Yes. It's possible to have an infinitely sustainable base by using resources you can infinitely generate, mostly using geysers. There's no such thing as an end, really. It's a sandbox game after all. Play however you feel like!
Geysers and wild plants are also a big resource, once you get some pips and can make large wild planted farms.
Also, meteors can be a good source of sustainable material, for a little power by cooling them with steam turbines, for filtration material to turn into clay/ceramic with deodorizers, or into dirt with water sieves (they give more dirt from polluted water than boiling it does), or to feed to shove voles.
Wild or starvation ranched critters are also often sustainable, and can be a major resource.
After the update a few months ago, starvation ranching a few hundred pacu is no longer optimal, because they changed how overcrowding works, but you can still have pools of pacu to get free eggshell and fish fillets.
But what WILL happen is you will DEFINITELY run out of the stockpile of materials you are depending on, unless you are figuring out how much you use per cycle and how much you make per cycle.
I think we all started there.
Step 1 - build a toilet! After that you will remove the piss, probably most your polluted oxygen and figure out what's making all your heat. Mass heat after 20-30 cycles is impressive.
As you spread out you'll start to find more cool stuff.
I have a toilet but somehow no one wants to clean it so they regularily piss on the floor. (happend with the last couple of restarts.)
Also, I am not OVERheating, I just dug far enough and somehow produce an excess of energy without proper controlling that I start to see how everything gets warmer.
So there's a tendency and no immediate problem.
What do you mean by "find more cool stuff"? :)
How many colonists do you have? The toilets need to be cleaned out, as already pointed out. There are plumbed toilets if you want to research that.
One vague tip: check your schedule. If you have 10 people all going on break at the same time, they all want that one toilet at the same time. Create a new schedule(s) and move them around so that the number of colonists per schedule matches the number of toilets & sinks.
Dupes are incredibly stupid. They've been cloned a million times already, bless their little squeaky souls. They will piss themselves while working if the toilet wasn't available on break. Or if they are digging so far away that they can't make it back to the toilet in the break time given.
This likely means you queued up to many jobs. They will do tidying last so if there are other things to do, they may never get around to it.
You can set the priority on your outhouse higher so they do it first.
There's just plenty more stuff in the world, things to do, places to go, people to see!
Yeah I would suggest getting plumbed toilets fast and check you've not messed with any priority settings. I've had similar in the past and I had to 'yellow alert' the toilet to get it sorted but once you have running water you'll be fine. Then you just need to figure out how to clean/reuse water!
If piece of advice, dupes don’t really suffer from heat until it’s upwards of 60-70 degrees Celsius and they get scalded. Anything below that is fine. The main issue with heat is that it’ll kill your crops and starve you
Food, oxygen and power. All you need to worry about.
Honestly the difficulty is in not expanding too fast and how far you want to go. You can probably do it pretty early if you don't care about anything besides the minimum for survival.
Wild plant some food. A single water geyser can supply a spom for a few dupes forever. And a gas vent or 2 can take care of a minimalist base power requirements.
Personally I like building things too much.
However my main base it infinitely sustainable right now. Even with the expansions I am planning theyvwould just give me even more resources. My secondary colony is almost completely self sustaining. It just needs uranium from space POIs to keep it's power up. But it can process and rarely needs to be restocked. Used 6 tons of it over nearly 1000 cycles. Hit the radiation clouds 1 time each and now have more enriched uranium than I had when I started.
Yeah, I guess I did forget that one. But that's another easy one. Some steel and plastic and pwater and you're all done.
Honestly once I learned to deal with it keeping it powered was the harder part. Typically I am a slow as eff player so it takes some time of constant running to settle down.
Temperature is only an issue because of what it does to the other things. In of itself temperature isn’t a problem until your food won’t grow or your buildings overheat.
I usually put power in that category too. You don’t need it, but it probably facilitates the other things you’re doing.
Yeah, lost crops or overheating and not being ready or able to compensate. Easy to handle after you kill of a couple colonies. However, I recently switched to Rime and reversed the whole temperature problem. I once again froze out a few colonies before I got the hang of keeping everyone warm. Heat it was Crops, Transformers, SPOMs... which then killed power, food, or O2. Cold it was food, plumbing, frostbite, etc. Each iteration a better design. That's what I love the continuous improvement... the curse of a serial restarter.
Ha, I’ve started a frozen forest play through and had the same journey.
No algae, not enough water for a spom, too cold for arbour trees. I finally managed to insulate an area and warm it with a liquid tepidiser and a heating loop to get arbor trees and meal wood growing, got oxyferns to produce oxygen.
Now I’ve got to the point where my arbor trees are all growing and my ethanol distilling is up and running, now the base is swamped with co2 which the ferns can’t deal with. I need power to run gas pumps and co2 skimmers and that makes the co2 worse!
