Episode 5 of Season 4 is not the starving colony from Episode 4. The commentary says so at the start: "this isn't the one we've played before," but "the current one I've been playing for a bit," on slightly easier settings. The top bar reads Cycle 87, with 18 duplicants and more than 92,000 kcal of food. The hour goes into stress, coal and carbon dioxide, and it ends with a new room where the carbon dioxide gets scrubbed out. When the stream stops, it is Cycle 98 and the alerts still warn about oxygen.
A tour of a bigger colony
The stream starts with a tour. Small cables kept overloading and breaking in earlier games, so this base runs heavier wire where the power is made and through the ladder wells, with a small converter that feeds the smaller cables. A Heavi-Watt Wire card shows a max of 20 kW.
Water gets pumped up and split into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen goes up to be burned for power, though "there's not very much being generated." The oxygen goes out through pipes running down the whole base. Dirty water drains into a tank that is "pretty empty right now," and machines clean it. A geyser nearby is "not always active." Hatches sit in a pen, eating dirt and making coal.
The trouble spots show up fast. The lower floors are full of carbon dioxide, and the alerts list high stress for nine duplicants. Another alert reads "Duplicants have died." In the commentary, one went to learn from a machine "and apparently suffocated in the process," and the machine still thinks it is training somebody. A couple of tombstones get planned by the compost.
A massage room
Stress comes first. A massage clinic needs a massage table and a decorative item, so a new floor goes in, two tiles high "because the actual massage tables are only two high," with doors to keep the outside air away. It needs power too, and a converter. A new bedroom, three tiles high, follows, because "I think I'm short on beds."
At first the massage table has no power ("oh I never hooked it up"). Once it does: "Now you are able to de-stress yourself. Good job." Later, "stress is doing better."
Out of coal
Then the power drops. "I'm out of coal. So my main source of power is coal." The duplicants get a platform and dig orders toward a coal seam, which the commentary calls "not really a long-term solution." The hatches make coal too, but slowly. A small cable overloads almost right away, so another converter goes in. A print choice brings in Bubbles as the colony's nineteenth duplicant, picked for a "tidy" interest. Later in the stream, coal runs low again, and more digging opens a way toward a large patch of it.
The scrubbing room
The main build is a sealed room for carbon dioxide, with two carbon skimmers to start. Under the power floor, where four coal generators sit, the room is planned with its own power converter and pipes for clean and dirty water. The generators give off carbon dioxide, so they vent down into the same space.
An air pump goes in low, where the gas collects, because "carbon dioxide seems to be the heaviest of all of them." Filters sort what comes up the pipe: carbon dioxide goes to the scrubbing room, oxygen goes back into the vents, and anything else gets dumped in one spot "and then I can deal with that later on." A water line fills a pit below, and a fish nearby gets warned that it will die out of the water. The commentary checks in: "Our scrubbing is working well."
Where it ends
Near the end an old outhouse gets removed for a vent, and a washroom that is no longer used is closed up. A vent stays blocked because "there's too much oxygen," which the commentary calls "an okay problem to have." The research screen shows Agriculture, with the research station waiting on materials. The last look is the whole gas loop: carbon dioxide sinks, gets pulled down to the scrubbers, and oxygen goes back into the pipes. "These things work pretty well." The top bar at the end reads Cycle 98, with 19 duplicants and about 121,000 kcal, and the game is saved before the stream ends.
