Line #141 VideoGame/OxygenNotIncluded


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/maxresdefault_260.jpg]]
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3	''Oxygen Not Included'' is a SpaceManagementGame by Creator/KleiEntertainment (of ''VideoGame/DontStarve'' fame), which can be described as ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'' meets ''VideoGame/DontStarve'' InSpace The player indirectly controls a crew of [[ArtificialHumans duplicants]] awakened deep in a [[RandomlyGeneratedLevels procedurally generated world]]. From there, it is up to you to ensure their survival. To do this, you have to provide them with basic necessities, including oxygen, climb up the TechTree, and try and deal with [[AlmostOutOfOxygen all]] [[WizardNeedsFoodBadly sorts]] [[PottyFailure of]] [[ThePlague problems]].
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5	The game entered Platform/{{Steam}} Early Access on 18th May, 2017, and reached full release on July 30th, 2019. On December 16th 2021, a space-focused DLC appropriately named ''Spaced Out'' was released.
6
7	!!This game provides examples of:
8	* AbandonedLaboratory: You can find these in the world, complete with a BrainInAJar that gives a free positive trait to your Duplicants (such as less oxygen consumption). Inspecting some leftover equipment from these so-called "points of interest" will uncover various pieces of lore that give clues to the origin of your printing pod and duplicants, why [[EarthShatteringKaboom Earth is destroyed]] and what the world was like before.
9	* AcceptableBreaksFromReality: While the game tries to be realistic as possible, certain AntiFrustrationFeatures exist to make gameplay possible.
10	** All of the dupes' tools do not need to be made and are completely free to use, requiring nothing but the dupes themselves.
11	** Temperature is handled realistically; ConvectionSchmonvection is {{averted\|Trope}}, machines that cool down gasses and liquids only transfer their heat to themselves and their surroundings, and [[UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay ''entropy exists''.]] Normally this would eventually result in your base eventually succumbing to heat death, but there many mechanics to get rid of heat, including steam turbines, venting hot fluids into space, and the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, which cools its surroundings by breaking physics.
12	** One does not need to manufacture liquid bottles and gas canisters, they just appear as needed when liquids and gases are to be handled.
13	** Geysers and vents exist to give renewable resources before late-game rocketry can. All worlds generated will always have at least two Cool Steam Vents that give off free (albeit hot) water so that you'll always have oxygen, and one Natural Gas Vent so that you'll always have a renewable source of power.
14	** Substances don't mix with each other. Each square of the game world can hold exactly one gas. In real life, what we consider breathable air is mostly nitrogen, a little oxygen, and traces of other gasses, but this would be impossible to simulate for all but the sturdiest computers.
15	** Gasses are divided into "breathable" and "not breathable". Not breathable gasses can suffocate dupes if they displace all the oxygen but are otherwise harmless. The game ignores all the nastier effects that would come with exposure to gasses like chlorine (which causes severe burns to any exposed skin in the real world). Also, fire doesn't exist so it's perfectly safe to have hot machinery in a room full of hydrogen and oxygen.
16	*** As of ''[[DownloadableContent Spaced Out]]'', certain gases such as chlorine add the "burning eyes" debuff to Dupes who move through it unprotected, finally adding a cost (other than lack of oxygen) for exposing a Dupe to an unbreathable caustic gas.
17	** One key element is that unlike in real life, all combustion-based electricity generators do not actually consume your precious oxygen when burning fuel.
18	** Abyssalite is a fictional material that lines the borders of most biomes, and acts as a perfect thermal insulator. Without it, the heat from the core would very quickly overwhelm and destroy most of the map, so it's a necessary concession.
19	* AlmostOutOfOxygen:
20	** Can happen to the duplicants who got themselves trapped in hostile environment... or to your entire base if your oxygen production isn't up for the task.
21	** The 'Cosmic Upgrade' update allows duplicants to mine to the outside of the asteroid; directly into the harsh vacuum of space. Naturally, if you don't prepare for it with a well set up airlock system, expect whatever oxygen you have in your base to dwindle extremely quick.
22	* ArtificialStupidity: Sometimes this is unintentional, but other times the developers put this in the game as a justified feature. The duplicants were originally designed in-universe to do simple tasks. As the technology got better, the duplicants became relatively smarter, but they still had many biological and mental defects (such as lacking noses, all five fingers, and even lack feet by the looks of it). Furthermore, the scientists determined that being "born" as "fully grown" adults (the duplicants are only about one and a half feet tall according to the research notes you can find) has stunted many of their mental facilities as well. For example, if the toilets are out of order, the duplicants won't go to some remote corner of the base to relieve themselves in relative dignity, but instead just make a mess out of themselves where ever they are at the time, even if they are right near their [[TooDumbToLive only source of clean water]].
23	* ArtisticLicenseArt: When a duplicant gets the Masterworks ability in art, the artistic works produced resemble masterpieces by artists such as Creator/LeonardoDaVinci or Creator/FridaKahlo but featuring duplicants instead of humans.
24	* AwesomeButImpractical: Can happen easily if the player doesn't think their designs through.
25	** Boiling oil into sour gas, freezing it into methane and boiling it again to get natural gas generates ridiculous amounts of power (ten times more than just refining it into petroleum and boiling in a petroleum generator), but it's arguable that your power issues have long since been solved by the time you're capable of this.
26	** Some projects (like using shinebugs as a source of solar power) are an issue in late game due to their ability to tank your framerate.
27	* BigEater: One of the possible character traits is called "Bottomless Stomach". These guys always eat much more than the rest. Binge Eaters do it only when stressed, but boy, do they stuff themselves...
28	* BizarreAlienBiology: Given that the game features fictional flora and fauna, this is a given.
29	** Hatches eat [[ExtremeOmnivore almost anything]], and excrete coal. The smooth hatch eats metal ores and excretes refined versions of those metals.
30	** Dreckos eat mealwood or pincha pepperplants, have scales that only grow in hydrogen, and can clamber up walls.
31	** Slicksters inhale carbon dioxide and excrete crude oil. One variant excretes petroleum.
32	** Pips have a caching instinct that causes them to bury seeds in the soil.
33	** None of the creatures require a pair to breed and are capable of asexual reproduction. They're even capable of mutations despite this.
34	** [[spoiler: Some of the lore fragments added to the game make clear that this is intentional in-universe, as all of the various critters are also products of the same Gravitas project that generated the printing pod and the duplicants.]]
35	* BoringButPractical: All over the game. Some more so than others, such as:
36	** Granite: More common than sandstone, but much more sturdy and much prettier to look at. Granite statues will be a valuable early art item for morale, and a granite reservoir can hold a lot more water than sandstone, and more than most other materials too.
37	** Hatches: Easily the most reliable source of coal in the game, ranching hatches takes the least amount of effort and provides meat for barbecue with ease.
38	** Barbecue is a good meal that is always available to any trained cook, and will serve as a staple for a long time. It provides more calories than most crops and can be made very early in the game.
39	** Soda Fountains dispose of Carbon Dioxide and provide a mood boost and learning boost, and are not that hard to keep supplied.
40	** Lead Conductive Wires. Lead is typically very common in the bottom of most maps, and using it as wiring in standard to low temperature areas means that you can get rid of all the ugly and inefficient common wires for neutral looking wiring that has double the power tolerance.
41	** If you can overcome the DifficultButAwesome requirements of cooling water and the sleet wheat farm, then berry sludge should be one of you go to food options. One farm can produce dozens of these perpeptually preserved bars, keeping your dupes fed for a long time with no fear of spoilage. Perfect for space food since it is ridiculously calory dense and and one bar can feed one dupe for four cycles. One fridge can hold 150 bars, meaning your astronaut could technically stay in space for 600 cycles.