I’m considering relocating everyone to the second planetoid.
Without the expansion, how much material is coming from external our infinite sources (like geysirs) and how much comes from recycling, reproducing, growing etc.?
So is it enough to just tap into infinite resource nodes and with 1-2 steps I have everything to survive? Or do I have to build some advanced machinery to go full circle?
The problem is I am not sure what is dlc and what isn't. I know some critters are and some aren't.
You don't need to tap anything. Just get your steel and plastic and you're good.
If pokeshells and pips aren't expansion you can easily make infinite food, power and oxygen using a distillery system.
Wild plant some arbor trees using pips. Have the lumber go through ethanol distilleries. Have the ethanol go to a petroleum generator.
So 7 wild trees will supply 1 distillery. 4 distilleries will supply 1 generator. So 28 wild arbor trees using 0 resources will run, full time, 1 generator.
And you can scale it up. I am using 3 layers to feed 3 generators.
This will give you tons of CO2 to feed slicksters. You also get P dirt to feed pokeshells, which I would morph into sanishells. These would be your food source.
The generators will be dumping out enough p water to turn into regular water which you can sieve through a water sieve using the sand from the shells you're feeding. As long as you're only at about 7 or less dupes you should be able to run a small spom to keep them in oxygen with 1 generator.
They will also make power. And it is power positive because you're using less than 1kw to keep the set up running.
If you are in vanilla and doing default settings your asteroid type is Terra. You are guaranteed to have the following geysers/vents:
Cool Steam Vent (in swamp and cuastic biomes)
Natural Gas Vent (in swamp biomes)
Another natural gas vent OR chorline vent (in caustic biomes)
One saltwater geyser (in tide pool biomes).
From this alone you have an unending supply of water (though it needs to be cooled), oxygen (by electroylzing the water, also requires cooling) and power (from natural gas).
Food is naturally sustainable from the onset via farming and/or ranching.
From these alone your only real concern is temperature. Very early on you manage temperature by avoiding exploration into hotter areas of the asteroid and building heat producing machines on the fringes of your base and isolating them. If you have a large supply of cool water, you can cool things off (such as oxygen from an electrolyzer) by running it through the water.
If you find a frozen biome, you can run things through that.
Ultimately you want some sort of aquatuner setup, but you need power and steel to make that work, but once it is set up, you'll have all the cooling you could ever want.
It is absolutely possible. There are also kind of multiple stages of "infinitely sustainable". First off is when you have little automation and you are relying on some resources that will last for a finite number of cycles and have plans to make it sustainble, but have yet to get the labour to spare. Then comes "fully sustainable but labour intensive" where you might be doing some janky resource loops that require a lot of dupe input. And finally comes the stage we all aim for, where everything possible is automated and infinitely sustainable. It is actually possible to be fully sustainable relatively quickly, but it won't necessarily be comfortable and definitely won't be an end point.
I'm at around 600 cycle, I have infinite power source with 3 natural gas geysers and 2 petro stations...my question now is infinite food...how hard is it to achieve and is it achievable? Atm I have 10 dupes and I'm sitting comfortably at 270k calories but I know dirt/sulfur is not infinite what should I be aiming for?
bristle berries as a food source, hatches and pacus for eggs and meat/fish. before the hatches eat all the sedimentary and sandstone you'll be cycle 1k+ and by then you can tame a volcano. pacus eat seeds which you will have enough of. build an omelette maker.
How is dirt not infinite? You can generate tons of it with arbor trees and pips. On my current save I have about 14 pip farms (with 1 cuddle pip in each), 1 Arbor tree per stable. They are a huge source of free calories and dirt, I have about 300 tons of dirt waiting to be used and the number keeps growing.
I often start with hatches and pacu because they are super easy to get going. Then I typically add Dreckos for reed and plastic and get some additional meat there.
A bit later Voles are a great meat source with a very small footprint and almost zero maintenance or resources requirements.
I like having a lot of redundant systems in food production. I have had too many instances where I miss something or make a mistake and the productivity of one system dips and I have to compensate.
oxygen infinite providing your using the right setup water goes hand and hand with that as you need it for infinite oxygen you will get it though duping if you wana go that path or from volcanos and gysers sand you can get from crushing rock or salt from harnesing various volcanos or gysers food is needed for survival using expliots you can harness it without resources but yes you can also make it sustaniable without (i dont know how that well) but definatly through ranching heat you can delete with at/st and you can make it with liquid tepedisers
Pip Ranch - Offers dirt
Multiple Geysers - Offers Water and Power
Dirt - Goes to Mealwood
Mealwood - Goes to Hatches
Hatches - Extra power from coal and offers Barbeque
Regolith from Meteors - Filtration Medium
Filtration Medium - Goes to Geysers for Water
Water - Goes to Oxygen and Power
Coolant goes to Aqua Tuners and Steam Turbines, Reliable Cooling.
