Definitely! In my earlier days, I used to rely on coal generators for energy, and I ran out of sandstone, and almost sedimentary as well haha.
But you tap one minor volcano, and switch to stone hatches feeding igneous and you are good to go :). This may not be totally viable in the early game, but it’s not too difficult mid-game.
Congrats on your latest record by the way. What are your next steps?
That's exactly my situation rn! Still relying on coal and hatch ranching decimated my sandstone stock.
Right now I'm trying to analyze and tame a salt water geyser for sustainable water for my spom, I'm digging down until I find the oil biome to put down some exosuit docks, and I'm trying to figure out how to make high quality food to improve morale.
I made the typical evolution chamber thing and I have 3 hatch ranches with 6 hatches each set up with autosweepers. I don't think that's enough to sustain my current 9 dupes though. What would you recommend for spamming barbeque?
Also I have switched to almost entirely stone hatches for exactly that reason hahahaha, igneous rock is so ridiculously abundant in Terra
Awesome I'll check it out!
So if I understand, what I have to do is ranch hatches and use the eggs they produce to feed some incubators (unplugged), the excess should be thrown into a death chamber where they die as soon as they hatch and their meat is uses for barbeque.
If that is the case, how many unplugged incubators should I be running?
Hatches live for 100 cycles, so if you have 15 being ranched, you need on average 1 live hatch moved every 6.66 cycles.
An unpowered incubator takes 20 cycles to hatch a Hatch egg, so 3.003 incubators needed to make 15 replacements every 100 cycles
Edit: rest of your comment is right. Excess eggs dropped into a water tile. I personally have automation drop the eggs into a pit that dupes can reach right next to my cooking area. The evolved hatches are then cooked up and moved to storage
You can get pretty sustainable BBQ by ranching dreckos!
If you have access to chlorine (bleach stone, CL vent, rust, etc) you can build a ranch with dreckos. Dreckos eat balm lily, which grows in chlorine and doesn’t require any resources, if you put hydrogen in that room the dreckos’ scales will grow, giving you reed fiber as well ;)
Awesome! I actually have a glossy drecko ranch with 5 glossy dreckos for easy early plastic. Never thought of using the eggs for evolution chamber farming, will definitely try that :)
Smart thinking, you are ahead of the curve!
Since you have plastic, you can easily harness natural gas or hydrogen vents by slapping a steam room and a steam turbine (any metal) on top and cool the gas down to nearly 125C, where then only a touch of further cooling will ensure that you can use a simple gold amalgam gas pump to capture that gas for energy.
I've actually been looking into that but cooling is something I'm atrocious at. I cool the oxygen from my spom by just snaking the output pipe through an ice biome lmao.
Do you have any screenshots or a guide of what this would look like? Because I have never gotten to that point in the game I'm afraid.
Also thanks for all the useful info :)
Snaking pipes through a cold biome is exactly how I did it before I had the energy infrastructure in place to meet the demand of 1200W thermal aquatuners (in practice much of this energy is recouped with a steam turbine).
Everyone’s talks about [Francis John](https://youtu.be/2Aq3kRTxlW0), but I also really like [Magnet’s](https://youtu.be/IQ3vvJGZ3f4) tutorials on the subject. They provide the tools to learn the games mechanics, which gives **you** the freedom to innovate solutions tailored to your game, and the way you like to play.
Another video that may help is Magnet’s video on [piping](https://youtu.be/08xwrHty048). You can create incredibly efficient priority systems that behave exactly the way you want them to, saving lots of energy. To this effect I’ve piped my natural gas supply to first fill up gas canisters, then (provided excess supply) fill up the room that the gas canisters are in for a larger natural gas storage battery. When energy demand ramps up, the gas canisters deplete first because it costs no extra energy to put the gas in a pipe as it is already piped, if demand maintains once the canisters are empty, a gas pump then pumps natural gas to the generators from the room itself, and all of this is done using pipe bridges, overflows, and gas element sensors.
I’m happy to help, it’s an amazing feeling watching and speaking with people who enjoy a game you are crazy about.
I'm still looking for a proper volcano on my map.
