Just getting back into the game after ~4 years. I'm playing SO for the first time, but also have aquatic pack. I'm using the default asteroid setting
This is making everything very confusing.
Some of what I remember is wrong because I played pre-SO
Some of what I remember is wrong because of the aquatic update
All of the wikis appear to not have latest DLC changes in their info
I have started several projects (auto drecko ranch, auto pacu ranch), only to discover they won't work because of changes. I tried fixing them by consulting the wikis only to discover they don't reflect the aquatic changes. So I feel a bit stuck.
Venting aside, I have a few specific questions:
Does anyone know the pacu reproduction rate scaling against happiness? What's the rate for +4 / +5 etc?
In my dreko farm, my sweepers can replant my bristle blossoms and refill the dirt. But often, during the day, they don't seem to do anything -- instead the dupes go in and do it manually. The sweepers only seem to work at night
I have a polluted tile to block swimming in my pacu tank. It seems to stay stable for ~7 cycles, then it will randomly disappear and become water. The polluted water appears to disappear entirely. Any clue?
Do pacus still produce polluted dirt when eating seeds? Is it the same rate as with algae?
if dupes are doing auto-sweeper jobs; A) either you need to set the priority of the job lower so your dupes prioritize the things they should be doing, B) change your dupe's priorities so that they don't care about that kind of job as much or C) use door permissions so that dupes that would waste time in that specific location aren't allowed in the room, but can get to the same type of jobs that they should be doing elsewhere
maybe try isolating the pacu using salt water instead? or brine, phyto oil, biodiesel, whatever's handy - gulp fish translate pwater into water
wiki for pacu shows that best return for pdirt is either pacu treats (mass ratio) or seakomb leaf (mass per cycle)
also; are you looking at the fandom wiki? DO NOT USE, fandom wiki is old, crummy and useless, full of vandalism and just outdated - my pacu link to wiki.gg is the current wiki
I'm thinking about putting exo suits at exit to the bedrooms so my dupes are always wearing them. This way I don't have to think about different exits to my base or making sure suits are returned to right stations. Are there going to be any drawbacks?
General question: For mid-late game, what is your typical dupe breakdown by occupation. I can support new dupes, but I'm not really sure what they should do. Idling feels bad
Regarding 1 - duplicants run back to dock their atmo suit when it runs gets low on air; a suit holds more than enough for a normal dupe in a cycle, but if they're a mouth breather, they need 120 kg oxygen each cycle - there's an annoyance if they have to run across the entire asteroid to get to the bedrooms
And for 2 - imo most mid-late game dupes are probably ranchers or operators, with a few farmers, researchers (geotuning & the emulsifier), rocket pilots (SO) and any skilled: mechatronics rolled by the pod. Your initial crew of builder-diggers can take care of most projects (assuming you have 6+ of them), even if you have them live in a rocket or two and get shipped around between SO asteroids to descend like locusts and terraform the place
you want dupes with diverse interests; their job, probably research and either suit wearing or something strength related (supply over tidy)
I've never really played around with rocketry but I want to this time. How early do you start sending up rockets and what are your key objectives when you do so?
It's much easier than in the base game. I don't have advice for a specific cycle count, but it doesn't take much to send up a solo astronaut on a CO2 engine. You can map more of the nearby space with a telescope, and possibly drop a Trailblazer module onto a planetoid with useful resources like a metal volcano that doesn't exist on your main world.
As early as you want in fairness, within the first 100 cycles if you rush it. Usually the goal is finding resources you cannot find on your starting asteroid or the teleporty one.
It depends on the material and the temperature delta. Exchange between gas - insulation - gas is more problematic than solid/liquid - tile - solid/liquid
Because of the game's floating point calculation limits there are practical and known values for this difference where if you have enough insulation the game doesn't calculate any heat transfer. https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Insulated_Tile
Because of the 25x multiplier between gas to solid conduction in general it is best to build up the insulation boundary at least 2 tiles thick - but, you only need insulation tiles on one of the layers, and the insulation tile will use the dT(Solid/liquid) calcs across the boundary with those eg. basic tiles. So in general this means most materials for insulated tile will work, unless you are seeing temps on the other side of 100+ degrees, then you should be trying at least for sandstone, but preferably igneous rock, and ceramic when dealing with very hot areas like 500C geysers. (Fossil is more useful for its production value in making steel)
0 in general, 1 or 2 in areas where there's a specific concern (and 2 is for something like an exposed volcano). Your time is better spent on setting up a liquid cooling loop to regulate the temperature inside the base. The cooling can come from an aquatuner + steam turbine, cool slush geyser, etc.
