Thread by @GeePawHill

Oxyygen Not Included: Molly's home, yayyyyy, and looking much better, tho not quite fully back yet. Couple of hours to kill before Friday Geek's Night. Here's a new seed. Spaced Out, Big Asteroid, Survival, V-SNDST-C-1974494331-0

I'm ignoring order & symmetry for now. Mission: smallest footprint for barracks, bathroom, and soon enough, mess hall cum great hall and small farm. I am *not* planning my spine to be on that ladder. Instead, it'll be to the right.

If you look close, to the right of that ladder on the upper level and the left of it on the lower, there are two sets of four plants (not in oxylite, which will disappear). That's two nascent nature reserves, when I get the third food level. I think *that's* my spine.

So, going slow on the first 20 cycles, got two new players amongst my cadre. The first day or two is about the mandatories. First thing: shitters and hand-pump in water. Second thing: power to oxidizer. Third thing, power to research station.

These are all mandatory. No choice.

It's fuzzy, which turn which thing happens, but they happen in that order. I had a great seed here and a great first turn, so after 1 cycle, it looks like this.

I put two wash-basins in front of 4 johns. As you know, if you've ever had your cell-phone germ-analyzed, pooping comes with fecal matter getting all over. The wash basins clean off the food poisoning that happens every poop.

I put the hamster wheel and the small battery -- you want them both at the same time -- any random where, and use them to power an oxidizer first, and then the first research station.

Placement on the oxidizer isn't important, tho central is good. On the research station, right next to the arch is best: the arch is giving off light, and most machines produce better when the worker is in light.

Cuz I had such a great cycle, I already blueprinted in some cots, with a pneumatic door in front of them. Those pretry little shinebugs keep dupes awake, hence the door. It also makes that eventual room full of beds a "barracks", plus one morale for everyone.

Here we are at the end of c3. The research is on the first two food items, "basic farming" and ""meal preparation". basic farming is done, so I am building some planters to put mealwood in. I don't need it yet, there's tons of food laying around, but I will need it.

I'm laddering up & down. Left, that's a ladder leading to what will be a mess hall, then a great hall, which gives big morale. On the right, going up, I'm proposing that as the central spine of my build. In the middle, going down, I'm working around that water pool.

Advanced minmax-y aside: those wild plants I'm keeping alive and not digging out actually matter, but not to a beginner. We will discuss this in chapter 4.

c4, not much different. In the first 10 cycles, there'll be places where you're on it, it's happening, but no joy as yet. Sometime it just be's that way. Notice I *removed* the blueprint for the middle ladder. I was thinkin', yo, and I got me some hesitancy.doubt.

At c3, the printer offers you a choice. It'll be one random material, two random dupes, and 1 random dupe or material. You can take one or none of them. I often take none, or I take the material. You don't have to take a dupe you don't like.

The PRNG is, however temporarily, in my corner, and I got a viable "Cookie". I name my dupes for their roles. My first three were a Brains (researcher-only), a Digby (digger and builder), and an Opus (Operating & Supply). A Cookie is someone who wants to cook. And I got one.

When you print a new dupe, you get a skill point immediately. I gave Cookie cooking, which means they can use a grill. I stepped, then, *past* building a microbe musher, which would be normal, and went straight to building a grill. That's not standard. Standard is the musher.

Here, in c5, 1) the grill is in place, no musher. Not important yet, cuz we still have tons of raw food to find. 2) I put that ladder back in cuz I thot it was right. 3) See that room above the cots?

That room, in c4, was becoming a mess hall. Now it's gone beyond a mess hall, it's a great hall. Meal preparation gave me the tables. Decor gave me the planter, colony development gave me the water cooler. Putting a room together with those things makes a great hall. +6 morale.

So here we are, 5 cycles in. We have shitters, a little power, oxygen production, a barracks (+1 morale), and a great hall (+6) morale. We also have that little bundle of planters below the arch, half a dozen mealwood.

This. At this census, just four dupes, is stable for prolly 20 cycles, assuming we keep digging in the temperate biome. and if we don't add another dupe. If we *do* -- all praise the PRNG -- we'll need more planters and mealwood. But this is stable.

And for my noobs, I have three things to pass on.

1) This isn't a game with a "winning" state. The point is to feel good. If you're not having fun, quit the fucking playthrough and start over, or skim a save to where you were happy and play it out differently.

2) All this getting here in 5 cycles, this place, it is *shite*. If your luck goes, this'll work fine for maybe 40 cycles. But a central concept in this game is "make it okay for now and assume you'll replace it, in situ or somewhere else, later".

https://twitter.com/GeePawHill/status/1465892830539558917

3) I'mo go off noob instruction and work forward from here in my inadequate but more experienced mode. If you're a noob, do five cycles more-or-less like this, then sample my ideas and other people's ideas, it's a huge warm welcoming community.

Doh. I noticed I somehow didn't put up all the pictures. Here's the c5 picture.

That base is super crude, but viable. You can see I've done a lot of digging on that spine to the west, which I'm thinking will be my main spine. At c5, the order in which we do things starts to depend more on context and taste, but there are some fairly standard choices.

