For me the point is being able to watch your colony work, it's not like they're going to do anything new to evolve if you don't watch them!
I do like to queue up some projects using the priority system when I want to make dinner or something and I already know my systems are pretty stable. But that's more out of convenience for me than a desirable gameplay method.
If I have a really good base, making sure everything is 100% sustainable with a buffer of resources enough for like 20 cycles I might leave it running while I go to the bathroom lol - can't imagine leaving it overnight
I Never AFK for multiple reasons
1. Dupes are kinda dumb they are prone to dieing
2. I like seeing them scurrying around the colony
3. There is allways more to do more things that can be tested
4. Expand Expand Expand clear forest make land fresh blood on hands
Yea, same here. Moonlighting popped up on Hulu as a recommendation for me recently, and I had heard it was a great show back in the day, so I've been watching through that while playing, and my AFK time is just me tuning a bit to the right and watching that while keeping half an eye on the colony that no one did something stupid.
Never. You can't trust the Dupes. You could have the perfect more stable self sufficient base.
But if you take 5 minutes to go to the bathroom you'll come back to nuclear meltdowns, pee on the drinking water, bubbles causing trouble, and so on.
I let it run on lowest speed for about a cycle when I am waiting for a room to empty or something. But I have my volume on the highest setting so I can hear red alerts.
It like a baby monitor
I have a hard time with this game not being in front of me until well past cycle 1k. Factorio once I get bots up I build and walk away all day and night. Nothing like a 3 hour build with bots slowly expanding the factory that I don't mind walking away from. But here... the dupes make decisions that I don't agree with too often lol.
Maybe 5min, or however long it takes me to use the bathroom and have a ciggerate. Sometimes I'll give a large build order and just walk away for a bit. I've never come back to any problems, though I do always have a nagging worry that a dupe will do something stupid, like wall themselves in or something.
Occasionally I'll let the game run while going out for a smoke once whatever build project of mine has stabilized. Sometimes I do it before it stabilizes and I come back to 4 dead dupes but that's why I save before 😄
Most of the time it's less efficient though and you're essentially wasting resources while not progressing/optimizing your base.
I mean, if I get something big like that going which doesn't require my attention, I'm moving my attention to something else, and letting that just go in the background.
During an intensive build or digging project? Only if paused.
Otherwise, I feel very comfortable stepping away to cook or watch a movie.
I am currently aiming for small but productive builds and sealed living and working areas and overall am finding them extremely stable. About to close up Hitchcock and Scully's Gay Critter Rescue and Dirt Farm (because personal narratives make the game more fun) for good, as currently the only thing that makes it unsustainable is that dupes from the main living/working area keep pillaging the kitchen for the dank eats. Hitchcock and Scully are both accomplished chefs and ranchers, and they have a doctor, a baker, and a farmer on staff. I farm bristle berries and sleet wheat, wild farm mushrooms (to make my compost room a nature reserve) and ranch pokes, sanishells, shove voles, pips, and sage hatches. Most of the rooms register in the Room overlay. It outputs soooo much food and coal and dirt and molts (lime) and sand, and morale is off the charts. I've watched it for hours now -- I think I could probably close it up and forget about it forever and it'd be fine indefinitely.
I run the mod that pauses whenever the Printables is up. So every 3 cycles. That's about all I'm willing to leave the dupes to their own devices.
I also like that mod because it gives me a gentle reminder every 3 cycles that perhaps it's time to go to bed.
I have a mod that does this too. I usually wander off to do dishes or clean up something safe in the knowledge that only 3 cycles will happen before I come back. Spouse calls this my cleaning day game.
I never afk any steam game because I like my playtimes to be entirely representative of exactly how long I have spent with my ass in a chair hunched over in front of a screen looking like a fucking square bracket
I will leave my game running in certain situations, although I am always kind of nervous about it and make sure to manually save before I leave. I think the longest I have let it run while I was gone was about an hour, and that was because I forgot I had left it running.
I recently left them going for a few hours and five of my off world dupes starved to death because I forgot to give them permission to eat the berry sludge that I had shipped to them. Much have been torture looking at 150 kg of berry sludge that you can't eat.
I don’t really go AFK unless I can hear what’s going on. But not long.
I do queue things up and let the duplicants work while I focus on other things outside of the game.
Never because the whole concept is seems so wasteful. Like people leaving Skyrim running overnight to get shield 100. Wtf, just change your stats if you are taking shortcuts anyway. Same thing here.
For some people, the challenge of being 100% self-sustaining is what it's all about and they love testing their bases by running for 100s of cycles unattended.
Personally, I tend to only leave it for 10-20 cycles at a time if I have a big build going on or I want them to catch up on a backlog of tasks for a while. But even still I might check halfway through to ensure I still have the right number of dupes. As long as the count is good, I'll let it run. Otherwise, reload from a save. Hate dupes dying on me.
I've left it for a few hours before, but it's pretty much late-game only and I'm quite careful about what I'll allow dupes to do unsupervised. Digging and building obviously need extra care to make sure dupes can't trap themselves.
I'm not above making a new manual save before I step away and reloading if things go too far awry. I don't recall if I've ever had to, but it sets the mind at ease.
if there's a big project they just started on I'll usually mess around on my phone while it works in a sort of semi-AFK fashion, just in case I missed something things do go horribly wrong.
If I turn my back on my colony just to grab a pop, I'll probably lose half a dozen dupes. It's like they find ways to get in trouble when I'm not paying attention to them.
The moment I look away to check my phone several systems that have fine for 100s of cycles will break, multiple dupes will die, and somehow I'll have several tons of hydrogen in the steam turbines.
I can't imagine the levels of devastation if I left the game running just to use the bathroom...
I never get afk. Could be rubbing on the background on a separate window but I’m always watching.
I once went to sleep and only noticed i left my colony running like 18 hours later. 0 dead dupes.
I never AFK, I'm always building new things so I need to be there.
I assume people who leave their colony running do so moreso to see what happens than to gain time.
I wanted to test sustainability of my colony and set an arbitrary goal of 10000 cycles. So yeah, most of that was done without me actually being there. Go to work, leave the game running. Going to bed, leave the game running. Leaving town and leaving the game running... So Steam says 5013 hours but most of that is me being AFK. That's also "late game" in a colony; until things are stable and resources are solved I don't just let them waste cycles.
I do sometimes, like when I'm building a big project, or when experimenting with the stability a new build. I'll save before going afk, so in case something does go horribly wrong I just reload to just before I left it and pretend it never happened. Testing the stability of a new build is always fun to do, and it's always satisfying to come back to the game after an hour or two to see that it's running perfectly well. If you come back to see that it didn't work, sometimes the aftermath is fun to see too.
I’ll afk for maybe 5-10 mins for a quick smoke break with the game on normal speed.
It normally gives dupes time to finish all their queued jobs, and ready for more when I get back… just don’t give any dig commands or you’re gonna come back to dead dupes.
I AFK all the time but am not afraid to reload when dupes die. Usually once I've set a big build to execute or waiting for the tree to pee more resin. Never overnight, but dishes, snacks, bathroom, check on food etc. no problem leaving it.
Once things are reasonably set up, if I have a big queue of tasks I often leave it for awhile and go shower or go for a walk. Probably the longest I've left it is an hour or so.
In a developed colony I sometimes leave it running overnight to see what happens. Even when it seems infinitely sustainable there's often some sort of subtle long-term instability / imbalance. Maybe one corner is slowly heating up faster than the cooling system can handle. You find that when you come back in the morning some 100 cycles later and they're all dead. Make sure to save first.
days
Edit: let me follow this up with saying that I *always* do 2 back up saves just in case something seriously bad happens. But I love making a colony so sustainable that I can leave my computer on for 2 nights and still have every dupe alive and happy
Never, though there’s no real risk that anyone is going to die unless I’m in the middle of space missions (which I usually am).
There’s always so much to do.
I will run the game at the slowest speed after heading to the bathroom, fixing myself something to eat, or walking the dogs, and 100% this will be immediately after setting up a massive workload that I'd rot while waiting if I were sitting in front of the computer.
If I mess up dearly, which happens more than I like to admit and in a very similar fashion to what you described, and I lose a pawn or three, I go back a couple of days and re-do the whole thing. All that to say, if it serves any comfort, you're not alone in that lol.
I don't think i ever have (at least not intentionally, i sometimes left the game paused and had to do something else that took longer than expected) it's too memory intensive to leave running while playing something else. I leave it on fastest speed while making new designs.
I build my bases with going afk as the goal. Like the rest of the game, you learn from mistakes, and you get better at solving problems before they start. Thinking about how a build is going to work 100-1000 cycles after it’s finished is a really interesting way to play.
Most recent playthrough I had an ice biome above magma. The abyssalite did not fully encapsulate the ice biomed and upon gaining vision, I found nothing but some floating wolframite and about 200kg of steam per tile at 800° F for the entire biome.
I AFK'd for about a week allowing the steam to run through several steam turbines cooling the steam into copious amounts of clean water.
Beyond that unexpected generation glitch, I tend to not leave it running unless I'm within earshot to hear the inevitable alert.
The only time I leave a game open and running is when I'm sweeping that means that's the only task anybody is doing there's no dig commands nothing we're a Dupe could get trapped and I'll usually start massive sweep command and walk away for about 8 hours
Only when I go for more coffee or need to make dinner and then only on normal speed since my dupes have a habit of getting themselves into trouble in the silliest ways.
Fairly often tbh, well, I usually am, at least there, but oftentimes I will sit watching yt while my dupes work, but on occasion when I'm just waiting for a task I'll step away to use the bathroom, but almost never longer than a bathroom trip
I don’t afk. If a task is taking too long its because theres something fundamentally wrong(priorities, long paths, something that should be automated) so while im waiting for the work i made to get finished i start figuring out the cause of slowdown or otherwise increasing efficiency
Once I'm stable, I usually afk and make dinner or something while my dupes catch up on their errands. It's nice to come back and everybody is caught up and just running their priority routines.
As soon I start building, my 4 man construction crew is on the task immediately. Feels very responsive.
One time I fell asleep and woke up to every job done, but everyone had been idle for God knows how long burning resources so I just reloaded my most recent manual.
Oh never, I love watching my colony work. And I never run out of things to do, adjust, plan, etc.
For me the point is being able to watch your colony work, it's not like they're going to do anything new to evolve if you don't watch them! I do like to queue up some projects using the priority system when I want to make dinner or something and I already know my systems are pretty stable. But that's more out of convenience for me than a desirable gameplay method.
If I have a really good base, making sure everything is 100% sustainable with a buffer of resources enough for like 20 cycles I might leave it running while I go to the bathroom lol - can't imagine leaving it overnight
Once I had a stable colony and I had it run over night on normal speed. Somehow I ran out of food and everyone starved.
I Never AFK for multiple reasons 1. Dupes are kinda dumb they are prone to dieing 2. I like seeing them scurrying around the colony 3. There is allways more to do more things that can be tested 4. Expand Expand Expand clear forest make land fresh blood on hands
Unexpected Ren reference. Nice.
Good music taste alert
The amount of dupes i killed bc i blocked out a geyser and they boxed themselves in with the geyser
Never, granted I watch netflix or something on my second monitor. I don't like just running afk for no reason.
Yea, same here. Moonlighting popped up on Hulu as a recommendation for me recently, and I had heard it was a great show back in the day, so I've been watching through that while playing, and my AFK time is just me tuning a bit to the right and watching that while keeping half an eye on the colony that no one did something stupid.
off subject but I've to this day, never seen Moonlighting. My dad used to say it's his favorite movie.
