Complete Bionic Duplicant Survival Guide For Oxygen Not Included

Rarely will a colony management or simulation game add a feature that changes how the entire game is played. Even rarer is when that feature is a seemingly small change. Oxygen Not Included managed this feat, however, with the introduction of Bionic Duplicants.

A variation on the standard Duplicant, your colony’s hardworking humans, Bionic Duplicants have different needs and equally different strengths. With how much they shake up the standard survival formula, it’s best to go in prepared. Otherwise, those new Bionic Duplicants will power off before you get to really enjoy them.

How To Unlock Bionic Duplicants

Bionic Duplicants are part of the Bionic Booster DLC Pack. As such, you will need to own and download that DLC for these variants to appear in the game.

Once that’s settled, Bionic Duplicants will appear in two ways:

They can be manually selected during the new game Duplicant selection screen. On this screen, randomizing a Duplicant has a chance of having one be Bionic. Alternatively, you can select the filter box in the upper right corner of each Duplicant and select the bionic option. This will ensure all randomly generated options for that selection will be Bionic.

The other way for them to appear is through the Printing Pod. Like in any game, the pod will regularly offer the chance to print out either resources or another Duplicant. Bionic Duplicants have a chance of spawning here.

How To Keep Bionic Duplicants Alive

Like any good Duplicant, you need to keep Bionics alive. But HOW to do that is vastly different from the standard version.

They Consume Power Instead Of Food

Bionic Duplicants don’t eat. Instead, they consume battery power at a rate of 120 kJ a day.

To support this, Bionic Duplicants can retain up to four power banks inside of them. Each consumable power bank can contain up to 120 kJ of power, totalling 480 kJ between recharges.

There are three consumable power banks, each with 120 kJ of power but with different crafting requirements.

A fourth power bank exists, called the Atomic Power Bank. This late-game option cannot be used for Duplicants and is intended as a power source for machinery.

Given the relatively low cost of entry, we recommend striving for Eco Power Banks quickly since metal ore, while plentiful, is considered a non-renewable resource for most of the game.

Instead of a bladder, Bionic Duplicants have a Gunk meter. Generating 25 percent a day, once this meter hits 100, the Duplicant will vomit out 80kg of a purple liquid called Gunk. To avoid that, Duplicants will seek a method to remove the Gunk.

The ideal option is the Gunk Extractor, a simple machine they can use to drain all Gunk. Be sure to give the machine a liquid output, perhaps draining into a hole. When they use one of these, the machine will drain Gunk at a rate equal to their current gunk level (50 percent is 40kg, 100 percent is 80kg).

When no extractor is available, Duplicants will seek out Outhouses and Lavatories instead. Using them, however, will cause the stations to become clogged, which requires a Duplicant to manually unclog it.

Early game, we recommend building an Extractor as soon as possible and having it drain into a small hole with a water pump in it. This is because Gunk is needed for the next topic.

They Need Gear Oil

Bionic Duplicants require lubrication. This is tracked by the Gear Oil stat. There are two methods of lubricating: using the Lubrication Station or crafting Gear Balm.

The ideal method is a Lubrication Station, which consumes 200kg of either Phyto Oil or Crude Oil to fully refresh their gear oil stat. This also provides a small buff. But with both oils not being quickly accessible, this is a mid- to late-game option only.

An early-game option is Gear Balm, which is made in an apothecary station with 80 kg of Gunk and 200 kg of Water. This consumable item will fully restore the Gear Oil level when used.

Make sure you have a Duplicant with the Apothecary Usage ability and set their medicine priority high enough.

Gear Balm costs the same amount of Gunk that one Bionic Duplicant will generate. This allows you to create an Extrator-to-Gear-Balm loop that lubricates one Duplicant with just Water.

If they go without oil, they can still operate, but with a major debuff, lower speed, and increased stress.

They Consume Oxygen Differently

Bionic Duplicants still consume 100g/s of oxygen, like regular ones. One minor change is that they do not exhume CO2. The biggest difference, however, is that they only stop to ‘breath’ once every four days or so.

Instead of consistently breathing, Bionic Duplicants will absorb up to 240kg of oxygen at once, storing that in an internal tank until it runs out. Throughout the day, these Duplicants will breathe from their internal tank instead. Once the tank runs low, Duplicants will seek out an oxygen supply and refill their tank all at once.

The benefits of this are that they can hold their breath for extremely long periods of time, like in a vacuum or underwater. The downside is that if you don’t have a high reserve of oxygen prepared, you might quickly find yourself running out come refill time.

Water stresses out Bionic Duplicants, so try to avoid submerging them when possible.

When given the option, Bionic Duplicants will seek out bottled tanks of oxygen to consume. You can use this to prep large volumes of oxygen. When none are available, they will instead seek out wherever the oxygen is most dense and quickly absorbed from their surroundings.

Bionic Duplicant Sleep And Work Schedules

Bionic Duplicants do not have a standard daily routine. Instead, their productive time is split up between three days: two days straight of work and one day of work and extended rest and relaxation.

While beneficial, Bionic Duplicants don’t require sleep. And with battery and oxygen reserves large enough to span four days, they can work uninterrupted for multiple days. On the third day, however, they will need extra time to recharge, refill, and relax.

They don’t sleep, instead entering a “defragmenting” phase. This process both reduces stress and generates Microchips. Said chips can be used to craft Booster Packs, so it’s important that they do this regularly. This process also emits light, so be careful that it doesn’t bother non-bionic Duplicants at night.

The default schedule for Bionic Duplicants works great, but you can change it to match the daily routine of everyone else. They’ll still work, just with less efficiency.

Boosters VS Skills

While Bionic Duplicants generate skill points to unlock skills, a majority of their abilities come from boosters, which they can install. Certain skills can upgrade the number of boosters they can have on at a time.

The main benefit of Boosters is the modular nature they offer. You can swap out boosters at will, so each Duplicant will only have the skills they need. You can also ‘skip’ the skill tree by installing higher-tier boosters without needing the previous tiers (like going straight to Masterwork art)

Boosters are crafted at either the Crafting station or the Soldering station.

Every Booster And Where To Craft It

Note that every Booster includes a +2 Athletics buff on top of the listed stat boosts, with the exception of the Suit Training Booster.

Taking the Schematics skill will also grant Soldering Station Usage.

Bionic Duplicant Pro Tips

While this is enough to keep your Bionic Duplicants alive, a few pro-level tips and tricks can really improve your overall survivability. Keep these ideas in mind for your next game:

• Consider either having all Bionic Duplicants or none. Managing the needs of both varieties will make your playthrough remarkably more difficult.
• While Bionic Duplicants hold their breath in non-breathable environments, they still are affected by negative traits like Sopping Wet, Popped Eardrums, Radiation, and Eye Irritation.
• Set up a gas bottling system connected to oxygen generation. Duplicants will pull from those first, so you can prevent them from consuming polluted oxygen while also minimizing wasted oxygen production.
• Since both oxygen generation and Gear Balm production can be done with just Water, establishing a steady supply of clean Water is a number one priority when starting out. You can rely on ore deposits for power banks until you establish rechargable power.
• Bionic Duplicants make for excellent rocket pilots since all of their needs can be limited to a storage box of batteries and gear balm, a wall toilet, and an oxygen bottler (ideally rigged to a rocketry gas module holding oxygen.
• Once you have Eco Power Banks, you can shift focus on (biome permitted) a Plug Slug farm. Plug Slugs generate a fairly large amount of power when properly ranched, which can recharge your batteries.
  • The Plug Slugs will consume the metal ore you previously would use on making Metal Power Banks. Eventually, this will need to be replaced with refined metal for longevity.