TOP 5 MISTAKES NEW PLAYERS MAKE - Tutorial - Oxygen Not Included Guide

In this video I show you the TOP 5 Mistakes that a new player makes when playing. Learn from my mistakes and you will find yourself getting farther and restarting less and less !
Watch at 1.25 or 1.5 speed if English is your first language. I talk slowly on purpose so that ESL learners can also enjoy the content !

What is Oxygen Not Included?
Oxygen Not Included is a space-colony simulation video game being developed by Klei Entertainment. The game is currently available on Steam Early Access. Oxygen Not Included allows players to manage their colonists and help them dig, build and maintain a subterranean asteroid base. Players will need water, warmth, food, and oxygen to keep them alive, and even more than that to keep them happy.

[keavinmutuc]

Lavatories are actually a good source of water. 5kg goes in 11kg goes out. Just a matter of purifying and disinfecting. Everything else is spot on!

[ENBOmniGaming]

Just FYI I said in the video that Mealwood uses "fertilizer" but Its fertilized with "dirt", not "fertilizer" which is used for other things. Very important distinction! Thank you to the people who pointed that out ! - 2022 edit- Its been 3 years since I made this video, and 90% of it is still accurate ! Some menus and systems have changed but I'm pleased so many new players are still benefitting from these tips. READ the comments on this video - there are amazing tips from all kinds of players below

[G.r.e.g.g.l.e.s]

Best tip for water conservation: Use seived germy water for your electrolyzers! Using toilet water, polluted water from equipment sources, and pockets in swamp/slime biomes will make your life easier so that you can save pure water reservoirs for those blossoms/other urgent needs. The food poisoning will die on contact with clean O2 so fast you may as well have been using fresh water. There's no difference to your dupes and their immunity gets better so they can host plenty of food poisoning from airborne sources.

Best tip for Insulating heat: Go straight for the Abyssalite! Don't ever use insulated tiles or pipes unless it's a really really hot source you're blocking off like magma biome and steam vents/volcanoes. Just ALWAYS use Abyssalite. Regular Abyssalite is a nearly perfect insulator, but if you need it that badly, insulated Abyssalite tiles are 10, 000 times more effective.

Best tip for pipes/plumbing: Learn how to avoid backflow in liquid and gas pipes by splitting piping properly. In addition, block directional flow off using liquid and gas bridges, which will make only 1 direction possible for flow on that line. There is also a neat trick where gases and liquids prefer to go through bridges every time, so you can make a priority queue for fluid flow, meaning you send air to one part of your base first, then the other parts, then last you start filling your exosuits and finally you start dumping it outside. This will ensure you can prioritize what goes where.

Best tip for Oxygen production: Everything is dependent upon airflow. Clear out larger areas and make sure at least 1/5 of your tiles are airflow or mesh tiles. This will make your gases flow better, meaning you don't necessarily need to produce more O2 and waste resources, but you can actually clear out the CO2 and Chlorine rather easily by maintaining pressure and flow of gases. The best solution is the cheapest (and quickest) quite often.

Best tip for prioritization: Make sure on the new priorities board, you select certain things for all duplicants to do urgently or to avoid. I recommend completely disabling combat for all duplicants, and disabling art for all duplicants but the selected artists, who will learn faster, and produce the good paintings instead of the crayon drawings and fruit bowl sketches. Additionally, and more importantly, you should make life sustaining an extra high priority for all duplicants, as well as toggling. This will ensure that oxygen delivery and clearing out toilets will happen even when important projects occur, and that things you toggle (often times through direct player command) will actually happen in a timely fashion, so there's less waiting around for sweeping before they hit a button or close a door. And finally, I recommend slightly prioritizing delivery and care, so that minor resources are consistently getting where they need to be and people are taken care of in med bays before water is cleaned or iron is mined.

Best tip for Expanding the Colony: Always ALWAYS make sure to avoid all contact unless intentional with bad gases, heat, and germs, even if you think you're prepared for them. If you're not aware of a problem ahead of time, it can get out of hand. This is particularly important when mining Abyssalite, as you should make sure to keep a one block gap of border Abyssalite between all the biome border columns. Understand what pressures of gases and liquids you're breaking into, as well as what heats and specific heat capacities you're dealing with, and how many germs you're dealing with. Pre-preparing a swampy biome with tons of mesh tile, liquid locks, vacuum airlock door heat seals, exosuits, and air deodorizers will 100% keep airborne slimelung outside your base. Setting your storage to sweep only will prevent germy substances from coming into the base (although they die over 25-50 cycles generally from O2 or CO2 exposure). You can also put your storage in the swamp biome itself, and pump in chlorine around the area. For oil biomes, you should pre-emptively get some CO2 down for your slicksters and also make sure the oil doesn't spill out into your base making a hot mess everywhere.

[teodorosantos]

Genius idea: put 20 flatulent dupes in a room and suck out the natural gas.
BOOM, now you have an energy source that runs on farts.

