Unscheduled December 2025

[blissful elbow]

V-CERS-C-49767906-0-4A-0
Blasted Ceres (The Lab)

IT'S. TOO. HOT.

You have to do something. This is too much. This is intolerable. Maybe... maybe if you imagine some place really really cold, and you imagine it hard enough, it just might...

... oh, this is a whole new problem.

Welcome to our first unscheduled map adventure! Just to be clear up front, THIS IS NOT REPLACING THE CURRENT MONTHLY MAP. You may play this map in addition if you wish, for however long people are still interested in it. Rules are as on the current monthly map, with biome remix disallowed, but all other options available. ... I swear, I'll update the rules post soon. We won't be putting up another unscheduled adventure for a while, and we will be posting another map before people are likely to lose interest in this one, so take it casually. This one's not meant to be rushed.

In addition, these unscheduled maps give us a chance to explore DLC-specific maps more often without excluding people from playing on the main seeds, and we will be using them in the future to revisit Relica(aaaaaaa?), and potentially other asteroids or scenarios with specific restrictions. Stay tuned for more, and give us your thoughts. And in the meantime... don't look down.

Suggested Challenge: Care Packages and Teleporters Off. What you got is what you got.

[pastel pond]

I just did a Blasted Ceres run a while ago and got bored at around cycle 160 and I see this

[gritty swift]

you get bored of hot-cold?

[blissful elbow]

We promise, it's a perfectly typical Blasted Ceres. We promise. Honest this time. Honest.

[plush ore]

...hmmmmm.

Will start later today when I have time

[blissful elbow]

The beautiful thing is, no matter what answer people take that as, it's gonna hook somebody.

[real kiln]

question that I'm sure has been answered in the past, I know DLC-mixing isn't allowed but is just having the others enabled fine?

[gritty swift]

Biome mixing messes with how map generates

It's safe to add fragments though

[real kiln]

Oh ok, ig the outer planets aren't really the focus anyway

[gritty swift]

It doesn't change geyser placement iirc. I am sure we tested it at some point...

[plush ore]

I feel like I may be being cheated of my precious heat here

[pastel pond]

in my last Blasted Ceres run I just moved the base to below the magma layer and called it a good day

[plush ore]

...oh, this can only end badly.

[loud oxide]

Naaah it's fiiiine.

[plush ore]

Jorge has a scenic view, at least

also, who decided that gunk should freeze at -8°C? I've had so much trouble keeping my boops running smoothly

[pastel pond]

just keep the boop toilet in a vacuum

[plush ore]

...yeah, I should have done that. Alas, I went and hunted seals instead until I had an area where the gunk stayed liquid

[blissful elbow]

I am beyond entertained that the base game channel is the active one for this pair. <_<

[pastel pond]

wow, ||there is an easy path through the magma layer||

[plush ore]

I'm having very little time to play now. I'll have to try catching up again tomorrow

[blissful elbow]

This seed will run for ages. Relax. Take your time. Play the standard SO seed for a bit.

[pastel pond]

restartitis kicks again for me

[pastel pond]

cycle 26, still no outhouse

[pastel pond]

kinda funny how peeing without toilet doesn't transfer germs to the dupe, while peeing at an outhouse or lavatory does

[pastel pond]

now I cansee where the surface of the magma layer is

[pastel pond]

beetas deployed to enrich the uranium geode

[pastel pond]

liquid uranium would be my metal refinery coolant before getting through the magma layer

[pastel pond]

okay I love volcanic activity

[pastel pond]

trying to decor bomb the ranch for shatter floxes

[gritty swift]

Isn't artifacts or statues better decor?

[pastel pond]

I don't have them yet

[gritty swift]

Keepsakes?

[pastel pond]

don't have them either

but I managed to get a shatter flox egg just now

[pastel pond]

[plush ore]

Cycle 100 of the Unplanned Assembly. It's my first time playing with bionics, and it's way more difficult to get power than I thought. I just sheared my 4th shatter flox, so I'll be trying to set up some solar temporarily until I get plastic for STs

Also my first time playing anything Frosty. I really like how cozy it felt at the start, there's a very clear distinction between "inside" and "outside" that made me want to waste all my wood on drywalls to make it feel even more like a little igloo

[loud oxide]

Solar on Ceres?

