Colony 101: Dupe training (post-game)

Learn about the pitfall and hidden mechanisms in Oxygen Not Included, from shipwrecked on a strange asteroid to rocket science.
This part focus on optional Dupes training.

Introduction

This guide is all about training your Dupes attributes so they can be more effective to perform their tasks afterwards.

While it's useful to do so, I consider this part "post-game", which means something that's not necessary to complete the game, and as such is not explained in the main series.

It can be harmful to start training your Dupes too early: early on, you have better things to do rather than making your Dupes perform useless tasks only to train them.

The main reason to specifically train your Dupes is when recruiting new Dupes starting from late-game: their labor before training is going to be dramatically lower than other experienced Dupes, especially if they have to use Atmo Suits without the associated Exosuit Training skill.

In this guide, attributes are ordered from the most useful to train to the least useful to train. For each attribute, I'll only talk about the most effective ways to train them, rather than listing everything that raises those attributes.

In an effort to release this guide sooner rather than later, I decided to release it unfinished: only the first few attributes are really finished, and the least useful ones are less detailed. Builds and details will come later.

This guide is made for Vanilla, without the Spaced Out! DLC. There are a few differences on the DLC that won't be covered in details:

• For Excavation training, there are no Meteors.
  
• For Science training, there is a renewable source of training.

Living module

In order to live, very few things are actually necessary to a Dupe:

• A bathroom is needed, to avoid messes (unless you choose to have a Mesh tiles floor and harvest it below). The easiest option is a Lavatory and Sink, so that there is no refill errand and Dupes don't catch disease, which would lower their productivity.
  
  
• A Cot or Comfy Bed allows avoiding the Sore Back debuff and cut on one Bedtime slot. The difference between both is minimal. From a pure min-maxing standpoint, a Cot allows to have a 3x4 room (1 cell saving), the same 2 Bedtime slots as a Comfy Bed, and 1 less Morale, which isn't useful there anyway.
  
  
• It needs to eat, so you might as well has a small Mess Hall with a Mess Table to reduce stress from eating off the floor and have a bit more Morale.
  
  
• Food needs to be stored so the Dupes can be locked inside without having to retrieve food outside.

For food, there are 2 approaches:

• Ship food in the living module according to a pressure plate or another automation, in a food preservation pit.
  
• Fill a Refrigerator with food so that your Dupe has enough food for the duration of the training.

For that second approach, how much food is required depends on the food type. For example, assuming you feed your Dupe Barbeque, a Refrigerator filled to the brim will contain 400 000kcal, enough calories to last for 400 cycles for a Dupe eating 1000kcal per cycle, more than enough for any training you want to put that Dupe through.

I favor this approach because at this point, you should have more power than you need from a Petroleum loop (covered in my late-game guide) or other large scale power source, and you'll probably have stockpiled way more food than you'll ever need anyway.

Here is an example of a stackable design of a minimal living module:

All needs are covered, and your Dupe will get +6 Morale from rooms, which is more than enough to cover a few skills. It's easy to get more Morale with a bit of Decor and by feeding high quality food.

You'll need to add a Water Sieve to complete the bathroom loop, which is covered in my early-game guide, optionally a Carbon Skimmer to handle CO2, and you will need an Oxygen source, for example a SPOM, which is covered in my mid-game guide.


For the schedule, it's best to maximise the number of Work slots:

• 1 Bathtime slot is enough for them to go to the bathroom and clean their hands.
  
  
• 2 Bedtime slots are required so they can get up to 100% Stamina. They will wake up as soon as it finishes because they are hungry (unless playing on a lower hunger difficulty).
  
  
• 1 Downtime slot is enough for them to fill their belly on normal hunger difficulty.
  
  
• 20 Work slots are left to train Dupes as much as possible.

Training speed & Zombie spores

It gets harder and harder for a Dupe to raise their attributes with each new point. That's why it's advised to only train Dupes until to a "good enough" level, and let them raise the rest up to the cap, +20 per attribute, naturally. Note that Interests are included in that cap, as they effectively work as the Dupe having already "learned" those levels), but Traits and other buffs do not, as they function as external buffs not related to the Dupe attribute level.

