Chernobyl Done Right

Several hundred moons ago, I found the Uranium biome. This is a biome filled with – wow, you guessed it – Uranium. But more interestingly, there's Beeta hives here. Two of them. I need to get into doing things with radiation for several entirely optional reasons:

1. There's an achievement to run a nuclear reactor at full capacity for 5 cycles straight.
2. There's an achievement to extract enriched uranium from a Beeta hive without getting stung.
3. There's an achievement to analyze at least one mutated seed of all mutatable plants.
4. I could potentially switch entirely to nuclear power in the future.

Enriched Uranium

After a teeny-tiny glance into the game's built-in database, enriched uranium is just uranium that has been refined. What a revolutionary concept. It's only purpose, it seems, is to be used as fuel for the nuclear reactor.

How do I get it? There's two ways. The first is quite simple - get uranium ore and throw it into a Uranium Centrifuge. Unfortunately, the conversion rate to enriched uranium is only 20%. The remainder is lost in the form of liquid uranium, which appears to be largely useless. I will say, liquid uranium makes for an interesting coolant liquid, given that it doesn't evaporate into a gas until 4000° C, but it has pretty bad specific heat. I can't think of a reason to use it over water, polluted water, or super coolant... unless you're Francis John and trying to melt diamond. IYKYK.

The other way is a classic game design choice - use those Beetas to do the conversion. Essentially, they eat uranium ore and excrete 90% of it as enriched uranium. That's so much better than the mechanical way – isn't nature just incredible? 10% of the input mass is apparently just gone, however. Like a bad Thanos snap or something. 10kg goes, only 9kg comes out.

Well, I can't be on record doing things the less efficient way, so naturally the Uranium Centrifuge is from this point forward, an illegal choice.

My Rootial planetoid has two Beeta hives on it. I uncovered Rootial a long time ago, so the Beetas have been doing their thing without intervention for quite some time now. This has led to an interesting situation:

This hive here used to be alive and well. At some point, though it ran out of food (uranium ore in the environment), so I guess all the Beetas died. This gave me a great opportunity to run in when there were no Beetas to attack me (they're hostile according to the in-game database) and pull out some sweet-sweet enriched uranium to get me started. This one has nearly 3 tons of enriched uranium in it – I don't know how much fuel the reactor requires per cycle, but surely 3 tons will last me a little while.

Unfortunately, extracting anything from the hive seems to be a ranching task. The dupes I brought here, who were here first and foremost to do some quick repairs and pick up more metals, do not have that skill. I built a box around the hive, as you see in the screenshot, and then moved all the uranium ore away just in case it triggered Beetas to spawn. I'll make another quick trip here with my rancher duplicant and we'll be good to go. Easy "achievement get!" too.

A quick rocket trip back and forth from home base later...

The hives can be set to enable auto-harvesting... and they are by default. As soon as I landed, my trusted rancher person, Banhi, ran over to the hive shown earlier and scooped some beeswax (enriched uranium) out. Interestingly, this worked even though the hive was still entombed and inactive. Regardless, I got the achievement. Nice!

I figured that I might as well allow the Beetas to convert uranium into enriched uranium while I'm not there, so I uncovered the hive and dug out a lot of the surrounding area to expose all the uranium ore. I let the hive replicate itself to make a total of three hives, so hopefully I'll get a good conversion rate, should I need more enriched uranium in the near future. I also dumped about 1.5 tons of uranium ore that I brought with me from home base, because I have no other use (immediate or eventual) for it anyway.

There's another pocket of Beeta hives on this planet, so I did the same over there. Overall, I've got six hives now. I'm not sure what I did right or wrong, but the Beetas did not attack my duplicant, even when Banhi was actively pulling goop out of the active hive over there. Maybe that achievement isn't so hard after all?

Anyway, I don't know how many hives I'll need to keep a nuclear reactor going... but hopefully six hives will be enough. The two original hives have given me 7 tons of enriched uranium to start with, so I'm hoping that I'll be good for a little while. I'll have time to evaluate if I need to let the hives create even more hives.