[plush ore]

Well, I'm desperate

[blissful elbow]

Bionics can run for their own supper, if you're willing to lose half a cycle of labour.

[loud oxide]

Ouch

[blissful elbow]

But yeah, it's like when people take too many standard dupes and realise they're starving.

[plush ore]

...and also didn't look at the stats. Okay, maybe a bad investment

[loud oxide]

Heh

[blissful elbow]

It's much cosier on a non-Blasted Ceres. <_<

[plush ore]

That's very true. This is probably something I'll have to do

[plush ore]

Yeah, I'll definitely be doing a normal start as well some other winter

My personal challenge is to complete the great escape before (or on) the 24th, but that might be unlikely. We'll see how much time I get to play.

[sudden umbra]

Haven't touched ONI in a while...

[pastel pond]

kinda lost about what to do next

[blissful elbow]

All that snow is messy... best drop it down the garbage disposal.

[pastel pond]

wait, did I spoiler tag the image?

now with spoiler tag

I feel that the "best" thing is building a base under the magma but I have already done that in a previous run and I want something new

[blissful elbow]

Relocate the magma to the surface; Flipped 2.

[pastel pond]

how can I even do that

chained escher waterfall?

[sudden umbra]

pitcher pumps

It's really the only way

[sudden umbra]

I'm taking the challenge: no TP, no care pkg

First time on blasted ceres

[pastel pond]

I intended to disable TP but somehow kept it enabled, now I will pretend that it doesn't exist

[sudden umbra]

There's a mod you can use to delete it

[pastel pond]

gotta appreciate this source of rock

[pastel pond]

bruh why does this map have so many ||leaky oil fissures||

[loud oxide]

Because we carefully selected it for various fun factors.

[blissful elbow]

Or just for lols.

[loud oxide]

That's what I said.

[pastel pond]

now I'm doing what Vertel did as well

[blissful elbow]

It is convenient, if odd.

[viscid escarp]

Awww, no bionics??
You mean I have to ACTUALLY plan for food consumption??? sigh
(Shuffles off to find old notes on how meat sacks actually survive in this game)

[gritty swift]

use bionics if you want?

[viscid escarp]

Aww, it's all good. Just having fun. 😄

[pastel pond]

first rocket launch on cycle 302...

[pastel pond]

excuse me what

is that just a quirk of stinko swamp asteroid?

[pastel pond]

cycle 302-332, 333 data banks, 1 outer asteroid discovered

[sudden umbra]

No, really. Mixing in DLC content is fine. The only rule is no biome mixing

I am using boops and meat dupes... I say "using" but I have zero progress yet.

[pastel pond]

the ||tungsten volcano|| seems to be a bit bad (for Relica Fragment)

[pastel pond]

space mining moment

[plush ore]

Update: It did, in fact, end badly

Luckily no-one seems to have died

[pastel pond]

now I lost some interest on this run

[modest sandal]

Woah

I was just entertaining the idea of having like a little event MonthlyMap

Hm...

[plush ore]

First rockets sent somewhere around cycle 160. I now have the moon artifact and will start producing data banks until I get a steam rocket with research modules

Also, my power woes are solved! Unrelated, parts of my base are rapidly heating up and I have a growing pool of pwater. Currently in the process of switching to geothermal

[pastel pond]

insulite on cycle 666

[plush ore]

Cycle 200! Progress has slowed a bit now.
I'm currently in the process of moving my entire power spine away from my main access shaft and to the left. No rocket missions in a while, but I've been busy setting up more permanent solutions on the ground. Actively looking for new dupes that would fit a colonization crew.
also, still no toilets

[pastel pond]

my base looks much less expansive

iirc I did toilets at around cycle 60

[sudden umbra]

I have made it to cycle 10 & cycle 4 and restarted I think 4 times. This start is tricky with boop + dupes.

Also I only played ceres once when it came out and I have been getting analysis paralysis wrt project priorities

[sudden umbra]

odd steam pocket

[pastel pond]

I think it's snow falling -> evaporating when touching magma -> rise into hollows above -> blocked by falling snow -> condensed to under 1g -> stopped transferring heat when under 1g

[sudden umbra]

There is no magma layer below this

[pastel pond]

are you sure?

