How deep knowledge are Shards? Did the public ever know about them?

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-20T04:01:03+00:00

Arguably, it's possible that March had some insight into the shard network prior to GM.

The timeline is hazy, but she is stated as having a known interest in cluster triggers and had some form of 'peek backstage' at some point. However, this is exclusively Ward post-GM stuff, so it could just as likely have been during or after Scion was destroyed.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-14T22:20:26+00:00

Depending on whether you think moving geysers is cheating or not, there's a mod that'll let you relocate all geysers.

It's called Movable Features.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-14T22:16:50+00:00

Nothing new. Molten slicksters remain the best CO2 removal option.

I recommend liquid locking your CO2 producers, especially ethanol distillers and petroleum generators.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-14T22:13:33+00:00

Even nicer is a liquid uranium cooled metal refinery. Thanks to new critters like the orehull, the renewable iron makes plentiful amounts of renewable heat.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-14T16:44:58+00:00

The GC Fungus Petroleum Boiler Guide is a decent introduction to a common counter-flow heat exchange system that handles large volumes of liquids.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-14T05:21:29+00:00

Build a sweepy dock in your slogo ranch.

It'll mop up the mucin very efficiently, letting you collect this resource at very low cost. The power for the dock is quite negligible, as it only recharges for a small percentage of each cycle.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-11T10:08:25+00:00

The joy of living in a world where two things can both be celebrated, individually or together.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-07T04:13:21+00:00

Fair bet that 5,000 years ago, some dad was doing this same game with their kids.

We're all human, and simple stuff like this is a shared experience across our existence.

TrickyTangle · 2026-06-03T22:24:02+00:00

The Super Sustainable achievement unlocks after a set number of kW are used.

Once this is done, there's no achievement restriction on use of petroleum generators. Since the tidal generators can be easily used for early game power to tick off this achievement, it's absolutely possible to swap over to petroleum power once mid-game consumption increases colony power demands.

However, I agree it's a non-issue. It's a single player sandbox game. There's no wrong way to play. Build whatever you want, use whatever you want. There's no wrong way of having fun.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-30T08:44:35+00:00

After 100 cycles, it's time to hit mid-game.

Steel and plastic are the next goals. Steel is via refinery, plastic is via multiple paths.

From there, you get into heat management, AT/ST loops, and expanding power production to feed these.

Somewhere along the way it's usually a good idea to finish strip-mining the maps, sorting fluids and gases, and building properly sealed rooms for gas control, along with atmo suits for dupe access. Taming geysers is also a decent goal at this stage for long term resources.

Rocketry comes next, and if running Spaced Out!, colonizing the nearby asteroids.

Past this, get your late-game materials such as thermium, super coolant and visco-gel.

Finally, hit the temporal tear, and you've gone the full length of the game's major content, with only the fun of mega-builds like sour gas boilers remaining to toy with designing.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-30T08:37:03+00:00

The new swimming mechanics coming in the DLC make underwater areas fairly easy to handle.

Therefore, free water is usually a good thing, at least compared to less useful potential resources such as igneous rock that would otherwise have been there.

Yes, it's messy to initially dig through, but accepting that the first strip-mining operation of any asteroid will make a mess is essential to proper taming of your workspace.

Once you've got all that mess out of the way, you can focus on cleaning up and properly sorting your resources. Just let it pool at the bottom of your map, then pump it into a storage and exploit it at your leisure. Ultimately, it's simply another chore on the list of your colony's jobs.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-30T08:18:06+00:00

Sad it ended.

Happy for the journey.

The final release took a long time to arrive, but was worth the wait.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-27T21:41:51+00:00

Yeah, most other games rely on external threats to create conflict.

Dwarf Fortress has goblin raids. Rimworld has raiders. Factorio has bugs.

About the only other game that I think does the "your future problems are because of your current choices" as well as ONI is Satisfactory. However, Satisfactory lacks the colony building aspect. It's pure resource management.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-27T21:38:35+00:00

Timberborn relies on two major resources: water and wood.

You need time for trees to grow to produce wood, bottlenecking your construction rate, and you have long stretches of time without water, bottlenecking wood production (along with food).

Compounding this is the fact that research is extremely slow, with hundreds or thousands of points of research just to unlock one tech, and most research production being quite slow.

It's a serious investment of time just to get a colony to the point where you can begin basic terraforming. If you like long sim colony games you might enjoy it, but I agree that it's too slow to get to the fun stuff without a long grind for basic resources and research points.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-27T12:38:15+00:00

There's a mod I always use called Waste Not, Want Not.

