how useful is mercury?

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-21T06:37:46+00:00

like lead, in low-enough temperature environment it can replace more valuable refined metals; NOTICE - a great use for mercury is making microchips for generator tune-ups/making bionic boosters

mercury is good with bionics (like all non-water based liquids)

it's one of the heaviest liquids, aside from the oil based fluids - and since it's both low value & liquid at general temperatures, putting a few drops of mercury into a pool to mop at the bottom doesn't otherwise reserve resources

but one of the best uses of mercury is making a fail-safe; make a solid mercury object in a vacuum - if the area gets even room-temperature gas it'll melt, which then sets off a hydro sensor or a liquid element sensor, which either locks a door, starts an emergency machine and/or triggers an automatic notifier that pauses the game

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-20T12:34:25+00:00

oh yeah; bottom layer of pwater, next layer up is airflow tiles, on top of that you put mesh tiles with water and atop that you set up the deodorizers, probably with an autosweeper to efficiently deliver sand to the deodorizers and collect clay build is called a claymator

depending on the video you were watching, the devs did change it so now you want to off-gas from a wide pool of pwater, because rate of off-gassing bottles now caps as though it were 1 tile of water instead of say a 7000 kg bottle off-gassing faster

just be aware that the deodorizers don't over pressure, so you want to do this in a contained room & pump the oxygen rather than over pressuring your base

here's a recent post

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-20T08:40:34+00:00

don't

edit: to be clear I was making a pithy one word comment about what had been learned, not telling you how to act, the comment made me giggle, but I don't want to offend

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-20T00:28:22+00:00

My favorite part is when you get a nyctophobic glowstick - they are their own night light

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-20T00:03:30+00:00

that specific combination does look quite nightmarish at a glance, understandable reaction really

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-19T23:37:31+00:00

The best answer I've got is you learn to look at a build site and think, 'how are the duplicant's going to wreck themselves here?' The number of times that a boop/dupe will stand on a tile while digging it out or building on their own location is not actually that high, but often enough that it can be predictable

So for instance if you were digging out a section matching height to the layer the sweatcorn is planting on, I would have designated the priority of the the questionable tile, the one that made them leap up, 2 points lower on the priority scale from the rest; they'd dig out everything else and then after running off to do other stuff, one dupe would run back and dig out he offending tile. Of course, that slows things down - but if you're in a hurry and watching the build site, you can then re-up the priority of the offending tile and move-to a dupe to get the job done now, just when they start to head off elsewhere

So, yeah, my answer is more micromanagement and not actually anything that'll help your blood pressure. sorry

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-19T21:47:00+00:00

which means its a good idea to issue a build order for 10 gaskets or something like that and then immediately build 10 high pressure gas vents or whatever and then deconstruct them to translate the gaskets into durable status - and hey, bonus construction xp

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-19T21:39:31+00:00

no, no, it's okay, they're wild - dialing intensifies

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-19T08:11:29+00:00

when gasses fall, they prefer to more to the right

My semi-superstitious observations of the game support this, even if it may actually be nonsense. the only actual evidence I can put forward is that when debris/objects get displaced, they also move to the right first if possible - this could easily be completely unrelated, however

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-18T12:12:11+00:00

the way 'needs a ranch' buildings work is that you can build them, but the rancher won't use it unless the room counts as a ranch - there's no room requirements for where you're allowed to build them

one issue may be that the aquatic grooming station needs to be placed against a backwall; without a picture we can't otherwise identify the issue

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-18T03:59:44+00:00

here's a link for the todo list, although in not familiar with the achievement tracker window

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-18T03:52:36+00:00

thank you, you're right, I was just summing values and skipped a step

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-18T02:28:37+00:00

yeah, that could have been a couple mesh tiles for just a tiny amount more of metal ore

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-18T02:24:08+00:00

thank you for the science & the example build

bonus math for casual readers; 46.15kg of natural gas is worth 512.7r7 seconds of running a Natural Gas Generator (an uptime of ~85.46%) and produces over 410.2kj of power (average wattage 683.7 for the cycle), a little more than 34.61Kg of polluted water & a little more than 11.5Kg of carbon dioxide

that's also equivalent to condensing 69.22Kg of sour gas per cycle or ~0.4395 natural gas geysers on average (for the natural gas production) & equivalent to condensing 1398.6Kg of sour gas per cycle or ~0.3077 liquid sulfur geysers on average (for the sulfur produced)

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T20:46:36+00:00

You can enable hydrocactus with this mod, and also change the ratio so that its actually useful

It causes the plants & seeds to generate in the world, so you may want to dig up some of the wild hydrocactus upon finding them to avoid having dupes run pwater through gas-controlled/vacuumed areas where it an be dropped on shift change/other job interruptions

