Need serious help late game

[APOPU]

I have over 900 hours in this game and have created over a dozen 700+ cycle colonies. They always end up falling apart right at the very end of the game because of one simple fact, I CANNOT EVER SEEM TO GET ENOUGH WATER. As you could imagine this is quite infuriating as I have dumped an unhealthy amount of time into this game and still have yet to beat it. With each colony I create, I get access to EVERY water generating geyser on my planetoid. For my most recent run, that is a steam geyser, a cool slush geyser, a cool salt slush geyser, and a polluted water geyser. I filter and boil the geyser's products at max efficiency and recycle whatever polluted water I generate and STILL have a net loss. Partially because I have to share the water between my main planetoid and the oily planetoid because it doesn't generate with any water geysers and cannot self-sustain. Whenever I look at youtube for tutorials I see people with MASSIVE water reservoirs that take up an eighth of their planetoid, but I have no idea how to even get there. Can someone please tell me what I've been doing wrong for the past 6 years? Thanks.

Edit : Just realized it's probably because I tend to rely on plant-based farming, there is a very real chance that is just randomly occurred to me right after I lost yet another colony. SMH.

[Bobucles]

Well, I guess you kinda nailed it.
Dupes consume ~70kg of water on electrolyzer oxygen, and 1000kcal of food can be around 50kg of water daily. It doesn't seem like much but it adds up for every dupe. So obviously, the best way to save water is to limit how many dupes are in your colony.

Ranching offers a ton of kcal without spending water, but critter farms do make demands on the CPU. It's tough to get free oxygen but oxyferns will help out.

Probably the most spammable source of water is wild arbor tree farming. Follow the guides for placing wild tiles and planting with pips, and start making forests of the stuff. Process the lumber into ethanol, and eventually water comes out the other end. The side products save water as well. Pip dirt will reduce the need for water crops. Polluted dirt can go to dirt or sublimate to oxygen, and the surplus carbon dioxide will grow slicksters for food and additional oil.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Originally posted by APOPU:

I have water shortages

Install spreadsheet software, make the most basic table listing how much water does each geyser actually output and then calculate what your consumption should be.

Example:
I have a cool steam vent outputting 1528g/s of water.
That alone is enough for 13 duplicants, or 46 sleet wheat/bristle blossoms.

I also have a natural gas geyser, geotuned 4 times to 162.8g/s, could do it on 5 geotuners but excesses are easier to deal with than shortages, specially when we're talking about oxygen generation and not say, pincha peppernut farms.
Since natural gas isn't water, I have to multiply those 162g/s by 0.75x which is 121g/s of water: enough for 1 duplicant, 3 water plants or 2 pepper plants.

I can also just use pipe bridges/valves/shutoffs/meters to feed oxygen generation>crops>oil>whatever.

With all said, I know what the limits are and I'll respect them.
Any excesses out of these calculations can be sent to recreational buildings, destroyed, or used in a youtuberman's impressive yet equally pointless water tank.

[APOPU]

Originally posted by POWER WITHIN USER:

Originally posted by APOPU:

I have water shortages

Install spreadsheet software, make the most basic table listing how much water does each geyser actually output and then calculate what your consumption should be.

Example:
I have a cool steam vent outputting 1528g/s of water.
That alone is enough for 13 duplicants, or 46 sleet wheat/bristle blossoms.

I also have a natural gas geyser, geotuned 4 times to 162.8g/s, could do it on 5 geotuners but excesses are easier to deal with than shortages, specially when we're talking about oxygen generation and not say, pincha peppernut farms.
Since natural gas isn't water, I have to multiply those 162g/s by 0.75x which is 121g/s of water: enough for 1 duplicant, 3 water plants or 2 pepper plants.

I can also just use pipe bridges/valves/shutoffs/meters to feed oxygen generation>crops>oil>whatever.