42	* BraggingRightsReward: Breeding Crystal Shinebugs is quite the process, requiring you to go through several different 'tiers' of Shinebugs, all of which require specific, difficult to obtain food items in order to have a chance at them laying the next 'tier' of Shinebug. Ultimately, there's no real point to it unlike other creature breeding, as the main thing Crystal Shinebugs do is add an ''insane'' amount of decor where they fly around, and being able to produce high tier food generally takes care of your morale needs by itself. Similarly, Longhair Slicksters consume oxygen but produce absolutely nothing except for decor.
43	* CommonplaceRare: Two of the most valuable and difficult to replace resources in the game are algae and dirt.
44	* ContinuityCreep: Originally, there was [[ExcusePlot no real plot to the game]]. You wake up on an asteroid and have to keep your duplicants alive. As more and more updates were added though, the game gradually got lore entries after examining certain things and gives hints as to why the duplicants are on the asteroid in the first place, with the ultimate end goal apparently being [[spoiler: trying to make it to the planet protected by a force field.]]
45	* ContinuousDecompression: Averted. Gases will leak gradually over time if there is a pressure differential, but it won't cause any noticeable wind. However, it might still end up being deadly if oxygen pressure drops far enough to become unbreathable. Same thing happens when you dig out stone, thus limiting the ability to rapidly expand your base.
46	* ControllableHelplessness:
47	** When duplicants get extremely stressed, good luck getting the entire colony to do anything productive. Stressed duplicants have the trait of causing non-stressed dupes to start increasing stress quickly, which further causes more dupes to start stressing out and quickly grinds progress to a halt, ultimately causing mass death in a matter of seconds. Unlike, say, ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'', it ''is'' possible to save a colony from these stress spirals but it requires ''very'' quick thinking and luck when it comes to getting non-stressed dupes to construct things.
48	** When a duplicant gets trapped somewhere, good luck getting to them before they die. Duplicant A.I. prioritizes having solid ground to stand on rather than simply jumping down a three block gap, so digging them out can take longer than they can hold their breath. Then there's the fact that non-trapped duplicants will frequently prioritize misc. tasks like farming and building over digging the duplicant out, even on red alert mode. A duplicant getting trapped far away from the base is frequently a death sentence.
49	* ConvectionSchmonvection: ''Completely'' {{averted\|Trope}} as of the early Thermal Update. Objects have certain heat capacities, freeze points, liquefaction points, boiling points, thermal flux rates, and specific heat, and every tile interacts with every adjacent tile in this system, allowing heat to transfer between objects, with some tiles radiating and absorbing heat faster than others. Managing this heat system becomes a major mid-game hurdle to overcome (for example radiant piping or ducts can be used to pump cooled fluid around hot areas to absorb and carry away heat from the air they pass through.) Duplicants in fact will refuse to go into, for example, an area filled with boiling fluid that would quickly kill them, but they might still take damage from any scalding gas in the vicinity of that fluid which might be absorbing its heat.
50	*** However it is played straight with rockets in the DLC. Rocket parts do not transmit heat, something that comes in handy given the extreme temperature of their exhaust.
51	* CoolStarship: With the Rocketry update, the dupes can build one that they can use to investigate nearby planets/asteroids and bring back resources from them. Becomes a core gameplay mechanic as of Spaced Out, with resources intentionally spread out across multiple planetoids and requiring you to establish a basic space program to reach the higher tiers of the tech tree.
52	* CripplingOverspecialization: It's possible for a duplicant to generate that way - they may be an expert chef, yet inept at other crucial activities like digging or construction.
53	* DecontaminationChamber: A wise player will build one in any situation where duplicants must return from germ-heavy areas, such as a swamp biome. Generally this requires a wash basin, sink, or hand-sanitizer dispenser in a room with airlock doors on either side that a duplicant must pass through. Air purifiers can be added for extra measure. Ore scrubbers can remove the germs from anything carried through it (essential for safe slime harvesting.) In extreme cases, a player might even flood the chamber with chlorine gas to kill off anything left in it.
54	* DeepFriedWhatever: The Mush Fry is a deep-fried version of the basic Mush Bar food item, making it marginally tastier and ''drastically'' less likely to [[PottyEmergency cause diarrhea]].
55	* DifficultButAwesome:
56	** Traversing the swamp biome is by far one of ''the'' hardest things to do in the game; until you get the Exo-suits, you risk the entire colony getting infected with [[ThePlague Slimelung]], which can kill them quickly if not dealt with ASAP. That said, it ''is'' possible to do without Exo-suits if you take things slow by not letting the duplicants spend ''too'' much time in them and chip away little by little, use a ''lot'' of deodorizers to keep the air clean and make sure to block off any exposed slime tiles in your passageways. By doing this, you can completely negate early game water problems, since the swamp biome has by far the highest amounts of random water pockets.[[note]]Albeit, polluted water. However, it's simple enough to clean with a series of pumps and water purifying machine.[[/note]]. It's much less dangerous in later updates then it once was due to diseases being significantly nerfed in power, slimelung now generally can't kill your dupes though it will stress them out and reduce efficiency.
57	** Setting up a ventilation system in the cold biome negates all worries about overheating temperatures in your base. Difficult because ice biomes are usually far away from home base and duplicants risk getting hypothermia while they're in there; awesome because not only does it give you a steady supply of oxygen, it ''also'' works as an air conditioner.[[note]]This won't be a permanent solution since the cold biome will eventually turn warm as it absorbs the heat being added to it, but that does generally take quite a while.[[/note]]
58	** Electrolyzers take great care to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen as well as handling the heat. With careful design choices, they become a steady source of both oxygen and power.
59	** Chlorine: it is a heavy gas found in caustic biomes that is completely unbreathable. However, it is also lethal to germs, so anything placed in a chlorine environment is quickly disinfected. A chlorine-filled storage room is ideal for storing things like slime as slimelung will be unable to reproduce in the storage compactors. This also applies to the rot that makes food go bad over time, so a chlorine-filled room with ration boxes will allow massive quantities of food to be stockpiled without spoilage.
60	** Ranching creatures from other biomes tends to be difficult as they usually require you to [[UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay recreate the biome they live in]], but they always give valuable resources in return.
61	*** Pufts are the only renewable source of Slime, and Dense pufts can turn Oxygen into Oxylite for rocketry without using up power and refined gold.
62	*** Pacus are one of the harder creatures to tame by virtue of being aquatic, existing in the germ heavy Swamp biome and being a constant drain on your algae supplies. However, penning them along with Pufts and Morbs can easily give you enough good quality food from their eggs, along with free renewable resources. Morbs constantly release polluted oxygen without needing to consume anything, which Pufts consume to produce slime. This slime can then be distilled to make algae and polluted water, both of which the Pacus need. Best of all, this entire process can be easily automated, and excess polluted oxygen can easily be converted back to oxygen automatically, meaning that this whole setup needs almost no attention at all.
63	*** Ranching Glossy Dreckos. A Glossy Drecko has a chance to be born to regular Dreckos when they feed on Meal Wood. Note this is not the Meal ''Lice'' which are harvested from Meal Wood, they eat the ''whole'' plant, so they need grazing access to planters or farm tiles, not just eating from a feeder. Complicating this is that Drecko's only grow hides that can be shorn if they spend most of their time in a hydrogen gas environment and hydrogen is one of the gasses that Meal Wood can't grow in. However, one can find a clever way to allow Dreckos to spend most of their time in hydrogen while still having access to growing Meal Wood by carefully exploiting the weight differences between gasses. They will then have a steady supply of plastics without the heat output and energy requirements normally used in an elaborate oil refinement production chain.
64	*** Slicksters only exist at the very hot bottom of the map, and capturing them requires you to use plastic traps that unfortunately melt in their home biome. That said, their eggs can easily be stolen and relocated, and slicksters consume carbon dioxide and excrete crude oil, which means that with enough of them you can make a self-cycling loop with oil refineries and petrol generators. Molten Slicksters are even better at this, since they immediately make petrol without the need for oil refineries, though they do need very high temperatures and skipping refineries means no natural gas.
