Oxygen Not Included - space colony sim from Klei

[Hellraiser]

For me the visuals look great but last time I tried it, like a year ago, it already looked way too autistic with all the complicated systems and shit. Don't Starve was a ultra-fun romp, this looks like you gotta have at least the Asperger Syndrome to enjoy it. But I will give the final version a try.

For me it is the opposite I find don't starve tedious and grindy.

 

[Space Satan]

The game is surprisingly well done. Because it has rather high "Perfection" limit. You start with common toilets, then you upgrade it to toilets with pipes, then you add temperature control to the polluted and clean water, then chlorine septic tanks then add automation to puft ranch etc. etc. etc. it is extremely hard to reach total perfection and you always have somewhere to grow or optimize.

 

[Raghar]

What chlorine? In proper distopian colony they are trying theirs best to keep water clean without chlorine, because chlorine is at location they would die on enter.

Then you try to make colony using less resources than EU comitee dream, and trying to pump heat by tripple pumps behind wall, because you think that at least half of the heat would propagate in opposite direction.

Of course the best way is to not use any hint books or spoilers and just encountering stuff unexpectedly.

 

[Space Satan]

Liquid tank in chlorine room somehow kills germs, may be a bug but still works afte rseveral builds.
Half of my colonies died from heat death, overheating farming zones so all plants withered. So each time I started anew I made colony better. With reserve space for tube transportation and SPOMs and insulated power plant areas.
That's why I never had "not again" feeling when starting new colony - because I know I can do better this time and that's why the game have such a high replayability

 

[cvv]

Half of my colonies died from heat death, overheating farming zones so all plants withered.

Hey you there, you seem to play a lot - how the fuck do you deal with heat in this game? I've finally booted it up, tried two runs, in both of them hot water cooked my base like a potato. I know you can cool things up with wheezeworts but there just aren't enough of them? Can you somehow breed them?

I know I should watch some jewtube guides first but I wanted to explore on my own. Not gonna work it seems tho.

 

[Space Satan]

Cool base with cool oxygen. Build a SPOM, look at forums for specifics. But mostly - insulate hot areas from growing areas and habitats. By hot I mean power generating buildings and batteries. They'll cook your base in no time. There's a lot of wheezworts on he map plus you canget them from space and dupe printer.
Notice that bridge is pushing gasses and liquids forwards, which means you can make a permanent circulation of hydrogen in radiant pipes that'll pass through isolated insulated room with hydrogen, tempshift plates and several wheezes. That'll make a permanent cooler. Also thermo-nullifier, but it can cool anything and you should build an automation to reulate its cooling power

 

[cvv]

insulate hot areas from growing areas and habitats. By hot I mean power generating buildings and batteries. They'll cook your base in no time.

If I enclose my generators and batteries with insulated tiles does the heat inside ramp up indefinitely or is there a ceiling? Dupes have to feed the generators with coal, do they at some point get immediately cooked when they enter the room?

 

[Space Satan]

If you enclose the area, then yes. If you separate the main base then it'll haemorrage into outside world that you don't care

 

[Darth Roxor]

Dupes have to feed the generators with coal, do they at some point get immediately cooked when they enter the room?

Better wear your exosuit to shovel coal :D

 

[Hellraiser]

I had the same problem with heat but eventually I learned all the quirks of ONI's heat system and managed to game around it.

Easy mode solutions are wheezeworts or anti-enthropic thermonullifiers cooling electrolyzer oxygen output either passively or actively (bu putting those air conditioning thingies that cool pumped gas into the same room as ths wheezeworts/nullifier). Oxygen is the thing you end up circulating the most into your base as it constantly ends up disappearing and has to be replenished. And the electrolyzer output is 60C or 70C always so you have to cool it anyway.

One good way to kill off heat is abusing constant temperature output (regardless of input temperature) of certain devices, most notably the electrolizer and water sieve. You can have some gains, not exactly stellar gains, by abusing the fact the water sieve always outputs 40C clean water.

