Advanced Robotics

Lore & Background

The colony's duplicants were designed for endurance, but endurance has a hard ceiling. They eat, they sleep, they breathe, they get sick, and every single one of them must be fed from finite soil, watered from recycled droplets, and kept breathing in an atmosphere the colony must manufacture from scratch. As the settlement grows and the planet's resources thin, the arithmetic becomes brutal: every additional biological worker multiplies the entire life-support burden. Advanced Robotics offers an escape from that compounding cost.

The philosophical weight of the unlock is something the game's quiet, understated tone lets players sit with. A robot does not need a bed, a meal, or oxygen. It does not get sick or die of starvation. It simply needs a charged battery and a task. For a colony teetering on the edge of resource collapse, that simplicity is almost seductive. Yet there is an odd stillness to a workshop where the only sound is the soft whir of a Robot Builder assembling another unit, and the colony's heartbeat has shifted from many small biological rhythms to the steady, mechanical hum of charging cycles.

The system is deliberately self-contained and modest in scope. You are not building an army or a factory floor; you are building a handful of tireless, silent workers that can be pointed at a task and left to it. The Robot Battery Charger, tucked in a corner with its soft indicator glow, becomes a small ritual in itself—swapping a drained cell for a fresh one, a tiny act of maintenance that keeps the mechanical workforce alive in the most literal sense.

In Their Own Story

The workshop smelled of solder and the faint, metallic tang of heated alloy. Yara wiped her hands on her apron and stared at the half-assembled chassis on the workbench, a tangle of articulated joints and a hollow chest cavity where the battery would slot in. Around her, the colony hummed with its usual chaos—duplicants hauling oxygen tanks, the CO₂ scrubbers cycling with their low groan, the hydroponics bay dripping condensation onto the floor below.

She slotted the battery in. The unit's optical sensor flickered, dimmed, then settled into a steady amber. It turned its head—slowly, deliberately—toward her. No greeting. No small talk. Just a quiet, mechanical readiness.

"Alright," Yara said, more to herself than to the machine. "Let's see what you can do."

The robot turned and walked, without a word, toward the pile of unsorted scrap in the corner. The colony had one more pair of hands. It would have to be enough.

Reader's Guide

The robotics system in Oxygen Not Included is a compact, self-contained tech branch. Below is a practical overview of the machines and items it introduces, grouped by function.

ROBOT CONSTRUCTION • Robot Builder — Tier: mid-game research unlock. Research cost: moderate (requires prior foundational tech). Function: Assembles a robotic worker unit over a set build time. The resulting robot can be assigned to tasks just like a duplicant but requires no food, water, oxygen, or sleep.

POWER & MAINTENANCE • Robot Battery — The consumable power cell that drives a robot. A drained battery must be removed and recharged before the robot can operate again. Without a charged battery, the robot is inert. • Robot Battery Charger — A small machine that recharges drained Robot Batteries using electrical power. Place it near the Robot Builder or in a maintenance alcove so you can cycle batteries quickly. Keep at least one spare charged battery on hand to avoid downtime.

PRACTICAL TIPS • Robots do not consume any life-support resources, making them ideal for expanding your workforce late-game when oxygen and food are tight. • They still occupy a body slot and need a task assignment, so manage them alongside your duplicants in the task queue. • A single Robot Battery Charger can service multiple batteries, but if you run several robots, consider a second charger to reduce swap time. • The Robot Builder has a non-trivial build time, so plan to start it early once the research is complete.

Did You Know?

• Robotic workers generated through the robotics system do not require food, water, oxygen, or sleep, making them uniquely valuable in late-game scenarios where life-support margins are razor-thin.
• A Robot Battery Charger can process multiple batteries sequentially, so a single unit is usually sufficient for a small colony of two to four robots.
• The Robot Builder's assembly process takes a meaningful amount of in-game time, encouraging players to queue it up as soon as the research completes rather than waiting until they need the worker.
• The robotics branch is intentionally small in scope—just a builder, a battery, and a charger—reflecting the game's design philosophy of adding focused, high-impact systems rather than sprawling tech trees.