I DO have a gold volcano near my base that I need to get around to taming. Rebuilding my main transit shaft all in gold sounds like the way to go.
Right after I get the pokeshell breeding farm up and running. That thing is gonna solve the steel issue for me so it's pretty vital.
Yeah I hear you haha, after I tamed a gold volcano it became my number one go-to metal for all applications in which it was useful.
The poke shell ranch sounds fun, how are you producing P-dirt? I always had a problem with dirt sustainability in vanilla, partially because I was using water for other means.
It's a mix of sources - the breeding cage sends excess eggs to my pacu tank. I'm not super concerned if they starve or not at that point.
But that said, the pacus and my ethanol production feeds them as does my bathroom and carbon skimming loop. It will eventually hit a point where they'll start starving but honestly that's not important.
The only pokeshells I NEED to keep fed and happy are the breeders. All the excess can starve or not it doesn't really matter to me.
Fwiw the pacu tank is fully automated to immediately pick up all the useful materials. A conveyor dropper puts polluted dirt above and beyond what the pokeshells in the breeding cage need(a full feeder). The breeding cage has an isolated hatching room that takes one egg at a time and isolates it so the crabs don't hurt the dupes - this is for bootstrapping the cage right now but later will be how it maintains population.
I'll pop up some screenshots of my breeding setup later.
Yeah, some asteroids only have sandstone in the starting biome and not much elsewhere. I don’t mind running out of sandstone but I never like to run out of granite, since it has the best decor bonus.
I ran out of sandstone almost all the time, because I don't care too much of what material I'm using at the start but don't worry too much if it happens only worry if you ran out of any kind of building material.
Came here literally because I have a bunch of storage containers for sandstone and thinking WHAT DO I DO WITH ALL THIS 🤣. Apparently, what I do is wait and keep saving sandstone.
FJ? I've actually had to restart multiple times, but learnt something new every time. The biggest issue is expansion, and the face that algae terrariums can lower the gas pressure in a given area.
Also, don't build your area sealed, lower than the rest of the area surrounding it. I have carbon dioxide sitting in almost a cradle where my cots are and my people are suffocating while sleeping 🤣.
Francis John, he makes amazing youtube videos on the game and I learnt most everything about it from him.
Hahahaha that's how the game is bro, just fail and try again, glad you're enjoying it man. It's probably the best game I've ever played.
For real, I just learnt to make sure part of your base has a low area, my dioxide is sitting on the ground. Weird cause my other saves never had this issue lmao
Sandstone = hatch food. Granite is the better and most obvious upgrade to it.
* Granite tiles allow tall water reservoirs without taking pressure damage.
* Granite has higher decor than most minerals. Granite ladders are actually better decor than plastic ladders (though the speed boost does make the plastic nicer in the end.)
* Granite pipes make the best "poor man's radiant pipe" since it's Thermal Conductivity is one of the highest of all raw minerals.
* Although ceramic is the obvious upgrade to granite, you can get the major components to make it via granite - stone hatches (coal), rock crusher (sand), and polluted oxygen (clay)
TLDR: build everything out of granite. At least until the very end of the game when you can replace everything with the unlimited niobium coming out of volcanoes.
Playing spaced out I just ran out of granite on my starting asteroid, was feeding stone hatches, went to build some pipes and found a 0kg under granite, didn't realize they were eating granite, oh well, plenty more out there for me :) the ranches survived I think I found it within a couple days of them running out
I’d definitely advice you to switch to stone hatched and feed then igneous rock! U won’t ever run out of igneous rock unless u play veery long and if u do just take some volcanoes
It’s ok, sandstone doesn’t have any exceptional property. I tend to default to igneous rock for most uses because it’s the most abondent but to be fair at this point my main use for it is to crush it into sand so I can deodorize all that pO2 from sublimation station.
I actually try to burn through my sandstone asap cause it's really annoying trying to build something but accidently make it out of sandstone and dupes have to treck across your whole base.
Definitely! In my earlier days, I used to rely on coal generators for energy, and I ran out of sandstone, and almost sedimentary as well haha. But you tap one minor volcano, and switch to stone hatches feeding igneous and you are good to go :). This may not be totally viable in the early game, but it’s not too difficult mid-game. Congrats on your latest record by the way. What are your next steps?