[sudden umbra]

Ok well eventually there is but there's a lot of space between them

Also it's trapped inside solid CO2

[pastel pond]

the game sometimes just make supercooled liquid/gas form tiles

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 10 again

[pastel pond]

damn, the thing happened to my previous monthly map run happened again

the latest progress was about cycle 705

and I went afk without pausing the game

then one of my infinite storages blew up due to a dupe peeing on it

[blissful elbow]

Whoops.

[pastel pond]

still manageable, I guess

at least no dupe died

[sudden umbra]

I don't know why I enabled biobots story. I've never used it and I probably won't again.

[plush ore]

I love how you can explore basically the entire teleporter planetoid with just a rover. Is that intentional/common?

[blissful elbow]

It's often small enough and with enough broken abyssalite in the middle that, yeah, in my experience you can uncover most of it without digging abyssalite, if you care to.

[pastel pond]

I'm not sure whether I should deal with the geysers in magma

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 34. First cot built. Struggling to keep boops powered as I am realizing I should probably find a way to make O2 since oxylite deposits are waning fast.

[plush ore]

That outhouse placement is genius

[sudden umbra]

That is the boop outhouse in the only location I could find where the resulting gunk would not freeze

First I just dug out enough to throw the gear balm in there before it froze, then I realized I could put the toilet in there and it's been great

I have used 0 heating so far. dupes are frostproof and 2/3 boops finally have climate control

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 40. we are go for emergency oxygen

[pastel pond]

cycle 864, finally got stable on Relica Fragment

I didn't know asteroid name can be two words

well this happened again

[loud oxide]

It's a pun, so yes.

[sudden umbra]

I don't get it. What happened?

[pastel pond]

an arbor tree on water asteroid

[sudden umbra]

Huh I don't see that

[loud oxide]

I assumed you were looking at the algae.

[pastel pond]

(starmap) how I didn't discover it first...

[sudden umbra]

I have been fighting the urge to restart with all boops

I'm only on cycle 93 but I think caring for & feeding both breeds of worker has slowed me down substantially.

[pastel pond]

||aluminum volcano|| tamed!

but I will be getting thermium soon anyway

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 192 finally got a boop service station built so they can stop clogging the outhouse every time.

and feeding it from a tamed ||leaky oil fissure||

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 215 preparing to ranch some bammoth for fiber finally, doing something with all that floxwood

The aforementioned boop service station

[pastel pond]

I still haven't started ranching bammoth lol

[sudden umbra]

What are you doing for fiber?

[pastel pond]

rhex on relica fragment

before that I sheared a few wild bammoths

now I have more than enough fiber production to keep up with isosap production for insulite

[plush ore]

Well, I didn't have time to finish before christmas

Will try picking this save up again once I'm back at my PC in, like, a week

[pastel pond]

now this base is good enough, moving on to the new monthly map

[sudden umbra]

Just got these 2 at about the same time

Cycle 365, about to start building a proper refinery setup. This has been a very relaxed colony so far.

Oh I need to fix the asymmetry of the left-side flox ranches

[lone solstice]

Cycle 53 Got Locavore now working in increasing meat production

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 456. Finally got my rock & power factory producing igneous after processing all that obsidian.

[lone solstice]

now to decide if I actually want to do super sustainable...

[sudden umbra]

I went this way

[pastel pond]

me too

[sudden umbra]

Might take a while to cool it this way, but I got time

[loud oxide]

Place your bets folks!

[sudden umbra]

I will probably add some STs

[sudden umbra]

The geyser went dormant, and I wanted to play

[loud oxide]

Delicious ||Raspberry Juice.||

[pastel pond]

I door crushed magma

for myself

[sudden umbra]

That steam chamber has evolved. all the magma biome (except most of the abyssalite) is piled inside this airlock now

[sudden umbra]

Kinda want to uncap the ||cobalt volcano|| and feed its output to the geothermal heat pump

I would have done ||aluminum|| but I already tamed that one

[pastel pond]

I just fed molten lead lol

[sudden umbra]

Hmm I will have to geotune it to get it over the temp required for fullerene & niobium

[sudden umbra]

awww

Not 100% sure what I'm doing here. Curious how it will turn out though

[sudden umbra]

OK after much screwing around I think I am almost ready to feed all this ||molten cobalt|| into the geothermal heat pump. Perhaps my largest project ever: a double-barrel molten metal pre- and re-heater using a couple 4xgeotuned volcanoes as a heat source. I'm about to start the pre-heating process.