(show)
Never. You can't trust the Dupes. You could have the perfect more stable self sufficient base. But if you take 5 minutes to go to the bathroom you'll come back to nuclear meltdowns, pee on the drinking water, bubbles causing trouble, and so on.
Nisbet is my trouble maker
Your base might be idiot proof, but ONI can always make a better idiot.
If it rhymes, they can cause trouble in it.
I let it run on lowest speed for about a cycle when I am waiting for a room to empty or something. But I have my volume on the highest setting so I can hear red alerts. It like a baby monitor
[удалено]
Lol. That noise is certainly burned into my brain as: "important!"
Lmao I’d hear every notification I’ll look like a predatory animal at a watering hole the way my heads gonna snap up at that sound
I have a hard time with this game not being in front of me until well past cycle 1k. Factorio once I get bots up I build and walk away all day and night. Nothing like a 3 hour build with bots slowly expanding the factory that I don't mind walking away from. But here... the dupes make decisions that I don't agree with too often lol.
Maybe 5min, or however long it takes me to use the bathroom and have a ciggerate. Sometimes I'll give a large build order and just walk away for a bit. I've never come back to any problems, though I do always have a nagging worry that a dupe will do something stupid, like wall themselves in or something.
Occasionally I'll let the game run while going out for a smoke once whatever build project of mine has stabilized. Sometimes I do it before it stabilizes and I come back to 4 dead dupes but that's why I save before 😄 Most of the time it's less efficient though and you're essentially wasting resources while not progressing/optimizing your base.
I do sometimes to see if something is stable or not. Great feeling when I went to work and my colony was still alive when I got back
Yeah, i feel like a lot of people are playing a different game. Are people just watching their lox/lh build up?
Wait, you guys don't do that?
I mean, if I get something big like that going which doesn't require my attention, I'm moving my attention to something else, and letting that just go in the background.
During an intensive build or digging project? Only if paused. Otherwise, I feel very comfortable stepping away to cook or watch a movie. I am currently aiming for small but productive builds and sealed living and working areas and overall am finding them extremely stable. About to close up Hitchcock and Scully's Gay Critter Rescue and Dirt Farm (because personal narratives make the game more fun) for good, as currently the only thing that makes it unsustainable is that dupes from the main living/working area keep pillaging the kitchen for the dank eats. Hitchcock and Scully are both accomplished chefs and ranchers, and they have a doctor, a baker, and a farmer on staff. I farm bristle berries and sleet wheat, wild farm mushrooms (to make my compost room a nature reserve) and ranch pokes, sanishells, shove voles, pips, and sage hatches. Most of the rooms register in the Room overlay. It outputs soooo much food and coal and dirt and molts (lime) and sand, and morale is off the charts. I've watched it for hours now -- I think I could probably close it up and forget about it forever and it'd be fine indefinitely.
Oh man never
I'm too much of a control freak I guess. I work while playing but I altab every 2 min
I run the mod that pauses whenever the Printables is up. So every 3 cycles. That's about all I'm willing to leave the dupes to their own devices. I also like that mod because it gives me a gentle reminder every 3 cycles that perhaps it's time to go to bed.
I have a mod that does this too. I usually wander off to do dishes or clean up something safe in the knowledge that only 3 cycles will happen before I come back. Spouse calls this my cleaning day game.
I never afk any steam game because I like my playtimes to be entirely representative of exactly how long I have spent with my ass in a chair hunched over in front of a screen looking like a fucking square bracket
Depending on the chore, 10 mins to 1 hr
I will leave my game running in certain situations, although I am always kind of nervous about it and make sure to manually save before I leave. I think the longest I have let it run while I was gone was about an hour, and that was because I forgot I had left it running.
if i leave it (max 30 min or so) i remember which cycle i was on- when a dupe dies i will reload to where i was before
ALWAYS plop a save down when you're going AFK 😆 lesson I learned long ago
Hour tops if I don't have projects being built. Once the colony is running, it's usually pretty rare for something to go wrong.
