Oxygen Not Included: How to Deal with Stress Guide

by Falagar / Articles, Misc. Guides / 22 May 2017

How to Deal with Stress

Stress is one of the biggest challenges in the game, especially during the early-mid game.

After you manage to overcome oxygen and food issues in your base at early cycles, soon you will have to deal with stress. And building lots of massage tables isn’t the best solution.

A happy dupe is a productive dupe, ignore it and you will pay for its price.

I will sometimes mention numbers and percentages in this guide, but be aware that they can change during the development for balancing purposes. This is Alpha Release after all. It’s highly likely that some of the patches will change the number.

Stress Responses

Before I explained further how to manage your dupe’s stress, I will explain stress responses first. The stress response is how the dupe will react when he/she stressed out (i guess around above 60-70%).

Currently, there are 4 types of Stress Responses:

Vomiter

Dupe will vomit, which means he/she will produce polluted water.

Side effects: reduce their calories (make them hungry) & soggy feet debuff (produce more stress to those who step on polluted water).

Destructive

Dupe will break the building/machine/wall.

Side effect: Dupe cannot perform repair job, means he/she can’t repair broken stuff & broken building/machine will stop working and require another dupe to repair it. Which mean it will cost time & resource (material/metal).

Ugly Crier

IMO this is the cutest stress response in the game 🙂

Dupe will start sobbing and crying from time to time.

Side effect: Produce negative decor around them (sorry, I never check how much is the negative decor. will check later). Negative decor can produce more stress in the surrounding area.

Binge Eater

Dupe will eat a lot of foods in order to reduce their stress (again, sorry I don’t check how much they will eat in calories, because this has been changed before).

IMO by far this is the worst stress response in the game right now, I recommend you avoid this if you are a new player.

Side effect: They can eat your whole food stock, which can trigger starving issues in your colony. Starving dupe will produce more stress and can be the start of snowball effect that leads to your colony’s doom.

How to Deal with Stress

Watch your dupe’s Status & Vital.

Open the Vitals window and see/sort their conditions. Look who has high stress and click on their name to open their info status window.

Red status means there is a negative effect (stress or attribute). Hover your mouse over to see what it does. You can also hover over their stress conditions and see what causes positive & negative effects on their stress. After knowing this, try to eliminate all of their negative status (you can ignore grimy & dirty hand).

Decor Rating & Expectation

This is one of the basic solutions to deal with stress. Every dupe has expected decor.

It’s simple, every time dupe(s) stand in a place that has a higher decor rating than they expected, their stress will be reduced by 20%/cycle (the number might change in the future) and vice versa.

So.. Decor all your colonies with painting & sculpture… Turn your colony into an art museum and exhibition.

Light also provides decor rating, but it’s not that worth it right now, they require power and the area is not that large. Painting & sculpture are good enough (better).

High-Quality Food

“There is No Love Sincerer than The Love of Food”

Good food is good mood, feed your dupe(s) with high-quality food to reduce their stress.

Similar to decor, dupes also have expected food quality. Watch their expected food quality and manage them in the Consumables window

Clothing

This is related to decor rating, you can assign clothing to each dupe. By wearing a certain cloth, it can buff the decor rating in the surrounding area.

Massage Table

Currently, this is the only building in the game that can fight stress directly.

Who doesn’t like a good massage, eh?

The thing is, you should build some but avoid using it.

Using the massage table, causes your dupe to stop working and just idle there on the table.

And what makes it worst, they also consume power, a lot of. If you are still using the hamster wheel (manual generator) as your main power supply, this means at least 2 dupes are being occupied to deal with the stress. This is holding back your colony progression. And it is kind of stupid if both of them are taking turns to use both the massage table and manual generator, never-ending loop until they run out of food & oxygen.

Mess Table

While eating at a table, they will reduce stress by a little. This can be useful if your base is small and they are not exploring too far from the base.

I used to build these before, but since it locked dupes to eat on the table, I don’t use it anymore.

When your base is large enough that it can take them 1/3 or 1/2 cycles to walk around. making them go back to your base to eat lunch/snack is super-wasting time. So instead of building mess table, you better create food storage in several places and let them eat there.

Info, Tips & Tricks

Decor expectation increases each time a dupe gain level.

The Max Decor expectation is 50.

Food expectations also increase by level.

Max Food expectation is 0 (standard).

Picking duplicant that have high creativity is a good thing once you are ready to create painting & sculpture. Raising creativity level is quite hard since they are rarely being used, so picking duplicant that already possess high creativity is quite useful. They can paint/sculp faster and create higher decor rating when done. Side note: you don’t need to pick one right away in the 3 first dupes.

Watch for building information. Learn which building is producing good & bad decor.

Watch their temperature too. Being in cold/hot area can produce stress.

Keep your oxygen pressure high. Low pressure causes stress.

Mop your floor clean (from water & polluted water). No matter how small it is. Wet floor trigger bad status (produce stress).

Be careful when managing their consumable list. If you can’t afford high-quality food, it’s better to let them eat bad food instead of starving.

Be careful not to set your massage table to high/low. Especially when you have a lot of things to do. I usually set it to 0-50% or 10-55% in early/mid-game.

“Follow Cam” feature can reduce their stress by 5%/cycle XD

Shower is not really needed, I recommend avoiding building it until late in the game.

Shower is good to remove soggy feet & sopping wet, also make the dupe less likely to catch the sickness. But it took time for them to take shower and sometimes make them walk for half a cycle just to get there and being interrupted while showering. Right now the mechanic is a bit broken and needs fixing.

Same thing with Hand Sanitizer, not really needed. Be careful with bleach stone, it produces chlorine.

Decor their room & corridor where they usually walk and do activities (especially their bedroom).

It’s possible to have low stress without having to use massage table. Some dupes will still have high stress because of their job.

For example, Frankie is working near a geyser and he is being hurt by it (Heat Stroke). It’s normal to have this kind of thing. No need to worry, just let him rest in the rejuvenator.

Falagar

He is the founder and editor of Magic Game World. He loved gaming from the moment he got a PlayStation 1 with Gran Turismo on his 7th birthday.
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