Oxygen Not Included is a sci-fi game by Klei, currently in early access on Steam. It's made by the same company who produced Don't Starve, which shows in the art style. Despite being early access, the game is very playable and has a lot of stuff to do in it. (I'd say "remarkably complete", but I don't know what their plans for it looking complete are. There's still at least one more update on the way.) The premise is, you're in charge of a colony of duplicants who start out having just woken up in the middle of an asteroid. You need to make sure their needs are met while you try and figure out what's going on and why they're in an asteroid to begin with. This means making sure the colony has enough oxygen, making sure there's enough food for them to eat, that everyone's got a bed, that there's sanitation set up, and figuring out things like plumbing and electrical systems. You get to hand-pick your first three duplicants (the ones the colony starts out with), and you get three new random duplicants to pick from every third cycle, when the printing pod is ready to spit out a new duplicant. Despite the comparison to Dwarf Fortress, ONI is much more intuitive for a new player; the devs are making a concerted effort to ensure that the learning curve is as gentle as possible, and that it's as easy for a new player to pick up the game and figure out how to build a functional colony as it is for someone who's been playing since it first opened for early access. The latest update was the Rocketry update, which opens up some new areas for the duplicants to access and has introduced a couple new hazards. So - what are your favourite critters? What world seeds do you like working best with? What things do you struggle with, in your colonies, and what things are usually really easy for you?
I had to reload the save for the colony I'm working with right now - which feels like cheating a bit? But I'd messed up with how I built my water filtration system, and where I had my duplicants going to get at it, and they weren't doing great - people were at 100% stress, and stuff wasn't getting done. So I'm about 20 cycles back from where I was, but I'm doing better now; I have them building the filtration system so that it's accessible without having to go through an area that's going to be contaminated with slimelung, and I've set up the airlock they'll need to go through so that I can stick a deodorizer in there and decontaminate the air and hopefully remove as much of the germs as possible. I've also got more miners, so hopefully this time I won't get stalled in putting up the generators by only having one person who can mine abyssalite and then that one person getting sick with slimelung. I'm also doing a bit better on food, hopefully? I'm going to be setting up a mess hall, and hopefully getting actual food made. Maybe even a fridge so that the food doesn't spoil.
Your description made me go and buy the game yesterday, and it's very absorbing! I am, however, entirely too stupid for these kinds of games and have no fucking clue what I'm doing. I put an oxygen generator dealie in an area I was planning to have my dudes mine out later, and I can't figure out how to make it so one of those fuckers doesn't spend all day generating power in a room nobody's in. Besides disconnecting the wire, I guess.
No, dude, you're not stupid. Learning curve, remember? You're just completely new to this and it doesn't exactly have a tutorial that'll guide you through the steps of setting up a colony. So, I'm guessing you've built an algae deoxydizer since it requires power. What you also need to do, if you haven't already, is build some batteries so that the extra power being generated is stored - as long as the batteries are full enough (the default is 50% charge but you can tweak it so that it's lower if you want), your duplicants won't go hop on the wheel unless you've set the priority for that building to higher than anything else they've got to do. Batteries will also let the deoxydizer keep running through the night when your duplicants are asleep. You're also going to want to build a research station and hook it up to your power system, and research Basic Farming - that'll open up algae terrariums for you, which use less algae than the deoxydizer does and also don't require power. The downside of terrariums is that they generate more jobs (delivery tasks for loading up algae and water, and maintenance for emptying them of polluted water) and you need around three terrariums for every duplicant you've got if you want to be generating enough oxygen.
Basic Farming will also give you access to the compost heap (which will let you turn polluted dirt into regular dirt, which lets you clean up the outhouses), and it will give you planter boxes that you can use to start farming with. I'd also have your duplicants dig out a pit that's a ways away from the rest of the colony (either down at the bottom, or off to one side, or both) and put an airlock in there (use the doors you've got right now, you can replace them with airtight ones later), and stick a bottle emptier in there so that it empties out into the pit, and set it so that it only takes polluted water. This will let you get started on the polluted water reservoir you'll need for water filtration later, and it'll give you somewhere to put polluted water so that it's not just sitting around and turning into polluted oxygen in your base. I also put my compost heap in there, so that it's not offgassing polluted oxygen into the main area.
I built a research station right after building and powering the food machine thing, and farming was the first thing I picked! I've got farming and the first power thing researched, but I had to put the kibosh on that cause the bathroom and oxygen situations both got real bad at the exact same time. I wasn't sure whether or not the algae terrariums needed power, so I built one basically right beside the second deoxydizer I built, the one in the area people actually do stuff in. I'm not sure if that's a waste or not. The impression I got was that oxygen would disperse throughout the whole tunnel, but if that's the case then it's taking an awfully long time for certain sections to get livable. I was wondering what I was supposed to do with the polluted water.
