Oxygen Not Included Catch-All

Decided we needed a thread for this game. Hopefully others play as well or consider playing?

Currently in Alpha, they release new features every 4-6 weeks which encourages replays and keeps the game fresh. From Klei, the makers of Don't Starve.

Steam description:

Oxygen Not Included is a space-colony simulation game. Deep inside an alien space rock your industrious crew will need to master science, overcome strange new lifeforms, and harness incredible space tech to survive, and possibly, thrive

For anyone considering buying this game, I find Blitz's regularly updated youtube series to be helpful:

I picked it up when it first hit alpha and put a fair few hours into it. It's an enjoyable--and slightly brutal--base building game/engineering and physics puzzle.

I got busy with things and didn't manage to get back to ONI until a fews weeks ago. Oh, man have Klei added *a lot* of content to the game since they launched it!

I still absolutely suck at this game. When it first came out I got a huge sense of accomplishment getting my dupes flush toilets and showers and making it to maybe 75 cycles. Then I watched some people play it on Twitch that were hitting 1,000 cycles.

Now I'm getting to toilets and showers quicker and setting up a crude system to convert water to O2 and hydrogen and burning the hydrogen for power.

But the good players are building these amazingly complicated systems that use magma to process oil into natural gas and use that to power their base (and then have to figure out another complicated system to deal with the heat from the magma).

And they're doing all that while they're feeding and taking care of their dupes, researching new tech, gathering resources, and having to build large structures.

I'm finding it to be a pretty deep and challenging game. There's loads of new content I haven't even touched because my dupes haven't survived long enough or gotten around to researching it.

But instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, I'm standing on an ever-growing pile of clone corpses. Each new colony is a little better than the one where everyone starved to death on a massage table with the floor covered in vomit and urine. Literally.

Yeah, the Twitch players are super intimidating to watch. I find the youtube series I posted above and Reddit to be more helpful. Trying to contemplate 500+ cycle plans when you're struggling to make it past 100 is not going to get you further.

I think you nailed the learning curve of the game. It's iterative and as you get the hang of one system at a certain point in the timeline, you start experiencing issues with something new which you might be able to recover or simply learn to anticipate in a new playthrough. The ultimate game of spinning plates. Of course, the system you mastered early on comes back to haunt you later.

I'm finally past a point where I don't suffocate my dupes because I run out of algae before I get electrolyzers up and running. Now I'm starting to learn the ins and outs of gas pressure in pipes. Well, I wouldn't say learn. Right now I'm in the "uh oh, that might not be good" phase.

I'm also just starting to create a few hatch ranches. I'd like to get a good source of eggs running to feed my dupes.

Ugh. My colony is spiraling out of control after 90 cycles. I expanded too fast for base size and number of duplicants and am now paying the price. I can't keep food on the table, I exhausted all my coal (about 21t) far too quickly, and then everything sort of collapsed.

What do you do for food? Right now my food roadmap is plant lots of planter boxes and harvest meal lice. The next step is panic when I don't have enough and try to run the musher until I generate enough food. Rinse and repeat until I run out of easy water and things get stretched.

bigred wrote:

Ugh. My colony is spiraling out of control after 90 cycles. I expanded too fast for base size and number of duplicants and am now paying the price. I can't keep food on the table, I exhausted all my coal (about 21t) far too quickly, and then everything sort of collapsed.

What do you do for food? Right now my food roadmap is plant lots of planter boxes and harvest meal lice. The next step is panic when I don't have enough and try to run the musher until I generate enough food. Rinse and repeat until I run out of easy water and things get stretched.

My latest colony is at 73 cycles and sh*t's about to hit the fan.

I've done much better with food in this colony than I have in the past. Right now I have plenty of meal lice and I'm slowly switching over to bristle berries. What helped was researching the farm tile and ditching the planters. Early game the farm tiles have the advantage of letting you plant more crops in the same space.

I'm still struggling somewhat on the food production side, but the main culprit of that--and the likely death of my colony in a couple dozen cycles--is power. Like you I teched up to coal for power generation and have burned through all the coal around me (I swear coal was *much* more plentiful in earlier releases). Now I'm stuck with just the manual generator.