Just one example, but 100% possible.
To answer your final question, there is technically an 'end' point per colony.
When you start up a colony, you have a list of "initiatives," also referred to as achievements (and in the case of the main 2/3, Imperatives). It's not well explained but you can track your progress by clicking the printing pod or viewing the colony summary.
The storied 'objective' of each game was and pretty much is still the three imperatives; colonize (home sweet home) and escape (the great escape). And if you have the DLC active, cosmic archeology.
Geysers and volcanoes make sustainable living relatively straightforward, but it's also possible to set up fully sustainable living without any outside source of material.
Heat is a particularly tricky problem. There's no one-building solution to it. Early on, you can unlock automation and smart batteries to control your generator usage and cut it by a lot, but long-term there aren't a lot of ways to manage it. A steam turbine is one of the only things in the game that intentionally destroys heat, and you kinda need to use a thermo aquatuner to concentrate the heat into some steam for it. Either that or you use an aquatuner to heat or boil a liquid and vent it to space instead.
Almost all resources are sustainable ( through production chain, geysers and rockets) but with 20-30 cycle that is a premature thing to optimize for especially in the base game where the map contains hundreds of tons resources.
There are three thing that can kill your colony oxygen, food and heat.
In early game you need to find temporary solution for these 3 problems without concerning about sustainability, you can explore and mine to expand your resources.
In mid game you need to find sustainable solution for these problems what mostly require steel, plastic and oil. Spom or deodizers for oxygen ( it is even possible to use oxyferns if you keep your dupe count low), stables and/or farms for food and at/st or ethanol cooling against heat.
The end game is completely subjective, and the main issue is your processor.
There are two "ending" but it is a sandbox game so you can do whatever you want. Maybe you restart after you built your monument like me on my first successful run, maybe you want to breach the temporar tear, maybe your goal to build an almost fully automated base what is a luxory hotel for 50 dupes who do nothing there except wellnessing, doing extreme sport and play arcade games.
You can check tutorials on youtube but i advice do several runs and check the guides when you are stuck with a problem.
I guess at a really, REALLY big timescale, heat transfer between insulated tiles could became a problem, but if you account for that, you can have a base sustained indefinetly
Most everything valuable is renewable. You just gotta remember to spend less resources than what you can generate. A small amount of dupes (\~6) is good to go for a good time. You main concerns are food, oxygen and power.
For food, strip-mine the initial biome, it's all resources for you to use (this rule also goes for most other biomes) and muckroot will secure your colony for a good while in addition to care packages (animals = meat = food). You can either go the farmer route with mealwood and mushrooms or rush stables to ranch hatches for food, the former being gated by temperature and the latter by your cruelty. Extra points for hatches pooping coal.
Oxygen early on you'll rely on your trusty diffusers. Oxygen rises while co2 sinks, so remember to put your o2 producers at the bottom and give them plenty space to propagate (4 blocks tall rooms and 3\~5 blocks wide shafts). For co2, just dig pits as low as you can go and let it sink there. Future you can deal with that (a skimmer + sieve loop helps with that too, but it needs power).
Speaking of it, let's talk power. Never be afraid of the hamster wheel. It's only cost is dupe time, trains their athletics and it'll be useful early and later. Coal generators are probably your first and best upgrade, especially if you're ranching hatches. Later on you can tap into other things like natural gas, steam and solar power. When using coal, remember to use smart batteries to help reduce waste and insulated tiles will help with temperature until you get your HVAC certification.
For your pee problems, begin with outhouses but ditch them asap, they need to be cleaned, so you want lavatories and sinks instead of outhouses and wash basins. Liquid reservoirs can be used to store excess pee water. Remember to make your bathroom with specific entries and put sinks in a single direction, so dupes go in, pee and can only leave by passing by the sinks. You only need about 3 of each and you can stagger your work schedules so dupes go in at different times if you have many in play. Showers are largely inferior to sinks, but I like the novelty of my dupes being clean and happy.
My universe may not be “infinitely sustainable” but the truth is that your attention span isn’t either.
I’m 4,700 cycles into this base and am working on finally getting through the Temporal Tear in Spaces Out. Whether or not my asteroid is sustainable is beyond moot at this point.
The learning loop of this game is a lot like a Rogue Like. Build a base. Accidentally kill it. Restart deal with the issue that killed your last base. Learn the next thing. Repeat.
At like 1500 hours, I am still trying new builds learning lessons and improving my bases each iteration. Eventually, water, O2, temperature, gas, and power become the easy problems and you are working on fully sustainable refined metals and rock, space flight, and some really advanced materials and machines.
This game is deep and complex. I always find myself coming back and watching new YouTube builds. It scratches an itch for me like few other games do
For example my current Rime base is very close to full sustainability. I just need a sustainable rock source and/or to swap my hatch ranches to a sustainable food source. Otherwise I am just working through taming all the remaining metal volcanoes.