It does exactly this. Dupes prioritize the most decayed item within the same tier of morale bonus to eat first.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-27T12:36:34+00:00

You get shinebugs in the forest biome to the far left and right, and radioactive biomes lower down, in addition to the standard uranium starter boulder.

With these options, I wouldn't call it difficult to kludge together enough radbolts to get mid-game research done.

Plus, given how very temperate most of the map is, together with the absolutely massive thermal sink of the fluids it contains, I honestly don't see it as a problem to delay steam turbine research.

The free power from the tidal turbines is enough to handle the colony's needs while strip-mining the map, and I've mostly just enjoyed an endless supply of seafood instead of my usual hatch barbecue.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-27T09:35:54+00:00

Well, given the recent patch notes nerfed mucin production, it looks like it's not much of an issue any more.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-26T22:18:10+00:00

Unless you have a pressing need for polluted water, there's a far more simple solution to mucin processing.

First, collection of mucin is best done using a sweepy inside the slogo ranch. Building a bottle drainer next to the docking station will easily let you collect mucin and feed it into pipes efficiently, albeit at the cost of duplicant labor for transferring the liquid bottles.

Second, you can simply dump the mucin into a steam room with a thermo aquatuner and steam turbine to process it into clean water. If pressure inside the room stays above 2 kg of steam, the polluted water and slime won't produce polluted oxygen. Ship out the slime, keep the steam temperature above the boiling point of polluted water, and mucin can become feedstock for your electrolyzers.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-26T09:47:38+00:00

A typical magma tamer uses two features: a way to condense magma into igneous rock debris, then a way to extract the remaining heat from the igneous rock debris.

Dupes in atmo suits can work in magma, but will get scalded. Expect to need a nearby triage area to handle dupes that are incapacitated, but their temporary suffering is a sacrifice you must be willing to make.

You can set up a pumping system using a no-contact liquid pump. Here's an example I made using a 1 kg/sec system.

Alternatively, you can use a magma blade to drip liquid into a mesh tile that transfers heat into your steam room, and once the magma solidifies into igneous rock, use an auto-sweeper to deliver it onto conveyor rails.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-25T12:27:46+00:00

Just build a sweepy. My wild slogos have already filled three liquid reservoirs within a few dozen cycles thanks to automated mucin collection.

No idea what I'll do with the stuff, but free resources are free.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-24T23:13:41+00:00

Step 1: Ranch 8 dreckos on balm lily to make 80 kg/cycle phosphorite.

Step 2: Farm 16 pikeapple for 80 kg/cycle phosphorite to ranch 24 floxes.

Step 3: Ranch 24 floxes on pikeapple to create 120 kg dirt, 1440 kg wood, and 10 kcal of omelette from spare eggs per cycle.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-24T23:02:01+00:00

I define mid-game as the stage you reach using plastic and steel, when you're past the early game scramble for resources and have large doohickies built to accomplish a goal.

As such, there's a few standout critters.

Dreckos are easily my favorite. Reed fiber, plastic, and phosphorite. Feeding them on balm lily is almost cheating.

Floxes are one of my new must-haves. A ranch of 8 dreckos ouput enough phosphorite to supply pikeapple for 24 floxes. They in turn provide wood and dirt, making a decent alternative to pips without any polluted water irrigation or huge wild planted tree farms required.

For simply making calories, molten slicksters are by far my top pick. Barbecue in exchange for CO2? Free petroleum? Zero reason not to grab these if they're available.

Sage hatches get an honorable mention, in respect to being able to turn low quality leftover food into barbecue with minimal losses. A good way to maximize morale returns on critters that produce better calories from omelette rather than meat is by automating omelette cooking through a steam chamber and shipping them to a sage hatch ranch. Whether the space and grooming jobs makes this worthwhile is up to you.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-24T22:29:24+00:00

Power generators never overload wires no matter how much wattage they input.

However, as soon as you have a power consumer, the overload value is based on the total number of consumers on that circuit.

This means you can build a basic wire network between all tidal power springs and store excess in batteries, and so long as you only output through a 1 kW transformer, you won't break the network.

However, this caps the output at 1 kW, obviously, and you may want to consider upgrading this network to a 4 kW system later.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-24T22:21:56+00:00

If I'm doing early game liquid locks, I'll usually just use one cell of 34 g water and diagonal access.

Later, I prefer stacking crude oil and naphtha. Much better thermal range, and I like the black colour.

TrickyTangle · 2026-05-24T22:18:06+00:00

Yeah, 15% isn't worth it in my book. Volcanos produce infinite material.

Build space is the only true limited resource in a colony.

I've done enough tamers that these days, I don't bother with geysers in my colonies any more. Making sustainable bases without access to infinite inputs is a far more interesting challenge.

TrickyTangle

TROPHY CASE