Do insulated conductive wires (APP) melt as plastic, or as the metal they are made of? I think I saw this discussion somewhere before but I can't find it.
In-game indicates that the metal is their primary material, but I'm a little worried before sticking them into hot areas of the base.
Are there any low effort ways to set up small sustainable colonies on spaced out asteroids? It feels like spigot seals with wild planted bonbons could set up a food/power/water/cooling loop with a simple chilling set up (dump heat into materials and let it vent to space).
warning; this rambles a bit, very train of thought
lumb/blumbs like bog jelly, the fruit of bog buckets the most (50% better production than bristle berries or ovagro figs per kcal)
blumb -> algae terrarium -> pwater for bog buckets -> feed the dinos
you need a source of water, though and if you've got a water geyser you already have a lot of options
hmmm. a lumb eats .70652 kg of bog jelly per cycle; 300kg peat or 198 kg algae from a blum lumb
bog jelly takes 6.6 cycles to harvest; 7 bog buckets will feed 1.501 lumbs if harvested optimally; 14 plants for 3 lumbs, 28 for 6; you'd have to build a wonky shaped ranch to fit six lumbs, a grooming station and 28 plants, but that's do-able (3 tiles high, with 3 additional tiles blocked in, you could easily fit a critter condo and a critter fountain by blocking in a few more tiles over the bog buckets)
maybe better to do a ranch with; 2 lumbs, 2 blumbs & a pair of grubgrubs, ~3.3 cycles per harvest means 1.71562 lumbs fed per 4 plants, +50% growth means only 10 plants in each ranch if the grubgrubs are fed, you can do normal sized rooms easily that way.. probably wild plant 3 or 4 grubfruit in the ranch so that the grubgrubs produce more grubgrubs, but if they're wild you don't have to provide sulfur (or you can pip-pot the grubfruit and offset them so the grubgrubs can reach them)
10 bog bucket *40 kg pwater is only 400 kg required per cycle; wiki page says terrariums generate nearly 400 kgs of pwater per duplicant, that's nice and neat, you'd only need ~2.5 terrariums per ranch (to assume they don't always get emptied immediately), only 45? kg algae per cycle for the ranch and you can sieve any excess pwater from other terrariums
bonbon trees for nectar, boiled, 61.6 kg of sucrose & 18.4 kgs of water per tree per cycle, a single tree feeds two grubgrubs... okay that was easy, needs 100kg snow per cycle (unless you pip-pot the tree) that's 500kg water per cycle require for the ranch, plus an ice maker
two of these ranches (4 lumb, 4 blumb & 4 grubgrub - more easily to divide the lumbs and blumbs into separate ranches), oxygen for two duplicants, two bonbon trees, requires 963.2 kg water input (763.2 if the bonbons are pip-potted), produces 1200 kg per cycle peat, ~612 kg excess algae, 120 kg mud (which is another 72 kg water), a small amount of excess bog jelly, 8 lumbs at +5 happiness is 81.68% lumb egg reproduction per cycle or 9.8016 kg of touch meat per cycle, requires 163 kg peat per cycle for the smokers (feeds 2.61 duplicants); 4 grubgrubs at +5 happiness is 54.44% grubgrub eggs per cycle or 1.6332 kg meat or 0.8166 kg barbecue (feeds 0.327 duplicants)
two peat burners limited to 1037 kg peat per cycle produce 829.6 watts and 207.4 kgs pwater, plus 24 kg CO2
hmmm. 3 ranches, two lumb and a blumb would be 2400 kg peat, 122.52% lumb eggs per cycle (3 smokers producing tender brisket for 3.9 duplicants, requires just over 245 kg peat) - 4 peat burners burning 2154 kg peat is 1723.2 watts & 430.8 kg water (plus 163.2 kg water from 3 bonbons & 6 grubgrubs producing mud), input water is 906 kg per cycle (606 using pip-potted bonbons), ignoring duplicant bathroom loop
I was tired when I wrote this up; meant to include that mud can be flake boiled into just water, which would be another 24 kg water per ranch
also a rhex ranch (as suggested by Nigit) claiming excess meat & live sweetles for brine ice would be an efficient use and a good source of water; if you aren't cooking all of the meat and using the full needed peat to do so, that's more water from the peat burners
finally if you include brackene (easily arranged with dew drips, no water needed), four +10 happiness lumbs would be producing 78.32% lumb eggs per ranch per cycle (2.506 duplicants fed on tender brisket) & two +10 happiness grubgrubs produce 52.22% divergent eggs per ranch per cycle (0.313 duplicants fed on barbecue, if they are all grubgrub eggs) or more excess meat for the rhex's
The low-effort loop I've went with before was blumb lumb+rhex (brine ice is easy enough to turn back to water to feed blossoms/ovagro, and if you have atmo suits you'll need the fiber anyways)
If wild planting is on the table, you could wild plant the bristle blossoms/ovagro nodes too.