While I'm here on Rootial I picked up some more resources:

• 1.5 tons of wolframite, which I can convert into tungsten if I want
• 50 tons of refined gold, a great general purpose building material
• 30 tons of oxylite, which is my typical oxygen source inside rocket capsules
• 25 tons of refined copper, because I misclicked when grabbing the aforementioned gold

Time to bring the boys and girls (and the resources) home, so I can try to not blow up my starting asteroid.

Building the Reactor

Unfortunately, I'm pretty late to the game when it comes to building reactor setups. I'm also just far too cautious of a player to let things break catastrophically. What this means is that I know 85% of how to build a reactor setup.

The reactor usually goes on top. It releases hot nuclear waste and steam. The nuclear waste, having the second-highest specific heat in the game, will contain the bulk of that heat. I know that this should fall down a shaft to the bottom, where some tempshift plates will be waiting to disperse the heat into the surrounding steam quickly. Then slap on 10 steam turbines (for a fully loaded reactor). Cool the turbines with a super coolant loop and let turbines' output water feed the reactor as its coolant, so you get a closed system in terms of steam/water pressure once you prime it with some excess water. Then you're good to go.

So, no, you will not see an exploding reactor in this article. Honestly, I'd just roll back to a prior save if it happened anyway; I'm not interested in waiting for the fifty cycles or whatever it is for a Chernobyl-situation to settle down. Sorry, not sorry. Maybe bug one of the other bloggers to blow one up.

One thing I need to decide on is what to do with the nuclear waste. Although the reactor itself probably generates a good amount of radiation, the nuclear waste will too, since it is creates with lots of radioactive contaminants. That's a specific germ in ONI that essentially simulates the radiation effect.

The standard way to deal with this is to pipe it into an infinite liquid compression tank. By compressing all that liquid (and the germs too) into a single tile of space, there's A LOT of radiation in the adjacent tiles. That makes radbolt collectors really effective. And I'm going to need a lot of radbolts. Why? Because of this achievement:

The long-story-short of it - I'm going to need 50 tons of diamond to make get that achievement. I'll need to manufacture around 40 tons of it. How do you manufacture diamond? With the diamond press, of course. It requires refined carbon (so, coal) and radbolts. Probably a lot of radbolts.

I want to leave the area to the right of reactor available for now. I'm hoping that the radiation penetrating the walls is high enough to alter crops meaningfully. That way, I can make some simple farms there and keep 'em going just long enough to get a mutated seed, since that's another achievement I'm after:

I figure that my duplicants will spend so much time coring out the other planets that there will be plenty of time in the meanwhile for crops to grow and mutate.

So, where is the nuclear waste going to go?

I'm thinking the top-left area of the reactor. It's not too far away to pipe the nuclear waste, and it's easy access to power for multiple diamond presses back-to-back. I don't think it'll be too hard to slap some two or three steam turbines on top to deal with the heat of the diamond presses. Potentially, they can cool the nuclear waste also, so I can get some more of the energy back... that is, if I really feel like I need it. All things considered, that geothermal boiler I built not too long ago might be relegated to being backup power pretty soon.

Prepping the Diamond Presses

I went ahead and put that plan in motion.

The nuclear waste gets piped over to the left-hand side. Here, I have an infinite liquid storage chamber for nuclear waste. The nuclear waste will be smushed between some crude oil below it and some petroleum above it. In here is a radbolt collector, whose radbolts are fired off, redirected a few times, and end up going through all the diamond presses, charging them up. Duplicants can enter in and out easily in their atmo suits, and even get down into the steam turbine array for the main reactor if they need to. The reactor should produce plenty of power to keep this going. The diamond presses are sitting in some water. Eventually this will heat up and boil into steam. The diamond presses are made of steel, so they should be good until 275° C, which should be plenty of buffer room for the turbines to do their job.

I didn't really plan ahead for automating input of refined carbon. It's just not really necessary. I have enough time and duplicants to manually haul it over - it'll just take a cycle or two. No need to set up automation when this has a known expiration time. Besides, I'm sure things will be pretty slow when the reactor is just starting up and there's no built-up nuclear waste yet.

