Guide For A Friend

## Introduction

Okay dude, this is for you. I'm gonna try and cover the basics in a summary form. It's mostly gonna contain tips on what you should and shouldn't do. It's not gonna be super comprehensive but I'll try my best since I'm also still learning this game

## Starting your base

It can be tempting to just dig out everything around you and then start from there but it's actually better if you use the overlays in the top right of the screen. Here's a link of all the different overlays https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Overlays

### Temperature

Firstly,temperature can be a pain especially later on into the game so it's important that you look at the temperature overlay and see where there are "hotspots" and "coldspots". The Temperature Overlay is to the right of the Power Overlay. You generally wanna keep your barracks or bedrooms away from hot areas and keep them in more temperate areas. This is also important for the plants you're gonna use for a food source. I can't stress how much of a hassle temperature is early on in the game, if the temperature in your greenhouse is even 1 degree Celsius above the requirements of Meal lice or Bristle blossom they won't grow at all.

If an area is too hot your dupes won't be able to work at all, they will most likely get scalded and have to be put in a Medbay and this can be a pain if you want to get a project done quickly. The Thermal comfort Overlay, which is located to the right of the Temperature Overlay, can give you a good idea of where your dupes can or can't go without suffering some sort of status effect.

There are dozens and dozens of different materials in the game and they all behave similarly or differently from one and other. Some building materials provide bonus decor (I'll touch on this later) such as granite which provides a 20% decor bonus or have slow heating properties like abyssalite. Using the right materials for different purposes is incredibly important. You generally want to build sculptures, paintings and tiles out of granite or sandstone. This is because granite provides a decor bonus so using tiles made of granite in areas that your dupes use a hell of a lot of the time will be helpful as well as using granite for paintings and sculptures which will actually add to the decor bonuses they already offer. You generally want to build areas such as greenhouses with tiles made of igneous rock as it is not thermally reactive. What this means is that it if it is in contact with objects with high temperatures it will not heat up and spread that heat to your plants and as I said before, temperature in regard to plants is really important. Abyssalite is even better but it isn't in abundance on a map.

You generally want to keep power generators and batteries away from your plants. Don't build them below, adjacent or even above your greenhouse because generators and batteries produce heat and this can screw you over pretty badly if they're located right next to your greenhouse.

### Food

You already know how important food is. Mealwood seeds are very easy to obtain and are great for the early game, their only downside is that the meal lice they produce tastes like crap and they require dirt which isn't fully renewable. Meal Lice provides 600 kcals and has a food quality of -1. The reason I said it's good early game is because your dupes have very low food expectations before they get promoted to new positions. As you promote dupes their food requirements increase and making them eat meal lice can cause them to be stressed out. Not a good idea.

    You typically want to switch over to Bristle Berries which comes from Bristle Blossom plants. When cooked they turn into Gristle berries and taste slightly better with a food quality of 1 and provide 2050 kcals. These plants are a little trickier to deal with because they require water and light. It's better to start planting these when you have a coal generator during the early game because you don't want your dupes constrained to a hamster wheel just to power your light bulbs or lamps in your greenhouse. Having your dupes deliver water to bristle blossoms can consume a lot of time and tie them up when they could be working on something else. It's generally better to use hydroponic farm tiles so that dupes don't have to manually deliver water.

Mushrooms come from fungal spores and can be fried to give you fried mushroom, big surprise. They also have a food quality of 1 when fried and provide 2800 kcals. They require polluted water and need to be immersed in carbon dioxide.

Now here's something interesting, you'll notice that your dupes might not always pick up meal lice, mushrooms or bristle berries after they drop on the floor instantly. They may leave them there for a couple of cycles even when you set refrigerator or ration box priorities to 9. If they stay there on the floor they'll rot due to exposure to germs in the atmosphere.