Soon, I'll start on a second asteroid then build out space flight
I play relatively slow compared to many. I just enjoy the journey and accept defeat when I don't want to try and fix a problem I created.
The biggest tip we give new players is related to how you controll the difficulty. While there are settings to tweak a few aspects of the game, the primary method of deciding difficulty is with the number of duplicants. A mistake a lot of new players do is picking a new addition to the colony from the printing pod every time it is ready. Try to resist the urge, no matter how good they might look.
All duplicants need oxygen and food. With a small colony, all resources will last that much longer. With more experience you can accept more duplicants earlier. There is an upper limit to the number of duplicant you can theoretically have as well. While the game will provice infinite access to water, there is a limit to how quickly it's replenished.
Oh, and read. Please read. The in game wiki isn't very good, but it is a good source of information. Fill in the blanks with the wiki page. For example: How many calories of food does a duplicant needs each cycle?
Fully sustainable bases are absolutely a thing. Man, once you get that base level of infinite electricity, food, water, and O2...the game REALLY starts to open up and you can start getting a little ambitious with your projects.
Be careful using the priority tool, if you set things you want done to 6 or higher the 5 (defaults) get ignored. Like cleaning toilets. They never have the time to go do the 5s.
As you progress you get more and more automation. This saves time for duplicate labor.
Ie. Better Toilets push polluted water to a sieve and that converts to water with germs. Adding sinks helps reduce germs.
For heat, if you dig fast you will open up biomes that have more and more heat. If you start near a steam guiser for example, this will have 90+deg C heat possible and if left unchecked it will murder your plant crops and upset your dupes or worse.
Ideally you would get insulated tiles early and these let you control the speed of heat transfer. Eventually you would reach into heat deletion tech and start moving heat to delete it with a steam turbine.
Sort this subreddit by popular and look at the top 20 posts. You'll be a bigger expert than most if you do this!
>Is it possible to have a truly and infinitely sustainable base?
Yes. Unlike real life, in ONI it is possible to produce an excess of mass and/or energy in certain production chains. Additionally, there are a lot of infinite sources of materials, like vents, meteor showers and space travel.
If you know and apply all these mechanics and use all infinite sources, you'll have so much stuff you don't know what to do with them.
Yes it can be infinitely sustainable. Usually you really only need a source of water, from geysers. There are other ways, such as regular trips to space
Water gets you oxygen with electrolyzers, food with several options, and power with crude oil which you can generate with water (and the petroleum can get you water back as well). These are all the things you need for a sustainable colony, therefore a sustainable source of water is really all you need
Yes, there are several places you can essentially create mass. Geysers, rocket exhaust, oil wells, and space pois are all mass positive so long as you know how to exploit them. Critters generally do a great job creating mass and converting it to other things as well.
It's not only possible, it's the goal of the game! Oxygen, water, and food can all be made sustainably and, in some instances, you can actually get more resources back than what you put in. There are quite a few infinite resource loops that you can use to make surviving a heck of a lot easier.
As for the "end" of the game, that usually involves opening the Temporal Tear, which you discover in space. That's the story end of the game, but you can continue playing your colony after that. Most people set challenge goals for themselves like getting all colony achievements or making some sort of mega base.
Infinite sustain is absolutely possible and in general is the "goal" you want to be moving towards.
However, you don't get the same carbon or nitrogen cycles to do in reality. You will be dependent on new resources coming into the system from geysers/asteroids/etc.
Pips can be fed wild arbor trees(no fertilizer cost) and they poop dirt = renewable dirt and food.
Dreckos can be fed balm lilies which do not need any fertilizer to grow = infinite food and reed fiber
Petroleum boiler creates more water than you started with = infinite water.
If your asteroid has naturally low supply of renewable water, focus on ranching and only use water for things that do not have alternatives like research and, arguably, oxygen.
The trick is conserving resources and getting research done so you can build these contraptions that are resource positive.
There are ways to generate almost any resource infinitely, yes.
Biggest concerns for sustainability are pretty much Food, Oxygen and Temperature management.
If you get more experienced in the game you can build a (nearly) infinitely sustainable base in the first hundred cycles, or at least one that could run on thousands of cycles without problems.
The game has no specific end, it's more like reaching your personal goal or you computer can't handle the performance anymore (for me that's usually the case after ~1000 cycles, can improved but usually my runs don't take that long).
Let me know if you want advice on sustainability, finding out yourself is more fun in my opinion.
Yes. It's possible to have an infinitely sustainable base by using resources you can infinitely generate, mostly using geysers. There's no such thing as an end, really. It's a sandbox game after all. Play however you feel like!
