"Always print a dupe" challenge.

[HyperKnight]

How long can you last before dupe dies?

[Myriad]

Have you seen the dupe challenges on YouTube? That may answer your question. Francis John has a 141, or something, dupe challenge. Not sure if any died. I haven't tried it, but I'm considering it. It actually seems like a very fun challenge.

I imagine you'd have to consider the frequency of which the printing pod refreshes, prioritize food and oxygen above all else to meet that, and any and all else would become secondary.

Thinking about it now, and how I'd plan it, I think I could survive until my computer wigged out, which isn't that powerful at the moment, so I could be right.

I've never watched all the vids to the end, but FJ is known for his rep, so maybe 141 is the most you could get. Perhaps after struggling to get that far, your resources just couldn't get pushed any further.

But I really don't know. You'll have to try it out, or watch the vids, or take what someone posts on these forums. But you'll really never know for sure until you try it yourself.

[beholder]

So they all need to live in one asteroid? I think you can rush to teleporter and cosmos to expand as fast as you can. Maybe start with a good science crew and super-hard digging.

[Ozzey_Lee]

I have been doing this since I started playing, it's fun but at the same time hard to learn a game with so much going on. I took it a step further and pushed the difficulty modifiers to max. The longest I've mad it was cycle 83 with 34 dupes I think.

The biggest issue is they'd eat 68,000 kcal a cycle and breathe in every bit of air possible.

Looking back at the colony summaries everything is just a trend upward and the time lapse is just rapid expansion, so far losses occur if you fail to keep expanding while giving them food and oxygen.

Mush bars end up the best food source for in my case the first 100 cycles while trying to get critters in place to supplement that.

Everyone sleeps on the floor and shares a bathroom. Eventually they get a mess hall and assuming I rushed some sort of AC system I can continue. Trying to build anything complex around cycle 30 becomes impossible since 1/3 of the dupes need to be making mush bars. Farms can keep up after a few harvests but then they take up too much space and I'll lack space for oxygen and food production while trying to break the starting biome.

I only play on the irradiated asteroid and so far I'm nearing a point where I can get to sustainable power production but everytime a dupe dies I restart. The only two things that will kill them are suffocation because I can't watch 20+ dupes construct a ladder where one of them gets stuck away from air and starvation because I didn't produce the extreme number of calories they want.

As far as priorities go:
Food=Oxygen=Power>Research>Expansion>Everything Else

I'm sure with enough time I can go pretty far but I'm learning the game as I go rather than using guides.

Dupe start typically is Research, Construction, Digging, with the digger being skilled in ranching.

4th dupe goes to cooking regardless of skills, get oxygen around base through vents to avoid needing to manage hydrogen pressure later. start pumping all water near microbe musher and build and dig everything needed to get more water. Every 6-10 dupes gets a new electrolyzer to maintain pressure, a new microbe musher to maintain kcal, while every dupe gets there very own manual generator. The numbers may be off due to difficulty.

Morale and stress is the easy part. Every time you recruit a dupe they make a new friend and if they work near each other they talk and both of those make stress a mostly non issue even on the highest modifier although for some reason one dupe always likes to get too wet for multiple cycles at a time.

I also hate binge eaters, never will let it happen again. Binge eaters have completely killed colonies during start up.

Aside from all of that just expand and convert resources and there is really no issue recruiting a dupe every 3 cycles aside from you needing to create a long term food source besides just mush bars eventually.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Originally posted by Ozzey_Lee:

The biggest issue is they'd eat 68,000 kcal a cycle and breathe in every bit of air possible.

Mush bars end up the best food source for in my case the first 100 cycles while trying to get critters in place to supplement that.

Everyone sleeps on the floor and shares a bathroom. Eventually they get a mess hall and assuming I rushed some sort of AC system I can continue. Trying to build anything complex around cycle 30 becomes impossible since 1/3 of the dupes need to be making mush bars. Farms can keep up after a few harvests but then they take up too much space

So, you're not only burning through dirt + water but also duplicant labor + power by making mush bars because the one thing that stops you from farming isn't heat but... space available?
Space. For farm tiles (1x3 per mealwood, 10x3 per duplicant or 8x3 if liceloaf).
That's not a lot considering that you need to find 24 to 30 tiles every 3 cycles until you get a rancher which drastically increases your kcal produced per cycle:
Getting a GOOD rancher is nearly impossible if you're starting with a researcher + digger + builder in a colony where you'll have a legion of low level researchers and building bots at your disposal; your starting duplicants can instead have several interests (ie. researcher+operating/digging+building/rancher) and they won't break down as fast from having several skills.

You're also going for manual generator spam instead of rushing coal generators (yes, even if you spam jumbo batteries and micro manage the coal generators they'll still beat manual generators), specially when you're getting excess workers that you can use to research everything up to the 3rd tier faster.