I put 2 aquatuners submerged into my septic tank where I dump all of the sewage. These aquatuners cool the water sieve's output (pumped via heat-isolated pipes of course) by transferring heat from the clean water back to the septic tank. The bigger the temp of the input seweage compare to 40C the better the heat deletion. As a bonus the temperature of the septic tank murders germs or can be used to grow pincha peppernuts.

Steam vents can also be abused this way as they too have a constant temperature output. The Electrolyzer has constant output temperature of the gasses it produces. Feed it with water above that temperature and you already have some net cooling effect.

Also remember heat has its uses. Best way to heat something up is to use aquatuners, made of steel ideally, gold amalgam if poor/lowtech. You can use them to generate steam by cooling water you want to feed into your farms and base. It is a win-win, you get steam for a steam turbine or steam engine of a rocket and cool water that does not kill you shit. Main problem is setting up the contraption to not cool water too much or it freezes in pipes, repairing aquatuners or pipes inside a terrifyingly hot steam chamber is extremely risky even with exosuits (some steam will escape and go warm things you do not want it to warm). With automation it is a bit of trial and error until you get the sensor settings right to avoid this. Isolated steam vents are predictible and with them as the only water source for such a contraption you could skip the sensors as long as the steam vent and its pool maintain a temperature close to the specified output temp. Aquatuners always move the same amount of heat (minus 14C or 16C IIRC for water).

 

[Space Satan]

I, personally, don't like heat deletion builds so prefer to stick with wheezeworts and other ways to reduce heat. For example, SPOM can provide stable flow of 1-5 celsius oxygen or even minus values.

 

[Space Satan]

Launch beta is on:
New and Notable Features

New Buildings

• Gas Range cooking station
• Desalinator
• Ethanol Distiller
• Rust Deoxydizer Wood Burner
• Airborne Critter Bait
• Monument
• Duplicant Motion Sensor
• Park Sign

New Critters

• Pokeshell
• Pip

New Fauna

• Arbor Tree
• Dasha Saltvine
• Oxyfern
• Waterweed

New Locomotion, Power, Stress, Insulation, Digging and Modding Tutorial animations New asteroids to colonize

• Asteroid select screen
• 9 variant Asteroids
• Additional start type: Forest
• World "Traits"

New Game Options screen New foods

• Spicy Tofu
• Sushi
• Improve food with Table Salt

New Biomes

• Tide Pools
• Rust
• Forest

New Colony Initiatives and Imperatives

• Imperatives are "big goals" for the colony
• Initiatives are optional goals and checkpoints
• Colony summary screen

New Space Destinations New Salt Water Geyser New Park and Nature Reserve room types

 

[Space Satan]

Tons of new flora and fauna

 

[Hellraiser]

I am playing the launch testing for the past few days. It seems they will just barely make the July release date as the Friday hotfix added missing art for the wood burning generator and it has been in testing for over two weeks. The test version is stable enough anyway, only issue I have is some memory leak/slowdown after a few hours and an occasionally freeze for a minute or so mid-cycle. Restarting makes them go away. Previous hotfix seemed to have ran slow as fuck but after the Friday one the game runs very smoothly apart from the issues I mentioned.

The new starting options are my favourite addition so far as they break up the routine starts. Oceania sounds extremely tempting as does the ice asteroid but I decided to leave them for later thinking they sound hard. I picked the desert asteroid hoping for a more mars-like experience with the rust biome but I got more of an Arrakis exeperience with regular sand. Also the random traits like geodes, more geysers (or less geysers), icy core etc. really add to variety.

Started on a desert-ish 'roid with little water and no immediately available algea, central biome is a forest with pips and oxyferns. Besides one decent but not spectacularly sized pool of water next to the printer there were only some shallow (mop-able) puddle around. Oxygen and water was a big issue. All surrounding biomes were desert, sandstone, copper and sand with nothing else...