[SergioLeRoux]

Also worth noting is that exploring too much can lead to loss of animals, volcanos and vents making messes: the fog of war keeps all undiscovered areas in stasis.

[vitorfray]

I'd say the most important thing for a successful long-term base is getting access to steam/water geysers. Even though the geyser water is scalding, it can still be used in electrolysers, bathrooms and super computers with little downsides.

Also, knowing how to build heat deleting setups is a game changer.

[RetechDragonflame]

That actually was a major help, the most useful guide I've found so far. I have 84 hours clocked into ONI and was struggling by cycles 30-50.
5. I used to use algae terrariums but I think I ditched them for algae oxydizers (or whatever those trumpet machines are called) and carbon scrubber at the bottom, also I don't build lavatories and showers until I have 100% completed sewage system (although I have no idea how to disinfect the sifted water, so I'm using it for either growing plants (bristle blossom...) or cycle it back into plumbing system).

4. Yes, I don't do that. I just didn't think about it. My life will propably become so much easier once I surround kitchen, greenhouse and power plant with insulated walls. Still that's just delaying the temperature raise as dupes generate heat aswell, and I don't really know how to make an effective cooling system that isn't limited to planting wheezeworts in random spots.

3 and 2. It's actually the exact opposite for me. In early game while building my base I take extra care to place everything in determined spots and to make it look good right away, so I don't expand past the starting biome at all until my barracks, mess hall, bathroom, medbay, power plant with heavy wires going through maintenance tunnel and batteries in separate room etc are finished.
But then I sit, look at my base and think "what now?" The moment I finish the base I lack a push that would point me in a direction of what to do next.

1. I usually get up to 6 decent duplicants early on and then unless an amazing one appears I reject all prints. 10-12 is my upper limit.
I would argue with the duplicants perk being bad or not, never really had a problem with biohazardous and loud sleeper stops being a problem if you make a separate room for each of your duplicants (in mass barrack loud sleeper is bad). On the other hand though having too many narcoleptics means you get nothing done cause someone constantly drops on their face and flatulent is pretty annoying constantly staggering other dupes in their tracks.

[Indubidably]

GREAT top 5 for this game. This is all stuff I had to learn the hard way. So much valuable information in such a small, simple package.
I would like to emphasize #2 for beginners. Only open up space you intend on using immediately, and no more than you truly need for the given addition. You do not need open, featureless spaces in your base. That's more area to keep oxygenated, more area for your dupes to be traversing, and ultimately less space for other purposes. I've lost colonies simply to the fact I made them too "roomy" with too much open space that got very difficult to keep optimal. Easily the hardest lesson I had to learn and most persistent problem across my many early colonies.

[zefnoly]

I made a self sustained washroom with plumbing early on. It uses its own germy water. You just need a water seive and a timer to remove excess clean germy water which I send directly to my electrolyzers to make oxygen. Works like a charm and they come out clean from showers and sinks despite the water being used being germy... Fairly simple. My oxygen production is self sustained of electricity as well. Just needs water. Also you can remove germs from clean water by storing it in a water tank with chlorine behind. Which means you can sterilize water with a water tank, room with clhorine and a timer that makes sure water stays in the water tank until its germfree... No need to heat water up to remove germs.

Also I made sure a hatcling is there to eat all the polluted dirt produced from the sieve

[ekimmak]

I mean... Lavatories produce more polluted water than they take in, so just build a reserve for polluted water to dump all the early game wash basin refuse into, and then install a liquid pump into it when you're ready to send it through a sieve. No need to pump in the fresh stuff. Eventually, you might want to plant a reed to soak up the excess so you don't overflow the PW tank.

[todd]

my mistake is skipping physics class and miss out on how electricity works

[SpoiledSoda]

I'm 100% I make all these mistakes

[KaneCold]

one thing i would like to add to #4 ... It really is important to insulate and know where to bottle up heat and where you want to keep it away from ... but this ins't exactly what brings in the problem of early heat and heat creep from other biomes close to the starting zone ... It's actually excessive digging inside the starting biome itself, that makes early temperature such a bother. Digging reduces the mass of material that you dug out, but also reduces the heat energy/capacity because of the missing mass.

Insulation and ways to deal with heat are important and a must to understand ... But if we talk about beginner mistakes is about this mistake where to dig and where not ... you want to keep the mass inside your starting area high, you want to mine out Caustic Biome quick to reduce the mass and therefor the heat there. Also find Ice Biomes yes, dig them out no ... we want the heat sink to be used, not wasted on reduced mass as well.

And another thing about #5 ... I understand that it is about the actual problem that Clean Water as an Item is needed for many things and yes you can "waste" it... but not on Algea Terraiums, not anymore at least. Personally I think this little building is way underestimated after they made the change that from the 300g input of "Water" you get 290g "Polluted Water" back now ... which is HUGE!. I mean the ratio of Algea for O2 was already better than the Algae Deoxydizer and doesn't use power. But now even the payout for Water is so much better than the than the Electrolyzer and again no power required. It needs a bit of work, true, especially in the beginning where you need your Duplicans for something else to work on, but you can automate a few things, like water and algea delivery, with expanding technologies. It could also be pointed out, that the dropped bottles of polluted water, are more germ free than the water fed to the Algea Terrarium and could be used in combination with Air Deodorizer to improve O2 production.

