Basic Robotics

Lore & Background

In the cross-section world of Oxygen Not Included, duplicants are small, hardy creatures who have been sent deep into a planetary crust to establish a foothold. Their tools are limited, their oxygen is finite, and the rock around them is indifferent to their survival. In the earliest days of a colony, a duplicant must physically walk to every door, every switch, every manual valve. It is exhausting, slow, and dangerous when a creature steps into a toxic gas pocket just to flip a lever.

Basic Robotics represents the colony's first collective decision to build something that thinks for itself. The technology is not flashy—no towering mechs, no AI overminds. It is a simple, reliable principle: a mechanism that performs a single, repetitive task without tiring, without needing oxygen, without getting sick. For a species that must ration every breath, a machine that never breathes is a quiet revolution. Fans often describe the moment of unlocking this tech as the point where the colony's tone shifts from desperate triage to cautious engineering.

The broader lore of ONI's world suggests that the planet's crust holds remnants of prior technological civilizations, and duplicants are gradually rediscovering and rebuilding what was lost. Basic Robotics is, in that reading, not an invention so much as a relearning—a reminder that the tools to automate and simplify are still buried in the rock, waiting for small hands to dig them out.

In Their Own Story

The duplicant named Vex had been on door-duty for three cycles. Three cycles of walking the same narrow corridor, pressing the same dented plate, watching the same heavy slab grind open and shut. Her oxygen gauge ticked down with every trip. Her legs ached in the way that meant she'd push too hard at the next meal and regret it.

Then the engineer's duplicant rolled a small, boxy contraption into the corridor wall. It hummed. A red light blinked once, twice. Vex pressed the plate one last time, and the door slid open with a smooth, indifferent whisper. No one was standing there. No one was tired. No one was counting breaths.

She stood in the corridor for a long moment, watching the light blink. Then she turned, walked back to the research bench, and sat down. For the first time in three cycles, she simply sat, and let the little machine do the walking.

Reader's Guide

Basic Robotics is a single technology entry in the research tree rather than a family of machines, so its guide is straightforward.

Researching this blueprint requires a duplicant to work at a research station and consume a set amount of research points. It is positioned in the early portion of the tree, meaning it is typically one of the first technologies a new colony unlocks after establishing basic power and life support.

Upon completion, the technology unlocks the ability to build basic automated mechanisms—most notably automated doors and simple actuated systems that open, close, or cycle without a duplicant physically operating them. This is the foundational layer of automation in the game.

Practical impact: your duplicants no longer need to walk to a door to open it. Tasks that previously required a creature to stand in a hazardous zone (toxic gas, extreme heat, vacuum) can now be handled by a mechanism. This single change reduces oxygen consumption, eliminates a class of heat-stress deaths, and opens up room layouts that were previously impractical.

It does not, by itself, unlock advanced robotics, AI, or complex multi-step automation. Those come from later technologies in the tree. Think of Basic Robotics as the first brick in a wall you will keep building for the rest of the run.

Did You Know?

• In Oxygen Not Included, duplicants must consume oxygen to perform almost every action, including walking to a door and pressing a switch. Automating that step is one of the most impactful early efficiency gains in the ga
• The game's cross-section planet is not Earth; it is a fictional world with its own geology, and the technology duplicants rebuild is implied to be rediscovered from the planet's own buried history rather than brought fro
• Klei Entertainment designed ONI's tech tree so that automation technologies are deliberately gated behind basic survival tech—power, oxygen, and temperature management must be stable before a colony can afford to invest
• Many fans describe the moment a colony's first automated door activates as an emotional beat in the playthrough, a small 'we are becoming a civilization' moment in an otherwise brutal survival loop.