Episode 8 of Season 4 starts on a new colony. The commentary calls it "our new new game": the last one failed, "I forget why," and this one "is going really well so far." It has been played off camera, and the top bar reads Cycle 112, with 17 duplicants and about 56,700 kcal of food. The hour goes to cooling a farm that is too hot and to rebuilding the whole power grid with Heavi-Watt Wire and power transformers, and it ends with a duplicant stuck in a flooded cave. When the stream stops it is Cycle 120, still with 17 duplicants, and food is down to about 37,700 kcal.
The tour
The stream opens with a tour of what was built off camera. An Exosuit Dock holds suits, and a checkpoint means anyone heading into the polluted areas has to put one on. A second checkpoint guards a lower area so full of carbon dioxide that "they couldn't breathe for very long."
The biggest project sits around a Natural Gas Geyser. A pump pulls the gas down into a generator that powers the pump, "this nearly closed system," with a battery for backup. Then comes a long walk through the gas sorting: filters send oxygen out to the vents and the suits, carbon dioxide to a scrubbing room, and chlorine to a farm for plants that like it and to an ore scrubber. What is left should be hydrogen, for "a hydrogen burner" someday. Fish swim in the polluted water below.
A farm that is too hot
Food is getting lower, and the reason shows on a Bristle Blossom card: Growth Halted, with Body Temperature in red. "My big crops here, it's too hot." A walled-off room gets two Thermo Regulators ("I just researched this"), with insulated pipes. The plan is to fill the room with carbon dioxide, "because these crops are fine with that," so a line of it gets pulled off the gas system and run up with gas bridges. With resources low, the kitchen gets told to "make a little bit of mush bars." When the regulators run, the air coming through is "like 10 degrees," and the crops are still a little too hot.
Rebuilding the power
The cables keep failing: "I have bad cabling throughout all this. They're breaking fairly often." The research count ticks from 25 to 26, and Heavi-Watt Wire and a Heavi-Watt Joint Plate show up in the power menu. A Power Transformer card reads "Energy from the Left Outlet is used by the Right Outlet." The plan: big cables run between the areas, and each area gets a transformer with ordinary wire coming out of it.
The geyser circuit goes first, with its own battery behind a transformer, so that "even if I drain all the power from the rest of the base," it keeps running. Then, room by room, the old wires come out and transformers go in. "It's not gonna be as clean as I'd like, but I'm not gonna redo it all." Along the way some water is let out so the fish can drop into a new pool, and it overflows. A feeder the commentary calls "a little gumball machine" holds algae for them. Later the check comes back good: the geyser's battery stays full while another sits empty, "so that is working as I expected."
Digging for metal
The rebuild stalls because the colony is out of metal, and an Unrefrigerated Food alert pops up ("I know I killed the power"). Mining orders go out across the map. One dig finds a Copper Volcano, its card reading Dormant, buried in rock that cannot be dug out, and "they're sleeping right underneath the big copper volcano." The commentary hopes a leveled-up scientist in a suit can get copper from it later.
Stuck in the flooded cave
Then Camille, in a suit, ends up cut off in a cave past the water. A high-priority ladder goes in, but nobody comes to build it: "I'm out of power and so these aren't charged and nobody can come over here." Camille, the commentary says, is asleep. The fix is to dig: steps out of the cave, and a cut that lets the water dump lower, where "having the water down here won't be so bad." Dig markers go in through the rock beside the cave. When morning comes the suit has kept Camille going ("wow, these suits are awesome"). Soon the commentary calls it: "I've saved that person, good job me."
Where it ends
A missing cable gets fixed, the farm room gets cooler air, and "these crops are growing." "That'll be it for today." A last look at the Copper Volcano card: "hopefully this will give me enough metal." The top bar reads Cycle 120, with 17 duplicants and about 37,700 kcal, and the alerts still list flooding and not enough oxygen.