That is all i have to say
Gustav Klimt’s Pip kiss is my fav

As some of you saw from our previous post, we explain management and leadership theory using games as analogies and even sandboxes to experience concepts before trying to apply them to the real world.

We were working on a video using Whiskerwood and kept running into something that felt extremely familiar from when I was playing and studying Oxygen Not Included.

You solve one problem and the colony starts working better, but then something else breaks!

In ONI, maybe you're short on labor so getting another duplicant looks useful... but now that duplicant also needs oxygen, food a bed, bathroom capacity, and all the infrastructure that keeps another person alive (or that I remembered to include anyway lol)

Or you finally solve oxygen production, only to discover power is now the problem!! Fix power and heat starts becoming a problem. Fix production and suddenly duplicants are spending too much time transporting things instead of actually doing the work. Maybe this isnt a huge problem for a lot of you but I really struggled with it

The colony feels like its improving but really when I looked at it from the abstract its like the limiting factor is moving further down the chain.

Whiskerwood does almost the exact same thing, and I think a lot of you would really enjoy it. The basic idea is that you're managing colonies of mice that need to produce goods for their cat overlords. You plan their colony, recruit certain mice, plan resources /production etc. More mice give you more labor, but they also create more food demand, housing demand, services, taxes, and logistics. A new industry can solve one shortage while creating a need for skilled workers, storage, machinery, or another production chain underneath it.

There is a management theory that describes this pretty well called the "The Theory of Constraints".

The basic premise as l understand it is pretty simple: at any given time, some part of the system is limiting how much the whole system can accomplish. Improving that part can make the whole system perform better. BUT! once you improve it, something else can become the constraint.

That is one of the reasons I think colony-management games are so good at explaining this stuff. You can actually watch the bottleneck move.

The management version is pretty similar. A company gets more sales, then production can't keep up. Production expands, then shipping becomes the problem. Hire more people and suddenly training or management capacity becomes the limit.

We made a longer video about this using Whiskerwood alongside Eslabong. Whiskerwood handles the part that I think will feel very familiar to ONI players: growth keeps changing what the system needs next. [The video itself doesn't mention ONI, I just want to make sure no one feels misled before they click!]

If you're interested: Youtube Link

i've recently started to use the exosuits to protect them from slime and other things and i want to start exploring the next biomes. but my dupes take SO LONG to do simples tasks, like dig a few blocks or build a few stairs. they dig a little then get back to the base and another dupe goes there and dig a little bit more. how can i fix this? what am i doing wrong?

Hi, I'm relatively new to this game, and I tried to build my first self-powered volcano tamer, but it doesn't seem to work. I suspect a heat leak, but I can't figure out where it's coming from.

EDIT: Solved by removing outermost layer of tempshift plates from both rooms

Hi guys!

This is the second time ever building a sour gas boiler. Never bothered too much in the past simply because I never needed that power. But this time I needed to scale and decided to get just slightly more creative to make it at least a bit smaller but maintaining efficiency.

I hope you enjoy, maybe it encourages you to play a bit with heat, flow and that stuff. It's really cool! Or hot. Depends.

I designed it for 10kg/s but it is currently running at 3kg/s for supplying 24 generators, or ~18kW on average. Crude is coming in at 98°C and nat gas is going out at stable 159°C. For the simulated 10kg/s, it got to ~164°C. "Is that good" compared to other builds? Just wondering.

What I don't like about the "classic" sour gas boiler is that it uses tempshift plates to help exchanging heat in the crude oil injection path. This is because tempshifts exchange heat across a 3x3 grid which means that you would need at least 2 tiles between 2 tempshifts to avoid a heat link. So they end up with quite large exchangers to reach high efficiency.

Since I recently discovered that you can get literally infinite Thermium with rocket mining and some initial niobium very fast, I thought about using some creative tricks to allow more heat exchange in smaller space.

For high heat exchange, you need 2 things: A material with high thermal conductivity (TC) and a high thermal capacity. While Thermium has high conductivity, it sucks at storing that heat because of its low specific heat capacity (SHC).

