How might I proceed faster?

[MOK]

I'm an intermediate player, over the years I've done a handful of runs. In each, I see that I tend to take a long time to reach various milestones, compared to other players. I didn't really care before, because I knew I was learning a lot of new things each time. However now I've got a pretty solid knowledgebase, and this time around, I want to achieve something with less time investment. I'd like to be more focused, and maybe excise the time-sinks.

What are some common practices that take up a lot of time, but could be omitted or replaced?
What habits have you experienced that aren't really necessary?
What approaches have some of you found that gets you progressing faster than your prior runs?

[gtgiygus]

It's difficult to give advise without knowing what you feel are time sinks you think shouldn't' be. Everyone plays differently, so we can't really tell you many specifics without knowing more about what you do.

One thing I can say is, I try not to pause the game while designing new areas of the base. Just lower the priority of everything new to 1, then up it when I am satisfied. I got used to putting phantom machine/building/door templates over rocks to gague the size I need, then dig, then let them build.

When done right it helps move everything along well.

[View The Phenom]

Like gtgiygus said, you need to be more specific. What are some obstacles your personally face, that tend to slow down your progression?

What is your overall goal in terms of reaching milestones? There is no "one size fits all" solution, as ONI is a game with multiple approaches. One hundred players can have completely different methods of play, yet all of them can reach the same goal line.

[some moron]

Rush petroleum

[Dedmoin]

I am struggling with speeding up my progress myself ;)

Here are some points that might be interesting. At least for me it will be interesting to hear some feedback on those points from other players.
Those are not hard rules but rather guide lines to be evaluated and used as they seem to fit the situation.

From my own experience:
- try to automate as much and as quickly a possible
For me it is eg sanitary buildings (outhouse cleaning timesink), power generation, farming, resource shipment

- substitute materials with easy available alternatives
eg lead can be used right after excavation instead of processing ore to refined metal

- don't try to be perfect right away
Something I cannot avoid myself :D eg don't create a room for power generation that is located away from habitable area, sized to hold several generators, with cooling, managing CO2, ...
Just build a generator where is space now. Don't be afraid of refactoring/rebuilding/optimize things later
Also, I don't care much about CO2 for quite a long time after starting a new game. I just create a sink where CO2 gathers naturally and don't bother my dupes.

- don't rebuild too much
Sounds a bit contradicting to the previous point but actually it is expanding on the prev point. Avoid creating 'perfect' complex systems now just to find out you have to move it somewhere else or it does not meet new requirements

- use physics
Don't build a liquid pool at the top of the map to collect various natural occurences and then pump the liquid there. Instead create the pool at the bottom and let the liquid flow
Same for gases.

- tidying and cleaning as lowest prio
Of course there are situations when this has to be done soon or even right away but it really does not matter if there are things laying on the floor or if atmosphere is contaminated with other gases (of course dupes still have to have enough O2).

- dig with purpose
Excavate only when there is need for space. 'probe' if you can find poi, resources, geysier/volcanos

- create 'professions'
This is debated but imho it is more efficient to have specialists for certain tasks than let everyone do everything. (it does not mean a digger is not allowed to tidy up but only if there is nothing else to do)
Also change task prio setting to proximity

- controlled population
Make sure you have enough dupes to manage the work load but not too many

- create shifts/schedules
Make sure there are overlapping shifts with dupes assigned to keep everything running, so not everything stops because everybody went to bed

- use buffs
Like dream analyzer (sorry don't know the correct name), food, keep dupes in good mood and healthy

- avoid long commutes
Something that I mostly ignore but other people create small outposts for dupes to be closer to their workplace

- keep critters wild
Not sure if this is even a thing for other players but I keep all critters I find wild except dreckos (to farm plastic) and slicksters (recycle CO2). All other critters (pacu, hatch, ...) are wild in my games. Although I feed the wild hatches for coal

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Identify what's slowing you down then deal with it.