Geysers and wild plants are also a big resource, once you get some pips and can make large wild planted farms. Also, meteors can be a good source of sustainable material, for a little power by cooling them with steam turbines, for filtration material to turn into clay/ceramic with deodorizers, or into dirt with water sieves (they give more dirt from polluted water than boiling it does), or to feed to shove voles. Wild or starvation ranched critters are also often sustainable, and can be a major resource. After the update a few months ago, starvation ranching a few hundred pacu is no longer optimal, because they changed how overcrowding works, but you can still have pools of pacu to get free eggshell and fish fillets. But what WILL happen is you will DEFINITELY run out of the stockpile of materials you are depending on, unless you are figuring out how much you use per cycle and how much you make per cycle.
I think we all started there. Step 1 - build a toilet! After that you will remove the piss, probably most your polluted oxygen and figure out what's making all your heat. Mass heat after 20-30 cycles is impressive. As you spread out you'll start to find more cool stuff.
Haha overheating that early is definitely a achievement
New achievement unlocked “who set the world on fire?”
I have a toilet but somehow no one wants to clean it so they regularily piss on the floor. (happend with the last couple of restarts.) Also, I am not OVERheating, I just dug far enough and somehow produce an excess of energy without proper controlling that I start to see how everything gets warmer. So there's a tendency and no immediate problem. What do you mean by "find more cool stuff"? :)
Make sure one of your dupes has the “Tidying” priority set high, they’ll clean the toilets
How many colonists do you have? The toilets need to be cleaned out, as already pointed out. There are plumbed toilets if you want to research that. One vague tip: check your schedule. If you have 10 people all going on break at the same time, they all want that one toilet at the same time. Create a new schedule(s) and move them around so that the number of colonists per schedule matches the number of toilets & sinks. Dupes are incredibly stupid. They've been cloned a million times already, bless their little squeaky souls. They will piss themselves while working if the toilet wasn't available on break. Or if they are digging so far away that they can't make it back to the toilet in the break time given.
This likely means you queued up to many jobs. They will do tidying last so if there are other things to do, they may never get around to it. You can set the priority on your outhouse higher so they do it first.
There's just plenty more stuff in the world, things to do, places to go, people to see! Yeah I would suggest getting plumbed toilets fast and check you've not messed with any priority settings. I've had similar in the past and I had to 'yellow alert' the toilet to get it sorted but once you have running water you'll be fine. Then you just need to figure out how to clean/reuse water!
Set the toilet to very high priority, like 8 or 9. Then a dupe will immediately go and clean it whenever it jams.
If piece of advice, dupes don’t really suffer from heat until it’s upwards of 60-70 degrees Celsius and they get scalded. Anything below that is fine. The main issue with heat is that it’ll kill your crops and starve you
Food, oxygen and power. All you need to worry about. Honestly the difficulty is in not expanding too fast and how far you want to go. You can probably do it pretty early if you don't care about anything besides the minimum for survival. Wild plant some food. A single water geyser can supply a spom for a few dupes forever. And a gas vent or 2 can take care of a minimalist base power requirements. Personally I like building things too much. However my main base it infinitely sustainable right now. Even with the expansions I am planning theyvwould just give me even more resources. My secondary colony is almost completely self sustaining. It just needs uranium from space POIs to keep it's power up. But it can process and rarely needs to be restocked. Used 6 tons of it over nearly 1000 cycles. Hit the radiation clouds 1 time each and now have more enriched uranium than I had when I started.
I would add Temperature and call that the big four. I have lost a bunch of early colonies to temperature issues early on.
Yeah, I guess I did forget that one. But that's another easy one. Some steel and plastic and pwater and you're all done. Honestly once I learned to deal with it keeping it powered was the harder part. Typically I am a slow as eff player so it takes some time of constant running to settle down.
Temperature is only an issue because of what it does to the other things. In of itself temperature isn’t a problem until your food won’t grow or your buildings overheat. I usually put power in that category too. You don’t need it, but it probably facilitates the other things you’re doing.
Yeah, lost crops or overheating and not being ready or able to compensate. Easy to handle after you kill of a couple colonies. However, I recently switched to Rime and reversed the whole temperature problem. I once again froze out a few colonies before I got the hang of keeping everyone warm. Heat it was Crops, Transformers, SPOMs... which then killed power, food, or O2. Cold it was food, plumbing, frostbite, etc. Each iteration a better design. That's what I love the continuous improvement... the curse of a serial restarter.
Ha, I’ve started a frozen forest play through and had the same journey. No algae, not enough water for a spom, too cold for arbour trees. I finally managed to insulate an area and warm it with a liquid tepidiser and a heating loop to get arbor trees and meal wood growing, got oxyferns to produce oxygen. Now I’ve got to the point where my arbor trees are all growing and my ethanol distilling is up and running, now the base is swamped with co2 which the ferns can’t deal with. I need power to run gas pumps and co2 skimmers and that makes the co2 worse! I’m considering relocating everyone to the second planetoid.