The terrariums don't need power, but you are going to want to stick a lot of them all over the place. Like I said: three per duplicant to get enough oxygen for that one duplicant. I usually shove one per cot into the barracks, which isn't great for the decor rating but oxygen's more important. I also stick a couple in anywhere that duplicants will be going routinely or spending a lot of time in. You'll also probably want to build a pit that's lower than anywhere currently being accessed routinely by your duplicants, so that the carbon dioxide has somewhere to sink down to that isn't requiring them to walk through it. Oxygen will rise and disperse, it's just...kind of slow, especially if you're asking it to go through a horizontal section - it tends to fill the highest spots first, and then work downwards. Once I have airflow tiles or mesh tiles, I put one or two of those in each room I want to have uninterrupted airflow from - that way carbon dioxide has somewhere to sink down through, and oxygen can rise without interruptions. For bathrooms - I'm assuming you've got an outhouse built? I generally build two, so that the odds of both of them being down at the same time will decrease (and so that there won't be a huge lineup of duplicants needing the bathroom). The problem with the food machine you first have access to is that mush bars aren't great - they cause diarrhea, unless they're cooked (which turns them into mush fry), which means duplicants need to use the bathroom more often and take a bit longer in there. I'd put in at least one more outhouse, plus a wash station if you don't already have one set up - making them wash their hands before they leave the latrine is important. Once you've got sanitation and distillation researched, you can set up a plumbed washroom which reduces how much time they take in the bathroom and decreases how many germs they're carrying around. Once you get meal prep researched, you can set up so that they can make better food than mush bars - you don't want to use those forever, and you also don't want to make liceloaf either; they both use a lot of water, and liceloaf deteriorates pretty fast if it isn't refrigerated. I'd also set up the power generator (either coal or hydrogen - coal's easier to work with, honestly, and it gives you the right environment for planting mushrooms) well away from the main colony so that you're not getting as much heat from it. You will need more power than the manual generator can produce to run the filtration system on a consistent basis, too - each of the components takes about 120 units of power to run. Also, don't feel bad if things get to the point where you need to restart your colony! Everyone runs into that, especially starting out. If you particularly like the map you're using, you can write down the world seed and use it for another colony - it's a good way of figuring out how to play, too, since you're able to focus more on learning and figuring out how to avoid problems or work the system and you're not as busy with figuring out where things are or what's around your colony.
I built a second outhouse after the first bathroom mishap that flooded my base with polluted water. I've been focusing research on stuff I understand, so I'm just about ready to upgrade to lavatories, which I assume will be better for everyone involved. I probably didn't put my first coal generator far enough away from where my dudes work, but they do seem to complain about the chill a lot, so maybe it won't be too bad? I'll see how it goes the next couple days! Right now my dudes have been living pretty hand to mouth, so the refrigeration issue hasn't really come up. Or maybe that's just cause I'm on easy mode? I don't know. I know next time I'm gonna try and work on food a lot quicker than I did this go around.
Food's always an issue for me too, honestly; the thing that took down my last few colonies was insufficient food. You need a lot more mealwood plants than it seems like - about five per duplicant, if you're planning on feeding them with meal lice alone, I think? And it takes a few cycles to get anything out of them. Lavatories will be better, although you're going to want to rush distillation after that. Fortunately, lavatories and proper sinks actually end up creating more water than they use since they produce about twice as much polluted water - so once you filter it, you've got more water than you started with. Looking at your plumbing set up...hm. That's a bit more convoluted than how I usually rig the plumbing, personally - I try to avoid using the liquid bridges. It looks like you might have flipped the intake and outtake for the liquid bridge? Green is always an output, white is always an intake. So the green on the pump is where it pushes water up to wherever the pipes lead, and the green for the liquid bridge is where it sends the water out to the next pipe. You want the pipes to lead from an output to an intake. (Don't worry about messing it up - the plumbing's hard to figure out without trial and error. The reason why I try and avoid using the liquid bridges is because of how often I end up screwing up the orientation and needing to rebuild it.)
(Okay, on second thought, no - your set-up is more compact than mine and will work fine once you flip the bridges around. Mine's a bit more sprawling, since I try hard to avoid touching the liquid bridges.)
Switching it around fixed it! We're in the indoor plumbing age! Now I just gotta figure out the water seive.
Water sieve takes polluted water and filters it into clean water. It will produce polluted dirt as a byproduct, and it doesn't really do anything for germs. (I really hope that one of the updates at some point gives us the ability to chlorinate water.) For heat and offgassing reasons, you'll probably want to have it a bit away from your base but as long as you've got a pump in the polluted water reservoir and enough power to run it, it doesn't matter how far the water's got to go to the sieve. You can also set up an algae distiller - it'll take slime and turn it into clean algae, producing polluted water as a byproduct. (This is why ranching's a big deal, later on - if you corral a bunch of pufts, they'll turn polluted oxygen into slime and give you a renewable source of algae. Setting up a hatch farm also gives you a renewable source of coal. And both critters can be turned into food, too.)
Well, I'm down to three duplicants after most of my colony starved. (I might be back up to four now? I forget.) I'm just going to stick with limiting myself to that, until I've got a decent amount of food socked away and they've cleaned up and done repairs; one of my duplicants has destructive stress responses and trashed...a lot of things, including the deoxydizer, the manual generator, and the electric grill. And a bunch of wall tiles. I might see if deconstructing the deoxydizer and rebuilding it is faster than just having them repair it. At least the coal generator's finished being wired and is ready to go as soon as it gets loaded with coal. It's even got a bank of batteries.
...and I'm restarting, in easy mode. Because screw it, the Hardy Trainwreck is living up to its name and it's an absolute mess. It'll be less stressful to work out how to do this in easy mode, rather than try to limp along with only half the duplicants in my colony even functional.