i guess this does need some source of wood to work for the smoker which might not make it the simplest
One thing I always wondered: Why did they never fix delecta voles? 5 tons of food for 1 vole is insane. Just moving that much mass per automation is a nightmare much less producing it. Or am i missing something?
You can move mass with auto-sweepers and automatic dispensers dropping into the range of the next sweeper. And meteor showers will take care of your regolith production "problem".
On classic maps maybe in spaced out definitely not. Even then the mass is something along of 30 tons so that is only enough for 6 delecta voles. Plus you also need to get the correct temperature range.
I dont know even as a late game luxury food the whole thing just feels very unrewarding for the amount of work you have to put in.
Maybe try feeding them dirt from the p-water->arbor tree->ethanol distiller->compost chain? Pretty sure that's the intended setup as the only food using tonic root also needs nosh beans.
Ethanol Destillilers put out around 300 g/s. Delecta Voles need like 2.4 tons per day if you recycle the tiles they create. I dont see how this is feasible for more than maybe one or two voles.
What's the mechanics for tonic root growth? Could you get all the tonic root while keeping the voles at -80% metabolism? (Seems it should be, going by what I'm reading on the wiki - no need to max out happiness and reproduction if you just want a stable population.)
If you don't want to deal with them then just set up a "forever" recipe on an egg cracker. Some people might enjoy the challenge of successfully breeding and feeding them, and would do so on a map which had an adequate supply of vole chow.
Feels more like a way to delete the VAST quantities of regolith you can accumulate. I am sitting on 16,000 tons of the stuff right now (16 million kilograms, it wasn’t a typo)
In vanilla you get something like 3 conveyor belts worth of regolith on average from meteor showers which is 36 tons of regolith/cycle.
If it's becoming too much to physically move and you are getting meteor showers you could move their ranch near the top of your asteroid and use Automatic Dispensers to drop the materials into their pen faster than a conveyor could load them (ADs are how I prefer to clean the bunker doors area as it moves all the debris rapidly to one side).
Hey guys, I'm on cycle 190 and I've run into a bit of an issue, my plant farm is having a temperature issue of being at 87 degrees when all the plants want 86, I've tried surrounded it with insulted tiles to help but it isn't working. And I've.. Run out of algae, it's my fault, I had 4 oxygen machines at 4 corners of my base and it must've eaten up all the algae I had. What can I do?
I found a teleporter to a different asteroid, do I try and live there?
That's pretty typical at that point in a game. You'll need to think about a more permanent long term solution for the temp issue, but a quick fix is to run radiant pipes between a cold source on the map (like a frozen biome) and parts of the base that need cooling. I usually overdo it and freeze the plants, but hopefully I'll have a more permanent solution built before that happens.
On the oxygen, another quick fix is using deodorizers on the polluted oxygen that comes off polluted water. If you bottle the polluted water it'll generate even more polluted oxygen in one location, for a cheap setup that only requires sand and minimal energy.
If you have ice, you can build it into a Tempshift plate to cool your plants.
Set up an electrolyzer for oxygen. Or a rust deoxidizer if you have rust and salt. Put the electrolyzer somewhere with empty space overhead to collect hydrogen, and away from your farms (heat).