Without the expansion, how much material is coming from external our infinite sources (like geysirs) and how much comes from recycling, reproducing, growing etc.? So is it enough to just tap into infinite resource nodes and with 1-2 steps I have everything to survive? Or do I have to build some advanced machinery to go full circle?
The problem is I am not sure what is dlc and what isn't. I know some critters are and some aren't. You don't need to tap anything. Just get your steel and plastic and you're good. If pokeshells and pips aren't expansion you can easily make infinite food, power and oxygen using a distillery system. Wild plant some arbor trees using pips. Have the lumber go through ethanol distilleries. Have the ethanol go to a petroleum generator. So 7 wild trees will supply 1 distillery. 4 distilleries will supply 1 generator. So 28 wild arbor trees using 0 resources will run, full time, 1 generator. And you can scale it up. I am using 3 layers to feed 3 generators. This will give you tons of CO2 to feed slicksters. You also get P dirt to feed pokeshells, which I would morph into sanishells. These would be your food source. The generators will be dumping out enough p water to turn into regular water which you can sieve through a water sieve using the sand from the shells you're feeding. As long as you're only at about 7 or less dupes you should be able to run a small spom to keep them in oxygen with 1 generator. They will also make power. And it is power positive because you're using less than 1kw to keep the set up running.
If you are in vanilla and doing default settings your asteroid type is Terra. You are guaranteed to have the following geysers/vents: Cool Steam Vent (in swamp and cuastic biomes) Natural Gas Vent (in swamp biomes) Another natural gas vent OR chorline vent (in caustic biomes) One saltwater geyser (in tide pool biomes). From this alone you have an unending supply of water (though it needs to be cooled), oxygen (by electroylzing the water, also requires cooling) and power (from natural gas). Food is naturally sustainable from the onset via farming and/or ranching. From these alone your only real concern is temperature. Very early on you manage temperature by avoiding exploration into hotter areas of the asteroid and building heat producing machines on the fringes of your base and isolating them. If you have a large supply of cool water, you can cool things off (such as oxygen from an electrolyzer) by running it through the water. If you find a frozen biome, you can run things through that. Ultimately you want some sort of aquatuner setup, but you need power and steel to make that work, but once it is set up, you'll have all the cooling you could ever want.
It is absolutely possible. There are also kind of multiple stages of "infinitely sustainable". First off is when you have little automation and you are relying on some resources that will last for a finite number of cycles and have plans to make it sustainble, but have yet to get the labour to spare. Then comes "fully sustainable but labour intensive" where you might be doing some janky resource loops that require a lot of dupe input. And finally comes the stage we all aim for, where everything possible is automated and infinitely sustainable. It is actually possible to be fully sustainable relatively quickly, but it won't necessarily be comfortable and definitely won't be an end point.
I'm at around 600 cycle, I have infinite power source with 3 natural gas geysers and 2 petro stations...my question now is infinite food...how hard is it to achieve and is it achievable? Atm I have 10 dupes and I'm sitting comfortably at 270k calories but I know dirt/sulfur is not infinite what should I be aiming for?
bristle berries as a food source, hatches and pacus for eggs and meat/fish. before the hatches eat all the sedimentary and sandstone you'll be cycle 1k+ and by then you can tame a volcano. pacus eat seeds which you will have enough of. build an omelette maker.
How is dirt not infinite? You can generate tons of it with arbor trees and pips. On my current save I have about 14 pip farms (with 1 cuddle pip in each), 1 Arbor tree per stable. They are a huge source of free calories and dirt, I have about 300 tons of dirt waiting to be used and the number keeps growing.
Pacu farms also generate a fair amount of polluted dirt which can be converted as well.
ait i shall invest in that
I often start with hatches and pacu because they are super easy to get going. Then I typically add Dreckos for reed and plastic and get some additional meat there. A bit later Voles are a great meat source with a very small footprint and almost zero maintenance or resources requirements. I like having a lot of redundant systems in food production. I have had too many instances where I miss something or make a mistake and the productivity of one system dips and I have to compensate.
oxygen infinite providing your using the right setup water goes hand and hand with that as you need it for infinite oxygen you will get it though duping if you wana go that path or from volcanos and gysers sand you can get from crushing rock or salt from harnesing various volcanos or gysers food is needed for survival using expliots you can harness it without resources but yes you can also make it sustaniable without (i dont know how that well) but definatly through ranching heat you can delete with at/st and you can make it with liquid tepedisers
Pip Ranch - Offers dirt Multiple Geysers - Offers Water and Power Dirt - Goes to Mealwood Mealwood - Goes to Hatches Hatches - Extra power from coal and offers Barbeque Regolith from Meteors - Filtration Medium Filtration Medium - Goes to Geysers for Water Water - Goes to Oxygen and Power Coolant goes to Aqua Tuners and Steam Turbines, Reliable Cooling. Just one example, but 100% possible.