That's a problem because I need a fair amount of power to grow the bristle berries (they need light) and more power for cooking food. Right now I'm stuck at making mush fries, which are terrible but at least they don't make my dupes sick. I'm growing more bristle blossoms so soon I'll be able to switch over to gristle berries, which will be a massive improvement in food quality and kcals. But now I need power for both the musher and the grill.

My colony's treading water at this point. I've essentially stopped all research because I can't afford the power to run the research stations. That lack of tech is going to come back and bite me. And I'm struggling to get mining and building done because one of my dupes has to pedal the manual generator all day. The only thing I can think of to get around this is to print a couple more dupes, build another manual generator, and gut through it until I can research some much needed tech that will get me to a better place power generation-wise.

Good to hear they've added a bunch of stuff. I last played at release and it was pretty sparse in terms of content. I'll probably check it out again soon.

@slinger, sounds very similar to my situation. I haven't tried the bristle berry growth yet due to that power requirement.

I just looked back through my saves and found one that is at 24 cycles, 7 dupes, tons of algae, good food supply, and I'm about to start water tanks but haven't undertook a few projects that ultimately doomed my later saves.

Pro tip I just saw on a youtube video.

Dig out a trough at the bottom of your base to collect CO2. I already did this to help promote the breathable areas but apparently CO2 and a few other gases creates a sterile environment that prevents or greatly slows food decay. One of my biggest problems in early to mid game is the constant churn of harvesting a ton of meal lice only to lose some to food decay because I don't have a fridge system due to power constraints.

I started a new colony last night and was able to apply quite a few lessons learned.

What's good:
The colony is seven strong at Cycle 122. I have about 80K food banked, a lot of it gristle berries. I've switched over two of my three greenhouses to bristle blossoms. I also got a small ranch up and running, though I haven't really focused on it.

I've managed to stick with manual generator for power so far, though I am at the point where I'm probably going to fire up some coal generators.

Water is decent, though I'm down to one tank of clean water. I've done some major work to drain a bunch of small polluted water chambers into one large polluted water tank. My next big project will be to start cleaning that water and pumping it back into my clean water tank.

My colony's surrounded on several sides by slime, so I've just begun mining some of that out and converting it into algae. The good part of that is it generates polluted water, so I'll be rolling in the clean water in 20 cycles or so.

I've found an Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier and an icy biome, but they're pretty far from my base. I'm going to need them because my core base is surrounded by hotter biomes and it's already 85 Fahrenheit and rising in some places.

What's bad:
I've never dealt with slime before and I opened my main base to a slime biome. When I remembered that germs were a thing I smartly built an airlock with a washing station. Then I realized about 20 cycles later that my airlock had a huge hole in the roof because my dupes couldn't reach it for construction. My base is now pretty germy.

Oh, yeah. One of my dupes now has slimelung (and a couple are probably going to come down with it as well). I'm hoping to mine out and wall off the slime section I opened pretty quickly and then figure out a way to disinfect my base.

I've also got boatloads of toxic gas and chlorine around my main base. I really need to figure out how gases work so I can deal with them.

One dupe suffocated. I had just opened an interconnected chamber that led to the Anti-Entropy thingy and the air was horrible, mostly a mix of hydrogen and chlorine with a little polluted oxygen mixed in. I had him mine out a huge chunk of algae and he ended up in a five deep pit. I rush built some ladders, but the dude literally croaked when the ladder reached him.

Avoiding slimelung is a lesson I learned early on. My recommendation is to shut down all access and activity in the slime bios and let your dupes slowly heal. Unlike food poisoning, the lifespan of slimelung can be incredibly long and it spreads soooo fast. I'm assuming you have the med bay room with quarantine properties. Adding a ration box that can hold some food so your dupes never leave the room is a great way to slow down on slimelung spread. Otherwise, it's like the flu and you're going to lose 10+ cycles as each dupe catches it and then spends time recovering.

I haven't built exosuits yet but I don't plan to enter a slime biome again until I can build some kind of decontamination airlock. My assumption right now is that the combination of an exosuit station and some kind of heater with an automation sensor for germs that fires and quickly kills all germs on the exo suit after my dupe has left the decontamination airlock and returned to base. Don't know if this makes sense but I can't wait to try.