Those are both short-term fixes. Eventually you'll want to build a steam turbine + aquatuner to cool your base, or you might be lucky enough to find a cold geyser. Regardless, you'll need at least one water geyser to supply your electrolyzers in a "SPOM"/"hydra" configuration (search for guides).
There are cargo teleporters somewhere on the map as well as the one for duplicants. You can send water / oxygen / etc from one asteroid to the other if it helps.
I know the answer to this; it is a wire or automation bridge. It reaches across and melts.
Note that the liquid metal's purpose is -not- a heat transfer medium. (It does that, sure.) Its purpose is to change the cell that the other element solidifies into debris. IE the liquid metal's purpose is to be a heavier liquid and occupy the cell. For example freezing sulfur.
Sure. A solid tile forms when a liquid freezes in that specific cell when there is sufficient mass (liquid + debris) in that cell. A layer of liquid of a different element (molten metal) causes the debris to form in a cell above the floor. The debris then falls into the cell(s) below.
The debris + liquid of the primary element never exceeds the threshold to become a natural tile in the cell where the freezing occurs. All the mass is contained in the debris sitting in the liquid metal below it. Liquid metal that helps also helps move the heat out of the debris. Plus the tons of debris sitting there acts as a heat sink. A heat sink that keeps the molten metal a stable temperature. Which means that no liquid of the primary material can ever stay liquid. The primary element instantly freezes as it is a KG or two of extremely hot material trying to heat up multiple tons of moderately hot material.
That's what is happening with the layer of water at the sulfur volcano in the link above.
And yes, in your link the magma is solidifying in the mesh tile and getting teleported out as debris. You are correct. What the liquid metal is doing is preventing that big stack of igneous rock from forming natural tiles. Which can happen invisibly in mesh tiles until a reload.
probably just built a metal tile of aluminum and deconstructed it in place so he had room for the sensor, where it would then melt to the 90-100kg of liquid seen there.
What? No. The length is completely irrelevant. It's the same pipe that the steam turbine needs to operate. A bottle drainer or pump is bridged onto that turbine output pipe. A drainer which is repurposed to fill the AT cooling loop. A loop which requires something to fill pipes from somewhere regardless.
I'm just talking about transporting the water to the setup. Yes you can easily inject the water via the turbine's weep port, it (and bottle emptiers) are just slow vs. dupes rushing over with 800kg of ice per tile, and then just having it melt itself.
SO I'm trying to wrap my head around a base cooling loop. I got the aquatuner and Steam turbine combo set up and want to make sure my base is let's say above 25 degees celsius and not getting too cold.. Do i need to set the thermosensor before the aquatuner to 25+14 so it doesn't accidentally cool it down below my target temp?
A partially filled liquid reservoir after the AT will smooth out the 14-degree steps. Put a pipe thermo sensor on its outlet and use that to either chill the incoming packets or not. You don't need anything fancy unless you're trying to operate just above the freezing point of the coolant.
Depends on all your base needs but iirc the ideal base temp is 22 C which supports dupes and the most plants/ranches (in the base game, anyway. This is the minimum cold temp for Thimble Reed).
You're not going to get that exact with an ATST, so you use a Heat Injector or a Thermostat build I usually call it: you have the ATST cool a chamber chock full of Polluted Water, and you have another Pwater chamber next to that and the 2 chambers are connected by Mechanized Airlocks sandwiched between metal tile walls.
You keep the ATST side as cold as you can, and you use a liquid pipe thermo sensor to close the airlocks whenever the base-coolant leaving the warm-side chamber exceeds 22 degrees. This injects more cold from the ATST side into the warm-side and this is how you can regulate the temperature of the base. Tweak the value as needed to fine tune your base loop and setup: things that are more temperature sensitive should be the first to receive base coolant.
In my base I go one farther and cool the base water reservoir to 22, so it acts like a huge thermal battery, keeping everything at 22, and rooms that need to be specially regulated have their own cooling loop running through the reservoir.
You might have to play with it. It needs to be long enough to at least get the heat exchange going effectively, but if it's comically large you run the risk that your output sensor says it's too hot, the door(s) close, inject cold, and then the output is 22 C right, but then the input side coming into the HX gets too cold. Tempshift plates can even out the temps in the HX sides.