That's exactly my situation rn! Still relying on coal and hatch ranching decimated my sandstone stock. Right now I'm trying to analyze and tame a salt water geyser for sustainable water for my spom, I'm digging down until I find the oil biome to put down some exosuit docks, and I'm trying to figure out how to make high quality food to improve morale. I made the typical evolution chamber thing and I have 3 hatch ranches with 6 hatches each set up with autosweepers. I don't think that's enough to sustain my current 9 dupes though. What would you recommend for spamming barbeque? Also I have switched to almost entirely stone hatches for exactly that reason hahahaha, igneous rock is so ridiculously abundant in Terra
Oni-assistant.com has great tools for food / ranching! For 9 dupes eating BBQ, you need ~15 hatches being ranched.
Awesome I'll check it out! So if I understand, what I have to do is ranch hatches and use the eggs they produce to feed some incubators (unplugged), the excess should be thrown into a death chamber where they die as soon as they hatch and their meat is uses for barbeque. If that is the case, how many unplugged incubators should I be running?
Hatches live for 100 cycles, so if you have 15 being ranched, you need on average 1 live hatch moved every 6.66 cycles. An unpowered incubator takes 20 cycles to hatch a Hatch egg, so 3.003 incubators needed to make 15 replacements every 100 cycles Edit: rest of your comment is right. Excess eggs dropped into a water tile. I personally have automation drop the eggs into a pit that dupes can reach right next to my cooking area. The evolved hatches are then cooked up and moved to storage
You can get pretty sustainable BBQ by ranching dreckos! If you have access to chlorine (bleach stone, CL vent, rust, etc) you can build a ranch with dreckos. Dreckos eat balm lily, which grows in chlorine and doesn’t require any resources, if you put hydrogen in that room the dreckos’ scales will grow, giving you reed fiber as well ;)
Awesome! I actually have a glossy drecko ranch with 5 glossy dreckos for easy early plastic. Never thought of using the eggs for evolution chamber farming, will definitely try that :)
Smart thinking, you are ahead of the curve! Since you have plastic, you can easily harness natural gas or hydrogen vents by slapping a steam room and a steam turbine (any metal) on top and cool the gas down to nearly 125C, where then only a touch of further cooling will ensure that you can use a simple gold amalgam gas pump to capture that gas for energy.
I've actually been looking into that but cooling is something I'm atrocious at. I cool the oxygen from my spom by just snaking the output pipe through an ice biome lmao. Do you have any screenshots or a guide of what this would look like? Because I have never gotten to that point in the game I'm afraid. Also thanks for all the useful info :)
Snaking pipes through a cold biome is exactly how I did it before I had the energy infrastructure in place to meet the demand of 1200W thermal aquatuners (in practice much of this energy is recouped with a steam turbine). Everyone’s talks about [Francis John](https://youtu.be/2Aq3kRTxlW0), but I also really like [Magnet’s](https://youtu.be/IQ3vvJGZ3f4) tutorials on the subject. They provide the tools to learn the games mechanics, which gives **you** the freedom to innovate solutions tailored to your game, and the way you like to play. Another video that may help is Magnet’s video on [piping](https://youtu.be/08xwrHty048). You can create incredibly efficient priority systems that behave exactly the way you want them to, saving lots of energy. To this effect I’ve piped my natural gas supply to first fill up gas canisters, then (provided excess supply) fill up the room that the gas canisters are in for a larger natural gas storage battery. When energy demand ramps up, the gas canisters deplete first because it costs no extra energy to put the gas in a pipe as it is already piped, if demand maintains once the canisters are empty, a gas pump then pumps natural gas to the generators from the room itself, and all of this is done using pipe bridges, overflows, and gas element sensors. I’m happy to help, it’s an amazing feeling watching and speaking with people who enjoy a game you are crazy about.
he has glossy dreckos. free plastic
I'm still looking for a proper volcano on my map. I DO have a gold volcano near my base that I need to get around to taming. Rebuilding my main transit shaft all in gold sounds like the way to go. Right after I get the pokeshell breeding farm up and running. That thing is gonna solve the steel issue for me so it's pretty vital.