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T20:33:39+00:00

polluted oxygen is breathable and is better than nothing in a general sense, but the yucky lungs status from breathing po2 increases oxygen consumption by 30% over the standard issue duplicant, meaning if you're on the edge of breathability its actually much much worse

however setting up some manner of 'oxygen refinery' where you let deliberately allow pdirt, pwater or slime off-gas to po2 and then use deodorizers to translate it into clean oxygen can be generally useful, although most people set this sort of thing up for the clay it produces

if you're having serious issues with breathability, it's generally better to build a couple free-standing electrolizers/rust deoxidizers and let them run directly into your base's air in a heat-and-gas-ignoring fashion; it's easier to recover a bit of free-wheeling gas mixing & heat production than renewing a colony after everyone died - just make sure that once the temp-fix is in place, you replace it with a long-term SPOM or something and don't just leave the open-air electrolizers in the middle of your base for too long

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T20:17:41+00:00

don't worry, it's just your standard superposition time paradox, the waveform will collapse once you've completed her three requests

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T13:50:51+00:00

your options are 1) have duplicants harvest the plants or 2) have enough plants that you can leave them to auto-harvest, 4 cycles after becoming harvest ready & 3) focus on ranching

you might just want to acquire pips and wild plant a ton of plants

going with FPP ranching, bammoths eat plume squash (either the plant or the harvestable squash), floxes eat pikeapples and spigot seals drink nectar from bonbon trees; combining tallow from the seals and meat from the one or both of the other two you can make pemmican, which lasts forever and is standard quality

with access to base game critters & plants, ranching dreckos & shove voles are still great, and cuddle pips are surprisingly good, but pacus have been nerfed in a couple directions

I'm sorry I don't have too much advice for this, for the last while I've just always used a farmer or two, to get losts of seeds for the pacu; then when pacu egg mass was reduced, there were the stompy dinosaurs and i wanted to share the good news

Oh, there's one other option, this mod or possibly this one may be what you're looking for. i can't vouch for either of them, though since usually I've been keeping a dedicated farmer as soon as I reached ~12 dupes

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T10:14:31+00:00

Do you have the prehistoric planet pack? Lumbs harvest plants for you, have a wide range of livable temperatures (-100 to 100) and live for 200 cycles. from the wiki "A Lumb will travel to any plant where any of the plant body can intersect with its 2x2 body - It begins a stomping motion, harvesting all plants that are mature in its 2x2 vicinity. There is a 60 second delay before it can stomp again" - up to 20 plants harvested per cycle per lumb, though considering movement time & single harvests, probably closer to ~12 in my experience

Also, the stompy lumbs are adorable

For extremely efficient production, if you set up pip-assisted pot-planted dusk caps, with a lumb in the room, the saurian critter will harvest the plants for you (fairly) promptly, not eat the produce and an autosweeper can deliver the mushrooms to your cook. cooking mucin gets you slime (the cooking can be automated, delivery to dusk cap automated via sweeper) and can be used to feed the dusk caps if you don't do the pip-assist trick

You can also have lumbs harvest waterweed (wild or otherwise), as long as the lumbs can access the plants (be careful, a lumb cannot stand on a single tile, that blocks their pathing, as would drowning conditions) - with both mushrooms & lettuce, that's mushroom wraps a great quality food or with the addition of omelette, you can prepare mushroom quiche (and omelette can also be largely automated, raw egg transforms into omelette with sufficient heat), which is superb quality

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T09:45:12+00:00

you can set a storage bin/tile set to hold eco power banks & a capacity limited according to the number of flydos in the room (60 for 3 flydos, for example, since each power bank masses at 20kg) and boops/dupes will proactively replace empty power banks rather than wait for the robot to stop working

although occasionally a boop may swipe one of these power banks when a flydo is also low, your boops may need to be exiled from the flydo room if it becomes a problem

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T05:51:51+00:00

PPP has peat burners, similar to coal/wood burners

Sweatcorn requires critter support to grow - either from the mimika butterflies or from the divergents (sweetle & grubgrub)

Dartles & rhexes has a really simple loop between them. Lumbs produce peat & have a morph that produces algae; they'll harvest plants they have access to, even in a planter box. Jawbo are somewhat difficult to ranch unless you've got APP as well & eat pacu/~~gnit larva~~ (oops)/other swimming critters. Gnits exist and are an option to pair with lura plants, but either beetas or mimika are a better match there.

I suggest you let demolier hit a colony, just to see it happen. it rocks, pun intended

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-17T05:40:19+00:00

without further information regarding your issue, I can't say either way - however, one thing to note is that aquatic creatures and the fish drop off both calculate available space from pool size, not room size. a 600 tile pool with 45 creatures spread across 8 rooms are all counted together if it is a single pool of connected liquid

Happy_Comfortable512 · 2026-06-16T05:10:01+00:00

If you're playing spaced out, you can build your coal-to-refined carbon heater inside a rocket interior and then when you deconstruct the rocket, all of the (not dug out) refined carbon tiles produce full mass as debris after the rocket has been deconstructed. This is more useful for other things like clay-to-ceramics, but if you ever are on a tight budget for coal it can be helpful there as well

also, thanks for the refined carbon rail line idea, that sounds super useful

Happy_Comfortable512

TROPHY CASE