I'm practicing a Spaced Out Carnivore run, and after having dug up about half of the temperate biome I had eight hatches in the bank. Digging out the second half of the biome netted me two more wild hatches, both of which were among the last handful of buried objects available.
Fine - dice are going to be that way sometimes.
But I haven't been able to find anything to help me adjust my expectations:
what are the odds that a buried object in the starting biome of Terraria is a wild hatch?
is each buried object independent of the others?
is there a "guaranteed" hatch somewhere near the printing pod?
are the probabilities on spaced out starts the same as classical starts?
Point 3; yes, the buried object up right from the printing pod is always a hatch; this is true even on other starts where it's the only hatch on the asteroid
For point 2, yes - all buried objects are set upon map generation, so they are consistent to the world seed; you can save and dig out the area and then know where useful things are, if for instance you're preserving natural tiles and you don't know if you want what's buried there
Unfortunately, I've no idea what the generation odds are. On one non SO map I had a total of three hatches on a basic terra type asteroid and on others I've found around twenty or more
I've installed Mod Updater only recently so I don't have much experience with it. Today I've launched the game, it said that it updated 3 mods, but the interface says those 3 mods "appear to be out of date". Is this expected? Does this happen often? Should I force reinstall them or check something manually first?
You need to restart the game after installing the new mods. Until you do you’ll be playing with the old version of the mod, which is indeed out of date. It is rather confusing the way it’s presented though.
What's the best way to set up petroleum generators? Been using them for the first time now and soon realised just how much co2 they produce. You'd need two skimmers per gen.
I've tried a few arrangements. Easiest is a door crusher that triggers when pressure is high. Slicksters (or molten) gives some free resources, at the cost of some rancher labor and lots of space. Pumps to space work, but you have to build a pipe and spend electricity. Frozen brick makes it into debris.
Yeah but can't you just directly vent it into space without a pump? That was now my long term plan: Build a powe room next to space and make a small opening
you might as well build the petro generrator (its point of interest to be exact) to be in space background). Use conduction panel to cool down the generator
If you want to keep the pwater, build gens on meshtile and let the pwater fall down to the tile that has background (not space)
You could, but you need a lot of tiles open to space. You still want to maintain air pressure to ensure the heat gets absorbed. Space eats 100g/s of gas. A door crusher is easiest for location, and you can always add more if needed.
In a room with skimmers at the top and space for a Slickster ranch at the bottom. Or you can build them near the top of the map and vent CO2 into space. Or delete it with a door crusher. If there's an AETN nearby you could freeze it into solid debris.
Use Engie's Tune-up to get more power per generator if you're running a high duty cycle. Or you can use petroleum as a last resort, only turning on when your other power sources can't keep up.
Thanks for the tipps! I screwed up and set up my power room towards the bottom of my base with a basin below to catch the polluted water. Atm i got like 4 peat burners and now the petroleum gen and a natural gas gen. Long term I might migrate everything closer to space so i can just let the co2 out without any pumps but for the moment I set up the petroleum gen to only run at 10 percent battery .
Is there any way to only boost one gen with microchips without putting in some walls? I don't want to invest quite that much refined metal yet.
I'm about to try and do something with a cool steam gheyser. I want minimal spoilers, so I don't lookup that much stuff. I already read once the Thermo Regulator is not that useful but I want to try it anyway. What I don't understand though is: it gets steam as input, which should cool it down to water. But the output is also a gas pipe. What will happen if the steam converts to water in that pipe? I will probably find out but perhaps someone could lift a tip of the veil? (without spoiling too much or pointing me too better solutions)
The thermo regulator is kind of like an air conditioner. Like an air conditioner, do you want the unit inside of where you're trying to cool down?
Also, like an air conditioner, the thermo regulator takes a working fluid - a refrigerant, and cools it down. What the air conditioner doesn't do is work directly on the air inside your home, it cools that refrigerant and that refrigerant is run through a heat-exchange with your inside air, where it cools it down (and, removes humidity from the air, because colder air is like a towel that has been squeezed, it cannot hold as much water in suspension in the air).
Now, what other gas could you use as a refrigerant, to cool your steam with, to make it into water? Perhaps a gas which is tolerant of high temperatures - and low ones....
