and I couldn't afford the power (1200 watts!) and when it did run, it quickly overheated. I don't know how to shed the waste heat it produces. The tutorials I could find on it all assumed resources I don't have, like oil.

I've got a bristle berry hydroponic farm, but it's not growing because of my perennial water shortage, and they're not getting enough cool water.

Wheezeworts are obvious cooling tools, but since you only get a few and they don't reproduce, I get the impression they're a stopgap, and you're supposed to find other methods.

Yea, cooling is power expensive and complicated, and works slowly, especially when it's based on wheezeworts. Wheezeworts are the best because they're free... but they are limited, and they are slow. It sounds like you're looking for late-game answers to early game problems. I think you may be able to just chase cold rather than try to create or move it.

Originally posted by gussmed:

I started ranching late, so I only have 3 hatches, which aren't enough to contribute meaningful eggs of meat.

Hatches are my favorite mid-game food source, plus the lyme in the shells are the limiting reagent in steel. Keep growing em, just be mindful that ranchers tend to require higher morals than cheap labor, and they require more time than farms.


OK! So here's my specific advice:

Grow your hatch farm, but be aware they're tricky to maintain the population. (My late-game base now has 15 hatches completely feeding 17 dupes, if you're trying to ballpark how many you need). They produce food in bursts, so you'll need storage and time before they get started. In the meantime, move your farm to a cold biome. If that biome gets to warm before you get your hatches running, move again.

Get better cooling on your steam vent -- it sounds like the steam builds up then blocks the vent. You want it to condense into water asap so it doesn't block it. Just clear a bigger area for it, and run a strip of metal conductive plates behind it. You'll need to actively cool it eventually, but for now just help it distribute heat to its surroundings faster. It may look like it's just disappearing because steam takes up so much more volume than water... but as long as the vent doesn't say "overpressure" then you're fine.

If you still don't have enough water, cut into a slime biome and get the slime distillers going -- get some algae, water and dirt, all of which you'll like. Alot of people use slime for shrooms, but I like it for algae and water so much more. Just don't leave slime sitting around loose cuz it'll make germy air. You can never have too many deoderizers. Just keep an eye on your sand levels -- I've never run out, but it might be problematic if you did.

If all else fails... restart and try again. This isn't Don't Starve or Invisible, but I don't think your intended to succeed with your first colony.

Spacebase Sagan wishes you luck.

[foimols]

You did well for a first colony! Congrats! I think mine died off because of starvation about that time. If your colony hasn't perished yet, you can break into all the little nooks that houses critters and grab the meat that is lying around to sustain your colony while you try to recover. Given that the new patch is coming out with the ability of the printer portal to print critters, you can actually kill off all the critters in the immediate area for food too.

FYI there is a bug with steam geysers. While venting steam, the steam geyser generates/duplicates the gas it is surround with which obviously will cause over-pressure at some point. I never looked too deeply at the amount it adds to the environment but I have a steam geyser that is generating extra hydrogen for me while my second one just totally over-pressurized an entire area with ear popping pressure of O2...

[gussmed]

I've been expanding into slime biomes for some time. When the algae from the starter biome ran out, I switched over to distilling it from slime. There's a little algae in the slime biome, but not nearly enough to keep the air flowing.

Three silme distillers was enough to keep up with 12 Dupes, but it was never comfortable in terms of oxygen. Switching over to electrolysis helped a lot, though of course that precipitated the water crisis.

My impression is that I really should have switched to mushrooms ASAP. Those don't consume dirt or water. The main reason I didn't was that I was put off by the CO2 requirement. I had plenty of CO2 around my base, but wasn't sure how to collect it where I needed it.

Eventually I moved to power generation from natural gas, and I ended up producing and storing a lot of CO2 in tanks. I started a mushroom farm when my mealwood started experiencing heat problems, but at this point it's too little too late. I'm pretty sure everyone's going to starve before the first crop comes in.

I tend to view the way slime off-gasses polluted air as a feature. Park a deoderizer next to it and it's free oxygen. Despite having slimelung bacteria through much of the base in low concentrations, everyone's pretty healthy.

I did have some very serious cases of slimelung when I was mining slime for algae production, enough to sideline my miners several times, but fortunately they recovered. I think the difference was primarily switching over to electrolysis for oxygen, which both cut down on the amount of slime mining I was doing, and because I had a lot more oxygen in my base, which slimelung bacteria doesn't like.

[DutchGamer78]

There usually some algae fields in warm biomes near phosphorite and ignious rock that are germ free. You can kill slimelung with chlorine too. Try not getting slimelung it in the base but it will slowly die in pure oxygen.

You can store slime under water for example and will not gas off with germs. Early game i harvest slime slow. Have dupes pick it up at high prio after digging and have 1500kg before transitioning to fried mushrooms. Depending on the number of dupes (6-10 round cycle 50) i start feeding mushrooms and fasing out mealwood. And start building washrooms to save on dirt.

To help with co2 a bit you could use a scrubber and/or dig down to feed it to the slicksters.

