Advanced Construction

Lore & Background

In the world of Oxygen Not Included, the crew of the S.S. Meridian crash-landed on a barren, resource-rich planet with no atmospheric support. Their survival depended on building airtight structures from salvaged and mined materials, and the ship's onboard research database—accessed through portable Research Stations—was their only guide to what could be built and how. The Advanced Construction entry in that database represents the engineering knowledge the crew recovered after stabilizing their initial shelter: formulas for pressure-rated joints, load-bearing floor assemblies, fluid-routing manifolds, and electrical conduit housings that go well beyond the duct-tape-and-plate approach of Basic Construction.

The game's narrative treats these blueprints as hard-won knowledge. Each research completion is framed as a colonist spending time studying, testing, and verifying the design before it can be trusted with the crew's lives. The in-game flavor text for construction blueprints often references the Meridian's original engineering manual, suggesting that the crew is reverse-engineering their own ship's building standards from memory and fragments. This gives Advanced Construction a quiet, grounded feel: it is not magic, it is the crew remembering how to build properly now that they have the materials and the time.

For the player, unlocking Advanced Construction is a rite of passage. The colony transitions from "stay alive this cycle" to "design a system that will keep everyone alive for the next hundred cycles." The new blueprints do not just add pretty options; they introduce the structural vocabulary—dedicated pipe runs, wire channels, multi-level hatches—that makes larger, more complex bases both possible and manageable.

In Their Own Story

The Research Station hummed its low, patient drone in the corner of what Kira had started calling "the workshop," though it was really just a 3×4 metal room with a single lamp and a shelf of salvaged parts. She had been sitting in front of the terminal for two cycles, watching the progress bar crawl. Basic Construction was done. The walls held. The air held. The crew held.

But the crew was growing, and the single sealed room was no longer enough. They needed a second level. They needed pipes that didn't run through the middle of a sleeping colonist's face. They needed a way to route power without a tangle of wires that looked like a nest of angry copper snakes.

The bar hit 100 percent. The terminal chimed—a soft, almost apologetic sound, as if the machine were embarrassed to interrupt. Kira blinked, stretched, and read the new blueprint list that had appeared in her build menu. A dozen new icons. A dozen new ways to make the underground feel less like a coffin and more like a home.

She smiled, picked up her tool belt, and walked out into the corridor to start building.

Reader's Guide

Advanced Construction is a single research category. Once completed at any Research Station, it unlocks a bundle of blueprints that expand your building toolkit. Below is a general overview of the types of components it adds, grouped by function.

Structural & Layout: More advanced wall, floor, and ceiling assemblies that support multi-level builds. Improved door and hatch options that let you seal rooms more flexibly. Ladder and stair variants that integrate cleanly into vertical layouts without wasting floor space.

Fluid & Gas Infrastructure: Dedicated pipe blueprints (water, gas, oil) that let you route fluids through walls and floors rather than across open floor space. Valve and pump housings that give you finer control over flow direction and pressure.

Electrical & Power Routing: Wire-conduit blueprints that let you run power through walls and ceilings, keeping the floor clear. Junction-box and switch housings that make wiring multi-room layouts significantly less chaotic.

Functional Additions: Small utility components—such as material hoppers, storage-integrated walls, or ventilation ducts—that let you embed systems into the architecture rather than bolting them on as separate objects.

In practice, the exact list of unlocked blueprints can shift with patches and updates, so the in-game build menu after research is always the definitive reference. The key takeaway: Advanced Construction is where your colony's architecture stops being a single sealed room and becomes a layered, multi-system underground settlement.

Did You Know?

• In Oxygen Not Included, research is not time-based in the traditional sense; Research Stations generate a resource called 'Research' over time, and you spend that resource to unlock blueprints. Advanced Construction is o
• The game's construction system is deeply tied to its simulation: every wall, floor, and pipe you place interacts with the fluid, gas, and temperature simulators, so Advanced Construction blueprints are not just cosmetic—
• Moonfrog Games designed ONI's research progression so that each category builds on the last. You cannot meaningfully tackle Advanced Construction without first having Basic Construction, and the later research tiers assu
• The distinctive hand-drawn, slightly rough art style of ONI means that even 'advanced' buildings look handmade and slightly imperfect, reinforcing the in-world idea that the crew is building from salvaged parts rather th