The Science attribute gives +10% attribute leveling speed (not science, contrary to what the tooltip says). In order to speed up training speed, it's worth taking the Research skills as soon as you can so that training speed is improved. They can be scrubbed after training if you don't wish to keep them. Taking all 3 skills will give +6 Science which translates to +60% attribute leveling speed.

I will include a few indicative numbers based on extrapolation from a 5 cycle period observation in each section. All those numbers assume a Dupe starts at 0 in that skill, has 0 Athletics and 0 Science and no particular trait or interest that could improve or degrade attribute leveling speed.

Training speed is directly proportional to how much time Dupes spend performing errands, not how many errands are performed. With that knowledge, Zombie Spores, which are something you'd otherwise try to avoid at all cost, start being really attractive.

By lowering all attributes of your Dupes in training, Zombie Spores can make them perform errands slower, which means they will gain more attribute points per errand performed.

This is useful in 3 main scenarios:

• For errands which are limited in number, it allows to get more attribute points out of those. This is the case for all Science errands.
  
• For attributes that require player commands, it allows reducing the number of commands required.
  
• For attributes that require materials, it allows to get more training out of the same amount of materials.

Please note that it's a double-edged sword: since it reduces the Science attribute, which controls attribute points experience, Dupes afflicted by Zombie Spores will also train much slower.

No matter what, don't give a 0 Science Duplicant Zombie spores: by dropping to -10 Science, that Dupe will never gain any attribute experience. I really advise not going too low into negative science.

Since this also reduces Athletics, it's advised to train Athletics to a reasonable level before infecting Dupes. Otherwise, they will be so slow that they won't be able to complete the bathroom/sleep/eat errands during the associated slots and will have to randomly stop to perform those urgently during work time.

Skill points training

Training a Dupe to get Skill points fast can be useful to train new Dupes to be Rocket pilots.

Rocket pilots don't need any attribute, since they are locked in a Command Capsule forever, and only need the relevant skills to pilot the Rocket. As such, training their attributes is a waste of time.

Dupes gain skill points slightly faster when they are doing something they have an interest for. On the other hand that effect isn't huge, and it might not be worth using that if the Dupes interest are attributes that are hard to train. It seems to be around 50% more experience, which translates to reaching 5 points at age 35 rather than 50 for example, if only doing work errands related to its interest.

In general, just having non-idle Dupes will make them gain skill points at roughly the same rate (including non-work errands like sleeping, eating and going to the bathroom), but the Manual Generator, explained in the following section, happens to be one of the slightly faster methods, and is both continuous and very easy to set up.

This means your Athletics trainer can double as a skill points trainer.

As a general rule, for a fully occupied Dupe that do errands outside of its interests, skill points will be gained:

1. just about age 5 or shortly before.
   
2. around age 13.
   
3. around age 23. That's the earliest they can get Exosuit Training.
   
4. around age 35.
   
5. around age 50. That's an interesting point for Mechatronics Engineering.
   
6. around age 63.
   
7. around age 80. That's when they can get Rocket Piloting.
   
8. around age 95.

And the trend continues afterward.

Note that those threshold are mostly based on calculations based on a 5 cycles skill points gain rather than observation. I've personally observed a Dupe being put through Manual Generator gaining its 5th skill point at age 49 and its 7th skill point at age 82, so there might be a few cycles of error in those thresholds.

Athletics training

Athletics is arguably the most important attribute for most Dupes: it determines running speed, which is crucial late-game as your base will tend to be spread across your asteroid.

It also happens to be one that's very easy to set up a training room for.

Warning: if you intend to train a Dupe on Construction using a repair gym, don't train it in Athletics first. This is explained in the Construction section.

The only way to train athletics apart from making a Dupe run around is the Manual Generator. In order to train it, you need to have a way to make the Dupe run all the time.

It's done by adding a power load on it, for example a Ceiling Light, that's only connected to the Generator. A small tip is to add an Automation Wire on that Ceiling Light, so it's disabled and doesn't generate heat (the lighting isn't useful for training), while still acting as a power load.