How are you cleaning your polluted water? I'm just starting to mess around with a natural gas geyser and I'm realizing I will have unlimited polluted water as a by product. I already have the infrastructure to ship this to my polluted water tank. However, I know that using a water sieve to convert polluted water to clean water does not kill all food poisoning germs and you need to either freeze or heat germs to a certain temperature.

This is my first time messing with the slime biomes, so I have no real idea how they work. I just know I need the water and algae.

I now have one access point to the slime mines. It's a large airlock with a wash basin and air deodorizer in it. That opens onto the slime mine and an algae distiller. I've placed several air deodorizers in each section of the mine to deal with off gassing and the mined slime. It's not enough, but it's something.

And after checking r/oxygennotincluded, I've realized that I f*cked up horribly. I've been storing the slime and algae in a storage locker by the algae distiller. Everything else has been swept up and stored in my main base. Without washing or decontaminating it first. My base is going to be germ city.

It looks like I gotta figure out a way to pump up chlorine gas and use that to sanitize everything. It looks like everything's going to have to be stored in the slime mine until I can deal with things and I have to figure out a better decontamination set up.

I haven't started cleaning the water yet. That was going to be my next project. I was just going to filter it, but it's probably germ soup. The Anti-Entropy thing is kinda close to my polluted water basin, so maybe I'll pipe it over, freeze it, and then somehow get it all the way back to my fresh water tank. Of course that also means I need to pump hydrogen down to the Anti-Entropy thing...

It looks like I'm hitting another tech/experience barrier! It should be fun!

I went overboard on dealing with slimelung germs at one point. I ended up spending too much time and resources on it, to the detriment of other base operations, but I later learned I didn't really need to.

Slimelung germs will die off on their own in clean air. As long as you don't have polluted oxygen or slime in your base, it won't be a problem. I would just fix the processes that are bringing germs into the base. Even if you take the occasional contaminated item out of storage in your base, it won't stay contaminated long.

Pro tip learned on coal generators (and other resource generators). Use a smart battery with automation wire to control coal use. Apparently generators will continue to run as long as it has resource material. Then you can set the recharge thresholds on the smart battery. I've actually gained coal (yay hatchlings) while running a coal generator on my water tanks.

Had to restart after cycle 170. The rails were coming off with food and water production. I learned a new constraint with mealwood when I ran out of dirt around cycle 140 and thus my food supply. I knew that dirt was used but have always had a ton of it so never bothered to monitor it. I was too late to get bristle berries and irrigation set up, plus my clean water was very low. Ultimately, I might have been able to recover but decided to restart. I made many mistakes while learning about gas vents and heavy watt wire so I wanted an opportunity to try again.

That's where this game punishes you. It's a lesson on constraints and as you learn to upgrade each system (i.e. algae oxidizers -> electrolyzers) it imposes new constraints you need to consider and most likely will solidify in your mind when you're punished again later.

Looks like Klei is adding outer space to the game!

They're currently conducting open testing of the Cosmic Upgrade, which will be released the middle of the month. It looks like the update will have new materials, technologies, and more.

This is a really fun game, I've played a few patches to ~200cycles.
It's definitely scratching a DF/Banished/Rimworld itch but with some more interesting systems going on than the latter 2.
Really excited for the stuff they keep adding.

Just to confirm, new updates/releases don't affect in-flight games?

Not sure why I held off getting this for so long, since I've loved everything else by Klei. I've rectified the situation now and what a charming game this is! Surprised there isn't more activity in this thread. After 3 or 4 hours I've got a pretty sustainable food source, and I'm generating plenty of Oxygen, at least until we run out of Algae. Not quite sure what I'll do then but the tech tree seems to have an answer for most things.

I bought this and Rimworld at the same time but so far this is what's grabbing me. Really cool game.

I picked it up in the sale, just gone. Not dived in just yet. Sooon!

A short list of the problems you'll be solving
O2
food
hygiene
Algae
O2 again
Power
Heat
Water

I grabbed this about a week ago and dumped a lot of time in it over my vacation. So addictingly frustrating!

My first nascent colonies came crashing down quickly after realizing that clean water is a VERY valuable resource and the water sieve is not the be all end all.

My current colony has been trying to balance not running out of algae with trying to cautiously poke at a nearby slime biome for polluted water to sieve. Germs are no joke! The game should be called “Oxygen and Disinfectant Not Included!”