65	*** Pips are not as hard to ranch, if you plan ahead for their pen. Placing Arbor Acorns in the same pen with the right placement of natural tiles will cause the pips to plant them. These will eventually grow into full trees, with an optimal build having 4 wild trees in total. You only need two to feed 8 tame pips, and the rest of the trees can be used however you see fit. Pips also provide dirt, and a sizable amount of it too. This can eliminate all your needs for farming and provide free meat and eggs. Doesn't hurt that the trees are rather easy to maintain due to their good temperature tolerance.
66	*** Aside from being fliers, and therefore hard to catch and tame, Shine Bugs have by far the most variants, and breeding one into another requires feeding them progressively harder to grow foods, but Radiant bugs provide as much as a whole room of paintings of decor each.
67	*** Shove Voles are difficult to catch and keep due to their ability to burrow through tiles, but provide five kilos of meat per critter.
68	** Sleet Wheat farming. The wheat itself is only found naturally in cold biomes, requiring the Dupes to traverse into there, most of its cultivatable temperature range is ''below'' freezing, it's best irrigated with liquid clean water which necessarily needs to be ''above'' freezing, it takes a lot of cycles to fully grow, and its harvested produce is also its own seed, so if all of its output is accidentally consumed the farm goes fallow. However, it can be cooked into Frost Buns on its own, and when combined with many other crops it produces some really high-quality and calorie-dense food.
69	** Steam Turbines are difficult to maintain since they require an ungodly amount of heat just to run them, and the steam they require condenses very quickly without heat. If you can make them however, they give enough power equivalent to a single petrol generator without the excessive waste and effectively serve as one of the game's best cooling systems.
70	** "Taming" Geysers and Volcanoes. The products they provide are mostly too hot to use normally, located in hard to reach locations and are generally difficult to bring their materials to reasonable temperatures. Succeed in doing so, and that Geyser or Volcano will provide you infinite resources of their type.
71	** Potted Wheezeworts. Yes, they also appear under BoringButPractical for chilling centralized oxygen production and mitigating the heat given off by common appliances and power generators. But between their minor capacity for sinking heat and the fact that any given asteroid has only a finite number of them[[note]](discounting getting more from other planets once rocketry becomes available in the very-late game)[[/note]] they are ill-suited to dealing with major heat-producing industrial processes or chilling something to extremely low temperatures (like as required to make liquid hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel.) Unless, that is, you come up with an elaborate system of heat exchange and feedback loops using [[GameplayAutomation automation]] that can serve to maximize the efficiency and impact of the limited number of Wheezeworts available.
72	** Sour Gas Boiler, again, even though its power potential is usually quite redundant by the time it's available, it becomes a very potent source of Polluted water, which can be easily turned in normal water in your Industrial Brick. It's still water positive (2/3 of the spent water surplus), even if you use the water get more oil from Oil Wells, to get more sour gas boiling, especially if you use the resultant carbon dioxide to also produce more Oil/Petroleum from your Slicksters.
73	** Rocketry is by far ''the'' most resource-intensive 'side quest' in the game. Not only does it require taking control of the outer layer of the asteroid, a hard task in its own because the amount of steel needed, the player also needs a specific research station that needs to be placed outside the asteroid, a large amount of steel (again) to build the rocket, a lot of petroleum (from refining oil) or liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (made with lots of electrolysis and an extreme cooling system) for fuel, and it needs to be set up in a way that A: doesn't end up boiling the base upon take off or B: kills any creature you bring back from other planets by either being exposed to the vacuum of space or boiling them alive. Astronaut dupes also have ''the'' highest morale requirements out of any of the jobs that can be assigned to duplicants. This is all, however, very much worth it, as getting a spaceship setup gives the player access to ''infinite'' resources. Infinite wheezeworts? Infinite refined metals? Infinite hatches? Infinite more exotic materials that don't occur on your asteroid? The list goes on...
74	** Sporechids emanate Zombie Spores, which are nigh-indestructible and cause a really nasty disease. Furthermore, they only accept a carbon dioxide atmosphere to live. However, they have an insane decor value of of ''80'' in a huge radius, and can live in a wide array of temperature. This makes them the nec plus ultra of decor in extreme environement if you are brave enough.
75	* DisasterDominoes:
76	** Likely to happen, given how many factors you need to keep in mind for your base to function properly.
77	** Duplicants with Ugly Crier or Vomiter traits hold particularly great potential for this, since after being stressed out they become a source of stress for everyone in vicinity.
78	* DiscOneNuke: One of the possible rooms you can have in your base, the Great Hall, provides all who dine in it a whopping +6 Morale boost - as much as the highest tier dishes, for example. The furniture required for it is: at least one dining table, a recreational building (a mere water cooler qualifies) and a 20+ Decor object, like one of the decorative plants that grow in the wild... or the printing pod that you start the game with. The whole thing can be easily set up by the second day, and its morale bonus combined with buffs from other things you want as soon as possible, like toilets and bedrooms, will let you rush any jobs you need to set up your base, without worrying about things like decor or better food.
79	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Tying to the GreenAesop nature of the game, dealing with heat is something you will have to plan since the beginning of the colony. Neglect it, and you'll find to your horror that your crops start dying, Duplicants getting heatstroke, machineries overheating, and so on as average temperature keeps rising. It's pretty much a simulation of what global warming can screw up.
80	* DumpStat: Creativity and Cooking are useless for non-Artists and non-Chefs appropriately, and you'll need only one of the former and a couple of the latter. Caregiving speeds up treatment of injured and sick dupes, but it's much better to avoid both of them in the first place. The Ranching stat used to be completely useless even for your dedicated ranchers (it used to speed up taming of critters, but tame critters lay tame eggs anyway), but now it makes grooming last longer, thus keeping your critters happy with less maintenance. Considering the usefulness of Ranching, it's arguably one of the must-have stats now.
81	* EarlyGameHell: The early to mid-game is often regarded as the hardest parts of the game. There are a ''lot'' of things that need to be set up to maintain livability and certain research trees needs to be rushed since the lack of them severely limits your ability to maintain your colony. This is not an easy task as, on top of all this, one must maintain a low-stress level amongst the duplicants by allowing them to have break times and keeping decor in the base at a high level, lest they break down and cause the space age equivalent of a [[VideoGame/DwarfFortress Tantrum Spiral]]. Because of this, many players will attest that the late game is by far the ''easiest'' part of maintaining a colony.
82	* EatDirtCheap: The humble mush bar, whose only material ingredients are water and ''dirt''. Presumably the Microbe-Musher that produces them treats them in such a way to increase their nutritional value above baseline dirt, but they are still pretty poor sources of calories, [[MasochistsMeal taste disgusting]], and [[PottyEmergency give duplicants the runs]].
83	** Hatches primarily eat dirt and minerals, and convert them into coal. Pokeshells munch on rotten food and Polluted Dirt and convert them into industrially-useful sand.
84	* EarthShatteringKaboom: The planet seen the the Cosmic Update video had one.
85	* ElaborateUndergroundBase: You certainly can build one. Supporting it is another problem entirely, since you have to provide oxygen and heating to the whole complex.
86	* EndlessGame: In the beta builds, there's no real 'end goal' to building a colony outside of making it self-sufficient, and even that is more a SelfImposedChallenge than anything else. There were hints that there will be an ultimate 'end game' to the Colony in the future, with several updates building more and more to a proper storyline coming down the line.
87	* ExplosiveBreeder: All the creatures of the asteroid can become this once you get a proper ranching/egg incubation area up. Special mention goes to Shinebugs and Pacus though. Although balanced out by the fact that they're usually short-lived, it's extremely easy to turn a group of three into 20+ in the span of a few cycles.
88	* ExtremeOmnivore: Hatches can eat ''anything'' solid lying around (except coal). The in-game database even says that the trope does not begin to describe the hatch's diet, as "omnivore" does not extend to the non-organic materials it can digest.
89	* TheFamine: A frequent cause of colony collapse. Too many Duplicants with too few food sources can mean a lack of food, creeping atmosphere or temperature changes can cause crop failures, and food can rot to inedibility over time if care is not put into storage. All of these can force the colony to resort to mush bars and frantic digging for muckroots, and even those are not guaranteed to provide enough food.
90	* FantasticFruitsAndVegetables: Literally every growable crop in the game.
91	* FluffyTamer: Ranchers can tame all the various critters that inhabit the asteroid and all dupes apparently find ''all'' the critters adorable, since they all add a positive decor effect while in their presence. For Shinebugs and Dreckos it makes sense since the former is a flying glowing lightbulb with BlackBeadEyes and the latter is a fluffy sloth-like creature. However, this also includes [[ExtremeOmnivore Hat]][[MoreTeethThanTheOsmondFamily ches]], [[ExtraEyes Pu]][[{{Gonk}} fts]] and [[StarfishAliens Morbs]]. Keep in mind, the latter two constantly output sources that contain [[ThePlague Slimelung]] and the last one can spawn from ''uncleaned outhouses'' and[[note]]in one of the development builds[[/note]] ''dead dupe bodies''.
92	* GameplayAutomation: Added with the aptly-titled Automation Update. Various signaling wires and logic gates can be constructed, as well as many different kinds of sensors which can trigger signals when player-selected thresholds are reached. While an extremely complicated system is possible, small and simple logic systems are extremely useful to manage colony systems as they grow more complicated. Some examples:
93	** Using logic gates to create an elaborate airlock that keeps gasses on either side from mixing and prevents duplicants accidentally letting anything through (though this is somewhat AwesomeButImpractical compared to other methods.)
94	** Using thermometers to activate and deactivate heating or cooling systems to ensure the base remains within a comfortable temperature. This is especially useful if the colony is growing multiple kinds of crops close together and they all require different environmental conditions to grow.
95	** Turning on and off power systems to save on fuel and reduce stress on wiring, charging batteries when they are low and letting the generators idle when they are high. It also helps to make energy consumption more efficient, disabling and enabling energy-consuming buildings only when they would be useful (for example, only activating a gas pump when the gas near it contains a certain element and is within a certain pressure.)
96	* GeniusBruiser: In order to train as astronauts, duplicants have to first train both the supply and research skills which buff strength and learning respectively.
97	* GreenAesop: Subtle, but the game is ultimately about ''sustainability''. Oh sure, you can just strip mine and power your industrial machines with multiple Coal Generators, which are simple and early enough to obtain. Until you run out of coals, then have to start ranching Hatches to produce more... until you run out of mineral food for your Hatches. Or you can go and smelt as much Refined Metal as possible, until you realize you've produced too much heat, eventually raising your colony's average temperature and killing its crop... It would perhaps be more efficient to turn to Smooth Hatches to produce Refined Metals (which is only 75% efficient but produces no heat nor consumes energy) and optimizing your base design to reduce overall power consumption.
98	* GuideDangIt: Due to being initially released in its alpha state, the game had some shades of this. The building material system was one of the worst offenders.
99	** Fabrication recipes didn't show up until you had the necessary resources to make them. Normally this was fine since you're bound to find all types of plants and metal ores, but the ingredients for steel was almost impossible to find out in this system. Steel requires iron, which is easy enough to make, but lime and refined carbon were hard to find out about since they're used for nothing else other than steel. Worst of all, steel is required for all rocketry related items, meaning that you had to look up how to make steel just to make them.
100	* GoingCritical: To an extent - overheated machinery, overloaded wires and overpressurized pipes will break - in latter case, spilling their content everywhere.
101	** Played much straighter with the ''Spaced Out'' Research Reactor. It takes refined uranium as a fuel and outputs an '''enormous''' amount of both radiation and heat. Properly harnessed, this radiation and heat can be incredibly useful for things like research, space craft propulsion, and electricity production. But if the heat in particular is '''not''' handled properly, overheating can lead to the research reactor literally melting down, venting its heat everywhere and generating highly toxic nuclear fallout and steel-meltingly hot radioactive corium.
102	* {{Hammerspace}}: Averted in regard to materials duplicants are carrying, but played straight with their tools.
103	* HamsterWheelPower: Your earliest way to generate power. BoringButPractical, so expect to use it for a long long while.
104	* HeadDesk: Duplicants with the "Destructive" stress response will, upon reaching maximum endurable stress, proceed to a solid tile or building and repeatedly slam their fists and head into the thing until either their stress lets up, or it is broken.
105	* HelpfulMook: Hatches may not seem like this at first given their tendency to eat resources left out no matter what it is, but the fact that they're not actively hostile to duplicants and make for an easy way to get a renewable source of coal makes them a great pet to have around the colony; doubly so if you can lock one in the bathroom/room where the outhouses are, as they are ExtremeOmnivores and make a great way of getting rid of polluted dirt produced by the outhouses.
106	** Morbs may look like annoyances, spouting out bursts of polluted oxygen that carry [[ThePlague slimelung]]. However, this polluted oxygen is consumed by pufts (who produce slime, and this slime can be refined into algae, which is used to feed Pacus or generate oxygen) or can be processed into plain Oxygen with the help of deodorizers. As such, Morbs are more helpful than they look at first glance- and as a bonus they provide positive decor value.
107	* InTheFutureWeStillHaveRoombas: Banhi's Automation Innovation pack update introduced Sweepy, a small Roomba like robot that will automatically clean up debris and liquids lining the floors.
108	* {{Irony}}: The game is titled "Oxygen Not Included." You always spawn in an area with not JUST oxygen, but solidox ("oxylite") bricks to keep you alive. In fact, out of all your needs, oxygen is the one you can afford to handle last precisely because you get a fair amount to start with.
109	* JackOfAllStats: A preferred starting crew should have at least one. Since you start with only three dupes, they will have to do everything. However, you might want to keep a dupe with high Creativity or Learning stats...
110	* JetPack: The Space Industry update added them, allowing duplicants to more easily work out in space/mine large areas of the asteroid without having to create 'ladder bridges' the duplicants have to use for jumping across gaps/reaching their intended task.
111	* MadeOfIron: Duplicants can survive exposure to sub-freezing or near-boiling temperatures, holding their breath in chlorine, being mauled by rock-eating creatures, and being hit by meteors. A trip to the med-bed will get them back on their feet quickly enough.
112	* MagicTool: Your duplicants use these for pretty much everything, from digging to ''painting pictures''.
113	* MasochistsMeal:
114	** Some starting foods count as these, as your duplicants have varying standards when it comes to food quality. They will eat lower quality food, but they won't be happy about it. The easiest food to make, the Mush Bar, is also the worst, since it's literally a lump of heavily-processed mud. It can subsequently be [[DeepFriedWhatever deep-fried]] into Mush Fry, which increases its quality.
115	** Pickled Meal is referred to as "regrettable."
116	* MinMaxing: You have an opportunity to do this during initial crew selection - or, rather, to reroll the characters until you have a decent set of stats on them. Some flaws are easier to counter than the rest - say, Pacifist (can't fight) or Gastrophobia (can't cook). You need to be careful, however, or you might find yourself with a crew where no one can perform a particular needed task...
117	* MoraleMechanic: Duplicants have expectations for morale that scale with their jobs in the colony and with their experience, with more advanced jobs having higher requirements. Generally this can be kept up by having lots of decor around, having comfortable sleeping accommodations, eating good food, and socializing with their fellow Dupes. If their morale requirements are not being met, those Dupes stress level will slowly rise, eventually hitting their breaking point unless they can find an outlet to de-stress (fortunately a Massage Table works well for this.)