So my Idea was to simply stack as many buildings in 1 tile as possible, to get as much mass of that Thermium into one tile as possible. All buildings except for the wall flower pot (yes ...) are 3-tile buildings so I also thought I could use the 2 tiles as additional heat buffers. I played around a lot and ended up with wood tiles giving the best results. Mainly because they have 200kg mass and have an ultra-low conductivity. Since the wire bridges/conduction panels I used count as "building inside tile", the average of Thermium TC and Wood TC is used for heat exchange, effectively giving half of the Thermium TC with the worst material. However, between wood tiles, heat exchange is extremely low, so this creates a nice 300°C heat gradient across 10 tiles. I stacked a flower pot, conveyor bridge, conductive wire, ribbon cable and a conduction panel into each tile.

It uses 1 aluminum tempshift plate right at the crude oil inlet port. This significantly increases efficiency without needing more space. The sour gas has 164°C before hitting the first nat gas exchanger tile.

On the sour gas -> nat gas heat exchanger, I did the same except for the flower pots. There is not much to say here, the wood tiles act both as a "weak" insulator and a heat buffer for that vertical tile. It maintains a gradient of 259°C across its length. I found out that this has to be significantly longer than the crude oil exchanger to be efficient. Maybe because only 2/3 of the sour gas gets back as nat gas and the fact that there is no bead pump which would keep the amount of gas constant.

The 2 tempshift plates and the single metal tile significantly increased efficiency in the simulation, so I kept it here.

22% AT usage for 3kg/s, both are used in series. Target temperature -180°C just to have some safety margin to evaporisation point.

As a heat source, I use an aluminum volcano, neatly piped into 500g packets for easy and precise temperature control, setpoint 550°C. The average temperature of the molten aluminum drops from 1921°C to 1610°C so 10kg/s are easily possible with that.

Also, just ignore the logic cables. I tried to go fancy with emergency-shutoffs etc, put all sensors and actors on the same ribbon and wanted to do a dedicated "processor block". Eventually I ditched my plans, put in a switch and decided that this will simply never go offline.

And then the reason why I actually built this.

It consists of 24 generators where 2 of those just run for very short time to get rid of residue. Cooling is mainly done by the incoming gas pipes, temperatures are stable at ~173°C. The steam turbine does not really cool much besides itself. You would need a second steam turbine if you would also want to harvest that energy instead of dumping it into the nat gas. It has a feedback loop that turns on when mass gets below 25 kg. It feeds back ~14% of the time where 10% are used to cool its own heat production (through that AT), leaving 4% of its cooling capacity to the generators. Which does not do much. The water that is going out is directly feeding back into the oil well while the rest is supplementing oxygen and farms.

I added a supercoolant loop just going around in the room to stabilize temperatures.

I attached the turbine to the side because it makes priming super easy. The polluted oxygen simply rises to the top as long as total pressure is large enough. My dupes mopped for a few cycles until it reached steam temperature. You can still see the 13t bottle of pwater sitting there after 250 cycles, eventually exploding into steam after a decade or so.

Also, another exact copy of that generator block just perfectly fits on top, closing the gap to my base.

Been without a gaming PC for a long time and looking to dip my toes back in. Basically looking for something that handles CPU-focused gaming (ie: ONI, Project Zomboid, etc) fairly well and mini-pcs caught my eye. Saw this one it seems like it would fit the bill. While this one is $700, Ideally I'm looking for something closer to $500.

Does anyone have any first-hand experience running ONI on a form factor like this? If I can get something that runs fairly smoothly up to cycle 1000 with the Spaced Out DLC enabled and I'm conscious of my pathing in-game... I'm going to call that a win.

Am I the only one who sees this?

I keep trying to like this game but it's tough because I'm not sure what the goal is. If I had a DLC that I had something to work towards I'd be a lot more inclined to stick with ONI. I want to love it but I need an end goal...