This is a challenge somewhat similar to the 100 dupe challenge, but with some key differences that make it a unique playthrough. The rules:
- You may not have more finished techs than living dupes.
- Your starting dupes count and are included in this count.
- Dupes sent to the temporal tear do not count.
- You do not have to print a dupe from the pod when one is available. The only exception is if dupes die and bring your living dupe count below your researched tech count, in which case you must print dupes when available until the count is fixed.
- Care packages, map choice, difficulty settings, optional objectives (e.g. All Achievements) are up to the player.
- The challenge is complete when all techs are researched and all colony imperatives are fulfilled.
There are 95 techs in Spaced Out, which means we will have at least 95 dupes by the end. Since a lot of late game (and even mid game) techs are somewhat optional depending on playstyle, we might settle in around 40-50 dupes in the middlegame and only expand when we need more techs for the endgame.
For a little bit of added challenge, although I am running on normal difficulty, I will be playing on a badlands map. There was only really one world trait I wanted to absolutely make sure we had, and that was Irregular Oil. This generally means more oil wells are available than on a typical classic map, and my plan is to generate a lot of the water needed to sustain a large population from petroleum (and later, natural gas) generators. Metal rich + metallic caves were a nice bonus, and slime molds will provide extra algae/slime for oxygen production, I guess.
For starting dupes, we need to remember that our tech progress is going to be a bit slow. For that reason I didn’t bring a scientist, and instead used the third slot for a farmer/operator which will help get food supplies up early before we run into a problem, and will probably be running on generator wheels the rest of the time. I wanted to focus on single interest dupes for digging and building so these can happen faster in the early game, as you will see later from the strategy I am using.