118	* NecessaryDrawback: Duplicants themselves, as seen in the MinMaxing entry above. Each of them has at least one negative trait, with certain traits being significantly more annoying than the others.
119	* {{Nerf}}: As the game is still being developed, several once useful tactics have long been rendered obsolete.
120	** The biggest is Abyssalite. Abyssalite could be used as a building material for tiles. Not only did it turn basic tiles into great insulators, the building speed was twice as fast as insulated tile and didn't have the negative decor the insulated tiles had, and tiles encased in Abyssalite insulation were pretty much removed from the universe as far as thermodynamics is concerned, which had a side effect of making Ceramics, a dedicated fabricated insulator material, irrelevant. Naturally, a later update made it so that it can no longer be used as a building material until the player is really late into the end game.
121	** Cooking oil into gas in the early days of the game resulted in it becoming natural gas, which was much more worthwhile as a fuel source than petroleum, how you were ''intended'' to use oil as fuel. A later update would change the gas released into sour gas, which can be turned into natural gas, but this requires significantly higher effort.
122	** For the longest time, there was no reason to use any other decor item outside of just plastering your base with paintings everywhere. The [=QOL1=] updated changed the items needed to make paintings from common items you get from mining to thimble reed specifically, on top of adding more 'lesser tier' decor items to serve as a stopgap until then.
123	** All the way since alpha, polluted water would produce polluted oxygen at a reasonable rate for little penalty so long as you were good at keeping germs in check. As such, some people would have polluted water trenches to serve as 'checkpoints' for Dupes to breathe at when traveling through unbreathable areas, which overall was more cost-effective than having exo-suits for anywhere but the magma and space layers or making additional self-powering oxygen machines for areas outside the base. The ''Spaced Out'' [[DownloadableContent DLC]] nerfed this tactic by introducing a new debuff known as Yucky Lung, which gives Dupes decreased morale if they breathe in polluted oxygen. The strategy isn't completely obsolete, but it does now require a few air purifiers and a small source of power to make practical.
124	** Wheezeworts used to be the go-to set-and-forget cooling solution. Now they can no longer be planted in flower pots, require regular fertilization with phosphorite, and emit radiation. Granted, this can also be seen as a buff since the Wheezewort will disinfect food of any food poisoning, meaning a storage space kept frozen by one in carbon dioxide will keep the food from ever going bad.
125	** Water sieves used to output water at a steady 40°C regardless of input temperature. This turned them into an excellent way to delete extra heat from polluted water used as coolant.
126	* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Your crew can eat some alien plants and animals and get sick from alien bacteria. [[spoiler: Logs you can find indicate that most, if not all, of the flora and fauna are creations of the corp that created the printing pod. They are very likely made up of the same material as the dupes.]]
127	* NobodyPoops: Averted. Dealing with refuse in a way that doesn't leave you with even more refuse is a significant part of the game's challenge.
128	* [[NoConservationOfEnergy No Conservation of Energy/Mass]]: Mostly averted, with consumption or production of mass, rather than conversion of one into another, being the exception and not the rule. Geysers, volcanoes and vents produce inexhaustible amounts of element specified by their type.
129	** Whatever temperature your building materials were will transfer over to the building.
130	** While magma makes for a great source of free heat, it's not infinite. If you splash enough water on it, sooner or later it WILL run out and crystallize into igneous rock. Same with the ice biomes - they will eventually melt if you keep dumping heat in.
131	** Played straight with the Anti-Entropy Thermo-Nullifier ruin added in the Automation upgrade. It uses a measly 10g/s of Hydrogen to chill everything near it to potentially -175 degrees.
132	** Also played straight with Wheezewort plants, which cool the air around them.
133	** Gassy Moos eat Gas Grass and excrete natural gas at five times the mass of what they ate.
134	** Some devices, such as the electrolyzer, output product at a fixed minimum temperature. This allows heat to be created by feeding it inputs below that temperature. The polluted water sieve used to output purified water at a fixed temperature, allowing heat to be deleted in the same way, but this was patched.
135	* NondescriptNastyNutritious: Mush Bars taste horrible, but provide enough nutrients to sustain your Dupes. This may have to do with the fact said bars are quite literally heavily processed ''mud''. You’re generally advised to grill the mush before feeding it to Dupes, since this makes it somewhat more palatable and also decreases the risk of food poisoning.
136	* NonEntityGeneral: The opening text of a new seed and the text logs you get from clicking on Gravitas equipment seems to indicate the player woke up and is giving the duplicants orders throughout the game despite them not appearing in person, nor using resources themselves. [[spoiler: It's strongly implied that the player is [[BrainUpload the Printing Pod itself, driven by the uploaded mind of a Gravitas scientist]].]]
137	* NoSuchThingAsDehydration: The game has elaborate water cleaning systems to produce clean water for bathing, growing food, and industrial use. Not a single duplicant drinks. Doesn't stop them needing to pee though.[[note]]Somewhat truth in television. If you're very dehydrated, you'll still need to pee to get the waste products out of your blood, but you'll pee a lot less and your pee will be concentrated.[[/note]] That being said, they will drink from expresso machines and water coolers if given the chance.
138	* NotCompletelyUseless: Sage hatches eat dirt and various foodstuffs to produce coal. This generally makes them the least useful hatch variant, as dirt is generally better used for farming and the amount of coal granted from food is miniscule. However, if you use lumber from wild-grown Arbor trees for ethanol production (for example, for power generation), the process produces very large amounts of polluted dirt, which, instead of having to deal with composting all of it, can be fed to sage hatches for coal to use in coal generators, getting even higher power production for free.
139	* NotTheIntendedUse: Solar panels are designed to be a free and easy source of renewable power for the base; the catch being the player has to go through hoops to set up a meteor storm detection system in order to protect them from damage. However, broken solar panels can't actually be destroyed by meteors and they also allow light to pass through them. This, ironically, [[https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/97lozj/i_sort_of_hate_that_this_works/ makes them great for protecting functioning solar panels from meteor showers]].
140	** Naphtha has an extremely high viscosity, and as a result it made for an ideal "liquid airlock", by dripping it down it could form a much more compact version than the more common water lock. Cementing that its use in this way was "not intended", this application of naphtha was eventually patched out in the Tublar Upgrade. The Space Industry Upgrade eventually introduced Visco-Gel, which has much the same "stacking" property as the older version of naphtha, but with several more hoops to jump through[[note]](it requires materials not found on your asteroid which means it's impossible to manufacture prior to the Dupes having the capacity to go into space)[[/note]] before the player can utilize it, making this something of an AscendedGlitch.
141	** Hydroponic tiles can be used in closed loop bathrooms to dump polluted water into, and Thimblereed uses a lot of polluted water. The kicker is that the polluted water from the bathroom is the ''perfect'' temperature to neutralize the waste.
142	** Steam Generators are meant to use heat for power, but with smart use, one can use them to cool a metal volcano for free.
143	** According to some ads in Abandoned Facility biomes, the Printing Pods were originally meant to be {{Auto Kitchen}}s. Once [[EarthShatteringKaboom Earth got shattered by a kaboom,]] they were pressed into service as {{Clone Maker}}s for re-colonization efforts.
144	** Door pumps. Using a series of automated airlocks to displace gas or liquid in one direction, you can force essentially infinite amounts of it into a given space, provided the containment chamber is built to accomodate it (coincidentally, building its walls out of airlocks will do the trick).
145	* OneStatToRuleThemAll: Athletics and Science stats. Athletics impacts how quickly duplicants can walk and Science impacts how quickly they level up all of their attributes, making both of them critical for ''any'' duplicant. Athletics in particular can make a duplicant almost useless if it's extremely low, since any further movespeed penalty (such as that from wearing an Atmo Suit) will leave them barely able to walk.
