Our first (this is a hint) rust deoxidizer setup involves a simple mechanical filter. The pumps will feed into this once we clear all the carbon dioxide out of the room, so the filter will only have oxygen and chlorine to deal with. Oxygen will go up to the base, while the chlorine stays in the room to be eaten by the saltvines.
We also set up a few sweep bins to get rid of the debris at the bottom of the room – we don’t want dupes running in there to grab stuff out of a chlorine cloud.
Mushrooms are also starting to come online, and our calorie production is looking very healthy. As mentioned last time we can support about 13 dupes on our current mealwood setup, but with adding mushrooms, bristle berry, and even some meat to the menu, we can go even farther.
With 6 dupes and a single algae generator running, we’re not making enough oxygen right now, so we need to get this deoxidizer setup running soon. Polluted water offgassing and some extra oxylite pockets are keeping us going but won’t last forever.
While the deoxidizer room gets pumped out, we throw in an extra pipe loop through the ethanol pool (and then back through the deoxidizer room) – this should keep the room cool and the oxygen going up to the base shouldn’t be too hot.
At last the carbon dioxide is cleaned out and we can set up the mechanical filter and run the deoxidizers.
It’s running warm, but not too warm.
And we are finally distributing oxygen through the base.
We run into our first problem pretty quickly – 2 pumps and 2 deoxidizers take 600W, while a single power wheel only provides 400W. This might be enough once the base catches up on being oxygenated and the system runs less than full time, but without full power it probably won’t ever catch up. A second wheel temporarily solves this until we can get better power generation going.
This reveals the second problem: 2 saltvines are nowhere near enough to deal with the output of 2 deoxidizers – you need 5 per deoxidizer. Work begins on a larger chlorine room with plenty of room for lots of saltvines.
We dump a little blob of crude oil into the chlorine room so the vent will never overpressurize.
Since running both pumps through the same pipe was causing occasional backups, we split the pumps onto separate filter circuits. Since this wasn’t planned for originally, it’s a mess. The filter on the left ensures only chlorine enters the chlorine room, while the filter on the right ensures only oxygen goes to the main base.
We grab another two dupes in preparation for our next two techs.
Those techs? Bigger batteries and coal generators. We won’t have the smarts to run the coal generators without waste, but this is not actually a problem – our setup takes exactly 600W when running full blast. We’re not quite running enough gas pumps to actually go at full blast, but it’ll be close enough that the amount of coal waste will be minuscule.
With 26 tons of coal we are good for at least 46 cycles, which should be plenty of time to get some ranches going.
This is a good point to take a bit of a reset and look at the progress on the larger base. The upper left was a small oil biome with no oil wells, so we demolished it and plan to move the hot liquid and rocks somewhere safely away from the base. There’s also more water and ethanol we can move into our main tanks, although the water tank will probably need more expansion. We’ve also put in a second set of bedrooms for our next few dupes.
As for the next plans, a SPOM would be nice but we currently have no renewable water sources. Ranching is still on the table, and getting smarts for our coal generators would also be nice. All of this requires one thing: advanced research. Just getting that unlocked will cost us two more dupes, and at least one more to unlock ranching after that.
Next: Advancement