With that training, Athletics will reach level 5 after a bit less than 30 cycles, and a bit more than 100 cycles will be needed to reach level 10, making it a very slow attribute to train.

When running, in addition to Athletics, the Dupe will also train Machinery (actually at a faster rate than Athletics) and gain skill points, making it a very complete training regimen.

For most purposes, this is the only worthwile training, so that you can make Dupes skip the "unproductive" stage before they get Exosuit Training as fast as possible, when recruiting them late into a game.

Read on to learn how to min-max training of other attributes, for the sole purpose of making your Dupes way more productive than necessary.

Science training

While science is a very important attribute, as it speeds up all attributes leveling speed, science training is in limited supply. There are only three errands that train science:

• Researching technologies in the Tech Tree, using a Research Station, Super Computer or Virtual Planetarium
  
• Analysing asteroids on the Starmap, using a Telescope.
  
• Analysing geysers.

To optimize science training with a Telescope, make it so that it has only 1 cell of visibility to analyze at 9% speed, so that it will be as slow as possible. It can be combined with Zombie Spores.

Since geysers are a single errand, it's not worth optimizing for.

A science trainer is just a research room with a Research Station, Super Computer, as well as accessible Dirt and a Pitcher Pump for water.

All that can be compressed in a small room, by shipping Dirt and venting water to be bottled up.

As we talked about before, the bulk of your research, apart from the very first technologies, can be optimized by taking advantage of Sporechids. Credits to Angpaur for popularizing this method.

You can actually train up to +6 science using the Monstrous science trainer[forums.kleientertainment.com], though this is not recommended since it takes so much time.

Hovering around -3 to 0 science should get you the most bang for your buck in terms of attribute leveling vs time spent vs research point used.

With 0 Science, you need about 55 research points and 1.5 cycles to get the first attribute point gain, then about 135 research points and 5 cycles for the second attribute point. It quickly requires a lot more research points to gain additional science points to the point you are better off training other Dupes if your goal is to min/max.

Strength training

Strength seems like it's super important as it improves Carrying Capacity, but is actually not when you look into the details.

When you add things up, a new Dupe that got its Exosuit Training already got:

• 200kg initial Carrying Capacity
  
• 1200kg from both Improved Carrying skills
  
• 160kg from the Strength added by Improved Carrying skills

For a total of 1560kg of "initial" Carrying Capacity. This is already very consequent, and enough for most Dupes, as they don't often need to carry that much load.

If you actively train 10 Strength, a sensible value to stop on since it becomes much longer to train the higher you go, you only get 400kg of additional Carrying Capacity, about 25% more of the initial. Even if you go all the way, 20 Strength gets you 800kg of additional Capacity, which is 50% more than the initial value. Is spending so many cycles training strength worth that much? Generally not.

If you still want to train strength, the main known and most efficient method is Mopping errands. You'll find countless mopping strength trainers. The gold standard is mathmanican Strength Training Gym.[forums.kleientertainment.com] Presented right is a scaled down for a single Dupe, with a 4 cells high room. Thanks a lot to mathmanican for helping me figure out the exact configuration that doesn't break the mop errand.

The valve is configured to 300g/s, and the Bottle Emptier set to Water.

When using this setup without Atmo Suit or with a Flatulent Dupe, the mopping errand will break on occasions, because of the mixed gas displacing water. To ensure a 100% working setup, you should use Atmo Suits and not take Flatulent Dupes. If you don't use Atmo Suit or have Flatulent Dupes, consider adding a Duplicant Sensor, Cycle Sensor and Automated Notifier to be notified when a Dupe is in the wrong room according to schedule, indicating that the errand broke.

When using this trainer without Atmo Suit, it's very important to pay attention to the potential debuffs:

• Soggy Feet gives 10% stress/cycle.
  
• Chilly Surroundings and Toasty Surroundings give 10% stress/cycle.
  
• Hypothermia and Heat Stroke gives -5 science (and other non-important debuffs), and Hypothermia also gives +1 Sneeziness.

