Advanced Fluids

Lore & Background

On the colony ship, fluid management is not a convenience—it is survival. Every drop of water, every litre of liquid waste, every stream of oxygenated coolant must be routed, recycled, and accounted for in a sealed environment where nothing simply evaporates into the sky. The earliest settlers managed with a single Basic Pump and a tangle of standard pipes, but as the population grew and hydroponic bays multiplied, the old infrastructure became a bottleneck that threatened to starve entire sections of the habitat.

The Advanced Fluids research program was developed by the ship's engineering corps to address exactly that scaling problem. By refining pump impeller geometry and reducing internal pipe resistance, the new hardware could move significantly more fluid per cycle with less power draw. In the cramped, multi-level decks of the colony, that efficiency difference meant the difference between a thriving greenhouse deck and a slowly dehydrating one.

For the colonists themselves, the shift was psychological as much as mechanical. No longer did a single clogged pipe or undersized pump cascade into a colony-wide crisis. Redundant, high-flow lines could be routed around failures, and the Advanced Pump's greater throughput let engineers design systems with genuine margin—something the early-game setup simply could not provide.

In Their Own Story

The alarm was quiet, which was worse. Kael pressed her thumb against the conduit wall and felt the faint, arrhythmic shudder of the Basic Pump struggling three decks below. The hydroponics bay was brown again. Not dead—just thirsty, just barely not enough. She pulled up the research log on her tablet: Advanced Fluids, 80% complete. Forty more minutes of the chemist's shift, and she'd have the impeller schematics.

She walked the narrow service corridor, boots clanking on grating, and could see the condensation beading on every pipe joint. The colony breathed water the way it breathed air, and right now the lungs were tightening. In the pump room, the old unit groaned and sputtered, its flow rate barely keeping pace with the six new tomato racks the botanist had insisted on.

Kael set her pack down, pulled out her wrench, and started sketching the new routing on the back of a ration manifest. Advanced Pump. Lower resistance lines. A loop that could actually handle the load instead of just surviving it. Forty minutes. She could make it forty minutes.

Reader's Guide

Tier 2 – Fluids Branch

**Advanced Pump** Unlocks a higher-throughput pumping unit that moves significantly more fluid per cycle than the Basic Pump while drawing comparable or slightly higher power. Essential for scaling water delivery to multiple hydroponic bays, waste-processing stations, or multi-level fluid routing without the flow-starvation that plagues early-game setups.

**Advanced Pipes** Unlocks a pipe variant with reduced internal resistance, allowing fluid to travel faster and with less pressure loss over long runs. Particularly useful when routing water across multiple decks or feeding distant systems where Basic Pipes would create noticeable bottlenecks.

Practical tip: pair the Advanced Pump with Advanced Pipes for the best flow-to-power ratio. A single Advanced Pump can often replace two Basic Pumps in a well-routed system, freeing up power for life-support or agriculture. Plan your pipe runs before placing pumps—re-routing after the fact is where most early colonies lose precious hours to backtracking.

Did You Know?

• In Oxygen Not Included, fluid resistance in pipes is a real mechanical factor: longer pipe runs and more joints increase resistance, which is why Advanced Pipes' lower resistance value matters disproportionately in multi
• The Advanced Pump's higher flow rate becomes especially critical once a colony adds multiple hydroponic bays or a Desalination Unit, as the combined demand can easily exceed what a single Basic Pump can deliver.
• Fluid management in ONI is a closed loop: water used in hydroponics, waste, and life support must all be recovered and recycled, making pump capacity a direct bottleneck on colony population growth.
• The research tree's tiered structure means Advanced Fluids sits behind earlier technologies, so players typically encounter its necessity organically—when their Basic Pump simply stops keeping up with demand.