Rene PlaysRegrettable Homestead. Cycle 35. 9 Duplicants.
It’s time to take on our first big project: oxygen generation.
In the early game, you create oxygen by converting a non-renewable resource, algae, into oxygen using electric power. This gives you a buffer while you get things set up. Eventually, you will run out of algae.
The main source of oxygen in this game is electrolysis . You consume water and electric power to produce hydrogen and oxygen gases. In the game, gases don’t recombine, so the oxygen can be pumped back into the base for breathing.
The first hurdle is finding a renewable source of water. The game seeds resource spawners in the form of “geysers” around the map; these emit a specific resource. I found a water geyser below my base:
This will spew out an infinite amount of water, but always at the warm temperature of 60ish degrees C. That’s a lot of heat, so we’ll need to box it in with insulation and pump out the water.
Heat is a real threat. If the temperature in our base rises too high, the temperature-sensitive crops inside will die. As our base grows and our technology progresses, we’ll add more and more heat-generating machines, causing more temperature problems.
We want the oxygen pumped into our base to be cold. Just like IRL, we need a way to pump the heat somewhere else. Something that can absorb an endless amount heat, since the oxygen loop will run in perpetuity. We need another geyser.
On the opposite side of the base, there’s a “cold slush geyser” that produces polluted water around -14 degrees C. Because it’s a geyser, it’s an endless resource of both polluted water and heat absorption. Once the water has absorbed enough heat to be useless, we can dump it out and refill with fresh, cold water for heat absorption.
Now we have the necessary parts of our oxygen generator loop:
- hot, clean water is emitted by the steam geyser
- electrolyzer turns this into hot oxygen and hydrogen
- gas filter separates the oxygen and hydrogen
- hot oxygen is pumped into the cooling loop
- cooling loop is powered by cold slush geyser
- when the cold slush reservoir gets too warm, refresh the water
- pump the cold oxygen back to the base
What about the hot hydrogen? We can pump that into a hydrogen generator, which burns it off and turns it into a little bit of extra electricity. It won’t do much, but it will stop the hydrogen from backing up our pipes.
Speaking of electricity, this whole system is very power hungry. We’re going to need a lot of extra generators to produce power. The power production will produce excess carbon dioxide and heat, which will exacerbate the temperature problem we’re trying to fight. Just like the fossil fuel lobby, that’s a problem for our future selves.
Funnily enough, we start this project by moving oxygen out of our base and into portable masks that our dups can use while working on remote construction projects.
Let’s close out with a close-up of some disgusting food being made.