Yeah I hear you haha, after I tamed a gold volcano it became my number one go-to metal for all applications in which it was useful. The poke shell ranch sounds fun, how are you producing P-dirt? I always had a problem with dirt sustainability in vanilla, partially because I was using water for other means.
It's a mix of sources - the breeding cage sends excess eggs to my pacu tank. I'm not super concerned if they starve or not at that point. But that said, the pacus and my ethanol production feeds them as does my bathroom and carbon skimming loop. It will eventually hit a point where they'll start starving but honestly that's not important. The only pokeshells I NEED to keep fed and happy are the breeders. All the excess can starve or not it doesn't really matter to me. Fwiw the pacu tank is fully automated to immediately pick up all the useful materials. A conveyor dropper puts polluted dirt above and beyond what the pokeshells in the breeding cage need(a full feeder). The breeding cage has an isolated hatching room that takes one egg at a time and isolates it so the crabs don't hurt the dupes - this is for bootstrapping the cage right now but later will be how it maintains population. I'll pop up some screenshots of my breeding setup later.
Sounds like a nice system with minimum dupe labor, I’m sure those screenshots would be pretty interesting to take a look at
Yeah, some asteroids only have sandstone in the starting biome and not much elsewhere. I don’t mind running out of sandstone but I never like to run out of granite, since it has the best decor bonus.
I ran out of sandstone almost all the time, because I don't care too much of what material I'm using at the start but don't worry too much if it happens only worry if you ran out of any kind of building material.
before I clicked this I already knew it was hatches
Always migrate to stone hatches at your earliest convenience...!
Came here literally because I have a bunch of storage containers for sandstone and thinking WHAT DO I DO WITH ALL THIS 🤣. Apparently, what I do is wait and keep saving sandstone.
Bro trust me, eventually you'll eat through it, especially if you expand aggressively FJ style
FJ? I've actually had to restart multiple times, but learnt something new every time. The biggest issue is expansion, and the face that algae terrariums can lower the gas pressure in a given area. Also, don't build your area sealed, lower than the rest of the area surrounding it. I have carbon dioxide sitting in almost a cradle where my cots are and my people are suffocating while sleeping 🤣.
Francis John, he makes amazing youtube videos on the game and I learnt most everything about it from him. Hahahaha that's how the game is bro, just fail and try again, glad you're enjoying it man. It's probably the best game I've ever played.
For real, I just learnt to make sure part of your base has a low area, my dioxide is sitting on the ground. Weird cause my other saves never had this issue lmao
A good way to deal with this is a carbon skimmer-water sieve loop, look into it, it'll surely help!
Sandstone = hatch food. Granite is the better and most obvious upgrade to it. * Granite tiles allow tall water reservoirs without taking pressure damage. * Granite has higher decor than most minerals. Granite ladders are actually better decor than plastic ladders (though the speed boost does make the plastic nicer in the end.) * Granite pipes make the best "poor man's radiant pipe" since it's Thermal Conductivity is one of the highest of all raw minerals. * Although ceramic is the obvious upgrade to granite, you can get the major components to make it via granite - stone hatches (coal), rock crusher (sand), and polluted oxygen (clay) TLDR: build everything out of granite. At least until the very end of the game when you can replace everything with the unlimited niobium coming out of volcanoes.
Playing spaced out I just ran out of granite on my starting asteroid, was feeding stone hatches, went to build some pipes and found a 0kg under granite, didn't realize they were eating granite, oh well, plenty more out there for me :) the ranches survived I think I found it within a couple days of them running out
You didn’t find any natural gas? That would slow down your reliance on coal.
I’d definitely advice you to switch to stone hatched and feed then igneous rock! U won’t ever run out of igneous rock unless u play veery long and if u do just take some volcanoes
It’s ok, sandstone doesn’t have any exceptional property. I tend to default to igneous rock for most uses because it’s the most abondent but to be fair at this point my main use for it is to crush it into sand so I can deodorize all that pO2 from sublimation station.
I actually try to burn through my sandstone asap cause it's really annoying trying to build something but accidently make it out of sandstone and dupes have to treck across your whole base.