146	* OurGnomesAreWeirder: Duplicants are ~2 feet high and weigh precisely thirty kilograms, and have an odd combination of hypercompetent and pants-on-head stupid. They can build sprawling space colonies that take up the majority of a planetoid and build machines to recycle the wastes back into resources, and at the same time have no qualms about [[PottyFailure pissing on the floor (or in the kitchen, or the well, or...) if they're too far from a bathroom]] and [[LimitedWardrobe can't comprehend changing their outfits]]. Heck, the shower doubles as a laundromat because of this.
147	* OxygenMeter: Comes in two flavors: the oxygen overlay that shows you which parts of the map have breathable air, and the individual 'holding breath' meter that appears near duplicants.
148	* PintsizedPowerhouse: Duplicants weigh 30 kilograms and are 42 centimeters tall but can carry hundreds to thousands of kilograms of material.
149	* PercussiveMaintenance: The Rock Crusher runs on electrical power and operates by closing some large metal jaws over the material to be granulated once for every time a BigRedButton on the side is pushed, requiring several pushes to properly break down anything. Naturally, Dupes put their dukes up and rapidly slam the button with the knuckles of their fists like it was a speed bag.
150	* PercussiveTherapy: One possible way duplicants can react to high levels of stress is by breaking things. Including ones [[TooDumbToLive their survival is depending on]].
151	* PlaceboEffect: Used by the Placebo Pills in the Apothecary.
152	* ThePlague: Slimelung ''used'' to be this; it was very common in any Swamp biome and both contagious and very deadly. Later updates toned this back to make diseases in general much less punishing.
153	* PlotAllergy: Even with utterly alien flora in the actual middle of a lone asteroid in space, pollen allergies still exist. They're not too common, but they make dupes with allergies ''utterly bloody miserable'', raising Stress so rapidly they will probably have a breakdown right then and there unless they can get to a Massage Table away from the allergens in question.
154	* PottyEmergency: Mush bars, in addition to [[MasochistsMeal being disgusting]], also cause diarrhea. Unfortunately, because they are so bad, they are usually an edible of last resort for a colony with nothing else to eat, which means that everyone is usually eating them if anyone is. Since diarrhea causes duplicants to need to use the restroom more frequently, expect to see long lines of desperate duplicants waiting to use the colony's lavatory which is full of other duplicants doing their unfortunate business, and pray none of them have a PottyFailure.
155	* PottyFailure: Expect to be dealing with these any time your sanitary facilities aren't functioning.
156	* PoweredArmor: {{Downplayed\|Trope}}. Exosuits and Lead Suits, which have a penalty to Athletics, also give large bonuses to Excavation and Strength, respectively.
157	* PlagueZombie: The [[DescriptivelyNamedSpecies Sporechid]] is a plant that has a decor value of 80,[[note]] with a range of 7 tiles[[/note]] (For reference a masterpiece large sculpting block has a decor value of 25) can be planted in a planter pot, and doesn't require any watering! A great thing to put in the middle of your base, right? [[WellThisIsNotThatTrope Well now your entire base is covered in zombie spores.]] If you're not careful when mining out an oil biome, you may come across one of these. And if the colonist that finds it isn't wearing an Atmo-Suit, then they are going to have more than they bargained for. In addition, the spores do not die off in carbon dioxide, sour gas, or crude oil, so when your colonist is bringing in an innocent looking bottle of oil to be refined, they may be exposing the entire base. Fun!
158	* PressurePlate: An option for automation, sending a signal when Dupes (or any other object) put pressure on it.
159	* RidiculouslyCuteCritter: Critters in general are this to the Duplicants, as they provide a decor bonus.
160	* SanityMeter: Stress stat is effectively this. Depending on their stress response, overly stressed duplicants will do things like vomit, break down crying, or start breaking things. Can be decreased with improving Decor, better accomodations, or good old massage session.
161	* SaunaOfDeath: A very real possibility that can happen to your base. When you start out it's fine but as you add in machines, wires, batteries, outside sources of water such as steam geysers and purified swamp water, temperatures in your base will start rising fast. Figuring out a way to regulate the temperatures in your base is usually a major mid-game hurdle most players have to overcome. This rarely gets bad enough that the duplicants themselves over-heat, but [[TheFamine the crops the duplicants depend on for food are much more sensitive to temperature]]...
162	* SchizoTech: To an extent. Your duplicants know how to build a supercomputer working on water, but making a compost heap requires research.
163	* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: The basic cot is made from 100 kilos of raw metal. A simple screen door is made from 100 kilos of metal ore, and the placebo pill is made from 100 kilos of water, and 100 kilos of sand. Gotta figure it 'cures' their disease because "I'd rather force myself to get better than have to try and swallow '''that'''. " A foot of wire (dupes are around 2 feet tall) requires 25 kilos of metal... but the wire can carry a kilowatt and run all the way across the asteroid with no loss, assuming it isn't overloaded and broken.
164	* SimpleYetAwesome:
165	** There are a number of clever ways to deal with the inevitable buildup of unbreathable gasses in a base (primarily [=CO2=] and chlorine), but it's far easier and more efficient to simply vent them into space.
166	** The [[HamsterWheelPower Manual Generator]] always remains useful, since it's a cheap renewable source of energy. Also, it gives your duplicants something to do in their spare time and improves their physical stats.
167	** Coal Generator is tier-2 upgrade over the Manual Generator. But they are your first step into Automation, and will be your mainstay for starting up automated systems as you expand. Especially since their fuel is easily renewable through Hatches and their waste can be purified by a Carbon Skimmer.
168	** Algae Terrarium absorbs [=CO2=] and produces some oxygen, while having moderate material consumption rates. Very useful both for early game expansion and mid-game exploration by creating oxygenated checkpoints for your miners. Later patches {{nerf}}ed the practical value of them a bit, by increasing the material consumption rates and producing bottles of polluted water as a byproduct, making their utility more situational than before.
169	** Air Purifiers, which convert polluted oxygen into clean oxygen. They only take up a single tile and have to be hand loaded with sand as a consumable resource. Fortunately sand is plentiful and easy to make more of, they are only actively consuming it when exposed to polluted oxygen, and they produce raw clay as a byproduct which can be further refined into mid-grade slow-heating construction material. A couple of these can keep bathrooms and sewage cisterns sanitary, and putting a few in an open area of a swamp biome will quickly remove most of their dangers. Later updates give it a very ''minor'' nerf, due to them now requiring power to operate, but their power requirements are very low so it's still fairly practical even if it can't be spammed like it used to.
170	** Lavatories, and bathrooms in general. When a dupe uses the bathroom, they use 5 Kg of water per flush, but produce 11.7 KG of Polluted water. Using a semi-closed system with a water sieve can produce plenty of water for farming or industrial use. It can get to the point where you can have an overstock of water if not constantly using it for one use or another.
171	** The Massage Table can quickly reduce [[SanityMeter Stress]] on a single duplicant, which complements the more gradual and over time effect of high Decor nicely.
172	** Decor items themselves. They only require tier 2 research, yet you will end up plastering your base with paintings anyway.
173	** Mesh tiles, which are walkable and allow building on top of them, yet allow gas and liquid to pass through. Combined with oxygen generating and carbon-dioxide consuming buildings at lower levels of the colony, they allow oxygen to easily rise to where it is consumed while letting carbon-dioxide fall down to where it is scrubbed from the environment, and it does so without a complicated atmospheric ventilation system. Later updates {{nerf}}ed their usefulness, giving them a heavy minus decor penalty which increases duplicant stress, although they can still be useful if used sparingly.
174	** The Automation update introduced many different ways to make an airlock to keep polluted oxygen/other nasty gasses out while keeping breathable oxygen in, using various sensors and ventilation systems... However, the most effective way to make a compact airlock is to make a simple 'water trench'[[note]]a two block high moat filled with water with a single column touching the top of it[[/note]] the duplicants can run through the water but gas cannot pass through it, which not only ensures no toxic gasses are getting in but also washes some of the germs off the duplicants as they run through.
