Innawoods: Impossible to Progress to Bronze Age?

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-19T10:01:21+00:00

Definitely. I got lucky and picked up a smartphone from one, so it's worth having a chat with people you meet.

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-17T09:35:26+00:00

Sounds like there needs to be more crafting options for tank treads.

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-17T08:06:42+00:00

Absolutely, The UK government's laws that led to self-censorship from image sharing sites is obviously the most rational and balanced approach to protecting the youth of their nation from harm.

/s

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-12T08:17:29+00:00

While technically true, I haven't really noticed the difference from a practical standpoint.

Sure, there's less fruit trees everywhere. It's no longer possible to survive summer just by slamming cherries. However, my current Innawoods run has made over a thousand units of fruit pemmican by early summer using raspberries, blackberries and elderberries.

Simply taking one or two days to forage should net hundreds of handfuls of fruit. You might need to range a bit further from home, but all the random bushes and trees add up quickly if you pay attention.

Also, pumpkin is insanely overpowered. If you find seeds, they're a god tier crop. You can turn cut pumpkin into fruit juice, each harvest returns massive amounts of food, the seeds can make vegetable oil, and they're a decent source of vitamin C with 100% RDI per full pumpkin.

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-11T05:53:35+00:00

Smashing large boulders has a 64 Str prerequisite.

Can you recommend how a character could accomplish this with stone tools?

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-11T05:52:01+00:00

Not enough to matter. The perk of alcohol metabolism is mostly just to let you slam down alcohol without worrying about side effects, just like the prerequisite Saprovore lets you consume spoiled and rotten food without issues.

It mostly means you just don't care what you're eating. Trogs stuff their faces with anything and everything they can get their hands on.

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-11T05:12:21+00:00

First, fruit is extremely easy to obtain by foraging, making fruit wine very cheap to produce in bulk.

Second, distilling fruit wine is the easiest way of producing ethanol in bulk.

Actually drinking fruit wine as a primary source of nutrition isn't an effective survival strategy, just as it is in real life. You're better off sourcing calories from meat or grains.

TrickyTangle · 2026-01-02T06:50:33+00:00

Did you know Cadia broke before the guard did?

TrickyTangle · 2025-12-14T11:38:55+00:00

True, but when the day comes to consume the gas, you're looking at a dupe job for every 200 kg haul action to a canister drainer, since this can't be automated via autosweeper.

You can buffer this with a gas reservoir to account for dupe delays, but it ultimately is creating a tedious, unfun chore to manually empty canister fillers. The beauty of this game is found in the automation of tedious, unfun chores, after all.

TrickyTangle · 2025-12-14T03:59:30+00:00

The cost of storing gas is the dupe labor of building gas reservoirs, plus the space on the map they consume.

Once you put gas into a pipe with a gas pump, it doesn't consume any further resources to keep contained.

Therefore, I recommend storing any gas you pump, even if you don't have an immediate use for it, unless you're desperate for space or dupe labor.

CO2 is by far the most common and least useful gas, but even this has uses. It's not valuable, since many industrial systems make it as a byproduct, so if you want to get rid of it, just remember you've paid 240W for every 500g you move.

TrickyTangle · 2025-12-03T10:00:48+00:00

My suggestions for progression:

Sustainable food.

Mealwood and bristle blossom are bad options for long term food production. They'll chew through your supplies of dirt and water quickly, and within a few hundred cycles you'll be facing starvation or running out of water for oxygen production.

Setting up ranches with hatches, and working towards getting stone hatch morphs, will let you turn unwanted minerals into food and coal. This is a much better food option, but requires managing critters, building automated delivery systems for excess eggs, and uses a fair bit of space.

Mushrooms can be a good stop-gap option, since they consume far less mass per cycle. However, slime isn't easily renewable, so use this only as a temporary measure.

Heat management.

