Duplicant Tutorial

Lore & Background

In the broader narrative of Oxygen Not Included, Duplicants are clones produced by the Duplicant Facility, each carrying a fragment of a donor's memories and personality. The tutorial Duplicant is no exception: it wakes in a cramped starter room with just enough air, a single food item, and a water source to keep it alive long enough for the player to learn the ropes. It does not speak in dialogue lines the way later Duplicants do; instead, its needs bubble up as simple, urgent prompts that teach the player to read a Duplicant's state before it becomes a crisis.

What makes the tutorial Duplicant thematically resonant is its solitude. Every other Duplicant in the game exists within a social web—friends, rivals, lovers, colleagues. The tutorial Duplicant has none of that. It is one consciousness in a metal box, and the player's job is to be the only thing standing between it and suffocation. That isolation mirrors the existential tone of the colony as a whole: these are copies of people, yes, but they still feel the cold, still get hungry, still die if you look away for too long.

Once the tutorial objectives are complete, the Duplicant simply becomes part of the ongoing colony. It does not get a special name, a unique portrait, or a farewell scene. It fades into the roster of workers, a reminder that every colony—no matter how sprawling and complex—began with one small figure blinking in the dark, waiting for someone to hand it a glass of water.

In Their Own Story

The lights hummed to life in stages—first the overhead strip, then the soft amber glow of the status panel. The Duplicant blinked, stretched, and looked at the four walls of its starter room. A single oxygen tank ticked away its reserves. A small food ration sat on the table. A water dispenser gurgled in the corner.

It did not know where it was. It did not know whose face had been copied into its own. It only knew that the air was thinning, that its stomach was a hollow ache, and that somewhere beyond the sealed door, a mind was learning to keep it alive.

The Duplicant picked up the water glass, drank, and set it back down. Then it waited. It had learned, in the fraction of a second that a Duplicant's first consciousness spans, that waiting was the only job it had. Everything else—building, growing, surviving—was someone else's problem. For now, that was enough.

Reader's Guide

Species: Human (standard baseline, no modifiers)

The tutorial Duplicant is a stock human with no species-specific bonuses or penalties. All needs and work capabilities are identical to any other human Duplicant you will meet in the game.

Needs & Mood Triggers: The tutorial Duplicant tracks the four core needs—Oxygen, Food, Water, and Temperature. Oxygen depletes passively and must be replenished via tanks or plants. Food and Water are consumed on a timer and must be sourced from crops or dispensers. Temperature outside the comfortable range (roughly 0 °C to 90 °C for humans) triggers mood penalties and, in extreme cases, health damage. Mood drops when any need is unmet; a Duplicant at zero mood will stop working and may suffer health loss.

Work & Abilities: As a standard human, the tutorial Duplicant can be assigned to any work category—Research, Construction, Farming, Mining, etc.—with no species lock. It has no innate resistance to radiation, extreme heat, or vacuum, and it cannot survive in a vacuum without a suit or pressurized room. It requires a bed for sleep and a toilet for hygiene, both of which affect mood.

Restrictions: None beyond standard human limitations. The tutorial Duplicant does not gain any permanent stat changes after the tutorial ends; it simply joins the colony roster as a regular worker.

Did You Know?

• The tutorial Duplicant has no unique name, portrait, or dialogue lines—its identity is intentionally blank so the player projects their own sense of responsibility onto it.
• Every mechanic the player learns in the tutorial—oxygen loops, food chains, temperature management—scales directly to the full colony, meaning the tutorial is a genuinely functional mini-colony, not a simplified sandbox.
• The tutorial Duplicant's starting room is deliberately cramped to force the player to think about space, airflow, and resource placement before they ever see a full map.
• Because the tutorial Duplicant is a standard human, any strategy or layout the player perfects during the tutorial can be applied one-to-one to the dozens of Duplicants they will manage later.