Got a plug slug problem that makes you cautious when digging metal? skill up a rancher just to pen them.
In fact, skill someone to finish whatever you need done then use the scrubber rather than wait for someone to arrive or go through all tasks - if you're placing 1000 tiles of rail with 1 engineer then get another one so that it takes half the time.

You don't have to save every single resource. Say, the map is full of ice and you've got 4 water vents? Dig all the ice as it can be a nuisance.

[Myriad]

Originally posted by MOK:

What are some common practices that take up a lot of time, but could be omitted or replaced?

Trying to be absolutely prepared before taking the next step in your plans. You'll find there's always something else you need to do in this game. It's a constant struggle, and sometimes while focusing on preparation, you do a lot of odds and ends that aren't really necessary. Next thing you know a 100 cycles have gone by.

Originally posted by MOK:

What habits have you experienced that aren't really necessary?

Worrying too much about opening a new area. If you want to be fast, just dig through it, build your infrastructure quickly (provided you know what you're doing) such as insulated tiles and airlocks, and be done with it. Deal with the aftermath, which shouldn't be too bad if you actually know the consequences beforehand.

Originally posted by MOK:

What approaches have some of you found that gets you progressing faster than your prior runs?

When you know what you're at, you'll dig towards specific resources, no matter where they are. Dig the outline of a double airlock and use polluted water if you're worried about something. Then also dig straight down to oil, if on a generic asteroid, and straight up to launch a rocket and further target specific resources.
Before that, you'll build a barracks, a mess hall, and a plumbed washroom, which is very easy, then use a Rock Crusher to get the early refined metals you need. Lead works too, but not in high heat. Don't worry about the inefficiency of the Rock Crusher, it won't make a difference in the long run.
It basically boils down to knowing what you can do with what, which really only comes from experience.

[some moron]

Originally posted by Dedmoin:

I am struggling with speeding up my progress myself ;)

- tidying and cleaning as lowest prio
Of course there are situations when this has to be done soon or even right away but it really does not matter if there are things laying on the floor or if atmosphere is contaminated with other gases (of course dupes still have to have enough O2).

I would say that is not true. the stuff on the floor causes a morale penalty. You can fight this by building stuff but untimately are still passing on higher morale buffs. I say it does matter.
It may not kill them immediately, true, but if everything is slowed by 10% that could send you into a death spiral and wonder why the game is so difficult.

That said, I do not tend to tidy all the stuff until my dupes are more trained and taking a morale hit from being skilled.

So it IS something you could postpone, but I'd say it makes everything harder, slower.

[John Hadley]

i would say if you want to build things faster you need to ensure that there are more duplicants doing the building. Don't use the bare minimum number of duplicants if you want to build fast.

I'd say if you want to progress faster you should focus on farming early because a single farmer can feed a dozen or more duplicants by himself without cooking any of the food. Research what you need for the farm plot and hydroponic farms first. Dig up all the mealwood plants you can find and plant them in farm plots when you get the farm plot. When you get up to hydroponic farm then plant all the bristle blossom plants you can find. You should keep panting more plants as you get more seeds by digging up buried items (cracks in the soil) and harvesting them from your existing plants. Try for somewhere near 30 mealwood plants and as many bristle blossoms as you need to make sure everyone has more than enough food. I would say at a minimum you want 8-10 duplicants, 27 mealwood plants and 18 bristle blossoms as early as you can get them in the game.

By splitting your food source between water usage and dirt usage you prevent yourself from running out of either too soon before you harness water geysers and if you decide you want to cook the food even though you don't strictly need to, the pickled meal made from meal lice has a really long refrigerator life (over 100 cycles) and duplicants prefer eating the gristle berry made from the bristle blossom, which spoils faster so you can stockpile your leftovers rather than having them turn into rot piles.

Once you have farms for food your goal is to find and harness two water geysers as soon as possible because that is what makes you able to have a renewable source of food and oxygen that will never run out. Each water geyser of any type provides enough water to support the food and oxygen needs of at least 8 duplicants. Its somewhat more than that but 8 is a safe number.