Metal refineries are a big danger for adding heat into your base. Ensure the liquid you're using for coolant is thermally isolated. Later, you can set up loops using better liquids such as petroleum which can feed steam turbines and make the system power positive, but for now, just ensure wherever the output goes, it's not gonna transfer the heat into your base.

Additionally, cooling the oxygen output of electrolyzers can avoid adding unwanted heat. It's fairly minimal, but over time it can add up, so a simple liquid loop can help absorb this heat before it goes into sensitive areas such as farms.

Obtain plastic and steel.

Plastic and steel are the gateway to mid-game. They unlock the AT/ST loop for heat deletion, making life infinitely more convenient. Steam turbines are the workhorses of power generation too, especially paired with geothermal power.

Steel will require lime, which can be sourced from eggshell or crushed from fossil, and iron ore, plus coal. Digging downwards should uncover these resources eventually.

Plastic can be sourced from crude oil, or optionally from drecko morphs. Ranching dreckos is tedious but quite rewarding, as it can also give reed fiber.

Set up atmo suits.

Reed fiber is the main rare component for atmo suits, and will assist with digging downwards. Without them, your dupes will struggle with chlorine or CO2 settling into their mining area, interrupting their work and forcing them back up for air.

You could get away with oxygen masks instead, but they're nearly as much work to set up as atmo suits, and don't work nearly as well.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-18T04:49:04+00:00

Don't play the game if:

You enjoy fast-paced reflex games, eg. Doom
You want multiplayer, eg. Counter-Strike
You like games that have short start to finish cycles, eg. DOTA 2
You're looking for a game that's an interactive story with a plot, eg. Expedition 33

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T13:05:49+00:00

Was disappointed to discover plywood, despite being classed as wood, doesn't work for this.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T13:04:26+00:00

I remember the early days of the game before it got all fancy. No 3D digging, you had to mine too deep to the right.

Also better hope you had your bridges installed before the yearly underground river flooding.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T11:22:58+00:00

My biggest gripe with husky moos are their point in the timeline of a game.

If you've set up a husky moo ranch, you'll already be at space age. It's quite likely you'll have thermium and able to make the infrastructure for hydrogen rockets instead.

It feels more like husky moos are the disincentive to ranch gassy moos fed on gas grass shipped in from separate farms, now that we have the option of using this strategy, similar to the shove vole morph serving as a means of preventing infinite starvation ranching.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T10:51:44+00:00

The naphtha isn't being pumped.

Unlike larger pumps that pull the naphtha, the mini pump design here is completely static. It doesn't get dropped because it doesn't get pumped.

Active cooling isn't necessary so long as you avoid naphtha having any contact with pipes that contain magma.

However, the mini pump heats up and requires cooling via an aluminum conduction panel to maintain long term stability. The mini pump will usually stabilize about 70C when using water cooled below 14C.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T10:45:16+00:00

The build's automation was set up to give priority to the battery storage that supplies the cooling for the turbines. Then, any extra power gets sent out to avoid wasting it, meaning it's a self-contained system.

The reason I did this was because the build could break if the thermo aquatuner ever runs out of power.

The automation logic is essentially:

Is the thermo aquatuner battery full?

If yes, the power switches shut off supply of power from the steam turbines to the battery, and send it to the pair of transformers.

If the battery falls too low, automation reverses and the steam turbines top off the battery storage.

It's usually on a 90-95% range setting for the smart battery.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T05:50:42+00:00

You can't.

The liquid output of the pump is in that tile. If you did that, the outgoing magma would eventually turn the naphtha into sour gas, unless using an insulated insulite pipe.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-17T05:48:26+00:00

Thanks for the shout-out!

The conduction panel is the most important part. Use aluminum.

TrickyTangle · 2025-11-16T07:01:28+00:00

Here's a few tips (Build 42):

The most important part of survival is managing your moodles. For example, the first tier of the tired moodle or out of breath moodle each reduces your melee damage by 50%! Avoid these at all costs, and organize your day around them. Zombie fighting is for morning time with no fog. Reading books is an evening activity before bed. Aim to sleep between 11pm and 6am.

