No Oxygen Included Guide

[Vikki Nagindas]

OxygenNot Included is one of my very favourite games. And it's also just recently been released, which means a whole wave of bright-eyed players have just begun their own journey into this hilarious, beautiful, infernally complex suffocation simulator.

So, to all those players: this is the Oxygen Not Included guide that I wish I had when I was first starting out. Updated for the full release of ONI, I'll go through all the problems you'll have to solve in your first 30 cycles step by step, and show you how to use this first month to create a beautiful, elegant, and fully functional base.

Oxygen Not Included is a tremendously impressive simulation, and there's an awful lot to learn about keeping your duplicants (or "dupes") alive that the game doesn't teach you. To illustrate my points, I'll refer to various screenshots from the first 30 cycles in my latest game. If you want to have exactly the same experience as I did, here are the details you need:

This Oxygen Not Included guide will assume some very basic knowledge - how to dig, how to build, how to set priorities, and so on. I've sorted the Oxygen Not Included guide into various "problems" that you'll need to solve in order to keep your dupes alive and happy. So, let's begin!

You can see above the three dupes I settled on. If, like me, you end up with a Night Owl on your team, then while they're sleeping at the end of your first cycle you should head into the scheduling tab and create a new schedule for that dupe, so that they're always at work during the three default "sleeping blocks".

So, you've landed in the middle of an asteroid, and already our attention has turned towards urination. The top priority for your first cycle is to establish a latrine area: dig out a dead-end somewhere nearby, and build two Outhouses at the end of it, with two Wash Basins at the entrance with their arrows pointing away from the Outhouses (so that dupes wash their hands when exiting the latrine area).

But that's not all! The other essential thing you need is a supply of water: else your Wash Basins won't function. So dig towards the nearest supply and build a Pitcher Pump to suck up all that lovely soon-to-be-germ-infested water.

Once you've got those three things working, the immediate crisis is over. You're no longer in danger of your dupes painting your asteroid yellow. The next step is to establish an initial barracks area where your dupes can sleep, so plop down three Cots in a separate room near the Latrine.

Now that your dupes have a place to relieve themselves, it's time to look towards power. Many of the solutions to the various problems that arise throughout Oxygen Not Included require power. For now, all we'll need is a single Manual Generator hooked up to a pair of Batteries.

The first two things you'll need that require power are a Research Station (so you can set your researcher to work thinking up new ways to solve problems), and an Oxygen Diffuser. The Oxygen Diffuser won't be needed for another cycle or two but you might as well build it all now and disable the Diffuser until all the natural Oxylite providing Oxygen to your base has run out.

Remember to hook it all up with wires! In total, you'll need 1200-1400 Copper Ore to create all this, so make sure you mine any immediate patches of Copper Ore around your starting location.

We've sorted our initial Power supply and the basic needs of our dupes, but the food in our Ration Box won't last us long. Our plan for getting us through the first hundred cycles or more will be to build a Mealwood farm so we can feed our dupes with Liceloaf, but we're not quite ready for that yet, and we need our dupes to not starve in the interim.

So, on Cycle 3 our priorities are twofold: first, we need to get our researcher started on the "Farming" section of the tech tree, beginning with Basic Farming and heading immediately on to Meal Preparation. And second, we need to build and hook up a Microbe Musher and set it to churn out endless Mush Bars - because food poisoning is preferable to starvation.

Besides this, Cycle 3 is a good time to expand the base a little more. You'll see below I've placed doors at the entrances to our bathroom and barracks area so that we get the Morale boost from those completed rooms (if you've no idea what I'm talking about, hit F11 in-game to bring up the Room Overlay). Your Printing Pod will also give you the option for a fourth dupe this cycle. Use the same criteria as I laid out at the start of this guide. If there are no suitable candidates, you can always pick the non-dupe offering, or reject it altogether. Remember, more dupes isn't always a good thing as you'll need to keep them fed and oxygenated. They've gotta be worth the trouble.

The Food Saga continues. Hopefully by this time your researcher will have finished researching Meal Preparation, which will allow you to get starting with your Mealwood Farm using your shiny new Farm Tiles.

For the base layout I'm using (8 dupes per barracks), it's a good idea to place down a farm of 30 Farm Tiles, which will be just enough to keep all 8 dupes fed. It's okay if you don't have enough Mealwood seeds for all of them right now; just plant however many you can.

While you're getting your Mealwood Farm set up, this is a good time to turn your Oxygen Diffuser back on if you disabled it earlier. You're likely not to have much more Oxylite left by Cycle 5.

The other thing to take stock of is your material reserves. Check the dropdown menu on the right-hand side of your screen for anything you're low on, particularly Algae and Copper Ore as these are essential and slightly rarer than the usual Dirt and Sandstone that everything is made from in your starting biome.

And now would be a good time to add a second Manual Generator to your power station so that you can easily keep Oxygen Diffuser, Research Station, and Microbe Musher powered at all times.

You'll no doubt have tonnes of debris littering every surface of your base, which dupes hate with a passion (check out how much of an impact debris makes on the Decor Overlay using F8). So you'll need to create a bunch of Storage Bins so dupes have somewhere to put all this trash. I'd recommend 10-15 Bins to begin with, somewhere off to the side of your base.

The other problem is slightly more complex. We're going to install a Water Lock so that we have a place to store the nasty polluted materials that come from our Latrine. Outhouses produce Polluted Dirt, and Wash Basins produce Polluted Water. Both these things cough out Polluted Air, which isn't nice to have floating around. Hence the Water Lock.

A Water Lock is a way of creating an airtight barrier between two areas, and it's actually very easy. Check below for reference: you'll need a V-shaped depression in the ground, and you'll need to install a Bottle Emptier next to it, with Auto-Bottle enabled so that dupes will fill the space up with water. Once it's done, deconstruct the Bottle Emptier, and build a Compost Heap (for the Polluted Dirt) and another Bottle Emptier over a small pit (for the Polluted Water) on the other side.

And there you have it! You now have a way to dispose of Polluted material without it constantly introducing Polluted Air into your base. Dupes won't like going there much (they don't like to travel through water), but luckily they'll only need to go there sparingly anyway.

Now that your storage area is built, it's probably an idea at this point to just set everyone who isn't on critical tasks (research, providing power) to sweep up the debris throughout your base, because Dupes hate mess.

Another thing worth considering if you haven't done so already is turning all your rooms into actual rooms to gain the associated morale bonus. With bathroom and barracks this will be easy; you can see below that I've also started putting together a Recreation Room and a Massage Clinic (requires Employment and Interior Decor techs) for even more of a morale boost.

Another big important thing to know is that your food will rot within a few cycles if you don't keep it in a sterile environment. Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this. Deconstruct your Ration Box, and build another one at the bottom of your base where it's 100% CO2. Carbon Dioxide is sterile, so your food will be preserved forever as long as the CO2 stays there.

Fire Poles are great, and you should plan from Cycle 1 to incorporate them into your base. They cost a fair amount of Copper Ore, but they drastically increase the efficiency of your base and the transportation of your dupes. Refined Renovations is the tech you need, so make a start towards that if you haven't already, and then put some Fire Poles down beside your main ladders.

If you have some spare dupe-power, you might also want to take this time to replace any natural floors, walls, and ceilings to your base with Tiles, because not only do they improve decor and morale, but they also allow dupes to run faster through your base.

You may not need to do this if you got lucky with your world seed, but I needed to at around this point, so I'll include it. Our next big project will require us to have a great deal of readily accessible water, and while I have a nice amount already, it could definitely be improved.

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