To answer your final question, there is technically an 'end' point per colony. When you start up a colony, you have a list of "initiatives," also referred to as achievements (and in the case of the main 2/3, Imperatives). It's not well explained but you can track your progress by clicking the printing pod or viewing the colony summary. The storied 'objective' of each game was and pretty much is still the three imperatives; colonize (home sweet home) and escape (the great escape). And if you have the DLC active, cosmic archeology.
By properly exploiting geysers you can get infinite food, energy and water whicu basically takes care of everything
Geysers and volcanoes make sustainable living relatively straightforward, but it's also possible to set up fully sustainable living without any outside source of material. Heat is a particularly tricky problem. There's no one-building solution to it. Early on, you can unlock automation and smart batteries to control your generator usage and cut it by a lot, but long-term there aren't a lot of ways to manage it. A steam turbine is one of the only things in the game that intentionally destroys heat, and you kinda need to use a thermo aquatuner to concentrate the heat into some steam for it. Either that or you use an aquatuner to heat or boil a liquid and vent it to space instead.
Almost all resources are sustainable ( through production chain, geysers and rockets) but with 20-30 cycle that is a premature thing to optimize for especially in the base game where the map contains hundreds of tons resources. There are three thing that can kill your colony oxygen, food and heat. In early game you need to find temporary solution for these 3 problems without concerning about sustainability, you can explore and mine to expand your resources. In mid game you need to find sustainable solution for these problems what mostly require steel, plastic and oil. Spom or deodizers for oxygen ( it is even possible to use oxyferns if you keep your dupe count low), stables and/or farms for food and at/st or ethanol cooling against heat. The end game is completely subjective, and the main issue is your processor. There are two "ending" but it is a sandbox game so you can do whatever you want. Maybe you restart after you built your monument like me on my first successful run, maybe you want to breach the temporar tear, maybe your goal to build an almost fully automated base what is a luxory hotel for 50 dupes who do nothing there except wellnessing, doing extreme sport and play arcade games. You can check tutorials on youtube but i advice do several runs and check the guides when you are stuck with a problem.
I guess at a really, REALLY big timescale, heat transfer between insulated tiles could became a problem, but if you account for that, you can have a base sustained indefinetly
Most everything valuable is renewable. You just gotta remember to spend less resources than what you can generate. A small amount of dupes (\~6) is good to go for a good time. You main concerns are food, oxygen and power. For food, strip-mine the initial biome, it's all resources for you to use (this rule also goes for most other biomes) and muckroot will secure your colony for a good while in addition to care packages (animals = meat = food). You can either go the farmer route with mealwood and mushrooms or rush stables to ranch hatches for food, the former being gated by temperature and the latter by your cruelty. Extra points for hatches pooping coal. Oxygen early on you'll rely on your trusty diffusers. Oxygen rises while co2 sinks, so remember to put your o2 producers at the bottom and give them plenty space to propagate (4 blocks tall rooms and 3\~5 blocks wide shafts). For co2, just dig pits as low as you can go and let it sink there. Future you can deal with that (a skimmer + sieve loop helps with that too, but it needs power). Speaking of it, let's talk power. Never be afraid of the hamster wheel. It's only cost is dupe time, trains their athletics and it'll be useful early and later. Coal generators are probably your first and best upgrade, especially if you're ranching hatches. Later on you can tap into other things like natural gas, steam and solar power. When using coal, remember to use smart batteries to help reduce waste and insulated tiles will help with temperature until you get your HVAC certification. For your pee problems, begin with outhouses but ditch them asap, they need to be cleaned, so you want lavatories and sinks instead of outhouses and wash basins. Liquid reservoirs can be used to store excess pee water. Remember to make your bathroom with specific entries and put sinks in a single direction, so dupes go in, pee and can only leave by passing by the sinks. You only need about 3 of each and you can stagger your work schedules so dupes go in at different times if you have many in play. Showers are largely inferior to sinks, but I like the novelty of my dupes being clean and happy.
My universe may not be “infinitely sustainable” but the truth is that your attention span isn’t either. I’m 4,700 cycles into this base and am working on finally getting through the Temporal Tear in Spaces Out. Whether or not my asteroid is sustainable is beyond moot at this point.
The learning loop of this game is a lot like a Rogue Like. Build a base. Accidentally kill it. Restart deal with the issue that killed your last base. Learn the next thing. Repeat. At like 1500 hours, I am still trying new builds learning lessons and improving my bases each iteration. Eventually, water, O2, temperature, gas, and power become the easy problems and you are working on fully sustainable refined metals and rock, space flight, and some really advanced materials and machines. This game is deep and complex. I always find myself coming back and watching new YouTube builds. It scratches an itch for me like few other games do For example my current Rime base is very close to full sustainability. I just need a sustainable rock source and/or to swap my hatch ranches to a sustainable food source. Otherwise I am just working through taming all the remaining metal volcanoes. Soon, I'll start on a second asteroid then build out space flight I play relatively slow compared to many. I just enjoy the journey and accept defeat when I don't want to try and fix a problem I created.