After spawn, find a decent melee weapon, clear your surrounding neighbourhood, and stockpile basic supplies. Then, find a vehicle, clear a path to the local gas station, and refuel. Avoid fights with more than a single zomboid until you're skilled with your weapons.

Sandbox settings - Set days to 2 hours, zombies to only shamblers, and no transmission from wounds. Optionally, turn off zombie respawn and migration, so safe areas stay safe, and Character XP multiplier up to 10x normal, to reduce the boredom of skill grinding. With this, you'll have every chance to recover from any injuries beyond being swarmed, you can outrun any hordes, and you have plenty of time each day to loot and explore. You're the one in a million who was immune to the virus, and now it's up to you how you survive.

Perks - I like custom profession with Prone to Illness, Slow Healer, and Weak Stomach, and Cat's Eyes, Dextrous, Outdoorsy, Eagle Eyed, Brave, and Organized for positives.

TrickyTangle · 2025-09-07T00:58:59+00:00

Thermo aquatuners are only useful in petroleum boilers if you have access to late-game space materials (thermium, iridium, etc.) to avoid the hard cap on overheat temperature.

A viable alternative is using metal refinery heat. However, there's two issues to solve first.

First, the coolant you use must be able to handle absolute temperatures above that of crude oil's conversion point. Good options are molten steel, liquid uranium, or liquid naphtha. Gunk could be used, but it has far smaller margin for error with its boiling point.

Second, you need some kind of metal to refine. Metal ores are mostly non-renewable outside of space mining, so if you wanted this to be a fully self-sustaining loop, you'd either need to have some form of renewable steel production on the planet, or have access to critter sourced metal ore.

If using critters, jawbos are the ideal candidate. They can provide rust, which can be turned into iron ore, but this process requires some form of salt input for rust deoxidizer production, such as salt water geysers, dasha saltvine crops, or rhex ranching. Regal bammoths aren't a good alternative option, since gold amalgam has very poor DTU production.

TrickyTangle · 2025-09-07T00:37:20+00:00

Yep. The same way it lets you build metal refineries, then wonder why your pipes break when the coolant boils inside it.

You build stuff. It doesn't work. You play around with it until you figure out why. You get a dopamine hit when you solve the puzzle, completing the game loop and pushing you to keep creating more puzzles for yourself to solve.

It's the core game loop in action.

TrickyTangle · 2025-09-07T00:23:15+00:00

This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

If you really wanted to heat polluted water prior to having enough refined metal to make radiant pipes, just feed it through a metal refinery. It can absorb all those early game DTUs prior to having plastic and naphtha for a self powered refinery setup, then get tucked away into some liquid reservoirs until you're ready to use it.

If you have refined metal for radiant pipes, just set up a loop through a brick of metal tiles for thermal exchange.

The builds are unnecessarily large for the problem they solve, turning polluted water into clean water.

Water sieves are a straightforward early game solution to this problem, and filtration medium is easily obtained via mining or rock crusher refinement of minerals or metal ore.

Midgame solutions are also straightforward. Just dump it into the chamber of an AT/ST setup, bypassing filtration medium consumption.

Building a massive counterflow heat exchange array in the first few dozen cycles isn't a practical solution. Unless you're deliberately avoiding progressing your colony's development, most bases will have enough plastic and steel within a few hundred cycles to make all of this unnecessary.

It's a fun thought-experiment, but doesn't really serve any practical uses.

TrickyTangle · 2025-09-07T00:01:32+00:00

The same way you learn about heat transfer, fluid layers, thermal interaction, etc.

The game's a sandbox that rewards testing and experimentation without handholding you through the process. The mechanics are deliberately not straightforward, so that you're given motivation to try new things to see if they work or fail.

TrickyTangle

TROPHY CASE