Episode 7 of Season 4 opens on a different colony again. "So the last one failed," the commentary says, and this one has been played off camera: the top bar reads Contagious Acropolis, Cycle 30, with nine duplicants and about 106,800 kcal of food. One duplicant has already suffocated. The hour goes into a block of utility floors, wires that keep breaking, and carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. When the stream stops it is Cycle 45, with 11 duplicants, the coal has run out, and a fix for the carbon dioxide is still waiting to be built.
A tour of a new colony
The farms come first. The crops sit behind airlocks, and the carbon dioxide gets pumped in with them, because "they can grow in carbon dioxide just fine." That saves making oxygen for those rooms: "I'm actually just storing all of my carbon dioxide with these plants." There is plenty of Liceloaf, kept in a refrigerated mess hall where the duplicants wash their hands before eating.
The room overlay says the mess hall is not a great hall yet. It needs a decorative item and a recreational building, and it is one tile too big: 65 against a maximum of 64. One tile comes out. "Yeah, that was an easy fix." Morale is the other lesson from earlier games. Duplicants get stressed if their morale is lower than their job expects, so the commentary is holding off on promotions. Stinky sits at minus one, mourning a lost friend.
Utility floors
The big build is a stack of three floors: "a med bay, a massage clinic, and then like bathrooms," all serviced by a middle floor. That middle floor gets a power converter and a machine to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen gets piped into the three floors, and the hydrogen runs up through a gas filter to be burned on the power floor. That floor is three tiles high so the generators fit side by side. Exosuits are on the list too, so that duplicants leaving the base "need to put on a suit," but they need refined metal first.
The missing duplicant
About twenty minutes in, the alert finally gets read: "Abe has suffocated to death." When the body turns up: "Well at least you died where I'm gonna put dirty water." The commentary wishes the duplicants were smarter about "digging out a lot of stuff but then like not giving themselves a way out." A print around Cycle 31 had already taken the count from nine to ten.
Wires that keep breaking
The power keeps going out. The wires are carrying more than they can take, and Overload Damage labels pop up over and over. The commentary grumbles about what happens "if you don't update the power." Between blackouts, the work moves on. A research finishes, rock crushing in the commentary's words, and a Rock Granulator appears in the refinement menu. A massage table goes up. Ruby comes down with slime lung and takes the med-bed. Placebos unlock, "sand pills basically." A print screen offers Burt, Gossmann and Liam, and the colony grows to 11.
The real fix is heavier cable. A Heavi-Watt Wire line goes down along the power floor, then the colony runs out of metal partway, so diggers get sent after more. The old broken cables get patched in the meantime "just so that our oxygen generation is working right."
Carbon dioxide with nowhere to go
The farms take some carbon dioxide, but not all of it. It settles in the new floors and in the bathrooms, and polluted oxygen gets in too. The commentary walls off one room, adds an airlock so the gas has "a place to go," and plans a pump below to send it somewhere it can be filtered. The algae runs out. A Starvation alert shows up with lots of food in storage, and three duplicants are sick, one with slime lung from "breathing in polluted air."
Where it ends
Then the coal runs out: "everything kind of falls apart when you run out of power." Diggers head for a coal deposit far away. The bathroom on the lower floor finally works. Last, a carbon dioxide scrubber goes in down below, with clean water in and dirty water out, and everything gets set to top priority. It will have to wait, "because we're out of time." "That'll be it for today." The top bar reads Cycle 45, with 11 duplicants and about 152,300 kcal, and the alerts say Colony requires Med-Beds, Starvation, Low Immunity and Insufficient oxygen generation.