Oxygen Not Included beginner guide: early toilets, food, water, and oxygen

Pause first and keep initial digging small

The early goal is to make essential services work from start to finish. Large digging orders create extra construction and hauling work, delaying vital supplies. Look around the Printing Pod and locate water, metal ore, algae, and seeds first.

1. Make a short route to water and place a Pitcher Pump where it reaches the water. Avoid making the area above your clean water supply a route from which polluted water can fall.
2. Keep toilets, handwashing, beds, research, and oxygen work areas close together. Avoid putting beds at the bottom of a pit where carbon dioxide collects.
3. Leave a central travel route and passages for gas to escape from each floor. Fully enclosing small rooms with normal tiles also makes oxygen distribution harder.
4. Before breaking a wall beside a liquid pool or another gas, check where it will flow and how Duplicants will return. Choose the resource to mine, then issue orders only around it.

Finish one usable building setup at a time

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If oxygen or toilets are already in danger, fix them first. This is an ordering guide, not a cycle deadline that applies to every map.

A Wash Basin beside a toilet is not enough

Dirty Duplicants use Wash Basin when passing in its configured direction. If a bathroom has two exits but only one has a basin, a route back without washing remains. Check the path from dirty work areas to food, including after carrying items.

1. Keep Outhouse away from clean water and eating areas. Place Wash Basin on the route back into the living area and point its setting arrow in the direction Duplicants leave the toilet.
2. If several toilets are used at once, match the handwashing capacity and schedules too. Observe downtime to check for missing basin supplies or queues.
3. Wash Basin uses 5kg of water per use and outputs the same amount of polluted water. Provide access to the water source and somewhere to collect and empty polluted-water bottles.
4. Ensure someone handles Outhouse cleaning and supply errands. If sanitation stops, check which errands are pending before adding toilets.

Once you have some margin, stagger downtime across schedules to reduce queues. Simply shortening downtime can leave insufficient time for travel, toilets, and meals.

Distinguish Mealwood planted from harvests actually maintained

Standard food consumption is 1,000kcal per Duplicant per cycle. Mealwood consumes dirt but does not require irrigation water or lighting. Allow time for planting and harvests while starting food remains.

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These plant counts are calculated from yield. Three standard Duplicants need at least 15 plants, but this does not include food before the first harvest, harvest delays, stalled growth, or spoilage. Gather wild plants and other food while seeds are scarce, and establish how much yield is missing before expanding the population.

What to check when food keeps declining

Having food in total does not mean everyone can eat it. Check food permissions and access before expanding farms.

1. Select a plant and determine whether temperature, pressure, gas, or missing fertilizer is stopping it. If dirt is scarce, more farms only increase supply needs.
2. If plants are mature, check the harvesters' pending errands. Hauling the harvest and cooking it if necessary are still separate tasks.
3. If harvesting works, calculate whether daily yields are sufficient for the population. Do not mistake shrinking starting stocks for proof that farms have caught up.
4. If the farm is hot, check warm water pipes and oxygen arriving from Electrolyzers as well as nearby generators. Adding cooling without moving heat sources can leave the solution unable to keep up.

Why priority 9 may still do nothing

Think of priorities in two stages. Each Duplicant's preferred errand categories come first; building and errand numbers then apply within that category. Giving a hauling task priority 9 may not produce the expected result from someone who prioritizes research.

1. Initially, choose people for research, digging and building, and essential supply and hauling. Avoid prohibiting essential work so completely that it stops whenever its main worker is absent.
2. Select oxygen or sanitation equipment and read its pending work under Errands or the equivalent list. Raising numbers cannot fix unavailable resources, inaccessible supplies, or a lack of qualified workers.
3. If resources exist, check door permissions, access platforms, digging skills, and worker schedules. Account for hauling time when only distant resources remain.
4. Prioritize essential supply work and postpone mass sweeping or extra digging. Setting everything to 9 makes urgent work harder to distinguish.
5. Restore temporarily raised priorities after recovery and check whether daily life continues during research. Using alerts as routine operation can disrupt rest and other daily needs.

Build water supply and wastewater together when upgrading toilets

Lavatory and Sink reduce manual work but become unusable if wastewater backs up. Keep existing sanitation while building the new setup and switch only after confirming that it works. White pipe ports are inputs; green ports are outputs.

1. Supply water to the new toilet and sink inputs, and connect each output to polluted-water collection. Use the plumbing overlay to check for input-to-input or output-to-output connections.
2. For reuse, send polluted water through Water Sieve and return its output to sanitation. This needs power and replenished filtration medium.
3. Lavatory turns 5kg of water into 11.7kg of polluted water per use, adding a net 6.7kg. A closed loop alone eventually backs up, so provide storage or consumption for the surplus.
4. Sink turns 5kg of water into 5kg of polluted water per use. Preserve the route from toilets through handwashing, with plumbing that lets you diagnose failed supply, drainage, or filtration medium.
5. Water Sieve converts polluted water into water but does not disinfect it. Do not mix bathroom-loop water directly into supplies for drinking or cooking.

While operating at 120W, Water Sieve takes 5kg/s of polluted water and 1kg/s of filtration medium and produces 5kg/s of water and 200g/s of polluted dirt. Polluted dirt still needs handling, so this is not a completely labor-free system.

Check before accepting another Duplicant

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More Duplicants can do more work, but food and oxygen consumption increase from that day. Traits can change requirements, so do not judge by standard values alone.

Frequently asked questions