The most common thing to deal with next is a coal generator. The research needed is Internal Combustion. *But*, just getting the generator is craay-inefficient. I'm going to research "brute force refinement" so I can refine some copper while the rest of the research happens.

Digwise, I'll make some space for the rock crusher, and think about what I want to do with that big pool of water where the spine wants to go, prolly drop it way down at the bottom of the starting biome.

At c9, finally had the research and some copper, & this is "baby's first coal generator". It's 1 generator, 1 smart battery, and a bin for storing coal. The wiring is just the usual wire, connected to the same wire we have the hamster conneccted to. There's automation wire, too.

The automation. Smart batteries send a green signal when they're below an adjustable value, and a red value when they're above another adjustable value. What we're doing here is pausing the generator when we're full, and restarting it when we're low.

I set the smart battery to signal green at 60% and red at 100%. There's a weird setting on the coal generator, not even sure it's applied in this setting, but I set it to 100%, which should mean "fill it the instant the battery asks".

Using a coal generator w/o a smart battery is super-wasteful. Coal isn't rare, but it's definitely finite. We don't want the generator to run when it doesn't need to. Even tho we'll be building all sorts of power-generation stuff later, it is all basically an elaboration of this.

Using a power-generator other than the hamster wheel is itself a playstyle choice. There are folks who live on hamster wheels for as many as the first 100 cycles. I'm not one of them. The generator makes more power and reduces dupe labor.

Here's the bottom half of things. What's going on? I'm clearing a place to stash all that water. I will use a pour-in infinistore for this. Many folks don't: they just dig a great big hole down there and pour the water in from above via digging.

Why do either? Primarily to clear the living space up above. Working around all those separate pools is a pain in the ass. This will take a few turns, we need a couple more researches to do an infinistore.

Notice the little cistern near the arch. Once we get the water down to our infinistore, we want to pump it back up and keep that little cistern full of water. Why? Research (and liceloaf, if you go that way) needs water. Inefficient to go that far to get it.

c16, now. The infinistore is in at the bottom, about to start dumping water. For a long explanation of the infinistore, see here.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464792…

Up top, I laid out some more mealwood planters.

What's next? Lots and lots and lots of digging. I want to core a large portion of the temperate biome, and I even got a little break: there are *three* sulfur/sucrose biomes touching this one. These biomes are just like the starting biome, completely safe and easy to dig in.

By c20 all of the cool water is in the infinistore. There are 265 tons of water in those 6 tiles. I was getting all set up to decide about coring the temperate biome, but then I remembered that cool steam vent over there. Dammit.

Cool steam vents, or CSV's, are an important and awkward resource. There are at least two on every map. They essentially ensure infinite water. Downside, that water is quite hot. And it's quite near my base. See this heatprint? I'm just a few tiles away from having mealwood die.

Later, we can tame the little bastard, but we don't have the tech or the power we'll need. So what to do? Two things. 1) block that sucker up in insulated tiles. 2) get that huge hot water pool tucked away in an insulated infinistore.

It's c30, and it's bedtime, and the CSV is all blocked up, with the hot water pool under it in an insulated infinistore. All that remains here is to clear all those hot solid tiles. This halves the mass, and debris conducts less well than solids.

And c40. We've done a lot of clearing, and I set up the hatch ranch stack and got the first ranch running. Next stop, boring: the bathroom loop & a little better kitchen arrangement.

c45, simplest jammedest worst fully-operational bathroom loop ever, second hatch ranch opening, my bulk storage facility, and I'm starting on my east-side gas facility, which, btw, is gonna be a different build.

Bounced to sandbox to sketch this out. It's a 2-input 6-gas filter ring infinistore. 6 gases is te absolute max, really, and only if you get sour gas. It input-preferences everywhere.

I want verticality cuz of the way gas leveling gets blocked by big wide things, and to make it easier to pipe in and out of the thing. It uses mechanical filters everywhere.

Tho I just noticed I'm not keeping o2 *out* of the thing. Maybe I should do that, too.

Sandbox is invaluable when you're making things up like this. Off the escape menu, Options|Game|Enable Sandbox. It adds a new button up on the upper left to toggle. NOTE: sandbox is permanent-going-forward in the saves. You want to do a save, then turn it on, play, then reload.

Three questions: Can I build this live? Can I build it incrementally? Will it work?

We're gonna find out.

Oh. Use the sixth one for o2 anyway, and that will give me a pure o2 line for the early suits.

c50, well, the slop pit works just fine. That's part 1. The only tricky part was getting the vents covered with the right amount of liquid. There's a video of the technique here, tho mine was 5-wide. Pretty easy, and faster than my old style.

c60. The gas rig is up, seems to be working fine. I'm up to 8 dupes. Had to pause to get the radbolt research in. It is time, sadly, for doing some slime work, which as you know I hate.

I want to continue the downward dive, but I'm also thinking about doing the ph2o infinistore for the east side. That slime biome whose bottom you see here is gigundo.