Cycle 13: Revisiting Oxygen, Deodorizers

Washroom Plan

Revisiting Oxygen

Deodorizers

Cycle 12 summary with our goal in parens:Food: 16,000kcal (20,000kcal)Oxygen: ~1500g (2000g)Oxygen rate: -32kg (>0kg)Temp: ~23C (<30C)Max Stress: 0%Research Queue: Decontamination, Filtration, DistillationUp to 4 cycles of food as more meal lice have come in and we'll get our final bristle planted. We have those 8 surplus mealwood plants down as well. Oxygen came up short this cycle mainly because the build micromanagement kept the dupes from going down and services the terrariums. We'll also notice our temperature is starting to climb. It's 24C at the mealwood closest to the latrine, and we'll find that first mealwood plant outside the door will probably be the first place we see any impact due to heat. But we have a little while yet. We'll cover heat in more detail later. Overall, we're doing okay. O2 is okay, not great, food is on the upswing. Stress is good.Cycle 13 Goals:1) Finish water reservoir containment, start washroom buildAs you can see, we're past the most dangerous part of lining the bottom of the reservoir and can now move without so much micromanagement. I'll finish the left side bottom first using a sub-priority of 7 and then dig out the top, and then finish digging out the reservoir. That'll give the water some room. So in our washroom we're going to install some machines that need power. The pump won't be needed to run the washroom water cycle once it's primed, but we will need to remove some water to keep the space from overflowing. We have a liquid vent planned in there which we may not need, but it's always nice to have the option. We'll dump our excess water into the lower reservoir since we're slowly using that one up. We're also going to build a water sieve in the space to the left of the washroom. It's 4 wide by 3 high and will need power when it runs, but that'll only be 1-2 times a day. We'll start off with a local generator/battery setup but before long find a better way to power this room.The room below the washroom will be our medbay, and we choose this location because we'll borrow the washroom infrastructure so we can put a latrine and sink in there. Hopefully we will never need the medbay, but we certainly don't need it now, so we'll temporarily use this space for some early manufacturing. We can still throw down a med-bed if needed. We'll put a battery and generator here, and probably upgrade that to a coal generator fairly soon. For now, we keep digging and get that reservoir finished.Another of the potential downsides of terrariums over a deoxydizer as the deoxydizer can be run more reliably as we saw in the last cycle. Our O2 at the bottom of the base is over 2000g, but at the top it's closer to 800g, mainly because of all the digging we're doing at the top. We've got one more cycle of that and then we'll mostly be building, so we should be fine. One other tradeoff in the choice of O2 production is overpressurization. If we had a deoxydizer where our terrariums are, it would be shutting off as soon as the pressure hit 2000g - that's what it does. Getting that O2 to the far side of the base can be pretty difficult in that case, particularly if that's where the dupes are consuming the O2. By comparison the terrariums will keep pumping out oxygen at any pressure. With this setup that's a little handy as it'll help pressurize the area above faster, but there's a downside. When the pressure hits 4000g, the dupes eardrums will pop, giving them a pretty bad stress debuff for half a cycle. We'll find that the air pressure above the bottom mealwood farm will be the highest as the O2 gets pushed into that corner and has trouble evening out. We'll probably install a pressure relief soon to help with that when we introduce the next trick to our O2 production.So terrariums can better help distribute O2 across a base early on, but require more attention. If we were using a deoxydizer, we'd probably be more concerned as it's more of a set and forget kind of thing, but its ability to distribute O2 is a bit weaker. Instead of installing it at the bottom of the base, I would probably have built it next to the latrine knowing that I would be building both up and down early on. I could also put a coal generator there to power it, which would help fill the food storage with CO2. I'd get a CO2 problem at the bottom of the base, but we could put 1-2 terrariums down there to soak up that CO2, and not have to try and maintain 8 of them. Had we installed the deoxydizer at the bottom of the base we might be considering relocating it now. Also, terrariums are handy if you want to generate bit of O2 far from your infrastructure. If you're doing some exploratory digging and your dupes are constantly running back for O2, drop a terrarium down and it'll create a nice little pocket of O2 and keep your dupes working.It's important to experiment with all the game has to offer. Try both, mix and match, see what the pros and cons are and see what works best for your play style.By the middle of the cycle our Decontamination research completed and we've moved onto Filtration. This unlocks deodorizers and we've put several of them down around the bottom of the map. Deodorizers will prove vital to protecting our dupes later on, but for now, they'll help us with our O2 generation.By now, our dupes have been emptying the terrariums of polluted water and just dropping it on the ground since we haven't set up any place to take it. That polluted water will periodically convert some polluted water into polluted oxygen, which isn't being counted toward our O2 generation, but which does add to the overall pressure in our base as the PO2 takes up some space. Now, pockets of polluted oxygen looks gross and should trigger a sense of a alarm, but for now is okay because this polluted oxygen has no germs. Later, once we reach slime biomes, that polluted oxygen will make our dupes sick - sometimes very quickly. The deodorizers convert polluted oxygen to oxygen, consuming sand and producing clay. We have loads of sand, and clay will be useful. Our bottles of PH2O on the ground are creating between 80g/s and 120g/s of PO2, or about the equivalent of 2-3 terrariums once it's cleaned up in a deodorizer. We should see the PO2 quickly clear up and and our O2 production jump up. In fact, we can probably start turning off terrariums saving water, algae, and dupe labor. Deodorizers have no decor penalty other than the debris penalty from the dropped clay, so we can put them down liberally. They will pull in any PO2 in a 5x5 box centered around the deodorizer, but not through walls.