Until you have harnessed at least two water geysers:

Don't ranch. Grow your food with farming.
Don't cook food. Eat it raw.
Don't use the musher for anything except berry sludge which lasts forever.
Don't take the gourmet trait on duplicants. Do take the shrivelled taste buds or kitchen menace traits.
Don't build a compost. Put your polluted dirt and rot piles in a storage container in water and forget about them. Place a wash basin or sink so they can wash afterwards. It works nicely to have this in the bathroom and have one more sink than you have toilets, but you could place it elsewhere.
Don't build a fancy water reclamation system for your germy polluted water. Dump it into a pit and dump some fresh water on top to lock in the gases and forget about it.
Don't build bedrooms or meal tables. Build a park outside the bathroom for morale boost.
Don't schedule more than 2 duplicants on the same schedule or have them start their downtime at the same time so you don't need to build more than two toilets in your bathroom.
Don't allow more than one duplicant to do the supply job. None is better than one, but if you don't have a mechatronics engineer yet to build auto-sweepers you might have to have someone to put food in a refrigerator.
Don't allow anyone to do research except your researcher.
Don't allow anyone to do farming except your farmer and don't let your farmer do cooking.
Don't allow wild plants that drop food to remain except if you are building a park. Dig them up so they won't distract your duplicants.
Don't let anyone have dig or build above the minimum priority except dedicated digger/builders. Let the others prefer storage first when you have storage needs.
Don't let your dedicated digger/builders do any tasks other than digging and building.
Don't order duplicants to store things in containers just to clean up. If the floor is clean it just means that you wasted a lot of time. If your goal is not to waste time then you need to be messy. Bathroom floors should be clear but you don't need to clean the floor anywhere else.
Don't store more material in a storage container than you can reasonably use in say 20 cycles at a nearby machine.
Don't waste time worrying about decor. Room bonuses to morale are much stronger than decor penalties in general, so its easier to just build rooms or items with morale bonuses than try to spend even a second worrying about decor.
Don't allow any outhouses to be disinfected.
Don't allow shine bugs to wander around your base. Kill them or lock them in a room light cannot escape.

Once you've harnessed two geysers you should be able to support 16 duplicants that can build or do anything fairly fast. Go back and do all the stuff I told you not to do now if you want. You don't need to move fast when you aren't going to run out of food or oxygen.

[Aargh Tenna]

Pace of this game is dictated by amount of dupes you have. The more dupes you have, the faster you will progress. So you need to build economy that supports amount of dupes you want. Having said that, I normally do not care - I play with 16 dupes these days, used to have 24.

Another key to progress faster is not to fix and not to rebuild things. Build it right first time. I use "blueprints fixed" mod for that. So basically avoid "temporary" and "good for now" solutions. Know what you want and build it so it serves you well into end game.

But like, at least for me, this is not about reaching the end but about the journey. So I do not think speed matters (unless you have magma channels lol).

[MOK]

Originally posted by Aargh Tenna:

Another key to progress faster is not to fix and not to rebuild things. Build it right first time. I use "blueprints fixed" mod for that. So basically avoid "temporary" and "good for now" solutions. Know what you want and build it so it serves you well into end game.

I've found this advice to be not realistic or practical. Doing it right the first time means accounting for a ton of variables and small details that you simply don't know to watch for until you've done it maybe twice.

I was building some automated ranching according to someone's blueprint, but inevitably some edge case or slight context difference caused problems. This happens quite often in a lot of different scenarios.

Then there's a lot of problems where there's no accessible template to follow, where it's not a modular plug & play situation. Fixing these tends to mean rebuilding things repeatedly, spread out over a lot of space and time, with a lot of trial and error. In my effort to progress faster though, I've been allowing a lot more kludge fixes and jank to simply exist, and deal with the consequences. What I've found this time, allowing unsustainable or broken systems, is that it's actually not that bad. It's nice to know you can rely on a perfectly balanced system here or there that functions as it should and never troubles you. But more often than not, a flawed system just gets a quick knock on it's side in order to allow me to proceed again. It'll break again later, but i'll just whack it again.