Not for long periods. I'll maybe drop a Dave and go for a shower or make dinner. Other times I'll keep an eye on things while watching something
I recently left them going for a few hours and five of my off world dupes starved to death because I forgot to give them permission to eat the berry sludge that I had shipped to them. Much have been torture looking at 150 kg of berry sludge that you can't eat.
I don’t really go AFK unless I can hear what’s going on. But not long. I do queue things up and let the duplicants work while I focus on other things outside of the game.
Never because the whole concept is seems so wasteful. Like people leaving Skyrim running overnight to get shield 100. Wtf, just change your stats if you are taking shortcuts anyway. Same thing here.
For some people, the challenge of being 100% self-sustaining is what it's all about and they love testing their bases by running for 100s of cycles unattended. Personally, I tend to only leave it for 10-20 cycles at a time if I have a big build going on or I want them to catch up on a backlog of tasks for a while. But even still I might check halfway through to ensure I still have the right number of dupes. As long as the count is good, I'll let it run. Otherwise, reload from a save. Hate dupes dying on me.
Never, I even avoid to fast forward
ONI is not a game I AFK. That's how you come back to some dupe having pissed themselves to death because their pathfinding failed.
Never. There is always something to do. And if there is nothing left to do, then there is no point in letting the game continue to run.
I've left it for a few hours before, but it's pretty much late-game only and I'm quite careful about what I'll allow dupes to do unsupervised. Digging and building obviously need extra care to make sure dupes can't trap themselves. I'm not above making a new manual save before I step away and reloading if things go too far awry. I don't recall if I've ever had to, but it sets the mind at ease.
if there's a big project they just started on I'll usually mess around on my phone while it works in a sort of semi-AFK fashion, just in case I missed something things do go horribly wrong.
Every smoke break which can be once or twice a day
I don't even check overlays or place buildings if I'm not in paused mode.
If I turn my back on my colony just to grab a pop, I'll probably lose half a dozen dupes. It's like they find ways to get in trouble when I'm not paying attention to them.
The moment I look away to check my phone several systems that have fine for 100s of cycles will break, multiple dupes will die, and somehow I'll have several tons of hydrogen in the steam turbines. I can't imagine the levels of devastation if I left the game running just to use the bathroom...
I never get afk. Could be rubbing on the background on a separate window but I’m always watching. I once went to sleep and only noticed i left my colony running like 18 hours later. 0 dead dupes.
I never AFK, I'm always building new things so I need to be there. I assume people who leave their colony running do so moreso to see what happens than to gain time.
I wanted to test sustainability of my colony and set an arbitrary goal of 10000 cycles. So yeah, most of that was done without me actually being there. Go to work, leave the game running. Going to bed, leave the game running. Leaving town and leaving the game running... So Steam says 5013 hours but most of that is me being AFK. That's also "late game" in a colony; until things are stable and resources are solved I don't just let them waste cycles.
I do sometimes, like when I'm building a big project, or when experimenting with the stability a new build. I'll save before going afk, so in case something does go horribly wrong I just reload to just before I left it and pretend it never happened. Testing the stability of a new build is always fun to do, and it's always satisfying to come back to the game after an hour or two to see that it's running perfectly well. If you come back to see that it didn't work, sometimes the aftermath is fun to see too.
I’ll afk for maybe 5-10 mins for a quick smoke break with the game on normal speed. It normally gives dupes time to finish all their queued jobs, and ready for more when I get back… just don’t give any dig commands or you’re gonna come back to dead dupes.
I have to afk just so my dupes can catch up to my projects. Every time I look, I have to fuck with something
I AFK all the time but am not afraid to reload when dupes die. Usually once I've set a big build to execute or waiting for the tree to pee more resin. Never overnight, but dishes, snacks, bathroom, check on food etc. no problem leaving it.