My first colony is suffering, but not due to germs, it's hypothermia that's going to kill us! I wanted to get to a water supply above us, and I'll be honest, I got lazy, so instead of digging up around the side and over it, I thought I'd be clever and make a little container below it, then remove just one tile from beneath the water. I misjudged, and some water escaped into our base. It only looked like a trickle but it seemed to go on forever. All 6 duplicants now have hypothermia (from soggy feet!?) and I'm not sure if there's a way back from it.

Edit: How did I not see the mop button?? Now I just need to get them off their sick beds for long enough to clean it up.

There's a bug in the beta build where if a Duplicant dies in a remote area, every other duplicant stops what they are doing, even to the point of dying themselves. I lost two colonies this way before reverting to the release branch. Hope it's resolved by Tuesday.

It's called mourning, Toddland. Have a heart!

I plan to jump back in on the next release. Definitely missing this game and haven't tried the latest surface features. It's doubtful whether I'll ever reach the surface before killing everyone but we shall see.

I had to give up on my last colony. Mistakes were made. Slime is not a thing to trifle with! You have to have a lot of precautions to not let it anywhere near your main base or slimelung takes over! Sooo, trying to get that under control meant I couldn’t get to the polluted water nearby to sieve in time before things went to pieces. I could revert waaaaaay back, but I just decided to take those lessons forward to another base.

I don’t know if everyone treats this game as a sort of “rogue like,” but I’ve been okay with that loop so far. Maybe if I had a base that made it past 100 cycles, then I might be perturbed to start over with a new one.

I’m very intrigued to try and get a base to survive to get to the surface! But I’ve got to get to “plastics” and high pressure vents first! I haven’t even seen oil yet :-/

I would recommend dealing with slime once you have exosuits and airlocks.

I typically make it to 200 cycles before things spiral out of control for whatever reason. Usually it's a combination of heat and lack of clean water.

I've been pondering my heat problems while I'm on a small work trip and vacation.
I have access to the freeze wort biome, but it's a small balancing act to get that up and running while I look into getting the cool steam geyser and polluted water geysers online to solve my a) lack of algae at this point and b) need to switch off my coal power system.
The coal I'll probably leave around, but since I've put it well below my base it eats up too many janitor/gopher cycles with refueling. Runs a smart battery so it only works when the batt drops below 10% (and charges it back to full).
That being said my main base is still bleeding a small amount of heat constantly and soon my crops will be endangered. I have a significant food surplus built up but cooling needs to be worked on before we start entering a spiral.

I was terrified of slime early on, but it dies off without polluted oxygen. You just have to keep an eye on everyone's health. When someone's slime germ count gets high, I lock them in the base until it goes back down. Accordingly, sources of polluted water or oxygen should be kept out. I keep slime storage and anything that uses slime, like algae distillers, outside of the base.

deftly wrote:

I was terrified of slime early on, but it dies off without polluted oxygen. You just have to keep an eye on everyone's health. When someone's slime germ count gets high, I lock them in the base until it goes back down. Accordingly, sources of polluted water or oxygen should be kept out. I keep slime storage and anything that uses slime, like algae distillers, outside of the base.

Yeah, I have to get enough room outside of my base to keep the slime there. I have just decided to lock the airlock to that biome for now while the slimelung germs die off in my dupes. I just *really* wanted that polluted water as my ticket to clean water for a little while longer. But it needs to be handled slowly. Luckily, I still have quite a bit of clean water and my polluted water pools figured out to where I think I can last awhile as I slowly try to get metals and other resources from the iron and hydrogen above my base. And then I should be able to get to exosuits and have the resources to get that set up to just delve into the slime full force. *Really* worried about my algae and oxygen levels. I think I’ve figured out that terrariums are for suckers :-/ Eats up too much clean water and not enough oxygen produced. Just need to go straight to electrolyzers. But I can’t pump all the clean oxygen where it needs to go without high pressure vents.

...and that’s probably not going to solve my problems either...This game! It dangles solutions in front of you only to complicate everything else! But I love it!

I'm still figuring out the switch from algae to electrolyzers. I think I'm going to be running an o2 deficit while I get up my electrolyzers and then have a water deficit for the foreseeable future while I figure out a cooling solution/mass filter solution to deal with my geysers.