[MOK]

Originally posted by Aargh Tenna:

But like, at least for me, this is not about reaching the end but about the journey. So I do not think speed matters (unless you have magma channels lol).

It does matter to me, since this session, I want to do more than just retread old steps from a prior year. I want to be able to move on to another game in a while too. So I'll enjoy the game more if I can accomplish a bit more in a bit less RL time, to increase this session's novelty. After this session runs its course, I'll probably return to it again eventually, later. But I don't want to be tied to ONI for that long before drifting elsewhere again.

[MOK]

One thing I've done differently this time around, resulting a bit of saved time, is systematic digging of full biomes. Start at the top, and move down, and use ladder scaffolding. That way all the debris lands concentrated in one single layer.

[linkbrad3167]

For your main question, being more specific would be a huge help in terms of details, but there are a lot of things that can be explored many things that seem simple can have some really complex and potentially revolutionary game changes, one case would be sour gas, not useful in the simplest of terms, but if frozen you get natural gas and sulfur, both have decent uses, both can be used for food, be it cooking or growing. Or you can use the natural gas as fuel for your generators. another thing you can look at in terms of revolutionary can be dreckos, when you first find them, only thing you can get is fiber, but if you take some time you can get glossy drekos, aka plastic generation all without researching anything related to liquids or refining, while it doesn't have as much of an impact later in the game it has huge benefits early on, not to mention there are potentially hundreds of these game altering physics hiding all right in front of you, sometimes you just need to be a little crazy, and have a big imagination.

[Bobucles]

It pays to master quick and dirty builds. Full projects take a lot of duplicant time and effort to complete. Instead, put that effort into completing several mediocre projects at once. If most of your problems are "kinda solved", the colony will have much more free time to work with. Spend that extra time on research, or refining the high tier resources needed for the proper permanent solutions.
For example, you can just build a naked electrolyzer in your base. No big deal, no real issues for dozens of cycles(maybe don't put it next to your farms...) and the hydrogen just floats away as a future problem. A proper SPOM can take a dozen cycles to set up or more, a quick and dirty electrolyzer can be set up in half a day. That's a lot of extra colony time to speedrun with.
The inside of a base doesn't really need a full heat management system for the longest time. Just build your hot machines outside in the wild. No real need to insulate. Natural tiles are a fantastic resource simply because they can soak up loads of heat for dozens or hundreds of cycles. It's a great way to start collecting refined metal and steel.
A full air conditioning system can take dozens or even hundreds of cycles to get working just right. Ice is the quick solution to heat issues. Build ice sculptures or ice tempshift plates in trouble zones. It solves the heat problem in 1 cycle, and buys time to worry about more pressing issues.

Your colony doesn't need to be constantly on the verge of collapse. Rather, just be aware that some fundamental base issues can be tabled for a long time. Abuse band aid fixes and you'll find your colonies progressing much more quickly where it counts.

[MOK]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

IYour colony doesn't need to be constantly on the verge of collapse. Rather, just be aware that some fundamental base issues can be tabled for a long time. Abuse band aid fixes and you'll find your colonies progressing much more quickly where it counts.

This is what I've been finding really is the most key. But it's still a difficult problem even when bandaids are embraced, because there's still a balancing act between when and how to build out a 'proper' solution, in parallel with to the bandaids. The long-term air distribution problem you mention is a great example of this balancing act, particularly since it's not something you can source from a template, nor simply solve by sketching out build orders and wait for it to complete.

But the matter of a SPOM is a very clear standout in things to avoid for a really long time. You just don't need it for a long time, and you can deal with the hydrogen with a very simple and good-enough kludge. If I were starting over, I wouldn't have built one until maybe cycle 300. As a big bonus, at that point, you have enough of your base dug out and formalized that it's requisite circulation system can be drawn out with confidence and little need to reformulate, with different gas managements factored in, and all the necessary space to keep it orderly.