Oxygen Not Included

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Intropy

Shit Gamer
358
60
Basically Terraria meets Factorio:


Looks like the former but plays more like the latter. Been having a great time with it over the past week. The concept is you have to build an underground colony without killing everyone by accident. Similar to Factorio, its all about managing resources - except unlike Factorio, there are consequences when you fuck up like suffocating everyone or accidentally destroying your food supply.

Its still in early access, and admittedly the content starts to get a little thin in late game - but I got a very solid 60 hours out of it so far, and they seem to be adding significant content on the regular. I know a few of you guys are big Factorio fans like me - if you want a fresh take on that style of management game with a bit more charm you will definitely want to check this one out.
 
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Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
606
Reviews on Steam say the game is somewhat shallow. In that the start is the best part but once you have everything set up it is kind of easy. Any accuracy to that? It looks like a fun game to me.
 
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LennyLeonard

Trakanon Raider
18
18
If you're familiar with their previous title "Don't Starve", it plays very much like that at the meta level. I'd describe it as more Don't Starve meets Terraria meets Dwarf Fortress. Play a while, learn/encounter something new, get screwed, start over, apply lessons learned from previous game. They've clearly spent a ton of time on getting their technical details working, as their fluids and liquid simulation is great, as is world generation, and the worker (called duplicants aka dupes) all work well, with only the occasional working themselves into a corner that you must intervene with. There's a few bugs though.

That said, I agree that the game starts to fall off mid level. It's certainly playable, but tends to fall into the same patterns. Above all, imo, it lacks diversity of choice at that point. I've so far played it ~30 hours in the last 9 days, and greatly enjoyed most of that time (I'm on my 10th restart btw, with longest base at 120 cycles). However I'm done playing it until the next update.

This game is very much a WIP. It's already fun and playable, but some may find the core gameplay tedious, and if you're the type of person who needs a game to be complete, you're better off waiting a few months.
 
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Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
606
Thanks Lenny. Your review echos many of the reviews I've read. I think I'll hold off for the official release.
 
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Jalynfane

Phank 2002
719
563
There are tons of streams and let's plays on this title. Some of the game play looks fun but then if you pull back and look at the whole picture it seems a bit shallow.
 
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Araxen

Golden Baronet of the Realm
10,213
7,559
This game looks very interesting to me, but I held off because of the reviews that say it's pretty shallow. It seems like it would best to wait till it comes out of Early Access and hopefully by then the mid-game is shored up.
 
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Caliane

Golden Baronet of the Realm
14,421
9,787
grabbed this the other day.

Not sure which updates have been post, jun 27 of the last activity here.

I am very impressed with it. On some levels it nails that, "let me just spend 10 more minutes optimizing this air flow...... 6 hours later." of Factorio, while I find it MUCH more engaging overall. I didnt really like Factorio much. Love Rimworld, etc far more. I find this combines the two wonderfully.
It takes the colony sim of Rimworld, and the workflow optimization of Factorio (for power, water, and air.)
 
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Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,271
50,238
TLDR: By no means is the game shallow.

My first two runs were fairly short lived affairs as I was getting a feel for the game. Third run I made it for a while, had the basics down, then I ran out of algae for my oxygen production because I hadn't transitioned into electrolyzers yet. Panicked and started mass mining algae in the nearest swamp biome, oblivious to the fact that I was tracking slimelung into my base en masse, which eventually ravaged my dupes and caused me to pull the plug.

Latest run I'm almost to cycle 300, probably going to start a new one tomorrow as this one has been a non-stop roller-coaster and I'm not sure if I can get ahead long enough to go self-sustaining before I deplete too many resources. I started off a lot more slowly so that I wouldn't have to worry about various shortages, made sure I was ready to transition into electrolyzers well before I ran out of algae. You can't avoid the swamp entirely because you really need gold amalgam for some of your hotter operating machines, so I constructed an elaborate two-level airlock entrance to the nearest swamp biome. Main level is wash basins, water lock, ore scrubbers, entrance to the sub level, and then the dual airlock doors leading out to the swamp itself, with two air scrubbers between the airlock doors. Sublevel is for storage, so anyone who comes in for something mined from the swamp has to carry it back out past the ore scrubbers. Both levels are filled with chlorine so that slimelung can't survive in the air, and the permissions on the doors are set so that only one or two dupes can go into the swamp, so I don't have to worry about too many dupes passing the wash basins at the same time to use them and letting slimelung sneak in that way.