If you already discovered a cold biome get some wheezeworts and plant 7 or so in your base near equipement that needs cooling.

[sgargoyle]

sleat wheat is easy with normal grow plots in a cold biome. bottle fed plots dont take the heat from the water like the hydro plots do. but <1000g/s water in the lines wont freeze over although youd need to individually set valves to feed each plant at the exact water amount the wheat needs or you will end up with too much water in the pipes and they will freeze and break(using slightly less then needed will not halt the growth too much as long as the difference is not too much they dont allways get to feeding water on time anyway the hydro plots are the same it will stall growth a little but its uptime will match the water amount

[L37]

With cooling - you underestimate what wheezeworts can do. Because of how they work their cooling power depends on gas they are in. I tried collecting most of wheezeworts on the map into single hydrogen room - suffice to say it was enough to to cool aquatuners used to produce LOX/LH2 to sub-zero temperature. Actually too much cooling because i had to add heater to avoid things breaking.
Also at this point in game it is not hard to cool water to specific temperature or otherwise create suitable environment for wheat, so i'd say wheat can be considered late-game food source.

Mid-game though, IMO it is a combination of avoiding heat (use insulation a lot, move hot machines away etc) and using simple cooling solutions like wheezeworts and cold materials from ice biomes.
Sculptures are good specifically because they melt. You need to deal with water (by either designing things so that it does not cause issues or just mopping it up), but it is very cold water which cools all the things it touches extremely fast. You can also cool things by simply storing cold materials in compactors (ice, granite), but it is much, much slower.

[gussmed]

I think I've managed to salvage my game, despite thinking everyone was going to starve to death.

The short version is, wild sleet wheat saved the day.

First, things weren't quite as dire as I thought. There was a deposit of dirt that I'd never mined, which gave me short-term fertilizer for the mealwood.

Then I went looking for wild wheat. There were 4 plants with accumulated wheat that were out of reach of my Dupes, and since that area was still at -17 C, they had not rotted. I built a ladder so they could reach, and suddenly I had access to 170 wheat, which is enough for 68,000 calories of bread, which is 5 days of food. By the time that ran out I'd gotten my mushroom and berry crops in.

I ended up solving my crop water problem by building a basin with a pump, and placing 6-7 ice blocks in it. When they melted they water went to my crops and secondarily to my bathrooms.

Then I dug out the area around the cold steam geyser, and it started producing water. There's definitely something going on with the pressure in the room rising steadily even though I was pumping out the water.

I've run several crop cycles since pulling out of that, and I think the mushrooms and berries are enough to feed my dupes with some margin for error. I'm going to leave the wild wheat alone for now, and I'm actively seeking more wild plants in an untouched cold biome.

I've re-designed my water cooling system, but since I need a large pool of water to cool the hydrotuner I'm using for cooling, it's taking a while to fill the tank. So I haven't really tested that yet.

I still have a water problem, particularly since the steam geyser just went dormant. I'm going to melt ice blocks to delay that problem for a while, but that doesn't feel like a long term solution.

I'm going to put an insulation layer around my base. I'm no longer in crisis mode, so I think I can afford the time for that, even though it's a lot of work.

There are some things I should really re-factor, too. Like placing the bathrooms and bedrooms closer to the Great Hall, and building a proper closed-water circuit for the bathrooms.

To be clear, I've got a water recycling setup, but it's a general purpose one, and it's not really being used because Dupes keep taking water from the polluted water tank out for tasks like watering the pepper plants.

[gussmed]

So, it turns out that my new water cooling system is really, really precise. As in, I can specify the output temperature within 0.1 degrees.

What I'm doing is feeding water into a reservoir, and checking the temperature when it comes out. If it's too warm, it opens a valve to the hydrotuner. Otherwise, that valve closes, and the output valve opens.

After the hydrotuner, I have a sensor checking for the presence of water. If it's there, it closes the main input valve, so the reservoir is only accepting water from the hydrotuner.

Because the hydrotuner is only cooling 10 kg at a time, and mixing it into a reservoir holding 5 tons, each new load only alters the temperature a small amount.

I did have one problem on the output side. Due to the oddball mechanics of ONI liquids, at a T junction, water packets choose a direction in a 50/50 ratio. If one direction is blocked (i.e. a closed valve), nothing happens that cycle. So water throughput drops to 50%.

What I did was put a liquid bridge toward the hydrotuner valve. Since bridges try to move water 100% of the time, and only let it pass if the output is blocked, the delay goes away.

Initial cooling took a while, but it's faast once in operation, since warm water packets at the input side don't raise the tank temperature much either.

[SamuraiJones]

Originally posted by gussmed:

Three silme distillers was enough to keep up with 12 Dupes, but it was never comfortable in terms of oxygen. Switching over to electrolysis helped a lot, though of course that precipitated the water crisis.

Ok, I think that might be your problem. I've no idea how big your base is, but 12 dupes is alot -- not alot of my bases grow past 12, and they don't get there till i've got 2 steam geysers, at least one natural gas geyser and a strong hatch farm. But if you've got things stabilized with the aquatuner, then go for it!