[sudden umbra]

Shiny Coprolite extraction complete

OK time to start pumping the fluids... after dinner.

Pre/re-heater is working. I added a manual shutoff toggle to each barrel so I can stop it without freezing metal in the pipes.

[sudden umbra]

I need moar heat

I am considering chaining other volcanoes into the mix but they are not as close (not that these are close, but at least they are straight up. There are others further up, but they are being harvested. I could tear all that down... and then start harvesting some other ones, I guess. Or I could make a crazy magma-fall that traverses the map from west to east.

Something like one of these

Or.. I could just be content with how slow this is at re-heating

[pastel pond]

could use one or two geotuned volcano

[sudden umbra]

The two I am using are geotuned 4x

Apparently it takes a lot of heat to reheat molten cobalt back up over 2230C

A lot of parts of the system are still pre-heating though, so there's a lot of loss there

Maybe it will catch up eventually

But I kind of like the idea of making the magma path more intrusive on my colony

[sudden umbra]

Also I am beginning to think I can't rescue all these liquids

Doesn't help that molten iron & aluminum have the same density, but even without that I think I'd have issues.

How do I avoid deleting the cobalt here?

Maybe I can push the gold down there

Still this is going to be difficult to design in a way that functions without intervention

[pastel pond]

would pitcher pump help to sort liquids?

[sudden umbra]

Yeah, it could. I could build a staircase into a pitcher pump well maybe...

But then there's the chance that I lead-gas the whole thing

Or salt-gas

And if I build in such a way as to preserve a liquid lock, I get this problem of a tiny bit of one metal blocking tons of another

I think the 1-tile-wide column is a huge mistake

Back to the drawing board

[sudden umbra]

I could automate keeping it all sealed until there's no gas, then drop all the liquid out the bottom where a [pitcher] pump waits. I would need to preheat the whole thing so there's no leftover molten lead or salt that will phase change after the drop.

[sudden umbra]

Cycle 920. 0 rockets launched so far.

[sudden umbra]

This is working better so far.

[sudden umbra]

Feels like I'm about to have a problem.

[loud oxide]

Coal time?

[pastel pond]

or route to metal extraction?

[loud oxide]

Maybe time to do something with a few dozen tons of liquid cobalt.

[sudden umbra]

This plus the 3 nearly-full reservoirs. I am almost done integrating another volcano into the pre-/re-heating mechanism, so I will be able to use more cobalt. Unsure of the rate of consumption though

I reworked the geo-vent design some to delete gases faster. The whole automation is getting unwieldy, and I still would not consider it automatic.

But also the liquid handling is getting better.

Oh, and I tacked on a petroleum boiler for good measure

3rd 4xgeotuned volcano added to the mix... After its next eruption, maybe its magma will reach the useful area.

Whew, 52 cycles of dormancy

[sudden umbra]

whooooops I failed to properly build the infinite storage

[sudden umbra]

whew fixed

[sudden umbra]

A couple more 4x tuned volcanoes joining the fray

[sudden umbra]

Added a way to take care of excess cobalt. Also, pretty magma falls...

The automation for the geo-vent harness thing can mostly run unattended now. I do get a few mcg of lead showing up in the pump pool due to lead gas getting a tick to escape and the condense on the very cold liquid pump. I still occasionally "stir the tanks" using the top 2 airlocks when the molten glass/magma and/or molten iron/aluminum density equalities cause stacks of those liquids

[sudden umbra]

holy crap I saved it

Paused. Locked the petrol boiler heater airlock open to not condense the lead. Locked the above magma-dropper airlocks shut (probably not necessary, but kept the mess small). Built a granite tile over the molten lead just left of the hydrogen/oxygen escher gases. Fortunately, no lead was pushed to the right? I didn't note whether it was pushed left or deleted. Mopped the lead and moved it out. Opened the magma droppers which melted the granite block and re-established the escher flow.

All in the name of making the place a little prettier by using gold for conductive heaviwatt instead of lead

[sudden umbra]

Finally got some super coolant at cycle 1100. Have not launched a rocket. Building cryofuel condenser. Straight to hydrogen hats!

[sudden umbra]

2 of the geo vent harnesses had meltdowns when I wasn't looking. Reloaded the save from a couple minutes prior to see what happened, but it did not happen again. Bummer. Curious how it failed so I can improve it.