With all said, I know what the limits are and I'll respect them.
Any excesses out of these calculations can be sent to recreational buildings, destroyed, or used in a youtuberman's impressive yet equally pointless water tank.

Thanks for the tip. Guess I never thought about actually doing the math on what I was consuming. Will definitely try in my next colony.

[Myriad]

Originally posted by APOPU:

Just realized it's probably because I tend to rely on plant-based farming, there is a very real chance that is just randomly occurred to me right after I lost yet another colony. SMH.

It's a very real thing and happens to me all the time. I'll think about something for days, and then finally post it. And almost immediately I realize my answer. I think it has to do with actually writing something down. I guess that's why taking notes was a big thing when I was in school.

As for an answer to your OP, it's hard to say for sure without knowing everything that you're doing. I always go well over 1000 cycles, and never ran out of water. But the above posts covered a lot.

It's quite possible you have too many dupes. Consider this scenario that I'm going to throw random inaccurate numbers at, just to make a point... Your four geysers can support 20 dupes with Bristle Berries and Oxygen, along with 3 Oil Wells. With that you can survive indefinitely, probably even leave the game running, go to sleep, get up, go to work, and come home and everything is still running smoothly.

But then you add another Dupe or Oil Well. Now your production can't keep up with the demand, and your reserves are going to slowly diminish. It may take a long time to deplete, but eventually you'll reach a deficit where you're in trouble. Oxygen thins out, you're getting blackouts, and Dupes start to starve.

This example may seem like a waste of words and is stating the obvious, but honestly that's many people's problems in a nutshell. They're expanding beyond their means.

You can start a new game and survive forever with those first few Dupes. So you use that as a base. You'll probably print a few more to fill the roles you never selected at the start, but limit it to 6 or so. Establish food and oxygen for that number, and observe how it goes.

When you want to expand, build the life support first. And if you can't, then you really shouldn't expand.

It all seems like common sense, but it's so easy to slip up, especially when things are taking forever, and you really want another worker.

[some moron]

I guess that's a little annoying because IRL I think plants are a closed system, meaning the only water lost in the ONI game should be electrolyzing, and spending o2 in space.
Then again there are magical creations of water, such as making them vomit gains you some water after filtering it. And toilets generate water. I could see that if dupes suck h2o from the air, from the plants, but then the whole system ought to be water neutral.
And animals, while they do drink water, also should be water neutral, but where is it? I ask you that, nay I demand, Where is the animal urine!!! We deserve it!

[View The Phenom]

How many dupes are you using when the colony ultimately fails? If you have less than 20 and 4 renewable sources of water, I'm not sure how you're running out of it constantly?
Even with a plant-based diet, shouldn't you have an excess with that many sources of water? Never mind all the other processes that produce waste water for you to use.

[APOPU]

Originally posted by View The Phenom:

How many dupes are you using when the colony ultimately fails? If you have less than 20 and 4 renewable sources of water, I'm not sure how you're running out of it constantly?
Even with a plant-based diet, shouldn't you have an excess with that many sources of water? Never mind all the other processes that produce waste water for you to use.

At the time of failure, I had 18 dupes total. 8 on my main planetoid, 6 on my oily planetoid, and 4 on my radioactive planetoid. IDK... To be fair I DID reserve the steam vent on my main base for oil in the event of a shortage. I tend to run my main base off petrol, with my oily base off Nuclear, and my radioactive base off solar, creating a closed loop of power generation so if one falls, the other falls. Maybe that was part of my issue.

[FDru]

Seems like a lot of dupes, but if you're on multiple asteroids shouldn't you also have access to an increasing number of water sources? I typically have 5k-6k/s on my starter asteroid so can't imagine how I'd still only have that much after exploring 3 different worlds.

[APOPU]

Originally posted by FDru:

Seems like a lot of dupes, but if you're on multiple asteroids shouldn't you also have access to an increasing number of water sources? I typically have 5k-6k/s on my starter asteroid so can't imagine how I'd still only have that much after exploring 3 different worlds.