I'll get some kilns going to turn coal into refined carbon. Here we go...

Turning it on...

OH. Okay, alright. Well then.

That sure is radioactive. A tad bit.

Don't mind me. Just need to add some plastic tiles in a few places. BRB.

Okay. Much better. Just needed a couple layers of plastic around the top of it.

All that radiation leaking off to the right is good... kinda. The radiation is pretty nice for the plants that will grow there. There's a good chance they will mutate as a result. On the other hand, that's a high radiation dose for the dupes to be standing in.

I did plan ahead for that - I made a lead suit checkpoint already specifically for this problem. I didn't know the radiation would spread so far, but I think I can modify this a bit to make sure duplicants only enter that area with a lead suit on.

In the meantime, I got another achievement:

A couple dozen tiles later...

Very nice. Most of the radiation is nicely contained in an area accessible only by lead suits. They'll still get kinda irradiated at a few hundred rads/cycle... but they shouldn't need to be in here very often. I think it'll be okay. They're troopers. This will be my little grow chamber - here I'll farm a bunch of plants for just long enough to get a mutated seed from each one.

Mutating Plants

Since that area is already a bit filled with carbon dioxide, I'm gonna start by tackling plants that either don't mind or require being in that gas.

I made a chilly chamber for Nosh beans, and just used the remaining space for Mealwood, Bog Jelly, and mushrooms. Once the Bog Jelly is done, I'll replace it with Spindly Grubfruit. Unfortunately, I only had one Nosh sprout when I put this together, and it has a fairly high radiation tolerance, so there's about a 75% chance that its seed does not mutate. On top of this, they take 21 cycles to mature, so not getting a mutation means a bunch of extra waiting. But since then, I've got 2 more to help hit the jackpot earlier. Also, since they are in their own dedicated chilly chamber, I can convert the rest of the room into stuff suitable for other plants while the Nosh sprouts grow.

I've let my diamond presses go in the meantime. I didn't realize how slowly I'd be generating radbolts... but good to get the process going, I guess. This achievement popped along the way:

My first nosh sprout and Mealwood plants dropped a mutated seed on their first tries! That saves me so much time. I'm not as lucky with the Spindly Grubfruit and mushrooms. I added a farm station inside this room, that way I can fertilize them and make the plants mature faster. That means less waiting around and more chances for them to drop mutated seeds.

It took 7 growth cycles, but the Spindly Grubfruit finally dropped mutated seeds.

On to the next batch of plants - Dasha Saltvine, Waterweed, and Balm Lily, all of which can be done in a 40ish° C chlorine room.

I tore down the old room, vacuumed it out, and rebuilt it for these three plants. I moved some bleach stone in here and spread it out into a bunch of piles. That way, each one will sublimate independently of the others. This serves a few purposes.

Firstly, by letting the bleach stone off-gas into chlorine gas, I don't need to build a massive pipe from my chlorine area to here. It's a lot less work and micro-management to let the duplicants dump a ton or two of bleach stone and call it a day. Secondly, the balm lily has the highest requirement of atmospheric pressure - 150g of chlorine gas. The bleach stone piles will pressurize the room with that in just a cycle or two. Thirdly, Waterweed needs to be fed bleach stone. Since all my bleach stone is already in this room, duplicants don't need to run across the map to deliver it, potentially dropping it along the way and creating a small chlorine cloud. And fourthly, the Dasha Saltvine plants actually consume chlorine gas right out of the atmosphere, so I need a constant source of new chlorine. With enough piles of bleach stone, at only 150ish grams of pressure, the bleach stone naturally sublimates fast enough to offset the chlorine gas consumption rate. The whole situation works nicely.

I did need to warm the room up a bit, so I dropped a bottle of super coolant in the nuclear reactor. I pulled it out around 80° C, then piped it into the radiant pipes you see in the picture above. I actually needed to do this twice (my duplicants ever so kindly chose to use -50° C dirt to build the farm tiles) to get the room up to a livable temperature for all the plants at the same time, but it worked out.

