Playing Oxygen Not Included

So. Still playing Oxygen Not Included. I keep abandoning my base and restarting, either because something catastrophic happened, or I just started in an awful location with no access to resources, and water in the way of everything useful.

I recently got as far as almost 275 cycles, in a base that for reasons that are unlikely to become clear I named "Thistle Me Wiggins". I had my dirt-to-energy system fully automated - all my dupes had to do was deliver dirt to storage containers in my sage hatch ranches and it would be auto-dispensed to the feeders. The resultant coal was automatically shipped to my small power brick and again automatically fed into my coal generators, which were operating on a heavy-watt spine leading to transformers. My excess hatches were automatically wrangled into a small evolution chamber so that they could evolve into their final form - meat - while eggs that did not get shipped to my incubators were delivered to my kitchen to be turned into omelette. All automated. Dirt -> energy + food, with little that my dupes needed to do. Dirt was plentiful. More on that later.

I started my dupes off on lice loaf and gristle berry, but I phased those out in favour of mushrooms and the aforementioned barbeque and omelette fairly quickly. I was also able to get sustainable thimble reed and balm lily farms going.

I was lucky enough on this base to have a couple of cool steam vents, that I was able to tame simply by having them drain into ice biomes. So I set up a small hydrogen hood-style electrolyser. I was running only 12 dupes do I didn't need a full Rodriguez. That pretty much took care of my base oxygen needs. I ran the oxygen through my water tank to cool it and burned off the hydrogen for additional energy on the grid.

By then my dupes had some Mad Skillz so I built a second electrolyser and, after playing this game for months, for the first time I had my dupes in atmo suits! Sense of achievement! Then an actual achievement because I was able to break into my oil biome.

It was at about this time that I noticed two things. First, I was completely out of dirt. As in, zero available on the map. My hatches had converted it all into coal. The couple of composts I had running were in no way able to supply all that was required. I greatly expanded this, but to no avail. My hatches started starving to death. No worries, I thought, and started planning out my oil -> petroleum + natural gas -> energy system with a view to decommissioning my coal.

The other thing I noticed was that some of my dupes were getting stressed. Very stressed. Okay, time for a massage clinic. Didn't help. A "relax and take it easy" schedule. No luck. More decor? I was already bright green in all but my most industrial areas, and all my dupes were in snazzy suits. Why were my dupes so stressed? Ah, there it was - low morale. I had forgotten to keep an eye on morale when I was allocating skill points, and a few of my dupes were well over their available morale capacity. Cue stress responses. Okay, that was it. That was the point at which my base became unrecoverable. I had done very well this time around, but it was time to quit and restart again.

And it was only just now as I am writing this up that I remembered that there exists such a thing as a skill scrubber.

I love this game.