However, if your greenhouse is completely full of carbon dioxide any food on the floor will not decay and that's because germs need oxygen or polluted oxygen to survive. So one little trick I like to do is to ensure that my greenhouses are full of carbon dioxide in case the dupes don't pick the food up. I do this because you can lose a lot of food this way and the last thing you want is to face starvation. Another tip is to keep your food in ration boxes in an ice biome, it acts as a natural fridge and reduces food decay and it's even better if the ration box is immersed in CO2 because the food won't decay at all.

### Dupes

I'm gonna start off by saying that you shouldn't fall into the trap of getting too many dupes. We've all made that mistake before, we get 12 dupes and then we can't even provide enough food for more than a quarter of them and then the "insufficient oxygen production" alert rears its ugly head in the left hand side of the screen. Ideally you wanna have a minimum of 3 and a max of 6. I generally keep 4 until I have an excess of food or if I need an extra hand in the colony. Seriously, keep as few dupes as possible until you're absolutely certain that you can accommodate more. **Remember : HAVE A MINIMUM OF 3 DUPES AND A MAXIMUM OF 6**.

Build these little guys some rooms. There are different room types which have their own bonuses. Building barracks increases stamina regeneration whilst building a latrine relieves bonus stress. The different bonuses are in the Room Overlay in game. The most important thing to handle with these guys is stress. It's a freaking headache and now it's a little more challenging to manage stress with the new patch. I'm gonna drop a couple tips.

Building rooms isn't that hard, they have their own unique requirements but one thing they all have in common is a minimum requirement of '12 tiles room size'. Enclose the space with a door or doors and voila. You have a room. Early game you wanna make sure your dupes have barracks for extra stamina as well as morale bonuses.

Sweep all debris in rooms especially barracks or bedrooms because they cause a negative decor bonus which will stress your dupes out. This helps a tonne throughout the game.

Heavi-Watt wire is a tool sent from Hell to cause misery, according to Dupes. They hate seeing that stuff. You can't run Heavi-Watt wires through tiles unfortunately, so your best bet is to use Conductive Heavi-Watt wire later on or connect regular wire early in the game and hook that stuff up "underground" so that you do not incur a decor penalty. You can also use conductive wire (the prettier version of regular wire). Making your Heavy Conductive wire out of gold will reduce the decor penalty.

### Power

Now this is where I messed up a bunch in the past. I don't really need to explain too much about hamster wheels and regular wire but here are some good things to note. Early on you can use the hamster wheel for most of your power needs. It can be tempting to want to just switch over to coal but here's why that's not a good idea right off the bat. Coal is not renewable, at least not until you get into ranching of critters found across the map. You have to keep digging for that stuff once it runs out and that can waste a lot of your dupe's time.

Instead, do some research until you unlock the rock Granulator. This machine allows you to turn raw metal into refined metal. You're gonna need the refined metal to start making smart batteries and automation wire. Once you've done all the research you can start trying to get some refined metal. You're gonna need about 300 kg of refined metal. Which metal you use is up to you but I advise using iron since copper is more valuable later on in the game. Out of the 300 kg of refined metal, 200 kg will be used for the smart battery and the remaining 100 kg will be used for automation wire. Now, the amount of refined metal you'll need for the automation wire will depend on how far away you build your coal generator from the smart battery.

I strongly advise using a hamster wheel to power the rock granulator and I know it's a bit of a slog but it's totally worth it. Once you have everything in place setup a storage box right next to your coal generator and set it to keep coal. This is so that your dupes don't have to keep fetching coal from elsewhere every time. Build the smart battery and hook it up to your coal generator using Heavi-Watt wire and automation wire. This will ensure that you never overproduce power and as an added bonus you get to save your coal for longer. Only one generator is enough for a colony of 3-6 dupes.

Now, another mistake I use to make was to hook my regular wire to Heavi-Watt wire that was connected to a strong generator like a coal or natural gas generator. There's a reason that's a bad choice. Regular wire can only handle 1000 W, anything above that will cause overloading and eventually damage. To avoid this we use something called a transformer. They're not tricky to use and are actually a godsend.

