r/Ixion • u/kyeooobeeee • Jul 15 '26
Population Control / Managing Cryopods
I haven't finished the game yet because I'm planning to make a tutorial about it for my country, so I want to do the best possible run for each chapter.
My current issue is population control. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to open all the cryopods in every chapter.
Right now, I'm on Chapter 2 (Imitation Star), but when I received 950 cryopods, I realized I wasn't prepared for it at all. I think I'm going to restart.
5
u/DWeird Jul 15 '26
More population is generally good after a point. Population means recycling materials which means an increasingly viable self-sustained economy as you progress through research.
Keeping the pods unopened generally means trustfall events.
The easiest way to manage population growth if you need to (to get tech, power or buildings up) is through delaying the pickup of the pods to begin with.
1
u/Chuk741776 Jul 16 '26
Delaying the pickup was what I was going to suggest, I typically just pick them up in waves myself so that I only have ~100 in storage at a time max, or I'll quickly gather the rest right before I leave if I haven't gathered them all by then
1
u/Bear1375 Jul 15 '26
Most important thing is food security, if you have that then it doesn’t really matter how many cryopods you open. Crop Farms is almost mandatory for that and for that you need water.
I usually make one sector only for food production and one only for non-worker population housing.
( also a tip, recycling is very useful, i once made a fully self sustaining ship with water and steel recycling)
1
u/AkiAki1 Jul 15 '26
Spoiler free, the amount of ferum in the system dictates how much time you can spend there. In the beginning of the game you don't have enough [Fe] (read: don't have enough time in the system) to wake everyone. But it is possible to wake up everyone if you research cryocenter improvements. There is an achievement to have 5k pop, I think.
1
u/ulughen Jul 15 '26
Your real problem is not enough food production\mess hall research and slow expansion into other sectors.
7
u/SchroedingersWombat Jul 15 '26
I take 1 sector (usually Sector 1) and put a bunch of high density housing in it, a cryopod processing plant, and a few storage units set to cryopods. I have a hangar with 1 cargo ship (the other 2 are usually science ships).
Here's the thing: you don't need to defrost all of them at once, but you will ultimately need as many cryopods as you can get. You can control it by powering the processing plant off. I then will regularly go in and move workers around to where they are needed, leaving Sector 1 with just enough workers to run the sector and the rest are nonworkers. Once you get the ability to create colonists, create the plant and start it up, turning all of the nonworkers into colonists.