Again I understand it goes about wasting "Clean" water ... but this isn't actually the problem, because the whole game is about using water for everything ... the beginning mistake is actually not to go quick for every source of water - even polluted one. It's about a quick setup for filtration that will help you out early and long term alike.

Also Bristle Blossom itself isn't really a waste of clean water ... it's more or less a halfhearted attempt to do it. Using Meal Wood isn't really without water itself as you probably make Liceloaf out of it (or not you run out of dirt waaaay more quickly) but this itself needs water, 50kg per loaf but Bristle Blossom can shorten it's grow time from 6 to 3 days via farmer station/fertilizer, which also reduces the water it needs from 120kg to 60kg per Bristle Berry, which than again can be cooked, to give even more Kcal with much less power consumption ... it just needs more job skills of your duplicates to handle this.

Overall the game changed a lot from it's way more earlier stages, where you only had the option to saving your materials, because you had no, or only heat intense ways to deal with it. I think it actually got to the point where there is a lot of materials you once tried to save, can now be (and should be) used way more ample like sand. Again i understand it's about beginner mistakes, but the actually mistake isn't so much about using up stuff, but not invest into long term sustainable systems ... like geyser that can help you out quite a lot, but you need to go out and see what you find. As you mentioned you should find wheeze worths and this should be done quick, to cope with early heat problems from simple machinery. So early exploration is a must as well, but i understand that expansion could be mixed up with this.

anyway :) nice video and yes ... never forget to hang up some Duplicado da Vinci's

[kilmameri]

I'm so glad I watched this! I always get so overwhelmed with maintaining the base that I stop playing! But I've never tried to insulate it or dig under it for carbon dioxide to fall down or made any effort with decor early on! I'll be sure to play more and build a good solid base for my as few as possible duplicants! Thank you!

[johns]

I'm going to add a sixth item to your list: Circuit Saturation; building too many things on the same circuit. Even with the coal generator, power transformers are your friend. In my current base, I use transformers for everything from my kitchen, to my filtration, to my oxygen production. From the main power line, I'll run a transformer to a single battery, as well as a manual generator for certain areas that are critical if they lose power, such as the kitchen or the bathroom, or especially later utilities, such as enclosed transit systems and exosuit docks. Once you get to smart batteries, use them to replace the standard battery, then run an automation line from the battery to the transformer, setting the transformer to be disabled once the battery is full, and re-enabled once the battery has reached about five percent. This will give both the chance to cool down, which will prevent heat generation and damage.

Aside from that, proper bathrooms will create water for you, and so are self-sustaining, if built properly. That said, you need to have unlocked water filtration and some automation before it can work without any real issue.

That said, algae terrariums do have their place, and they're not as wasteful as you might think. Clean water that's fed to them will be converted into polluted water, and most of the germs that were in the clean water are then filtered out. This polluted water can be filtered back into clean water for further decontamination. Further, you can pipe clean water directly to the terrariums by running a pipe to drip the water onto the floor around them - so long as you have a way to prevent flooding. This works decently well by placing a few terrariums underneath a coal generator, and running the excess water from your bathroom to it. It may not create a lot of oxygen, but that's not really the goal here - "clean" clean water is, especially for use in cooking.

[YourLocal_Mkara]

Timestamps:
0:32: Wasting Clean Water
2:32: Failing to Insulate Your Base
3:53: Under Prioitizing Decor
5:21 Expanding Before Completing Infrastructure Is in Place
6:43 Too Many Duplicants Too Quickly

[leakyabstraction]

I'm using a separated pool of water for toilets and shower; it's been circulating in a closed loop for ages, with a single water sieve, and works great. One huge mistake I made was that I thought I have to get rid of the germs too, so I heated up the whole body of water up to 90+ degrees Celsius, with a liquid tepidizer. Took AGES to cool down, and overheated most of my base. :D Especially since I wasn't using abyssalite to insulate.

[upsideken]

I got all mistake you listed. I often died after cycles 60 due to
No water
Too much oxygen ( I mean I paid attention to co2 and other gas way too much )
Too much colonist
I tried to finished the game over and over for almost a year now! Idk why this is in my recommendation but it's extremely helpful. Now I got 200 cycles without any issue. Thank you so much! You deserve a like!

[rcookie]

One big mistake I made, is wiring up the whole base as one big network and heaving to deal with many overloading issues, till I figured out I needed the bigger watt cables. Afterwards I made the mistake to just run them through my main base, not knowing what a horrific decor malus they radiate..

[geeksdotbetter]

I just started the Frosty Planet Pack DLC, and these tips are still spot on. Great work.