[Ozzey_Lee]

@ POWER WITHIN USER

I do understand what you are saying and I have tried many times to do mealwood starts but the issue occurs with the space needed. I need roughly 10 mealwood plants per dupe if using meal lice, and 4 plants per dupe if using liceloaf.

On the irradiated asteroid there is no coal available so I have to use petroleum generators instead. I have no choice but to spam manual generators so that I can branch over to other power sources quickly. Heat also stops me from using mealwood since I can't cool the other biomes rapidly enough to keep up with incoming dupes.

I don't need a good rancher at start because I wont have need for a rancher until around cycle 10-15. I start with a rancher so that if I don't get a good rancher from the printing pod I can use the digger instead right away. Since the a rancher from the pod only gets the one skill point and I don't want one of my other dupes to take the morale hit since starting with the ranching skill doesn't give a morale penalty.

I've done the math for the ranching needed to keep the dupes fed and it comes down to 4 pips per each dupe for my difficulty. Considering I only ever start with around 4 average I can't multiply them quickly enough to cover the incoming dupes until I get refined metal.

I take the builder to cut down my construction time significantly due to me needing to build my gas pumps, airflow tiles, hydrogen generators, ladders, microbe mushers and many other things. Early game I wont have enough labor to offset the lack of a builder and I need all of that stuff constructed before I get too many dupes that they can't sustain off of needing food and not having those things.

Manual generators with so many dupes produces tons of power. It's not the only power source I can use but it's readily available and I wont have time to farm the trees for the petroleum generators right away.

I'm not committing hard to these methods the way it may seem. Manual generators are spammed for each dupe for around 20 cycles, microbe mushers are used indefinitely with small farms filled with pips to hopefully exponentially expand.

1 scientist is all that is needed, I can't afford to have more than 1 dupe researching until much later and the one scientist gets everything done more than quickly enough.

The food requirement for the dupes can not be overstated enough, every 3 cycles my food per cycle increases by 2000 and I start at 6000. Even with the farm starts there are not enough mealwood plants on the map to feed the dupes and kcal on the map is gone in about 8. With a good farmer I can catch up but then things go poorly if I alter temperature which is bound to happen with different temperature biomes around and electrolyzer outputting hot gas. The microbe mushers being able to get rid of all the food problems for almost no space at all is significant. There are at times 400t of dirt or more and converting salt water is not an issue.

A rancher does increase Kcal output just as farms do but when you're at 10 dupes on cycle 21 consuming 20,000 kcal a cycle that rancher will barely do enough at that point and all the time rushing is time not spent doing something else. With that dupe count I would need 40 pips alone and there's no way to turn 4 pips into 40 in 20 cycles. Alternatively I would need 100 mealwood plant for meal lice or 40 mealwood plants for liceloaf. I typically do both liceloaf and mush bars. constructing multiple research station makes no sense because I need more power and space for awful researches and once I get a super computer only one dupe can use it without a morale hit.

I can't start with my dupes having several interests. without morale buildings they can only take one skills before having morale problems assuming they have the two hours downtime. They also have no need since the other dupes printed will do one specific task more often than not rather than everyone do multiple tasks. Morale buildings take up space early so I generally only make a washroom for 20-30 cycles and then make a great hall and that's as far as I generally make it as far as rooms go.

Everything pretty much beats manual generators, but everything I construct needs to be trending towards sustainable and exponentially increasing. Manual generators are sustainable at all times. Sure if I only had a few dupes I could build 1 powerful power source and be done, same with food, same with oxygen but I can't. After my first electrolyzer I need to be planning for another quickly. An extra electrolyzer means more power and an extra hydrogen generator to help power it, all needing more space. That's the biggest issue is mealwood will compete with this space so I rely on the microbe mushers which produce tons of food and remove resources I don't have a use for such as salt water.

With this start I generally have the same amount of food every cycle trending toward twice as much food as necessary, oxygen flowing through the vents with 1 electrolyzer for each 6-10 dupes, farms set up to allow for 8 pips in each room later, and where my last colony failed, petroleum generators which produce way too much carbon with the ethanol distilleries. I had all of these things running and doing very well before I abandoned the colony on cycle 47 having 18 dupes the time. I ultimately didn't want to fix both too much carbon and redesign my electrolyzer rooms to be more space efficient.

[Shame]

Due to processing limitations, even if we took multi-threading into account, I doubt you could ever reach the true limit of how many duplicants you could theoretically support if you are willing to take use out of every exploit imaginable. This theoretical limit may support up to 1000 duplicants when considering available space, but if we didn't have to consider that, it may be 10 times that amount, considering you can create the not so humane suffocation hotels. Coupled with oxygen masks, which might actually be even better than the hotels, as while worn with no oxygen in them the duplicants consume no oxygen at all even when gasping for air (last I checked at least), then it becomes a question of how much food you can make in time before the duplicants starve or making sure that despite lack of comfort, they do not generate too much stress and start breaking down systems.