Is there a way to survive the ionstorm?

[Elysium82]

I know this has been asked before and people said "Morpheus Project", but one needs to get there. I ended up building far away stations of water, oxygen, and electricity in order not to be too close to colonies, but the ionstorms hit everything at the same time and my colonists are dying like crazy. So, it feels like one can't even be prepared. It just keeps coming and my resources are dwindling.

[James187]

I've no idea how Project Morpheus is supposed to help with ion storms. So far as I know, it adds perks to adult colonists and doesn't affect ion storms in any way.

As for surviving the storms, here are my tips:

If you save the game right before the storm hits, you can load/save to get a shorter storm duration, making it easier to survive.

Make sure you have enough oxygen and water stored to last out the storm. Build at least one water tank and one oxygen tank right at the connection point for each dome in case of distribution issues.

Disable any non-essential buildings for the duration of the storm. Otherwise your resources will dwindle on repairs and maintenance.

Especially disable fuel refineries and other water consuming buildings, as they will consume your precious water supplies.

You can reduce oxygen consumption in a dome by building the small (3 hex) farm building amd setting the crop to the highest oxygen producing one. You only need one colonist working there to get the oxygen bonus.

Pipe leaks are the real killer. Don't wait for drones to repair them, instead, delete the leaky section of pipe and let your drones rebuild it. Not only is this faster than repairing the leak, but it saves all of your oxygen and water.

[Jon_Smith]

Originally posted by James187:

I've no idea how Project Morpheus is supposed to help with ion storms. So far as I know, it adds perks to adult colonists and doesn't affect ion storms in any way.

You are mixing up ion storms with electrostatic dust storms.
Ion storms are caused by Metatron.

Originally posted by Elysium82:

I know this has been asked before and people said "Morpheus Project", but one needs to get there. I ended up building far away stations of water, oxygen, and electricity in order not to be too close to colonies, but the ionstorms hit everything at the same time and my colonists are dying like crazy. So, it feels like one can't even be prepared. It just keeps coming and my resources are dwindling.

Yes, you just need to get a stronger base ahead of time, store more spare resources, a few large scale oxygen or water depots can really help. (I'm not sure if they are immune to the ion storm, its been a while since I played Metatron as I have been focusing on challenge maps). Get really strong science, this will mean you can progress quickly through the tech tree not only to get yourself the Metatron research stuff but also to make your bases better. Aggressively expand when you can, if you have resources or money sitting around then you aren't growing fast enough.

Do you have a screenshot of your colony? Perhaps I can give some tips? If not what Sol are you and how big is your colony?

Eventually Metatron will leave if you havent completed project Morpheus and you fail the mystery (according to the wiki), so I guess you can also just try to ride it out, I am not sure how long the storms last but I believe with will keep upping the intensity for a while.

[James187]

Originally posted by Jon_Smith:

You are mixing up ion storms with electrostatic dust storms.
Ion storms are caused by Metatron.

Ah yes, you are quite right. Now I understand the Project Morpheus reference. Sorry for the misinformation.

[cybera]

I just finished this mystery yesterday. The ion storms continue for a very long time, at a certain point you get a message, that you have one final test. The test is to construct the morpheus projects in 20 sols. If you don't have it researched already you're kinda screwed. If you construct the project in those 20 sols you win the trial and the ionstorms stop.

As for how to protect from the ionstorms its pretty simple, you spread out your infrastructure in such a way that regardless of what 3 points are hit by ion storms (no more than 3 ion storms hit you at the same time) you still have enough power, oxygen, water, oxygen storage and water storage to continue with the game.