Waiting for the seeds to mutate wasn't too bad. The Dasha Saltvine and Waterweed all got a mutation within the first grow cycle batch. The Balm Lily in the center took three full growth cycles. I think I got a bit unlucky on the Balm Lily and lucky on the Waterweed; giving their radiation tolerances, it would've been smarter to swap them. Oh well, what's done is done.

One more plant to go.

Gas Grass will be tricky to farm. I already need to go to a different planetoid to get it. But even if I get it... do I want to bring it back home?

Gas Grass is annoying to farm for two reasons. You need to irrigate it with liquid chlorine and it requires 10,000 lux worth of light to live. Both of these will be challenging back at home.

There's only one good way to get liquid chlorine. Remember my H2 and O2 liquefaction facility? I'd need to do that, but with chlorine gas. I could built one, but I don't want to. My grow room also doesn't have any light. In order to get enough light, I'll need to install a sun lamp. I could do this... I definitely have the power budget for it. If I do this near the top of the room, I can get around 2,500 rads/cycle of radiation on them, which theoretically puts the mutation chance around 20%. Not great... may need to supplement it with some radiation lamps. Boosting that to 30% or higher would be great.

Or... maybe I can get the mutation going while I'm still on the other planetoid?

The Moo planetoid, creatively named Moomato, has 80,000 lux of brightness just from the sun. To be fair, that will go away during the night, which will delay the growth of the plant... but that saves me from having to produce that much light myself. Gas Grass doesn't seem to require an atmosphere and Moomato doesn't have any meteor showers to worry about. So, I don't even need a roof for the farm!

The whole planetoid seems to be around -45° C, which already cold enough for chlorine gas to condense into a liquid, which is exactly the irrigation I need for the plant. I do see a good amount of liquid chlorine already; there's probably plenty more. And, worst case scenario, I can probably find a way to heat up the bleach stone, let it off-gas, and then chill down into a liquid.

At 80,000 lux and no meteor showers, I should be able to get a lot of power off of solar panels. I'm gonna go ahead and start mass producing glass now. With a ton of free power, I can also use a liquid tepidizer to warm up the bleach stone. I'd make a shallow pool of water in a vacuum, keep the water above freezing with a liquid tepidizer and tempshift plates, put the bleach stone in the water. Eventually it'll warm up and sublimate. At that point, I can use a gas pump to collect it, pump into the main planetoid, which will hopefully be chilly enough to make it condense. If it doesn't get cold enough, I can always brute-force it with an aquatuner. If I even need to do any of that. Piping the liquid chlorine should be done in some insulated pipes though... guess I'll go mass produce some more ceramic as well.

I'll bring along some uranium ore and uranium lamps to artificially produce the radiation needed to mutate the plants. The duplicants might get a bit irradiated so I'll bring (and go make...) rad pills too. Let's summarize the materials checklist:

• 20 tons of steel - general purpose buildable metal, sustains high temperatures (like for an aquatuner)
• 20 tons of refined aluminum - general purpose buildable metal, high thermal conductivity
• 20 tons of refined gold - general purpose buildable metal, something between steel and aluminum
• 20 tons of copper ore - general purpose buildable metal
• 10 tons of plastic - steam turbines and mini liquid pumps
• 5 tons of glass - solar panels
• 20 tons of ceramic - insulated piping
• 20 tons of igneous rock - general purpose buildable material
• 20 tons of granite - general purpose buildable material
• 10 tons of obsidian - extremely heat-resistant buildable material
• 20 tons of coal - fuel for coal generators (backup power)
• 1 ton of super coolant - thermo aquatuner coolant and making air locks
• 200 kg of petroleum - making air locks
• 50 tons of oxylite - will passively off-gas inside the rocket for oxygen production
• 100 kg of reed fiber - repairing atmo suits
• 1 ton of uranium ore - radiation lamps
• 5 tons of fertilizer - doubles plant growth rate
• 200 kg of rad pills - combat radiation sickness
• 100 kg of Berry Sludge - food
• 6 atmo suits - 3 for the duplicants to wear, 3 as spares

I also need to decide which three lucky people will have the privilege of going on this probably 2-3 week long expedition, accounting for travel time and likeliness of mutation. There don't seem to be any geysers to analyze. So...

