As mentioned in the Programming Notes, the schedule of posts will be a bit different for a while.
We left off with just having discovered the personnel teleporter. Let’s take a look at what we can see from here.
Not much to look at yet. We’re going to have to send someone through to see what’s available. What are we hoping to find?
- Water sources
- New kinds of seeds
- Pacu and plug slugs
- Any other resources that might be useful
We also need to identify someone who will be able to quickly put up some buildings so they can sustain themselves while exploring. Given the large amount of swamp on this planet, Stinky seems appropriate.
We will need to give him (or someone else) Field Research to be able to activate the supply teleporters, and we won’t be able to build things that require electrical engineering or mechatronics. First priorities for a second dupe are probably someone who can do a lot of carrying and wheel-running.
While we focus on Reekito and Stinky, we want our main base to be doing something useful. I queue up a bunch of digging and building to keep everyone busy. There’s also a lot of fertilizer around the ancient fossil, so this will take care of two things at once.
Someone will need both Masterworks and science skills to excavate the fossils, so we also set that up. This is why we wanted Science + Decorating interests on our main researcher.
With that taken care of, let’s go through the teleporter.
Swampy, as expected. We also immediately see some Pacu and a source of polluted water, but without sand we won’t be able to filter it yet. Not too far below, there’s also bees visible.
Up above, there’s some fresh water and an unrevealed vent or geyser.
And another one to the right, with some pips, oxyferns, and some food.
There’s enough oxylite around to keep us going for a while and eventually we can get the pips to put together an oxyfern pit to make more oxygen and consume some of our carbon dioxide. Down below, to the right of the bees, there’s also some more accessible fresh water, which we’ll need for the bathroom.
We get a small but crude bathroom and bedroom running, and plan to put the great hall and food storage in one of the rooms on the teleporter floor. This will take care of our basic needs for a while, so let’s get to exploring. First thing we find is a cool slush geyser, and it’s very close to the outgoing teleporter room.
There’s also a natural gas geyser, which will be good for power later, and a cool steam vent, basically just another water source at this point (we might be able to pipe the cool slush over to cool the steam). The cool steam vent room also has wild planted thimble reeds; we want to send some of those seeds home as soon as possible.
We briefly pop back home to grab another dupe and start working towards atmo suits.
And with Smelting research done, we queue up a small smelter setup in our ice room, with some crude oil for coolant.
And also make use of our new power wires to supply it with the 1.2kW power it requires, plus some buffer.
One other problem we have to work around is we don’t have radiant pipes yet. Luckily you can make regular pipes out of Wolframite, which is about the best we can get for non-radiant pipes right now.
The water tank is also collecting a lot of carbon dioxide. To make it easier for our dupes to run the smelter, we stick in an air pump that we can toggle on and off as needed. We also need a rock crusher to make lime and a kiln to make refined carbon, so we stick those in nearby as well (the kiln is higher up in the ice biome where it can warm up some polluted water faster).
Our rust deoxidizer setup is also starting to get a bit too warm, and with tempshift plates available we can now provide some temporary cooling. When they melt, the whole area gets a lot more livable.
The solution we provided for our salt problems last episode has developed another problem: now we have too much chlorine. However, now we have enough salt to get by for quite a few cycles, so this becomes a problem for Future Xerol.
With the main base on the path to making steel, and other problems at least temporarily taken care of, we can check in on the swamp planet. Further exploration has revealed a copper volcano, and not much else.
Another somewhat appealing dupe comes through the printer, so we use this as an opportunity to start on automation. We won’t be able to use conveyor rails just yet, but the sweepers can save a lot of dupe labor so we can focus more on digging and building.
Notably this can go into our kitchen to save a lot of in-and-out from the CO2 pit. The grills have to move one tile closer to be reached by the sweeper, as the target tile is the bottom-middle one.
And with automatic dispensers we can finally set up our trash pit. We set them as our dropoff point for any sweeping-marked items that aren’t going to offgas anything – basically everything but bleach stone, oxylite, polluted dirt/mud, slime, and rot piles.
This is set up next to the bedrooms because it’s got good dupe access and it’s one of the hottest areas inside the base right now, so any debris we dump will be cooler and hopefully even out the temperature some. This shaft arrangement also gives us a lot of places for errands to originate from, so large sweep commands can hopefully be completed quickly. We can also see our oxygen generation fixes from last episode taking effect.
Exploration on the swamp world has found us some sand, so we can start to filter the massive amounts of polluted oxygen being given off by all the polluted water, dirt, and mud. This should be more than enough oxygen to get by for a while.
We’ve also now produced nearly 4 tons of steel, with more on the way, and our ice water bath is holding up nicely.
One last thing to take care of this episode: the saltvine overpressure problem. In what I will later refer to as a “big mistake”, I try to take care of it by just opening the door and putting some extra saltvines nearby.
With over 11kg of gas pressure, it spreads throughout the base quickly. These saltvines will be able to eat some of it, but it will take a while. Another Future Xerol problem. The main cause of the problem was we didn’t have gas pressure sensors when we built the room, but now we do, so we set up a gas shutoff to prevent the room from overpressurizing due to the gas vent output. We still want the chlorine from the deoxidizer setup to have a place to go, so we only put the shutoff on the vent side of the pipes.
This is why “just open the door” was a big problem: the room is no longer pure chlorine. This will mess with the atmo sensor and cause more problems for Future Xerol. However, all of this is enough to get the saltvines eating chlorine again.
While we wanted to focus on the swamp planet, we spent most of cycles 160-180 putting out small (not literal, thankfully) fires, and this work isn’t done yet. But we’ve managed to get enough of a handle on things to go back to working on bigger goals. The next thing up on the list is making more use of the automation we have available and freeing up as much dupe labor as possible for construction.
Next: Meat and Plastic
