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The Complete Beginner's Completely Incomplete Guide to Oxygen Not Included

HOW MANY DUPES "SHOULD" YOU HAVE?

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100 dupe challenge. I rarely have much more than 20 dupes, but must say it's quite amusing watching a silly amount of workers get stuff done.

The short answer:

However many (or few) you want. Personally, I rarely take on more than a dozen dupes. Usually I have less than ten.

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The long answer:

I've played with lots of dupes and I've played with few. It's easy to think that more dupes will make the game easier, but this isn't entirely true. (It's actually completely false.)

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More dupes means you can get things done faster. But it also means you need a steady supply of more (and more) oxygen and food.

 

Many if not most of the disaster stories new players tell stem, in one way or another, from taking on too many dupes. Fewer dupes means things take longer to accomplish, but overall the game is a *lot* easier.

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I once tried a game with just one dupe. (The base pictured on the front page of this site is from that game.) This was back before the DLC. After a few thousand cycles of painfully slow progress, I was ready to send Ruby to the temporal tear. (The temporal tear is a destination in space that is arguably the "final" achievement or goal of the game.)

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At the other dupe count extreme is the "100 dupe challenge." The basic idea is simple enough: you have to take a new dupe every time until you have 100 dupes (or more). If you want to see such a challenge in action, there are several YouTubers, including at least Brothgar, Francis John and GrindThisGame, who have done this. Luma Plays even has a video where he starts with 100 dupes and sees how long he can keep them alive.​​

In a 100 dupe challenge keeping everyone fed and breathing is the challenge. In a 1 dupe challenge the main challenge is boredom.

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Get to the point already - how many dupes?

My advice is the same advice pretty much any ONI old-timer will give a beginner: keep your dupe count low until you know what you're doing.

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As advice goes, that is frustratingly vague. So let's break it down a bit.

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What does "low" mean?

I'd say six dupes (or fewer) is a pretty good number while you're still learning. There is nothing you can't accomplish in the game with six dupes, it will just take a while.

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From a practical standpoint, you can also think of bases as "small SPOM" or "large SPOM" bases. (A SPOM is a setup that will produce oxygen for your base - we'll look at them later in the guide.)

 

A small SPOM can produce enough oxygen for 10 dupes. (But you'll want a bit of extra oxygen production, so let's call it 8-9 dupes.) If 6 seems like too few, a SPOM-based alternative is to stay below 10 dupes.

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(One feature of everything taking longer with fewer dupes is that if you, like so many of us, suffer from restartitis and tend to roll a new world once things are under control, getting to that point will take longer.)

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What does "know what you're doing" mean?

As a rough target to aim for, I'd say you can start piling on more and more dupes once you have the hang of oxygen and cooling.

 

More specifically, learning how to build:

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The SPOM will sort out your oxygen. And cooling will enable lots of things: you can keep your base cool enough for plants to grow, you can tame water geysers to fill your water supply, you can tame metal geysers for resources, etc.

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Then again...

I have a fridge magnet that says: I've learned so much from my mistakes that I'm thinking of making some more.

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So another option is to ignore this advice and instead just try to learn something new from every playthrough. Even - or especially - the ones that end in disaster.

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