• Catalina - farmer, will tend to the crops and fertilize them
• Ren - builder, ensures that things can get built quickly and any pre-generated structures can be destroyed
• Ellie - digger, nothing will stand in my way
• Also Ren - engineer, some shipping automation is always good to have

I've got all their things, Lunchables, teddy bears, and all, loaded in the rocket. Let's go!

Off-World Mutations

The duplicants have entered orbit around Moomato! Let's find a place to land...

Hmmm... A nice pool of liquid chlorine and a geyser of some sort. Not a lot of gas grass, but enough to get started. I'll probably find more as I explore. Not bad.

Well, I got some solar power going and broke into the interior of the planetoid.

There's plenty of liquid chlorine. In fact, the more underground part of this planetoid so cold that it's filled with solid carbon dioxide and solid chlorine! I don't really see if/how that'll be useful, but it's pretty neat. Let's go see what that geyser is.

Yeah, I should've seen that coming. It makes sense though if you're trying to farm Gas Grass and maintain a Gassy Moo ranch; you're gonna need a reliable source of chlorine. There isn't anything else on the planetoid except a very basic ruins structure with two artifacts. It's embedded within all that -100 degree C solid chlorine and carbon dioxide, but I'll get there. Let's start the farm!

I have quickly noticed a potentially fatal flaw in my plan. Dirt. $%&!ing dirt. Gas Grass needs 25kg/cycle of dirt as fertilization.

Thankfully, there's a bit of dirt in the planetoid already. Emphasis on a bit, because it is literally one tile's worth. If you look closely, to the right of the neutronium underneath the chlorine vent, there is one tile of dirt. Digging it up gives me about 1000kg of dirt. Gas Grass has a domestic life cycle of four cycles, reduced to just two cycles when I use Micronutrient Fertilizer on them from the farm station. So... Each plant requires 50kg of dirt to grow. The day/night cycle will interfere with this a bit, so let's just round it up to 75kg/cycle of dirt per plant.

That means I can handle 14 or so harvests before running out of dirt. Probably a bit more if you account for light accurately. There's no way for me to make more, unless I siphon the duplicants' poopy water and boil it, since polluted water boils into steam and dirt. Now, boiling water on a planet that's entirely subzero? Not the most bulletproof idea I've had before...

I'm going to redesign the farm a bit to try to crank the radiation way up. I'm also going to try making the liquid pipes out of igneous rock instead of ceramic. The liquid chlorine here is -57° C, which is around 23° C colder than it needs to be to stay in liquid form. Even if the liquid loses some of its chill to the pipes, I don't think it'll be enough for the chlorine to evaporate and break the pipes.

Window tiles are on top to let the sun through. Liquid chlorine is piped in from the underside; the chlorine indeed remains in liquid form because it only lost around 7° C to the pipes. Radiation lamps flank each pair of plants to give them a little over 1100 rads/cycle when they're being harvested. Assuming the math works linearly, this means roughly a 10% mutation chance after the 85% chance that I get a new seed from the plant. Fingers crossed...

Nah, I didn't get any mutations. Sigh.

A rocket trip to home base and back, now with 20 tons of dirt in tow, we try again!

Four harvest cycles later, we got one!

One rocket trip back home aaaand...

This whole adventure, by the way, only used up around 1.5 tons of enriched uranium in the nuclear reactor. In the meantime, those Beeta hives have produced about 5 tons of enriched uranium. So yeah, now I know that nuclear power is absolutely the way to go. My two geothermal setups have both been sitting at 0% usage for a while now; the reactor is just too good.

What's Next?

I only have three achievements left. Two of them are pretty much just exploration-based; I need to fly around and actually visit every planet and POI available.

The third achievement? Well, that's where I need 40 tons of diamond. I've made around 11 tons over the span of this blog post's adventure. Just 29 tons to go.

I might set up one more nuclear reactor, just to speed things along.

Or maybe three more.