175	** Coal Generators are probably the easiest to maintain for a large part of the game. Not only is coal a semi-renewable resource thanks to Hatches, the downsides of Coal Generators are easily mitigated with some insulated tiles and a deoxidizer.
176	*** As a corollary to this, ranching Hatches. They are common in the starting biome, reproduce easily, eat literally almost anything, and excrete coal. The are perfect for starting an early-game ranch and if kept up will keep the generators and kiln provided with a steady supply of fuel as well as a regular source of meat to supplement farming.
177	** The quickest way to deal with water troubles is to find a steam geyser, set up an insulated pump system to a room made out of insulated tiles and set up a water pump there. Steam geysers are one of the ''very'' few places to find a completely clean, renewable water source, with the tradeoff being that the water is near-scalding hot. Insulated tiles and pump systems negate this problem by keeping the heat they generate to that specific room, and the bottled water the pumps generate doesn't heat up the colony much. If done right, you never have to worry about cooling the water.
178	** Wheezeworts are by far the best way to cool down your home base as they require next to no maintenance and slowly cool down the area they're planted in. Set one up in your ventilation rooms and you'll never have to worry about cooling the base down again. They do require periodic fertilization with phosphate, but that's plentiful in caustic biomes and can be a renewable resource if farming Dreckos. Spaced Out made them a bit more complicated by giving them a reasonably strong radioactive emission, giving them extra industrial uses but also making them mildly hazardous to plant in living areas.
179	** Having a colony consisting of only six duplicants. Sure, when the base starts getting bigger it'll make task take longer than it would with a large amount of dups but six duplicants is widely regarded as the easiest number to manage, as they don't take a lot of resources out of the environment and managing their stress/health is incredibly simple, on top of there being far fewer things that can go horribly wrong compared to having a lot of dups in play.
180	** Mealwood is by far the easiest food/plant to maintain, with large farms of it easily being able to carry you throughout the entire game. Even though it's a low-tier food item, it's still high enough that duplicants won't get too stressed from having to eat it, unlike mushbars. Combining the meal lice with heat and water in the Microbe Musher turns them into Liceloaf, which has higher calories and is, at worst, inoffensively bland in its food quality. Alternatively, Pickled Meal Lice give back slightly fewer calories than Liceloaf and is marginally more unpleasant to eat, but also requires no additional water and keeps for much longer than other foods, making it an easy staple to stockpile.
181	** Dusk Caps are very efficient crops, requiring nothing but darkness, carbon dioxide and slime. Their cooked variant only requires one harvest of the plant to make enough food for almost 3 dupes. Only a few plants are required to support an entire colony, and placing them at the bottom of the base with airflow tiles on top easily gives them the carbon dioxide they need. The only caveat they do have is that they require slime, but a single tile of slime can fertilize them for cycles, and slime is a renewable resource if you've got Pufts exposed to polluted oxygen. Best of all, their food gives the same value as bristle berries, meaning they can easily replace them in the early game.
182	** Pincha Peppers are one of the easier crops to farm, since unlike most crops, they ''prefer'' hot environments rather than having their growth halted. They also need polluted water which is easy to come by, and phosphorite, a material that is plentiful in their home biome. The only catch they have is that they have to be combined with other food to make something edible, but said food will always give extremely high morale.
183	** One of the best options for dealing with swamp biomes is to use a multi-airlock system with a decontamination chamber and maybe even an exosuit dock to allow duplicants to get in, dig up slime, and get out. Or, you can stick a single airlock over a swamp biome, place an oxygen scrubber on both sides of the door, and slowly dig the place out with auto-miners that will continue to work while your duplicants are asleep. That way, your duplicants aren't in the biome long enough to catch the disease, but even if they do, setting one duplicant to prioritize Care above all else can easily get the affected duplicant back on their feet. It's not an issue as long as you don't let more than one or two duplicants catch slimelung and just generally fill your base with oxygen scrubbers in key and problemic areas areas (which you should be doing anyways).
184	** Soda Fountains use up 5kg of water per use, but also destroy 1kg of carbon dioxide, and give buffs to science. Simple and useful.
185	** Basic Oxygen Diffusers that are unlocked at the start of the game remain useful all the way into the endgame. While using them as a primary oxygen source through the game will quickly deplete algae reserves, they shift into a much more commonly situational utility, by being able to produce large quantities of oxygen at a comfortable temperature with only minimal infrastructure. For places that need to be oxygenated but only get infrequent Duplicant visitation, these are an ideal solution that doesn't strain resources.
186	** Smart Batteries. Hooking up ONE to a power grid can save a lot of fuel and prevent the base heating up rather easily. They use no power but disable any generator hooked up to them when they reach their desired threshold. With further automation, it is possible to hook up automated delivery systems that make it even more efficient. Implemented wisely, this can ensure that your base can have multiple smaller power grids that are far more efficient than one big one.
187	** A Great Hall. It requires 20 decor, a recreation building, mess tables and at least 32 squares (but no more than 120). Easy enough to pull off, and provides 6 points of morale, all for the dupes having a nice place to eat.
188	** Bathtime: placing a bathtime before your dupes go to eat ensures they have enough time to wash their hands and avoid food poisoning. Clean dupes are happy dupes.
189	* SolidGoldPoop: As a product of the BizarreAlienBiology present in the asteroid's ecosystem, many creatures excrete valuable substances, the accumulation of which makes ranching valuable:
190	** Hatches are common and [[ExtremeOmnivore eat almost anything mineral]], then excrete coal at the other end of their digestion. This is a great way of converting common materials with limited utility to another common material with... quite a bit more utility (in power generation and steel for advanced buildings.)
191	*** Smooth Hatches are a breed of Hatch that can only be achieved via careful breeding. They consume raw metal ores and excrete refined versions of those metals, while keeping about a quarter of the mass to themselves. This represents much lower power requirements and heat generation than more industrial refinement processes.
192	** Pufts breath in and metabolize polluted oxygen and excrete... slime. This is a common material that off-gasses more polluted oxygen (which the Pufts can then absorb.. again) and generates [[ThePlague nasty slimelung germs]]. However, it can be refined into algae, which is useful in certain kinds of oxygen production or as fertilizer for mushroom farming. Via careful feeding and breeding, Pufts can eventually lay eggs which hatch into further sub-species with their own useful excretions:
193	*** Dense Pufts breath in oxygen and excrete oxylite, which off-gasses pure oxygen but more importantly can either be stored, or used as renewable rocket fuel.
194	*** Squeaky Pufts breath in chlorine and excrete bleach stone, which is used in certain sanitary applications (and off-gasses more chlorine).
195	** Slicksters are little floating creatures that inhale carbon dioxide and excrete crude oil, used in power production, heat exchange, and plastic production. They can be further bred into molten slicksters, which directly excrete petroleum. Normally, refining petroleum from crude oil is power intensive and generates a ton of heat, while this lets you recycle carbon dioxide directly into something usable.
196	** Gassy Moos are floating alien cows that can only be retrieved via rocket and consume only gas grass (that can also only be retrieved via rocket and only grows when irrigated with liquid chlorine.) These gassy moos [[GassHole excrete natural gas]]... [[NoConservationOfEnergy with a total mass of five times that of what they ate]]. This gas can then be used to power natural gas generators, and is capable of outputting a great deal more fuel than sources on the asteroid can for the same resources.
197	* SomeKindOfForceField: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brDXdFzKog0 The Space Industry Upgrade]] short reveals that the [[spoiler: planet seen in the background of the space biome has one]]. Why hasn't been explained yet.