They have a directional arrow that shows you where the current will flow. Power Transformers have an input side (the upper attachment point) and an output side (the lower attachment point). You want to hook the Heavi-Watt wire from your generators to the the upper attachment and your regular wire to the lower attachment. Like so :

Smart batteries are really versatile and can be used with hydrogen generators as well as natural gas generators which can often overproduce a lot of power which goes to waste if left unchecked during the mid game.

### Ventilation

Now this is super important. I'm sure you've noticed that all the oxygen in your base tends to stay at the upper parts of your base whilst the CO2 collects at the bottom. To ensure that gases flow freely in your base, it's good to research until you get air flow tiles. They require metal and allow gases to flow freely whilst obstructing liquid flow. I like to build these as floors for my barracks or bedrooms so that as the dupes exhale CO2 at night as they sleep it'll sink towards the bottom of the base. It's good to set up airflow tiles as soon as possible and where you expect your dupes to be working a lot or sleeping.

For a base with 3-6 dupes you only need one Carbon skimmer and one Electrolyzer. A neat little trick that I learned was to avoid using double pump systems for carbon skimmers. By using a carbon skimmer and a water sieve you can avoid the need to use two pumps to run the skimmer . The skimmer requires clean water and outputs polluted water. It's actually pretty simple to make use of these. You want to build your carbon skimmer at the bottom of your base where your CO2 should be building up. After you build the skimmer all you need to do is "prime the system". What this means is pumping water into the input slot of the skimmer and then deconstructing any on of the pipes that lead from the pump to the skimmer.

You then build pipes from the output slot of the skimmer and connect these to the input part of your water sieve and connect pipes from the output part of your water sieve to the input slot of your skimmer. You do this because a water sieve uses polluted water to make clean water and that clean water will then be used by the carbon skimmer which then outputs polluted water to the water sieve and so on and so forth. It's a continuous cycle and the only intervention needed is delivering sand (filtration medium) to the water sieve (an example is provided below).

The same can be done for showers with the use of a water sieve, the concept is literally the same.Now to move onto oxygen.

Oxygen production can be attained by using an algae deoxydizer but eventually you will run out of algae on the map. It is possible to use Slime distillers to turn slime into algae but it is generally not worthwhile as you only receive 10kg. This isn't so bad in the early game as you explore the swamp biome but isn't so great when you hit the late game.

So instead of using deoxydizers you can instead use an Electrolyzer. It requires clean water in order to work. An electrolyzer outputs both oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen is lighter than oxygen and tends to rise to the top of whatever room it's in. An electrolyzer has a fixed output temperature of 70°C and remember what I said about temperature at the beginning : **It's a pain to deal with**. 70°C is way too hot and will spread clean but very hot oxygen all around your base. This can cause discomfort for dupes and lead to added stress and completely destroy plants in your farms. Cooling the water that is pumped to the electrolyzer is pointless due to the fixed temperature output. So one method you can use is to set up your oxygen production plant in an ice biome and then lead the gas pipes into your base. This way you ensure that nice cool oxygen flows all over the place.

You usually build an electrolyzer with a hydrogen generator in your base, this is so that the hydrogen created by the electrolyzer is sent to the generator. The main issue with hydrogen generators is that they require quite a lot of hydrogen to run all the time so it's usually good to hook up the gas pipes that lead to the hydrogen generator to another device called the AETN [1] for cooling. If you haven't found one yet then that's also fine because you can employ the use of Smart batteries to disable the generator when it doesn't have enough hydrogen

You wanna have two pumps in your oxygen production room. One pump at the top of the room to collect hydrogen and pump it to your hydrogen generator and another pump at the bottom of the room to pump oxygen to your base. You can use a gas filter to ensure that only oxygen goes to your oxygen pipes and only hydrogen goes to your hydrogen pipes. One other tip is to make sure that your elctrolyzer is placed on airflow tiles, this is so that oxygen flows freely and doesn't build up pressure.

## References

1. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Electrolyzer
2. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Duplicant
3. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Overlays
4. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Power
5. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Obsidian
6. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Power\_Transformer
7. ↑ https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Algae\_Distiller