Bionic dupes just worse than standard dupes ?

[Naryar]

Hello, I have played with a mix of standard and bionic dupes.

Okay, bionic dupes don't need food but power, and only need to breathe... sometimes, but they make big gulps.

-They cannot work underwater ; which limits their ability to work in low-oxygen environments, or well, they can, but they stress quickly and their stress makes them "starve". There's no way to make them stop going in works that ARE underwater..

- Biological dupes provide polluted water as waste ; polluted water is an important resource, coolant, and make them provide extra water. Bionic dupes just provide gunk ; gunk is almost entirely pure waste, only way to use gunk is for earlygame oil balm and lategame heating gunk into petroleum.

- Bionic dupes need one each of gunk extractor (unlike standard dupes) ; they CAN use toilets, but they really shouldn't because they clog standard toilets AND fill polluted water liquid lines with the wrong liquid.

-Bionic dupes require one more resource to function than standard dupes (either crude oil or slime-based oil)

-Bionic dupes do not passively learn stuff ; they do not get better with time unlike biological dupes. This is the big no-no. They do have skills that increase their skills and athletics, but so do biological dupes, and bionic dupes require resources to increase their skills.

And that resource is the same that's used to maximize power ; so they use microchips to tune-up power plants, and then you cannot use resources for it.

-Bionic dupes's "big gulps" mess up basic gravity-based gas designs ; they cause trouble with drecko farms and things like fridges (which you only need for bio dupes but...)

Did I get it wrong ? Are bionic dupes just a slightly worse sidegrade to standard dupes with a few specific better cases (working in low oxygen environments)

[Draconis]

I have found a few pros of the bionic dupes so war.

- They are versatile. You can change their boosters whenever you like, so you can turn a miner into an artist or a delivery guy whenever you need.

- They can "breathe" from canisters, so you can let them live an a totally oxygen-free base. If you provide them bottled oxygen (of any temparature by the way - they can breathe from a canister that is filled with hot oxygen straight from the electrolyzer).
- This also keeps them from sucking in all the air around them and thus ruining the pressure in your base.

- They don't get sick.

- You can use gunk to cool the steam from a cold steam vent (and then just get rid of the gunk)
- alternatively you can produce gear balm, which also yields polluted water in a bottle)

- They get their skill levels from the boosters. The boosters don't just enable them do do certain things, they also raise skills like athletics, science, and so on.

Also, they can still work in liquids if they wear an exosuit. And as far as I noticed, not every fluid is dangerous. Water and polluted water might cause problems, but they can walk through oil and ethanol without any problems.


On my current colony (it's a spaced out colony) I have one single lonely bionic on my oil asteroid, and their only task there is to release pressure from the oil wells and produce petroleum from time to time.


They are not actually better or worse than biological dupes. They just work a bit different and have advantages the normal dupes struggle and vice versa. So it actually depends what you use them for.
I did not even temporarily have to send another dupe over, because for decoration I just produced the appropriate booster and that's it.
Fibers come from my main colony, via teleporter (to repair the exosuit), water comes from the main colony to run the oil wells. And a flydo helps picking up things (power banks into the loading station e.g.). And an arcade station for the mood.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

-Bionic dupes do not passively learn stuff ; they do not get better with time unlike biological dupes. This is the big no-no. They do have skills that increase their skills and athletics, but so do biological dupes, and bionic dupes require resources to increase their skills.

Biological need dedicated builds, five skill points on researching and to repeat a task for up to several hundred cycles.
Bionics can use skill points then install booster packs.

They're a godsend when you need someone to hit +20 in a skill that isn't machinery or athletics.

[Boyks]

I'm currently running an all bionic dupe colony, I'm at cycle 364 and have 12 of them. And I have to say that there are pros and cons to the bionic dupes. Most of the cons are only really felt during the first 50-80 cycles and are all reasonably manageable if you are careful.
Pros:
- Any bionic dupe can use any booster, so any dupe can have their skills swapped out without having to waste time and power in a skill scrubber.
- They never catch any diseases.
- They have no stamina so they need barely any down time and stamina reducing environmental debuffs are now a nonissue.
- No need for food means that you save space, time, energy, and resources that would otherwise be spent on farming, cooking, and food storage. Also you now free up that one dupe who is cooking all day long, and the farmer now only has to pay attention to a smaller range of plants such as thimble reed.
- Nearly all of the boosters give +2 athletics and many of the skills in the skill tree do so as well. So if you give them at least one athletics booster most will have 20+ athletics. My cleaner dupe had 39 athletics, which is insane.
- By default bionic dupes are active for 2.5 cycles. This means that only once per 3 cycles will a task be interrupted and therefore you save 2 cycles worth of running back and forth between interrupted tasks due to breaks.
- Bionic dupes only take in oxygen when their oxygen tank gets low. This means that now it is even easier to work in areas with unbreathable atmospheres, although you will still want to get atmo suits due to environmental debuffs which effect athletics and dangerous temperatures.
- Getting a mechatronics engineer early is now really easy, so automation can come online really early which is quite nice for lightening workloads.
- No need to manufacture microchips with that precious refined metal. Now your bionic dupes will do so during defragmentation.
Cons:
- They eat through energy like crazy and this means you need to be very careful with the number you hire until you can get hatch ranches going and complement that with some other power source such as natural gas.
- Creating eco power banks and boosters also demands a lot of energy so that's even more pressure on energy resources that can be an issue early game.
- Creating metal power banks costs metal and they are single use, this means switching over to eco power banks is a priority.
- They get stressed out real quick in water/polluted water/brine/salt water. But this can be dealt with through the use of atmo suits and minimising tasks in water filled areas.
- Boosters require microchips to produce which at the start can only be produced via defragmentation (sleep) and the rainmaker overjoyed response. At first getting boosters made will be slow, but once you have about 5-6 bionic dupes this problem will cease and you will start building up quite a stockpile.
- Currently you cannot start with a bionic dupe that has the basic researching booster. So either you get a lucky care package delivery or you're stuck with a level 0 researcher until you produce your first booster.
- Did I mention that they don't eat? Well that means that you're not going to be able to get the +6 morale from a great hall, nor are they going to get food morale bonuses. Instead your focus should be on decor and ensuring that they path through a nature reserve.
Pro/Con:
- Lubrication. I say this is both a pro and a con because it is entirely dependent on the world gen seed, your ability to set up puft ranches and or manage temperatures.
Here you can go with either phyto oil or crude oil. Crude oil may be easy to access due to world gen but it will definitely require cooling and that's crude oil that would be better used for petroleum production. Phyto oil is produced from slime and can be quite limited by world gen seed on the smaller starting asteroid, even on the bigger map you will eventually have to set up a puft ranch, however it will probably require little to no temperature management. Overall I prefer phyto oil myself.

[Mindless Dupe]

Great summary and analysis of Bionic Dupes from all of you!

[Draconis]

One more thing: Speaking of morale. While the bionics don't get the +6 from the great hall, they might not actually need that. The have a skill tree, but a rather small one. So they will require much less morale than any standard dupe.

And they still use jukebot, arcade station and so on, so boosting morale in their time off is still possible.


One thing regarding the long work phase though:
If you start having problems with bionics running out of power although there are enough powerbanks ready - give them a little break in between. They only refill their powerbanks when they are off duty.

[Fixit]

Food needs heat control eventually while biodupes don't care. If devs ever make a hot biome dlc then biodupes will be much more useful.

["the" Chase]

Great summary. The power sucking they do is crazy, but as I read the post, those once (almost) useless hot polluted air vents can just be canistered for a big oxygen supply for the bionics since they dont care about temperature or disease.

[01]

Speaking of disease, you still get rad-poisoning.

[Draconis]

....and they do suffer from too high temperatures. That means, they cannot just walk into Mordor. Or an oil biome.

[£|_ |\/|@RCØ]

I've found the greatest pro in the space program.
In the spacecraft u can't have many morale boost, so a bionic dupe don't suffer too much.
Also he only needs battery and oil, so you can put 1 slot of ~5 battery, 1 slot of gelm oil (into the tile-store) and a bit of oxygen.

You can put a battery recharge in the spacecraft and some sort of manual recharge, so you can stay in space for very long time, the normal ones have the food decay problem.

[Naryar]

Got it, so they're more of a sidegrade. They're pretty useful for doing important stuff at night, at least, and make for good space explorers (or even exploring your starting planetoid.

I guess having a mix of biological and cybernetic is not optimal...

[01]

Since it wasn't mentioned and I consider it their most noteworthy strength:
You can print them almost on demand every 3 cycles as their "negative" traits are almost negligible.
On the other hand, there's a huge gulf between 'the best' and the 'the worst' biological duplicant you can get and even if you settle and aim for something that's good enough for your need, the RNG can be a cruel mistress.
It's not a factor for fresh colonies, but when you are few thousand cycles in, save-scumming isn't really an option as it takes a couple of minutes to load a massive colony.

[£|_ |\/|@RCØ]

Originally posted by Naryar:

Got it, so they're more of a sidegrade. They're pretty useful for doing important stuff at night, at least, and make for good space explorers (or even exploring your starting planetoid.

I guess having a mix of biological and cybernetic is not optimal...

Nah, you can have a mix. I have more normal dupes than cybernetic.
Food isn't a real problem, especially because I always do a freezer-chamber, where nothing can go rot.

I think all cyborg is very heavy to support with energy, I prefer the mix.