198	* SpaceIsCold: Played straight, but realistically so. Vacuum is almost inevitably shown as being as cold as possible in the temperature overlay, but only because there is literally ''nothing there to contain heat''. As soon as there is any fluid which might fill that space, it just becomes the temperature of the fluid. The vacuum itself cannot conduct heat through it, and becomes a near-perfect insulator. The actual exterior of the asteroid likewise is a continuous vacuum, so the only heat which escapes that way is when atmosphere or liquid is vaporized and takes its heat with it. This also means that impacts on the asteroid surface generally retains its heat for a ''long'' time left on it's own, and any heat-generating devices in a vacuum must necessarily be connected to a cooling loop[[note]]via direct physical contact, such as a liquid or gas pipe behind a block of drywall that shares a tile with the device[[/note]] or it will eventually overheat itself due to gradual heat build-up.
199	* SpeakingSimlish: As of the Expressive Update, Duplicants will have a chit-chat with their fellows while working next to each other or while on a break, complete with {{Pictorial Speech Bubble}}s showing what subject they are discussing and how they feel about it.
200	* StockParodies: One way to reduce duplicant Stress is with art. A duplicant with high Creativity can create "Masterpieces" that resemble Creator/LeonardoDaVinci's ''Art/TheMonaLisa'', Creator/EdvardMunch's ''Art/{{The Scream\|Munch}}'', Auguste Rodin's ''[[ThinkerPose The Thinker]]'', and Creator/FridaKahlo's self-portraits.
201	* StoryBreadcrumbs: Introduced in the Expressive Update. AbandonedLaboratory and abandoned office spaces have desks which contain clues to the duplicants' origin.
202	* StressVomit: One of the stress responses that can occur when a Duplicant hits 100% stress is called vomiter. It creates a bunch of nasty "polluted water" that has to be cleaned up and will add to your other Duplicants' stress if they step in it.
203	* SuperDrowningSkills: Averted for duplicants, who can hold their breath for an impressive amount of time. Played straight for some critters, who despite being able to survive happily in oxygen, chlorine, natural gas or ''hard vacuum'', will die in seconds if fully immersed in liquid.
204	* TechTree: Present. Since earlier tech can support your crew for only so long, ignore it at your own peril.
205	* TimeCrash: Your log entries and other emails eventually reveal that [[spoiler: the "asteroid" you are on is in fact a chunk of your home planet, which was shattered after a disastrous experiment with generating temporal energy. "Temporal Tears" still remain, leaking artifacts and materials from other dimensions]].
206	* TooDumbToLive: It's annoyingly common for duplicants to dig or build themselves into a situation they can't get out of without help, which can turn lethal if they're in an unbreathable environment.
207	* TooManyCooksSpoilTheSoup: A colony can go under simply from having way more duplicants than it can support. Sure, they can make certain tasks go by quicker in the short run but more duplicants means more oxygen being used, more food being consumed and [[BreadEggsMilkSquick more duplicants desperately in need of the bathroom]], which leads into further tasks that need dealing with which can [[DisasterDominoes quickly end up spiraling out of control]]. This is part of the reason why it's considered a valid tactic to hold off on making more duplicants instead of creating a new one as soon as they're avaliable.
208	* TotemPoleTrench: Mentioned in the description of the duplicant trait 'Bottomless Stomach'.
209	--> "This duplicant might actually be several black holes in a trench coat."
210	* TrialAndErrorGameplay: In the words of [[VideoGame/DwarfFortress the game that this one takes the most influence from]]; 'losing is fun'. Even if you read everything about the game and learn what to do beforehand, expect a ''lot'' of colony deaths before you finally manage to get one that lasts past fifty cycles. Learning how to set up everything to keep duplicant stress down, how to effectively traverse more dangerous biomes, how to handle rising temperatures, keep a steady stream of food and water... It's all a process that has to be learned firsthand.
211	* UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay:
212	** Putting materials like slime or ice into storage doesn't make them safe - ice can melt, and slime can still release toxic gas.
213	** The Germs mechanic introduced in the Outbreak update means you can no longer ignore basic sanitation for your Dupes. Letting Dupes run around slime and fungus filled caves will get them a lethal respiratory disease and simply not making them wash their hands after using the bathroom will result in mass-food poisoning.
214	** Most machines give off heat. Putting too many lightbulbs over your farm can make the crops wither from overheating. And in the long run, heat management is vital unless you want to see your plants dying and your colony turning into an oven.
215	** If you try to store too much liquid in a weak container, the walls will leak before eventually bursting open.
216	** Dupes need O2 to live. If you have too little, they stress out due to barely being able to breathe. If you pressurize your base, you can over-do it and stress them out even more from popping their eardrums.
217	** Not all materials are made equal. Lead and Gold are useless for high temperature applications due to their low melting point.
218	** Pickled Meal kills food poisoning that it may have. Pickled food does indeed kill most bacteria that can cause food poisoning.
219	* {{Unobtainium}}: Neutronium has the highest hardness and lowest thermal conductivity in the game, which would make it excellent for tough outer walls and insulation. However, its material hardness is ''so'' high that it is impossible to actually extract. It only naturally occurs under unremovable geysers and at the edges of the world. The next best thing is Abyssalite, which fortunately can be extracted. Unfortunately, it can't actually be ''used'' [[BraggingRightsReward until certain late game buildings and materials are available]].
220	** Apparently there is ''one'' way to get Neutronium, and it's from having a lucky roll on a duplicant with the Super Productive trait. This is not recommended for multiple reasons, and no idea if it'll get patched, but apparently Neutronium isn't "can't" so much as "we've dialed up the hardness so high surely no one would be ''able'' to dig through it...."
221	--->''Duplicant has a 10% chance to skip working and complete a chore instantly. The chore must have a progress bar that lasts longer than 1 second to be skippable.''
222	* UpgradeArtifact: Neural vacillators, special BrainInAJar devices with attached chairs and head covers. A duplicant who uses one will have their genome re-sequenced and will be given one random major positive trait. [[spoiler:They can only be found in [[AbandonedLaboratory Abandoned Laboratories]].]]
223	* VideoGameCrueltyPotential:
224	** Critter meat is required for a high tier dish, but there's no way for humane slaughter. One can make their dupes take them out in combat, starve them to death, drown them (a popular design dumps eggs into the water so critters start drowning as they're born), and critters capable of swimming can be boiled or frozen alive.
225	** Duplicants with Ugly Crier and Vomit stress response will expel water and polluted water when they reach their stress limit. You can put them under undue stress to ''squeeze'' some extra water resource from them.
226	* VoiceGrunting: In ''Don't Starve'', every character was 'voiced' by an instrument. This time, Klei have used a theremin to generate the varied and adorably expressive noises duplicants can make.
227	* WeirdWorldWeirdFood: This should be a given for the setting, since there's not a lot of ''non''-alien things to eat. Even the plants are weird.
228	* WhatMeasureIsANonCute: Pacu are described by their encyclopedia entry as being bright and friendly, comparable to dogs in both intelligence and temperament. However, they look like fish, complete with seemingly vacant stare, and their sole purpose, aside from possibly decor, is to be eaten.
229	* WhenAllYouHaveIsaHammer: There's a number of different ways to cool things down, given how much of the game is dedicated to managing thermodynamics, but few beat the efficiency at which the combination of a steam turbine and an aquatuner with a liquid looped through it turn electricity into coldness. Do you need to recycle the coolant from your metal refinery? Turbine-aquatuner loop. Manage the large amount of waste heat from your general industrial machinery area? Turbine-aquatuner loop. Ambient heat crept into your farming area and interfered with plant growth? Turbine-aquatuner loop. Need to cool down the boiling steam from your geysers, or the molten metal from your volcanoes? Turbine. Aquatuner. Loop.
230	* WizardNeedsFoodBadly: You do get some rations at the start, but it's up to you to provide your crew with food later on.
231	* YouHaveResearchedBreathing: Some of the early TechTree borders on this. Apparently, despite having access to printing people and fantastic multitools, you still need to reinvent the compost heap. {{Justified\|Trope}}, since the dupes aren't very bright.

Context VideoGame / OxygenNotIncluded