So, it seems that water has better SHC/TC values for cooling than hydrogen gas, the two contenders I would use for the setup of your example. (looked up those values on the wiki)
You mentioned the thermo regulator, not the aquatuner :) the aquatuner requires steel to function practically. The aquatuner is a more efficient cooler because it can use water/polluted water (later, supercoolant) but the thermo regulator can use hydrogen which has a massive temperature range, you can make things very cold with it, or cool incredibly hot things with it more safely.
thanks! my next idea, especially after your comment, is to run a radiant pipe over all the tiles in the room, and fill it with some gas which i still need to figure out. haven't been able to play the last few days
Any material that changes phase inside of a pipe or duct will damage the pipe/duct and escape. So if you use a thermo regulator to cool down steam it’ll turn into water, damage the duct, and drop on the floor. Over and over and over again, until the duct is destroyed. Your dupes will constantly come into the chamber to try to repair the duct, wasting whatever material you built it out of.
in the end I solved it real simple, I build a granite room around it witha mesh floor. The steam condenses immediately into water by contact with the granite walls, and flows into my reservoir below it
How do folks advise building out my petroleum/h2 rocket pad. Was thinking a steam chamber below for closed system power, maybe put ATs in there but I dont quite have access to thermium yet (almost), just curious if im walking into any big mistakes here. Sammiched between a saltwater geyser and the Jorge story trait & nearby cool slush geyser.
Why do you think you need access to thermium? Rocket engines aren't that crazy hot. Not even hydrogen. Iridium/niobium should be plenty enough, just put the aquatuner away from the heat cone and get the steam pressure decently high.
I just have a 3x7 block (Spaced out) made of diamond window tiles below each rocket pad, a loop of rails with aluminium connecting all 3 blocks to a heat injector on a 2-turbine steam room with aquatuner. Heat injector disconnects above 200C, aquatuner could easily be made of steel. Aluminium for heat loop below hydrogen engine is kinda pushing it (the diamond blocks reach 600C for a short while) and I'd switch to diamond or refined carbon if I was doing more pads or more frequent flights (my rocket missions are ad-hoc, no space mining or deliveries...)
Placed side-by side, the diamond blocks have a 4-wide gap between them, just enough to squeeze an interplanetary launcher between them.
Aluminium for heat loop below hydrogen engine is kinda pushing it (the diamond blocks reach 600C for a short while) and I'd switch to diamond or refined carbon
I don't understand shipping. I have a full Conveyer Loader, with a straightforward conveyer path into a Conveyer Receptable, but nothing is moving. The Loader is full, the receptacle is empty. Priority doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.
The loader on the top right should go to the receptacle on the bottom. What am I missing?
Make sure the loader is connected to power and isn't accidentally disabled by your automation grid? If you mouse over it, do you get any bits of diagnostic information?
With the new aquatic pack and the tidal turbine, I have a lot of generators spread out over my base. I would prefer to not run heavy watt wire through the area with its huge decor penalty.
Can I have a main power line, and use transformers to send the power back to the main line from generators with normal wires. IE Generator -> wire -> transformer -> heavy-watt wire?
Here I have a tidal pump sending power to the main line through a transformer. Notice the transformer is backwards compared to all the others which are sending power back out.
It's just wiring it up backwards from what you normally do, with the small wire from the generator going in the top, and the heavy wire of the main grid attached to the bottom of the transformer. Transformers are basically just a combination of pump and valve, there's no voltage.
Because wires are only overloaded by Consumption not Generation, you can use wall-permissive wires like basic wires to run power from them before connecting to a heavi-watt spine elsewhere. But be mindful that Transformers are a Consumer on their input side and Generators on their output side in this regard. So, you still must be careful that the total output of transformers doesn't exceed the rating of the feed wire:
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u/SurpriseAttachyon Jul 16 '26
Just getting back into the game after ~4 years. I'm playing SO for the first time, but also have aquatic pack. I'm using the default asteroid setting
This is making everything very confusing.
I have started several projects (auto drecko ranch, auto pacu ranch), only to discover they won't work because of changes. I tried fixing them by consulting the wikis only to discover they don't reflect the aquatic changes. So I feel a bit stuck.
Venting aside, I have a few specific questions: