Series Index
Previously: The End?
So, it’s time to start fresh. Going Badlands again, but with some different world traits. Not having slime molds means mushrooms are probably not going to be a viable long-term food source, and the magma and volcanoes should make things interesting.
The starting dupes reflect the new strategy to be used on this run. I’ll explain that in a bit.
So what do we have to start with?
A little bit of water, and not much else. I see a rust biome below so we’re probably running another deoxidizer setup at some point. Temperature-wise there’s not much in the realms of very hot or very cold, so we should have some stable temperature around the base for a while.
We start by setting up the usual: a temporary bedroom and bathroom.
As far as oxygen production goes, algae will be the plan for now, but we don’t have an awful lot of it.
With some careful diagonal building we manage to sequester the water into what will be our main tank, and start digging down.
While that goes on, the usual research and oxygen setup gets put together.
And we take the typical first two techs.
So what’s the plan? As you might have guessed from our starting dupes, we want to, in the early game, focus on having fewer dupes with better skills. We still need to take a bunch to get the required techs for sustainability, but after that we’ll pause on hiring and build out the base. By my rough estimate we’ll need around a dozen techs to reach that point.
I briefly consider, but decide against (given our limited water supply), using Algae Terrariums instead of Oxygen Diffusers. They give more oxygen output per algae, especially with light, and the polluted water output can be additional oxygen (especially after deodorizers).
But we don’t have a lot of water and don’t know if or when we’ll be able to get more, and you lose about 3.2% of the water even if you can sieve it back to clean water. We’d also need a lot of dupe labor, something we’re not planning on having an excess of for a while – you need two and a half plants per dupe, minimum, which will convert 45kg of algae to 60kg of oxygen, consuming 450kg of water and producing 435.5kg of polluted water per cycle per dupe. So with 4 dupes, this is already close to 2 tiles of water per day. I didn’t count exactly how much water we have but it’s less than 200 tiles – so it would last a while (if we stayed with 4 dupes, which we won’t be) but it would eventually run out.
The first printing pod activation doesn’t give much worth considering, but we get a nice farmer/rancher with the second.
With our first two techs already spent on farming and mess tables, we grab flower pots and water coolers to make a great hall. Since we’re running with a limited number of dupes to start, we want to get the most work we can out of them, so keeping them happy is very important.
Exploration continues outward, where we find the first volcanoes, blocking further exploration to the let, and a cool steam vent, which we quickly brick in to stop it from erupting.
Going upward is blocked by what we will later find out is a cobalt volcano.
When skill points come in, we grab hard digging on everyone who’s a miner, dig up some granite, and start turning our temporary accommodations into something more permanent.
And we set up a small dumping area to take care of our polluted water output from the bathroom, while also working on finishing up the water tank. Below that, near the cold rust biome, we throw down some composters to recycle the polluted dirt.
Our fifth dupe is a cook and we set up the standard kitchen for him to work in. We also haven’t actually finished the research for the great hall yet – none of our dupes have research prioritized.
But we fix that with our sixth dupe, and also pick up advanced research as our fifth tech. And soon, we have the great hall finished.
We also send one of our main builder-diggers off to the neural vaccilator we found, hoping for a good trait. Well, they’re all good traits, but some are more good than others.
Darn.
For our sixth research we get jumbo batteries – unlike last game, we’re going for coal power early.
After 30 cycles, we find our exploration and expansion blocked on most sides by hot volcanic biomes, and as expected, we haven’t found much more in the way of algae. This is going to take some work.
The other major difference from the previous attempt is that we’re going to build our dupe apartments sooner. We won’t be able to get atmo suits or transit tubes for a long time, but oxygen masks are cheap to research and make, so as soon as we can get a sustainable oxygen supply up, we’ll get everyone moved into the first apartment block and using oxygen masks outside of it, which will limit the amount of area we need to keep pressurized.
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