Unfortunately what I didn't consider was that due to the size of my airlock setup and the position of the swamp biome I picked, I practically bisected my base, which dramatically increased the travel time between the living/farming area up above and the industrial area down below. Also although the central biome starts out temperate, heat from the other biomes will gradually seep into your base so even if you build your high heat producing a ways away from your central area, the whole thing will eventually heat up to the point that you can't grow simple crops. I noticed my farm rooms were starting to fail due to getting too hot so I frantically started setting up a new farming area right beside a cold biome. This worked out quite well until my new farm started to fail because the simplest plant to farm consumes 10kg of dirt every time you harvest it, and I had gone through all the dirt just like I did with the algae in the previous game. I start switching the farm to bristle berries and also start a new farming area inside the cold biome itself. I successfully get this set up, right about the time I run out of coal, which I was burning for power. I hadn't been paying good attention to my hatches so too many of them died to be able to set up a good coal pasture, so I set up a petroleum generator. Shortly afterwards I noticed my bristle berry farm was starting to fail due to more heat creep, so I set up some thermo regulators to try and pump cooled air up there, which worked except I accidentally built them out of iron instead of gold so they overheated super easily and instead of just quickly deconstructing them and building new ones out of gold, I kept dicking around with a setup to cool them back off.

And since I just realized how goddamn long this is dragging on, I'll also say that at one point I accidentally shut down my entire oxygen flow from installing a single backwards gas pipe bridge, the industrial area underneath my base is a twisted nightmare of liquid/gas pipes, power cables, and a ton of ladder sections used like scaffolding, and it's completely drowning in carbon dioxide because I didn't realize how much co2 a petro generator (plus some other stuff) shits out and the single carbon scrubber i had down there was completely overwhelmed. I've still got more than enough resources that I could probably keep things together long enough to reach the self-sustaining dream, but I think it would be better to start fresh again.
 
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Bubbles

2022 Asshat Award Winner
<Bronze Donator>
44,382
-29,779
I made a decision long time ago not to touch that game until it's actually released
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,271
50,238
Realized early on that I was losing another game to heat creep, then when I paid closer attention to the temperature overlay in the new game I realized I was doing the exact same thing. I had this habit of digging all the way to the granite that surrounds the first biome, but when you expose the granite that touches the purple biomes, it just sits there radiating heat to your base. That will release a ton of heat into your base well before you can surround it with abyssalite tiles and probably push you out of meal/bristle farming range before you can get a more elaborate cooling system set up. So I'm basically patching the exposed granite with a double layer of insulated sandstone tiles, and I'm gonna hold off on going past 4 duplicants for much longer this time around.
 

Heriotze

<Gold Donor>
1,031
1,410
The sheer number of catastrophic ways that there are to lose this game is worth trying it out in early access and with it being by the Don't Starve guys it was an instant buy for me. For some reason when patches roll around and add in huge changes it's not tedious at all to get back up to speed since, I think that it's similar to Don't Starve in this way but better, it's honestly a fun game to lose and see the gigantic holes in the crap system that you'd thought was perfect. Next round don't make those mistakes but next round has so many random elements that you get to make all new ones right from the start.

Plus the music sounds like Rubin & Ed
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,271
50,238
Thought I'd bump this in honor of the (no longer new) Space Industry Upgrade.

Current colony is in mid 300s. Abandoned my old strat of minimal dupe count and instead pushed up to 12 pretty quickly. I finished the pre-space research tree fairly early on and have just been slowly teching up ever since. Just recently broke into space and got a starter shield of bunker tiles started. The geyser placement on this seed has been something of a roller coaster, but my space entrance is right near a natural dip in the abyssalite layer that will probably be where i'll put my launch pad, and it's also at a cold biome with two AETNs and two nearby water sources, so hopefully i can set up a stable sleet wheat farm as well as easy pre-cooling when it comes time to advance to liquid oxygen/hydrogen based rockets.