While stress debuffs are easily counter-acted with High Morale, Science debuffs must be avoided at all cost. To do that, there are several options:

• Equipping Warm Sweater, which will lower the Dupe Thermal Conductivity so that its internal temperature stays at 37°C. This is the easiest option.
  
• Using Ethanol, which has a lower Thermal Conductivity, and thus a larger "safe" range.
  
• Water at precisely 37°C, with less than 2/3°C of variation. For example, 32°C doesn't work.
  
• Water that's way hotter or colder than 37°C. Apparently, the debuffs are only given when crossing the threshold. By consistently keeping the Dupe temperature above or below that threshold, they will only get it once.

Provided you avoided science debuffs, didn't have mopping errand breaking, a Dupe will gain the first 3 points during the first 5 cycles, then gain 1 additional point every 5 cycles, to reach 10 Strength around 35/40 cycles after starting its training.


There is another very valid way to train strength, albeit very obscure and slightly less efficient than the previous design: Disinfection errands. With the help of mathmanican and Hotep Thunderbolt, the Germavent strength trainer[forums.kleientertainment.com] has been designed to do that.

It's slightly less efficient because errands are not continuous, so Dupes lose a bit of time to "think" between errands. On the other hand, it's still more efficient than a lot of Strength trainers other than the previously shown one, it doesn't rely on player command, and it's also more efficient than the previous option if inflicted by Hypothermia/Heat Stroke.

Compared to the previous numbers, this disinfection trainer is about 10% worse in training speed, which translates to about 5 more cycles to get to 10 Strength.


Strength can also be trained using Compost flipping and Outhouse emptying, but the first is heavily limited by materials and the second by the number of times your Dupes go to the toilets. As such, those methods are of little use for dedicated strength training.

Machinery training

Since you'll train Machinery at the same time as you train Athletics with the Manual Generator, it's unlikely you'll need to train Machinery as well separately, especially since Machinery levels up faster than Athletics.

The Manual Generator is also the best method to train Machinery as well, as it's the only continuous trainer and has the highest attribute experience gain.

A Dupe will gain the first 3 points during the first 5 cycles, then gain 1 additional point every 5 cycles, to reach 10 Machinery around 35/40 cycles after starting its training.

If you don't want to have a dedicated Machinery trainer, Metal Refinery, Rock Crusher and Glass Forge (and most other Operating buildings) will level up machinery at roughly the same rate, minus the interruption between errands.

Exceptions to that are the Ice-E Fan and the Power Control Station, which are 2 times slower.

Construction training

To train construction, there are only two methods:

• the slower one which requires player commands and doesn't use any material: order Dupes to construct and deconstruct buildings repeatedly.
  
• the faster one which doesn't require player command, but uses some materials: make buildings break on purpose so your Dupes will repair them.

It's up to you if you want to use player commands to avoid using materials, or would rather use materials and have a faster, autonomous training room.

Using player commands, one of the best methods is to plaster Tempshift Plates all over a room, then deconstruct them, and start over. By using Auto-sweeper, the supplying errands are removed. You just need to initiate the room by providing enough minerals.

Using this method, a Dupe will gain 5 Construction points a bit before 25 cycles, and will reach 10 Construction between cycles 75 and 80.

If you want to train Creativity, you should instead build furnitures that have to be decorated, to combine both attributes training at the same time, as Creativity cannot be trained without constructing furniture.


The other, faster and automated option is to use a repair gym. They have the downside of using materials (once every 3rd repair) and can only be used with 0 Machinery Dupes. Indeed, repairing levels up Construction, but use Machinery to determine speed. A high Machinery Dupe will breeze through repairs, earning little experience and plowing through materials. In order to raise a Dupe level for Exosuit Training, it's advised to use Science and Strength training rather than the usual Athletics training.

Without using player commands, a good option is to overheat buildings, for example Ceiling Lights or Refrigerators and detect when they are broken so that Dupe don't try to repair them midway, as this often results in lost resources.

• Ceiling Lights use a low amount of Metal Ores, and you can detect when they are broken with a Wattage Sensor, which forces you to have a transformer per light.
  
• Refrigerators use a high amount of Raw Minerals, and can be filled with 1kg of medicine (which doesn't rot) to output a green signal when they are working.

