Oxygen Not Included 744825

A duplicant just made a mess in the water supply. The same duplicant, who is a naturally gifted digger because tool use is familiar to them, has just tunneled into a chlorine pocket. The mealwood is wilting, and the algae terrariums are barely keeping up. In Oxygen Not Included, you're not commanding an empire; you're running a chaotic, subterranean nursery for people who can't remember to breathe. The game tasks you with gathering food, water, oxygen, valuable resources, and happiness for the colony's duplicants, all while the clock ticks on a hundred tiny emergencies.

Where gas pressure and temperature form interlocking systems

• Lovers of deep, interlocking systems where gas pressure and temperature really matter.
• Anyone who finds joy in building a self-regulating base from scratch.
• Players who enjoy the messy, personal stories that emerge from simulated personalities.
• Those who appreciate a game that explains physics through plumbing disasters.

Your first colonies will fail before you learn base management

• Managing a base and several people in it is described as very difficult; your first colonies will fail.
• Your duplicants need a relaxation machine later on, not just a cot and a meal.
• You start on an asteroid chosen at the beginning, so each game has its own resource headaches.
• Colonists later require enough food with a surplus; sustainability is a slow, hard lesson.

Two tweaks to make early chaos easier to read

Out of the box, the game defaults are sensible, but a couple of tweaks make the early chaos easier to read. Open the options menu before you unpause, and head to the Game tab. The first thing I tell my evening class students is to switch on Show building ranges. It draws a faint overlay whenever you place an outhouse, a cot, or a deodorizer, so you can see exactly which duplicants will trek across the entire base to use it. Without it, you're guessing, and guessing usually means a puddle on the floor three tiles from the toilet.

Next, turn on Jobs and Priorities from the top-right overlay panel, not just the tabs at the bottom. The priority overlay colours everything from 1 to 9, and once you've got thirty-odd tasks queued, those little yellow and red bars are the difference between a colony that digs out the coal generator and one that spends a cycle sweeping up sand. A smaller change, but one that saves your ears, sits under the Audio tab: dial the Duplicant voices slider to about 60%. The soundtrack is a lovely, ambient hum, but the squeaky chatter of ten stressed duplicants competing for the same ration box can grate after an hour.

Will it run smoothly on an older Mac

One of the first things people wonder when they find an oxygen not included mac download is whether it'll run smoothly on an older machine. The answer is mostly yes, provided you haven't got a hundred cycles of piping and critters on screen. Version 744825 includes a set of texture optimizations that slimmed down the liquid texture array, so even integrated graphics have an easier time. That said, if you're on an older Mac with an ageing graphics chip, you'll want to keep the Liquid Blending setting off; it was causing a visual glitch on some cards, which this hotfix addressed, and leaving it disabled doesn't change the simulation one bit.

Another common question is whether the game truly needs a mouse, or if a trackpad will do. I've played entire colonies on a MacBook's trackpad, and it's perfectly workable. The cursor controls for digging and building are tile-based, so you're not fighting for pixel precision. The only time I reach for a mouse is when I'm laying long pipe runs across the map, and even then, the drag-build tool is forgiving. The game has no pinch-to-zoom gesture for the trackpad, so get used to the scroll-wheel zoom or the keyboard shortcuts; Z and X become second nature within a cycle.

A Workflow for Setting Up a Stable Oxygen Supply

Let's walk through the first ten cycles of oxygen, because this is where most colonies suffocate before they starve. You land with a ration box of oxylite, and that's your countdown. Here's how to beat it.

Start by digging a small alcove — four tiles high, six wide — directly off your main shaft, and place an Algae Deoxidizer there. It's the early-game workhorse: it eats algae, spits out oxygen, and asks for nothing but a bit of power. Run a manual wire from your hamster wheel to the deoxidizer, then set the wheel's priority to 7. You want a duplicant on that wheel as soon as the battery dips, or the oxygen stops.

Next, build Algae Terrariums in pairs, but not in the same spot. Terrariums consume carbon dioxide, so placing one at the bottom of your base where CO₂ pools, and another mid-level, gives you a passive carbon skimmer while producing oxygen. They also produce polluted water bottles, so stick a Wash Basin within five tiles. A duplicant who handles a bottle of polluted water without washing up is a food poisoning outbreak waiting to happen.

By cycle five, you'll notice the algae stores dropping. That's your cue to dig towards the nearest caustic biome and start bringing back Algae and Slime by the ton. Store slime in a submerged container — a one-tile-deep puddle will do — or it off-gases polluted oxygen and ruins your carefully built pressure balance. If you've set up an oxygen not included download torrent that came with an earlier build, you might remember slime off-gassing through walls; the current physics are a bit kinder, but submersion is still the safest trick.

The neutronium border trap that version 744825 squashed

One infuriating bug that version 744825 finally squashed involved incapacitated duplicants. Previously, if a duplicant was downed and another duplicant rescued and resuscitated them, they'd sometimes snap to the bottom-left corner of the world, trapped inside the neutronium border. If you're on this version, that's gone. If you're running an older copy from an oxygen not included torrent, just use the debug teleport tool as a handy workaround to pop them right back where they belong.

The most common self-inflicted wound I see is the "pissed-off artist" loop. You assign a duplicant to create a masterpiece sculpture, the skill string used to be wrong (it said Masterworks but didn't reference masterpieces), and the artist would churn out a mediocre block, denting colony morale. Make sure the duplicant's Creativity skill is actually high enough before you queue the art. A skill of 2 with one star in art means you'll get a crude sketch, not a masterpiece, no matter what the button used to claim.

Another snag is the gasket element bug that this hotfix patched. If you deconstructed a building that had a gasket — something like a liquid pump attached to a pipe — it would sometimes spawn a blob of the wrong element, like a tiny drop of superheated steam where copper should be. That's been corrected, but if you're carrying over a save from an older build, double-check any recently demolished pump rooms for rogue hot liquids. A single tile of steam in an insulated farm chamber can cook a row of bristle blossoms before you spot it.

Memory leaks are harder for a player to diagnose, but you'd notice the symptoms: after a long session, the navgrid — the invisible web that duplicants use to pathfind — would bloat and slow the simulation to a crawl. The fix was a navgrid memory leak patch in this version, so saving and reloading after a few hours used to be mandatory. Now you can leave a colony running overnight and it won't grind to a half-frame crawl by morning.

This is a hotfix release smoothing out a few peculiar bugs. The most dramatic saw duplicants teleporting to the bottom left of the world after a rescue and resuscitation. Elsewhere, a gasket deconstruction issue that spawned the wrong element has been corrected, and a liquid rendering bug on older graphics cards is now resolved. The Masterworks skill string also got a text fix to mention Masterpiece artwork quality.

• macOS (specific version not detailed by the developer)
• Runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs