Episode 20 is a stream and the last episode of Season 1 on the channel. It opens on Cycle 71 with 17 duplicants, a food shortage and 0 kcal on the food counter. The pipes and the oxygen look better early on, but food never reaches the duplicants in time. By Cycle 74 they are starving and collapsing, the death count reads six, and the video ends on the pause menu.
A new scientist and the pipes
The video opens on the Printing Pod's DNA blueprint screen. One choice is a scientist whose card the game describes as "the exact opposite of athletic." The commentary lets it go ("that's okay, allow it"), and the counter goes from 17 to 18.
On the liquid plumbing overlay, the polluted water pipes get another look. How to make the water "properly flow" up and across is a mystery, so the extra pipes come out. The Bio Distiller card shows slime going in, algae and polluted water coming out. The commentary walks the loop: showering makes slime, the distiller turns it into "algae that we use to breathe," and the polluted water becomes "regular water to drink and bathe in." Throughput is the snag. One machine is "not pumping because the output of water is too full."
More vents for the oxygen
"It seems like our oxygen is getting better." To spread it beyond "just this middle column," gas vents go in at a few more spots, built from copper ore. Beds follow at high priority. For a while the commentary sounds settled: "overall we're pretty stable." The one regret is power: "I just need more of the coal guys. I need to have not killed all those guys in the beginning."
Stressed and starving
By Cycle 73 the alerts list Starvation and Stressed. The mess hall seats are all claimed, "so they're not really using them," and more mess tables go in. The commentary finds Mae the most stressed, with soggy feet and dirty hands, and points out the shower.
"Let's try and address the starving thing." A food machine goes into the small closed circuit that runs on manual power, and the Microbe Musher is set to make mush bars all the time. "This is supposed to be 'don't suffocate,' not 'don't starve.'" The alerts also show Food beyond reach, and a tooltip spells it out: there is food in the colony that a duplicant cannot reach.
Cots, dirt and the death count
Then duplicants start going down. The game's tooltip from Episode 17 is back: these duplicants need to be rescued, and must have an assigned Medical Cot or Rejuvenator. Cots and the Rejuvenator get assigned one at a time.
The Microbe Musher still reads Awaiting Material Delivery. Its recipe tooltip says it consumes 75 Kg of an available 102114.6 Kg of dirt, and the commentary works out that the big number is the colony's total: "there is, I guess, none in the machine."
A Duplicants Have Died message follows: the scientist printed at the start of the video has starved to death. Graves are ordered at high priority. "This is not stable. We have learned a lot though."
Where it ends
On Cycle 74 the counter shows 15 duplicants, and the alert list reads Starvation (6), Incapacitated (4) and Duplicants have died (6), up from 3 at the start. "This disaster is the end of the stream," says the commentary, with lessons: keep the critters that produce coal, medical beds are important, and have enough power for everything being built. A fresh start next time is "potentially" the plan, but not settled: "I'll save it still, I haven't fully decided." The pause menu opens, and the end card follows.