By constructing Ceiling Lights in a vacuum and powering them, they will overheat themselves in about 1 cycle initially, and stay above overheating temperature even when repaired.

Refrigerators are a better option though, since Raw Minerals are generally plentiful, contrary to Metal Ores, and they don't require a separate Transformer, allowing a denser build. The power consumption can be greatly reduced by only powering them for a short duration to check the status once in a while.

The timer sensor is configured to 0.5s/10s, buffer gates to 11s to save up on power, then there is a NOT gate after the buffer to open/close doors so Dupes can only access broken Refrigerators.

A Liquid Tepidizer is placed on the far end to heat up the liquid to 85°C, which means using a Raw Mineral without Overheat temperature modifier. Once everything is at 85°C, it's no longer necessary.

Raw minerals of the same type as the Refrigerators must be shipped to cover the materials loss.

Refrigerators will need to be added as the Dupe level up. 6 Refrigerators is enough up until lvl 2 of Construction, then you will need to add more or have another thing for them to do while waiting for Refrigerators to break again.

If you can keep the Dupe being trained close to 100% occupied, assuming he has 0 Machinery and Science, it will gain the first 3 points during the first 5 cycles, then gain 1 additional point every 5 cycles, to reach 10 Construction around 35/40 cycles after starting its training.

Credits to Hotep Thunderbolt for designing a first repair gym based on Ceiling Lights, Amphoras for helping out figure all the little details, and Saturnus for the final design based on Refrigerators.

Husbandry training

This section is deprecated since the Fast Friends update[forums.kleientertainment.com], which changed Husbandry attribute leveling to work as expected with Ranching errands. I've left it as a legacy of how hard it used to be to level up Husbandry.

Husbandry is by far the hardest attribute to level up, which is why the general advice is to only recruit +7 Husbandry Dupes to be ranchers.

That's because only using the Incubator will raise Husbandry, while powered Incubators are generally of little use. Grooming and wrangling critters don't increase Husbandry, unfortunately. This is a known issue that has been in the game for several years.

There is a mod to fix that if you want to raise Husbandry with what should level it up: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1710686863
In order to raise Husbandry, you need a large row of powered Incubators for a Dupe to hug repeatedly. Since Incubators only need to be powered when the hugging happens, automation can be used to drastically reduce the power draw.

If you just want some random training here and there, a valid strategy is to have a few Incubators somewhere that your ranchers will use given the occasion, and have Critter Drop-Offs to move critters to ranches or a drowning room.

On the other hand, if you want to have a dedicated Husbandry trainer, you'll need a bit of investment.

First, let's see about critter choice:

• Shine bugs are bad because they don't produce anything useful, and their fast incubation rate means drowning is more frequent, tying up Incubators for 80s each time.
  
• Pacus are generally starvation fed, which means no excess eggs. Also you can't drown them, requiring a separate design.
  
• Shove Voles: are generally starvation fed, so no excess eggs either. Feeding them all the time is not possible considering how much they eat.
  
• Dreckos shouldn't be drowned because the excess is supposed to be sheared before dying of starvation. They'd otherwise make a great fit.
  
• Pufts are not easy to ranch and not a super popular critter. With the really random egg production, you'll have trouble setting up incubators too.
  
• Pokeshells are generally starvation ranched, so no excess eggs either.
  
• Pips, Hatches and Slickster are all good candidates. Whichever you ranch for Meat should be the one you use.

Late game, having Molten Slicksters with a Petroleum loop to feed them works really well. You need about 8 ranches to sustain eggs for 40 incubators, which can all be fed from a single 10KW petroleum generator room: that produces enough CO2 for 75 Slicksters, while 8 ranches only have 64 Slicksters, which is exactly what you need to consistently have enough eggs for 40 incubators being used by a Dupe.

You'll need 2 ranchers grooming those 8 ranches worth of critters to train a single other rancher, though they can rotate until all 3 are +20.

A full trainer with 40 incubators looks like that:
 
While it seems intimidating, let's focus on one incubator, because it's exactly the same design copied 40 times, with shipping every 5 incubators:
 

The sole purpose of all that automation is to save on power, by disabling the Incubator for a full cycle once it has been used by a Dupe (detected by the pressure plate), then re-enabling it so that it generates an errand. It uses this design, which is actually on the simpler side as far as Incubator automation is concerned. Feel free to use another design of your choosing.

It's highly advised to use the Rest for the Weary mod and insert a "Finish-up" slot at the end of work time, to avoid tripping the automation with partial lullabies.

There are 4 liquids being stacked (here Crude Oil, Salt Water, Polluted Water and Water, but which liquid you use don't matter) so that critters are automatically drowned when they hatch, saving on the errand to move them to Drop-offs. Each layer is only a few kg worth of liquids, to avoid flooding the incubators.

Eggs are shipped in, Eggshells and Meat are shipped out. For eggs, you need to ship in 1 every 16 eggs back to your ranches for repopulation, and the other 15 to the trainer. Be careful about only sending a single type of eggs in the trainer, otherwise you'll need to reconfigure Incubators. After that, you need to evenly dispatch eggs. This can be done either by splitting the Conveyor Rails to split the flow in two equal parts several times, or using a meter valve.

Now, while this works well, there are 2 issues:

• Dupes need the Critter Ranching skill to get started, and they will need Atmo Suits to work in the room, which means it's a good idea to get them to 5 skill points first.
  
• Even with 40 incubators, at a higher Husbandry level, there will be some downtime.

Both of those issues are solved by cross-training the Dupe. As explained before, the Manual Generator is perfect: it will allow them to gain those 5 skill points, and will fill idle time neatly.
An additional Timer Sensor connected to the Manual Generator is required to interrupt the Dupe from time to time so it can pick up newly appeared Incubator errands while running. A good trade-off is 1s green / 59s red.


Using this method, training Husbandry ends up being the fastest attribute to train: while it requires a consequent infrastructure in place, a Dupe will get the first 7 levels in 15 cycles (catching up with sole interest Dupes), then about 1 level every 5 cycles. This means level 10 by cycle 30, or by cycle 15 if they started from +7.

Note that you can also scale down the infrastructure by only having 20 or even 10 incubators, which will greatly reduce the infrastructure need, number of other ranchers required, and that your Dupe will spend more time training Machinery/Athletics and less time training Husbandry. Considering how fast Husbandry levels up, it's not a bad option.

Excavation training

You are entering the unfinished part of the guide. The next sections have an explanation which have not be thoroughly checked yet and don't have example builds either.

Excavation seems like it's important to train, but it's not, much like Strength, in addition to being harder to make a dedicated trainer for. That's because between the +10 Excavation from Atmo Suits and the +6 Excavation from skills, any Dupe actually diggingpast mid-game should already be at +16 Excavation making the digging already so fast it's not really worth optimizing. In addition to that, actual Diggers will level up the first few levels really fast, pushing the Excavation attribute much higher than needed: chances are your Diggers will spend more time running around than actually digging.

Excavation can only be trained by actually digging natural tiles, which requires player commands. It also has the disadvantage of halving the mass of any natural tiles mined, which means no matter what, excavation training is going to use a lot of materials (unless you go the exploity way). As such, it's a very good candidate for Zombie Spores.

A very good renewable source of digging is the surface Regolith, which is periodically brought by Meteors, but that forces you to build a training room in the Space Biome, and the amount of Regolith is very limited for a dedicated Excavation training.

Alternatively, solid to solid state changes can be used to create 20kg natural tiles, by heating them a material up to its state change temperature. This is easily done by passing debris through hot tiles, as it create 20kg tiles that stack upward.

The possible materials to do that are:

• Slime, Algae and Fertilizer changes to Dirt around 125°C
  
• Dirt changes to Sand around 330°C

While Dirt is the easiest to produce with Pips, the heating requirement is steep.

An easier option is to gather the Polluted Water output of buildings, some Dirt produced by Pips and Phosphorite created by Dreckos to create Fertilizer. It only requires being heated up to 125°C and you'll be left with useful Dirt.