I had to keep the dupes alive by digging to nearby oxylite and oxyferns (their efficiency is shit even when domesticated, but every bit helps), next by burning wood to produce CO2 for the wild oxyferns. Eventually I lucked out and found a cool slush geyser straight below my colony. -10 Celcius of polluted water. Teched straight to water sieves and electrolysers, the water sieve now outputs at around input temperature so I could actually use the slush geyser to water cool the base. Currently after 200+ cycles I have a bit of a water crisis again as my berry farm sucked too much water out of the system while the geyser was dormant resulting in the great pants-pissing crisis. Geyser is active again and I am building a pipe to a good old 80-ish Celcius steam geyser found in a distant swamp biome.

Pips really solve a lot of problems thanks to shitting out dirt. They can be used as a more reliable food source for hatches compared to the regolith>clay via oxygen deodorizer production. Also makes them easier to breed for eggs and lime than hatches are/were. Wouldn't be surprised if they get nerfed.

Pokeshells are assholes, they are not 100% non-hostile, they sometimes pinch dupes wounding them.

Lumber is a bit underused, I hoped you could be able to vaporise it to wood gas which would open up interesting possibilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas

I was surprised that they nerfed wheezeworts by making them require fertilization with phosphorus. Oh well, that is one reason to keep Dreckos around as wild reeds are enough for fibres and plastic is easier and faster produced with a polymer press.

 

[Space Satan]

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

 

[Makabb]

Played it some time ago...... will be there a point to play in the final version? Or is it just more of 'build more and dig and try to survive the mess that you created'

 

[Space Satan]

Well the game have a final goal now and building and endless optimizations. What else do you want?

 

[Makabb]

Well the game have a final goal now and building and endless optimizations. What else do you want?

Idk, an actual game with goals? Back in the day of builders (theme hospital, dungeon keeper etc) you had levels and every level was different and had a goal and the further you went it would get harder.

Pointless building is just...... pointless, these new indie devs have no clue how to make a proper game.

 

[Space Satan]

You have one big level, on which you will play 10 hours. And you have 10 missions on which you will play 1 hour each. What is the difference?

 

[Makabb]

You have one big level, on which you will play 10 hours. And you have 10 missions on which you will play 1 hour each. What is the difference?

Every level had a different design layout, had a different goal to finish the level and the difficulty would get harder as you would progress.

It's also good game design when at first level you have 2 buildings and with each every new level you have new technology unlocked...... instead of lumping everything together at the screen like you have in oxygen (just greyed out waiting to be unlocked).

It's just bad game design, there are these games from the past, anyone can play them today with emulators or old PC, somewhat the developers of today fail on basic homework which is playing old games.

It should be mandatory for every new game developer today to play all the old games, or atleast the games in the genre they are making, because I don't see any new pioneering groundbreaking genres being made, all ideas are just rehashed from the past in a worse form.

 

[Space Satan]

Every level had a different design layout, had a different goal to finish the level and the difficulty would get harder as you would progress.

You have a huge asteroid. You can't reach all at once. And it gets harder as you progress. Try reaching space or magma with just basic stuff.

It's also good game design when at first level you have 2 buildings and with each every new level you have new technology unlocked...... instead of lumping everything together at the screen like you have in oxygen (just greyed out waiting to be unlocked).

To get all that buildings you have to research it and to research it you have to sustain your colony long enough.

Overall, RimWorld proved that this game design is great and in no way inferior to mission-based games

 

[Hellraiser]

You have one big level, on which you will play 10 hours. And you have 10 missions on which you will play 1 hour each. What is the difference?

It's also good game design when at first level you have 2 buildings and with each every new level you have new technology unlocked...... instead of lumping everything together at the screen like you have in oxygen (just greyed out waiting to be unlocked).

It's just bad game design, there are these games from the past, anyone can play them today with emulators or old PC, somewhat the developers of today fail on basic homework which is playing old games.

You write "this is good this is bad without" providing any arguments back up either point.

 

[Space Satan]

Launched!

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Only played the tiniest bit so far, but I'm definitely getting brutalized as I struggle to remember what the fuck I'm doing. Gonna take me a while to get back into the swing of things, I put the sink behind the toilet like an absolute barbarian since I forgot the dupes were too stupid to wash their grubby hands otherwise. Probably going to have a seizure when I try to remember how to get plumbing and water processing figured out again. Especially if you still need to boil the water to disinfect it.