I ran food solely on blossoms for all 18 dupes for the first 500 cycles so it ran out fast

[cswiger]

Originally posted by APOPU:

I ran food solely on blossoms for all 18 dupes for the first 500 cycles so it ran out fast

Next game, diversify the types of food you produce. You should be making Surf-n-Turf and so forth using the Gas Range to obtain the most calories and morale bonus. Pacu and Shove Voles are essentially free since you don't need to feed or groom those critters.

And Hatches are important for generating coal from the practically inexhaustible rocks, but they also provide meat and eggs as well.

[Shame]

Interesting scenario you have here, never heard anyone get stuck at late game before.

The liquid sulphur geyser will be the most effective method for plant-based food production, I find it can feed at least a dozen duplicants alone.

You can also ranch dreckos by basically free, just let them eat balm lilies which when growing consume no resources at all, not even in farm tiles. They eat the lilies which grow from nothing, and you get phosphorite (for wheezeworts and possibly fertilisation), meat, eggs, reed fibre and egg shells for lime.

[View The Phenom]

Originally posted by APOPU:

Originally posted by FDru:

Seems like a lot of dupes, but if you're on multiple asteroids shouldn't you also have access to an increasing number of water sources? I typically have 5k-6k/s on my starter asteroid so can't imagine how I'd still only have that much after exploring 3 different worlds.

I ran food solely on blossoms for all 18 dupes for the first 500 cycles so it ran out fast

Yeah, that would do it. Bristle Blossoms eat through water like crazy, especially if it's feeding 18 dupes for that long.

[redhongkong]

i always start with rancher and live on that dirt /muskroot early game xD

the only water i spend is bathroom water on single reed before i get pip

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Originally posted by cswiger:

Next game, diversify the types of food you produce.

Originally posted by View The Phenom:

Yeah, that would do it. Bristle Blossoms eat through water like crazy, especially if it's feeding 18 dupes for that long.

Could start going for plant mutations as early as possible.

Superspecialized doubles a crop's yields for FREE (you need precise temperature control) while Leafy halves growth time and only increases resource consumption by 20%.

[Xeno42]

18 dupes breathing electrolizer o2 and eating only bristle berry (grilled into gristle berry) would be:

54 plants consuming 1080kg of water per day or 60kg of water per dupe per cycle
~1216 water used from oxygen or around 67.5kg per dupe per cycle

so you need 127.5kg of water per dupe per day or 0.2125kg per dupe per second

18 dupes would be 3.825 kg/s

average yields per cycle for the vents you have:

(cool?) steam geyser : 1.5kg/s
cool slush geyser : 1.5kg/s
cool salt slush geyser : 1.5kg/s
polluted water vent : 3 kg/s

which means you get 7.5kg/s of water per second on average

this assumes you have tanks for your geysers so they never over pressure. over pressure prevents them from outputting thus reducing they're average yield

also running petroleum generator full blast uses ~1.3kg of water per second assuming your using an oil refinery instead of a petroleum boiler

you said you where boiling your water?

it takes ~4KDTU to increase the temperature of 1Kg of water by 1C
assuming your exploiting the liquid tepidizer to reach the boiling point (which is one of the most efficient ways to boil) it would take about 960w of power to raise 1kg of water by 1C
which is a little under 1kg of petroleum to generate the power

polluted water vent: starts at 30c and needs to reach ~120c to boil meaning you need to gain 90c a whopping 86,400w of power or 86.4kg of petrolium to boil 1kg of polluted water.

86.4 kg of petroleum is 58kg of water (again assuming refinement if from the oil refinery)

or use a water sieve at 120w for every 5kg or 24w per kg of water

TLDR: it isnt worth buiding a water boiler just use the seive or a desalinator. for your water sources that are to cold just pipe the through your hot water tank. you can even make a logic loop to prevent the water from leaving until its 1c.