Oxygen Not Included

• Every Duplicate (worker) will need a certain amount of oxygen and food during each cycle. So while the Printing Pod will constantly offer you new Duplicates, don't get more of them until you can keep up with the increasing demand of oxygen and food.

• You want to avoid picking Duplicates with certain traits: Narcoleptic (randomly falls asleep), Flatulent (will fart Natural Gas), Anemic (very slow), Trypophobia (can't dig), Unconstructive (can't build), Mouth Breather (consumes extra oxygen) and Bottomless Stomach (eats more food). If your colony is running smoothly these won't matter that much, but at the start they are very bad.

• Gasses have unique weights to them. Hydrogen is light and will float to the top. Chloride and Natural Gas are heavy. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the heaviest and will float to the bottom.

• Storing food in CO2 will avoid them from rotting. Build a pit at the bottom of your base and put your fridges there. As the pit slowly fills with CO2 it will preserve your food forever. The fridges don't even need to be powered.

• If you have an area with lots of Polluted Oxygen, build several Deodorizers to filter it to regular oxygen as soon as possible. Set the Deodorizers to priority 6-7 so they will be supplied with Sand, which is what they require to filter.

• Nothing is immediately deadly; think of the game as a terrerarium where it's imbalances over time that end your colony. You aren't going to die walking into vacuum or chlorine. You CAN drown!

• Rooms provide additional benefits. It's one of the icons in the upper right, you can mouse over to see what's required. Rooms are generally 64 tiles, and people typically make them 16x4. Rooms must be completely enclosed so you'll have to create doorways and then select 'open' on the door to leave it open.

• Think of the gas in this game as thick and viscous. It has trouble moving around, especially through single tiles and even moreso through ladders. For this reason, make your vertical passage ladders between floors two or three tiles so that oxygen can easily move between floors.

• Because of the above, it's typical to see people's bases as a grid of 16x4 rooms with 2-3 wide vertical shafts with ladders on the sides. This is boring but also practical.

• Build your bedrooms near the top - oxygen tends to rise so if your atmosphere starts to get marginal, you have less of a chance to suffocate when sleeping. Build your mushroom/meal farms near the bottom for the same reason - they work in CO2.

• Make a little 2x2 pit inside your dining room and store your food in a ration box there - it will eventually fill up with co2 which is sterile so your food won't go bad!

• You need ~5 mealworm plants or ~3 mushroom plants per dupe.

• Mushrooms are generally the best early-mid game food.

• You need 1 oxygen diffuser per 5 dupes or electrolyzer per 8 dupes to break even. You likely want a bit more due to having to fill your expanding base with oxygen. When piping, you want a dedicated vent per electrolyzer since each one puts out 3/4ths of a pipe worth of oxygen when running.

• Be aware of different pressures of gas in pockets - if you've got a 1.5k oxygen and behind the wall is a 4k chlorine and you break it open, it's going to try to equalize the pressure and spill out.

• The first few batteries have a pretty large passive energy loss and normally your power generators will run as long as there's fuel. Once you get oxygen and food sorted, one of the first things you should do is upgrade to a smart battery with an automation cable connecting to a nearby coal generator. It will then only run to keep the battery topped off, saving you wasted fuel. You'll need brute force refining for the metal to make it.

• Start with a dedicated researcher dupe - that means at least +7 in research, though you could get away with less if you wanted. There are varying opinions on the other two, but I like at least one digger to speed up the early game. You might want to consider a cook or a artist or rancher or even just a builder.