The base is looking a bit messy, and we have some idle hands sitting around, so let’s clean up a bit. First, some storage bins for dirt and seeds near our main mealwood farms.
We also add a couple dupes that will be useful as general labor, which lets us get the last 2 techs needed to start automating the stables.
Our available calories also take a sudden dip. Our unrefrigerated pickled meal is starting to turn. We will need to get a cooling solution for frozen foods sooner rather than later.
We also start clearing out a hydrogen room for dreckos. We’ll open up that bottle of water to keep dreckos from going to the right side of the room while still keeping the whole room available as a single stable.
Meanwhile at the hatch ranch, the critter sensors start going in. These will be set to open the doors when there are any eggs in the room, dropping the eggs (and anything else on the doors) down to the bottom level.
We also set up a single incubator to start growing stone hatches faster, as we’ve had a few random (2% chance) eggs drop. Eventually we will move all the ranches over to stone hatches, but for now we only have a couple eggs.
Normally this is usually an ignorable warning because it doesn’t take into account cycles where you produced more oxygen than you consumed, but in our case we know it’s an upcoming problem – our current rust setup only provides oxygen for 11 dupes and we have a couple small supplemental sources from deodorizers and algae generators. We take some oxylite from the pod since none of the dupes look very good and it’ll buy us a little bit of time.
The ranch area is pretty far from the main rust setup and the single vent we stuck in the great hall isn’t doing a lot for it.
The plan is to dig out some of the ice biome, pump our current main water tank into it (to melt most of the ice without losing mass), and use that water to run a mini SPOM.
We don’t have the tech to use the hydrogen yet, so we set up a small infinite hydrogen storage room to hold the output until we get hydrogen generators. We also still don’t have smart batteries so I throw in a manual switch so we don’t waste a lot of coal.
Our newest dupe is our 17th, and has been sleeping on the floor since we only have 2 barracks. Let’s also fix that.
We also grab a couple more dupes, filtration, and distillation so we can sieve the polluted water from the ice biome for use in the SPOM.
And we’ll want atmo sensors to make the SPOM work correctly.
With the sieve and atmo sensors up, we can start running our new oxygen supply. For now we’ll just use it to fill up the ranch area, and let it flow out into the rest of the base if needed.
Pumping continues. A lot of it is getting hung up on regular ice, which will melt much later than the polluted ice.
With more oxygen production online we can start taking dupes again to finish up the crucial techs needed for this phase of the game.
Now we can throw smart batteries on both our main oxygen sources, which should save us a good amount of coal.
With 20 dupes we don’t need it to run full-time, just enough to supplement our other sources; this is good because it will take a while to melt the rest of the ice biome. Taking stock in general at cycle 120, the ranches are starting to fill up with stone hatches, we’re stockpiling hydrogen, and our food has been relatively steady despite losing a lot of pickled meal to decay and a lot of mealwood now being overheated. But, our mushrooms are also taking off, and soon we’ll be able to start harvesting the regular hatches for meat.