Alternatively, to save on heating, Slime can be produced with a Polluted Water => Polluted Oxygen => Puft => Slime chain, and will only requires a quarter of the heating of Fertilizer because of its much lower Specific Heat Capacity.


Once a Dupe has the skill Super-Duperhard Digging, it can try to mine Neutronium. Mining Neutronium will never succeed, but will level up the Excavation attribute.

Note that if the Dupe triggers the Super Productive overjoyed effect a Neutronium tile can be instantly dug up, resulting in a bug giving it an infinite number of skill points.

Agriculture training

Agriculture is trained by harvesting errands, uprooting plants and using the Farm Station.

While it's not very useful to specifically train this attribute, as farmers will naturally train for it, leveling can be speed up by using the Farm Station, even if you don't need Micronutrient Fertilizer, and using player commands by repeatedly uprooting plants, that you replant just after, helped by auto-sweepers.

Cuisine training

Cuisine doesn't make much sense to train specifically: only your cooks benefits from it, and they will naturally train it when cooking for your other Dupes.

The only way to level up cuisine is by cooking in any of the dedicated building: Microbe Musher, Electric Grill, Gas Range and Egg Cracker.

If you want to get more points per recipe cooked, you can use Zombie Spores.

Creativity training

Creativity can only be trained with decorating errands. As such, it requires constructing furniture that need decoration, decorating and then deconstructing those furnitures.

This means Creativity training have to be combined with Construction training, just with the decoration between contruction and deconstruction.

This is one of the most useless attribute to train, as decoration is infrequent in the first place, and its speed doesn't really matter. As such I really recommend you spend time on better things to do.

Medicine training

Why are you still reading this? Medicine is the most useless attribute, because unless you are using the Disease Restored mod, diseases are a joke in the game.

You really don't need to train that attribute, but if for some reason you insist, it can only be trained by crafting medicine or treating Dupes in Medical Cots.

Since making Dupe ill doesn't scale, this means producing a recipe on the Apothecary over and over, or engaging in scalding dupes, which is very unethical but will definitely give some work to your doctor. If you do so, the "Wounded go to Med Bed" mod is a must-have.

Vitamin Chews are probably the easiest to get materials for, as they only require Coal, which can be acquired from Hatches.

Conclusion

Special thanks to the numerous people on the Unofficial ONI Discord[discord.gg] who helped me understand the training mechanisms, perfect the build and offered suggestions, especially Amphoras, untitled7, mathmanican and Hotep Thunderbolt.

[Bilko]

This reddit comment from May 2022 has evidence that Lit Workspace actually speeds up Athletics Training on the Manual Generator, but not Machinery: https://old.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/uirmae/is_there_a_way_for_dupes_to_stop_falling_off/i7fe5o3/

I have no idea whether that's still true

[Darael]

More than a year later, to expand on the Comfy Bed: yes, it gives twice the stamina rate that a Cot does… but each of them adds its rate to the base stamina regen of a sleeping duplicant, which is 900%/cycle (unless they're sleeping from exhaustion, in which case it's 400%, but also if they're doing that they're not using a bed). The bonuses are +100%/cycle for a cot, twice that for a comfy bed, +100% for sleeping in a barracks and twice that for doing so in a bedroom.

That means that sleeping in a cot in a barracks will result in regenerating stamina at 1100%/cycle (minus the 70%/c constant drain that applies at all times, but we're gonna ignore that) compared to a comfy bed in a bedroom giving 1300%/cycle. As you can see, while the bonus is twice as large, the marginal improvement is less than 20%. It's not worth it for the sleep rate; bedrooms are really only useful if you desperately need the extra point of morale.

[claytruck]

ahh

[fradow]

@claytruck Both Comfy Bed and Cots requires 2 sleep slots. No matter what, Duplicants are going to sleep during those 2 slots unless they are interrupted, making the additional stamina recovery of a Comfy Bed in a private bedroom very very niche.

[claytruck]

when i checked the confy bed in-game, it showed as giving double the energy rate of the cot,

[fradow]

Thanks for your kind words :) I'll have to review existing guides for Mergedown, then on to Rockets!

[sweaty]

I really hope you continue writing. planning to read every word of this!