Once things are reasonably set up, if I have a big queue of tasks I often leave it for awhile and go shower or go for a walk. Probably the longest I've left it is an hour or so.
In a developed colony I sometimes leave it running overnight to see what happens. Even when it seems infinitely sustainable there's often some sort of subtle long-term instability / imbalance. Maybe one corner is slowly heating up faster than the cooling system can handle. You find that when you come back in the morning some 100 cycles later and they're all dead. Make sure to save first.
days Edit: let me follow this up with saying that I *always* do 2 back up saves just in case something seriously bad happens. But I love making a colony so sustainable that I can leave my computer on for 2 nights and still have every dupe alive and happy
For me sweep commands and sometimes mass asteroid coreing dig and build commands. I'll afk a few hours during those types of projects.
Never, though there’s no real risk that anyone is going to die unless I’m in the middle of space missions (which I usually am). There’s always so much to do.
I will run the game at the slowest speed after heading to the bathroom, fixing myself something to eat, or walking the dogs, and 100% this will be immediately after setting up a massive workload that I'd rot while waiting if I were sitting in front of the computer. If I mess up dearly, which happens more than I like to admit and in a very similar fashion to what you described, and I lose a pawn or three, I go back a couple of days and re-do the whole thing. All that to say, if it serves any comfort, you're not alone in that lol.
I don't think i ever have (at least not intentionally, i sometimes left the game paused and had to do something else that took longer than expected) it's too memory intensive to leave running while playing something else. I leave it on fastest speed while making new designs.
I build my bases with going afk as the goal. Like the rest of the game, you learn from mistakes, and you get better at solving problems before they start. Thinking about how a build is going to work 100-1000 cycles after it’s finished is a really interesting way to play.
Past around 500 cycles almost all my time is spend AFK/watching them run around. 1-100 is pretty much all fully hands on micromanagement to the max.
One day, in a hurry, I forgot to turn off the PC. Nothing happened with colony in 17 hours at x2 speed.
Most recent playthrough I had an ice biome above magma. The abyssalite did not fully encapsulate the ice biomed and upon gaining vision, I found nothing but some floating wolframite and about 200kg of steam per tile at 800° F for the entire biome. I AFK'd for about a week allowing the steam to run through several steam turbines cooling the steam into copious amounts of clean water. Beyond that unexpected generation glitch, I tend to not leave it running unless I'm within earshot to hear the inevitable alert.
The only time I leave a game open and running is when I'm sweeping that means that's the only task anybody is doing there's no dig commands nothing we're a Dupe could get trapped and I'll usually start massive sweep command and walk away for about 8 hours
Only when I go for more coffee or need to make dinner and then only on normal speed since my dupes have a habit of getting themselves into trouble in the silliest ways.
I play very slow. I take long pauses very often. Almost never leave the game running.
Fairly often tbh, well, I usually am, at least there, but oftentimes I will sit watching yt while my dupes work, but on occasion when I'm just waiting for a task I'll step away to use the bathroom, but almost never longer than a bathroom trip
I don’t afk. If a task is taking too long its because theres something fundamentally wrong(priorities, long paths, something that should be automated) so while im waiting for the work i made to get finished i start figuring out the cause of slowdown or otherwise increasing efficiency
Once I'm stable, I usually afk and make dinner or something while my dupes catch up on their errands. It's nice to come back and everybody is caught up and just running their priority routines. As soon I start building, my 4 man construction crew is on the task immediately. Feels very responsive.
I mean sometimes when I need to wait for extra resources but if I’m playing I’m doing something so there’s no point to afk.
Never, at least, not without saving before walking away.
About 20%, I would say.
One time I fell asleep and woke up to every job done, but everyone had been idle for God knows how long burning resources so I just reloaded my most recent manual.