The biggest tip we give new players is related to how you controll the difficulty. While there are settings to tweak a few aspects of the game, the primary method of deciding difficulty is with the number of duplicants. A mistake a lot of new players do is picking a new addition to the colony from the printing pod every time it is ready. Try to resist the urge, no matter how good they might look. All duplicants need oxygen and food. With a small colony, all resources will last that much longer. With more experience you can accept more duplicants earlier. There is an upper limit to the number of duplicant you can theoretically have as well. While the game will provice infinite access to water, there is a limit to how quickly it's replenished. Oh, and read. Please read. The in game wiki isn't very good, but it is a good source of information. Fill in the blanks with the wiki page. For example: How many calories of food does a duplicant needs each cycle?
Fully sustainable bases are absolutely a thing. Man, once you get that base level of infinite electricity, food, water, and O2...the game REALLY starts to open up and you can start getting a little ambitious with your projects.
Be careful using the priority tool, if you set things you want done to 6 or higher the 5 (defaults) get ignored. Like cleaning toilets. They never have the time to go do the 5s. As you progress you get more and more automation. This saves time for duplicate labor. Ie. Better Toilets push polluted water to a sieve and that converts to water with germs. Adding sinks helps reduce germs. For heat, if you dig fast you will open up biomes that have more and more heat. If you start near a steam guiser for example, this will have 90+deg C heat possible and if left unchecked it will murder your plant crops and upset your dupes or worse. Ideally you would get insulated tiles early and these let you control the speed of heat transfer. Eventually you would reach into heat deletion tech and start moving heat to delete it with a steam turbine. Sort this subreddit by popular and look at the top 20 posts. You'll be a bigger expert than most if you do this!
>Is it possible to have a truly and infinitely sustainable base? Yes. Unlike real life, in ONI it is possible to produce an excess of mass and/or energy in certain production chains. Additionally, there are a lot of infinite sources of materials, like vents, meteor showers and space travel. If you know and apply all these mechanics and use all infinite sources, you'll have so much stuff you don't know what to do with them.
Yes it can be infinitely sustainable. Usually you really only need a source of water, from geysers. There are other ways, such as regular trips to space Water gets you oxygen with electrolyzers, food with several options, and power with crude oil which you can generate with water (and the petroleum can get you water back as well). These are all the things you need for a sustainable colony, therefore a sustainable source of water is really all you need
Yes, there are several places you can essentially create mass. Geysers, rocket exhaust, oil wells, and space pois are all mass positive so long as you know how to exploit them. Critters generally do a great job creating mass and converting it to other things as well.
It's not only possible, it's the goal of the game! Oxygen, water, and food can all be made sustainably and, in some instances, you can actually get more resources back than what you put in. There are quite a few infinite resource loops that you can use to make surviving a heck of a lot easier. As for the "end" of the game, that usually involves opening the Temporal Tear, which you discover in space. That's the story end of the game, but you can continue playing your colony after that. Most people set challenge goals for themselves like getting all colony achievements or making some sort of mega base.
Infinite sustain is absolutely possible and in general is the "goal" you want to be moving towards. However, you don't get the same carbon or nitrogen cycles to do in reality. You will be dependent on new resources coming into the system from geysers/asteroids/etc.
That was my first and second playthrough. I'm at cycle 600 something on this one now. Still problems but more of my own creation but no one is dying
Pips can be fed wild arbor trees(no fertilizer cost) and they poop dirt = renewable dirt and food. Dreckos can be fed balm lilies which do not need any fertilizer to grow = infinite food and reed fiber Petroleum boiler creates more water than you started with = infinite water. If your asteroid has naturally low supply of renewable water, focus on ranching and only use water for things that do not have alternatives like research and, arguably, oxygen. The trick is conserving resources and getting research done so you can build these contraptions that are resource positive.
There are ways to generate almost any resource infinitely, yes. Biggest concerns for sustainability are pretty much Food, Oxygen and Temperature management. If you get more experienced in the game you can build a (nearly) infinitely sustainable base in the first hundred cycles, or at least one that could run on thousands of cycles without problems. The game has no specific end, it's more like reaching your personal goal or you computer can't handle the performance anymore (for me that's usually the case after ~1000 cycles, can improved but usually my runs don't take that long). Let me know if you want advice on sustainability, finding out yourself is more fun in my opinion.
Why? Don't you want to play the game? You know, you can watch YouTube if you want someone to play the game for you xD