Have to say the single biggest game changer for my new run was creating a carbon dioxide trap at the bottom of my base to farm shrooms and store food. Food that never spoils completely changes the game, I've survived pretty much entirely on fried mushrooms into wild farmed pepper bread, and have over a million kcals banked. I do want to get a stable sleet wheat farm established though because I haven't really done anything to protect the cold biomes from heat creep and pillaged almost all the wheezes, so the wild sleet wheat won't stay viable forever.
 

...

Goonsquad Officer
5,600
13,419
I'm 300ish cycles in. I'm thinking of starting over. I goofed on my heat management and also allowed the oil biome to shit up the above spaces with tons of hot goss. the sour gass being superheated seems to cause a chain reaction with draining water (steam) and chain burns my guys while trying to create a buffer. my crops (fungus) got kind of hot. I built a "vaccume shaft" to send hot gasses to space without shitting up my living space but...i should have planned better.

I'm thinking of doing a ranching run where I try to live on ranched food. a guy on reddit just put a thing up about how he auto ranches fish, which is interesting.

My Egg Frying Machine : Oxygennotincluded

Automated fish/egg shell farm : Oxygennotincluded



I've made some "sort shit out and drown" automatic hatch killers but never on a s cale to feed the colony. i dunno. i may try.

when i get home i'll post up a picture of my current base. it's pretty wacky.
 
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...

Goonsquad Officer
5,600
13,419
heat management is the most dificult and important thing to master IMO. the change to abysalite really made me use vaccume compartments more.
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,271
50,238
I'm 300ish cycles in. I'm thinking of starting over. I goofed on my heat management and also allowed the oil biome to shit up the above spaces with tons of hot goss. the sour gass being superheated seems to cause a chain reaction with draining water (steam) and chain burns my guys while trying to create a buffer. my crops (fungus) got kind of hot. I built a "vaccume shaft" to send hot gasses to space without shitting up my living space but...i should have planned better.

I'm thinking of doing a ranching run where I try to live on ranched food. a guy on reddit just put a thing up about how he auto ranches fish, which is interesting.

My Egg Frying Machine : Oxygennotincluded

Automated fish/egg shell farm : Oxygennotincluded



I've made some "sort shit out and drown" automatic hatch killers but never on a s cale to feed the colony. i dunno. i may try.

when i get home i'll post up a picture of my current base. it's pretty wacky.

Yeah i actually scouted my oil biome a bit before I broke into it to make sure I wasn't gonna get flooded with sour gas, basically the entire left 2/3rds of my oil biome is full of sour gas so i locked it in with an oil lock and have been careful not to dig down far enough to expose any super-heated tiles while I scavenge for fossils to make steel. Best thing about pacu farms is how much eggshell they generate, worst thing is how fucking laggy they are due to pathfinding.

I downloaded this last night. Seems hard, loving it so far.

Once your done with/get frustrated by trial and error, I recommend watching
Don't try and copy him directly because his attention to detail can be hilariously awful at times, but watching his vids helped me a lot with the macro level of ONI, i.e. transitioning up through the tech tree.
 

...

Goonsquad Officer
5,600
13,419
I wonder if you put your pacu into slots, like one pacu per colum of 1x8 fish tank area seperated by mesh...if it would help pathing. because they can only path up and down.
 

James

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
2,804
7,056
This is a lot like Factorio, probably better. I'm hooked, my last base was a series of fuckups to cycle 47, but it was fun.
 

Caliane

Golden Baronet of the Realm
14,421
9,787
yeah. this game is great. More of a town builder like, rimworld, etc. But, tons of automation, like factorio. Great art style as well. none of that pixel art, or 2001 flash art of most of these games.. Constant major updates as well.
 

Denaut

Trump's Staff
2,739
1,279
This is sitting on my wish list waiting for release. Since it is a game that looks right up my alley I very much want to wait for 1.0 before diving in.

So my question is, how complete do you think it is and when do you think it will have its 1.0 release?