Before you start your first colony

Hello! This is a beginner guide to basic tips as you get started with your colony. This guide is mainly geared towards new players, but hopefully anyone can get something out of it. Keep in mind that this guide is entirely subjective, and based on my own preferences, so some people may disagree with what is best for a beginner. Feel free to comment any suggestions or corrections you may have below.

You can use the Oxygen Not Included Wiki for more information, although don’t use the fandom wiki, use https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Oxygen_Not_Included_Wiki, because the fandom site is officially unsupported, and can’t be trusted for reliable information.

Choose "No Sweat," instead of "Survival," it is more beginner friendly, and possibly turn off asteroids to make rocketry easier. Don’t expect to make rockets on your first colony, though.

Start with the first asteroid, Terra. It is by far the most beginner friendly, with plenty of resources and a good temperature.

Avoid world traits like “Boulders,” “Volcanic Activity,” “Magma Channels,” “”Metal Poor,” and “Slime Molds”. They can drastically change the asteroid you spawn on and can make the early game much harder.

Instead, use traits like “Metal Rich,” “Geoactive,” and “Geodes”. Keep in mind that Geodes may generate in undesirable places, and you won’t be able to mine them immediately. (Geodes can no longer generate with neutronium.) “Large Glaciers” can be used, as they make cooling in the early game easier, but may also get in the way until you have a Duplicant which can mine Wolframite.

You can reroll seeds until you find one you like.

If you want, you can use "Tools Not Included" which is a website that lets you find the traits for a given seed, or search for seeds that have the traits you want.
https://toolsnotincluded.net/map-tools/world-trait-finder

For story traits, you have 6 options (at the time this guide was made) Here is a list:

Critter Flux-O-Matic
Changes critters into a different morph after activating via putting 5 different species of critter into the machine.

Somnium Synthesiser
Lets Duplicants wear pajamas, which slow them down, but also lets them produce dream journals while sleeping, which can be used to power the synthesiser. Once fully powered, it slowly consumes dream journals to buff all Duplicants colony wide.

Mysterious Hermit
Generates a Gravitas shipping container somewhere in the asteroid, inhabited by an unknown Duplicant. Give him power, nice decor, and fancy food to convince him to join your colony.

Ancient Specimen
Generates Fossils across the map. Find all of the Fossils and excavate them to unlock the ability to turn Diamonds into Fossils.

Biobot Builder
Build robots out of steel and use them to contain a Sporb, made by collecting dangerous zombie spores and pumping them into the Biobot Builder. Biobots can do work like Duplicants, but can’t operate machinery. They will shut down after a few cycles, allowing you to deconstruct them for the steel they are made from

Printerceptor
A building which can siphon a charge from the printing pod once activated, allowing you to print a critter egg or seed of your choice using databanks and consuming all charges once 3 have been collected.

All story traits can be useful, and it is up to you which ones sound best. Be warned that the Somnium Synthesiser takes 6 Duplicants sleeping full time to run constantly, and may not be worth the effort if you don’t have enough food to sustain them. The trait I recommend most is by far the mysterious hermit, as he has the charismatic trait, as well as +7 to all attributes and 3 starting skill points. Choosing more than 5 story traits may cause the world generation to fail, so be mindful of that.

Once you have chosen an asteroid, world traits, and story traits, and generated your world, you will be at the Duplicant selection screen. There are a lot of different attributes to choose from, but once you have an idea of what everything does, it isn’t as complicated.

Every Duplicant has 1-3 interests, 1-3 positive traits, 1-3 negative traits, an overjoyed response and a stress response. Here is a link to a list of all traits: oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Duplicant#Traits

Start by selecting interests. I recommend starting with a researcher, a builder, and a digger. Click the arrow beside the rename button to choose what interest you want for a specific Duplicant. More interests may be more desirable than one very high interest, depending on the interests, because it prevents some morale loss from learning multiple skills.

The most important consideration is what negative traits a Duplicant has, rather than positive. These are some traits which you can use without noticing much negative impact:
Critter Aversion
Gastrophobia
Irritable Bowel
Kitchen Menace
Pacifist
Plant Murderer
Small Bladder
Squeamish
Unempathetic
Unpracticed Artist
Yokel
Any negative traits other than these are mostly undesirable, and you might wish to avoid them.

Positive traits are much more based on what your preferences are, but here are a few very good ones:
Quick Learner
Mole Hands
Buff
Mechanotronics Engineering
Any digging skill

Any specific Duplicant, e.g. Turner, Meep, Pei, Nicola etc. will have a pre-determined stress and joy response, and they will always have those responses, unless mods are used. One of the best Joy responses is “Balloon Artist,” so try to have at least one of them in your colony. The stress responses are less important if you avoid them entirely by keeping your Dupes happy and stress-free.

Once you have selected your Duplicants, click embark to begin your colony! (you can also name your colony, of course.) Once you load in and read the alert, pause your colony by hitting the space bar.

Now you can begin!

First, see if you have a nearby water pool. There should be at least 1 within a screen of the printing pod. Dig to it and build a Pitcher pump in the water, high enough that the dupes can use it without getting wet. You may need to build ladders to reach it, which can be built with any stone. Mine some sandstone from anywhere the dupes can reach to get it in item form. It will sit on the ground until a Dupe comes and picks it up to use it to build.

Build outhouses and wash basins where the duplicants have to walk past the basins after using the outhouses (usually by putting the outhouses against a wall). Build 3 outhouses and 3 wash basins, as that number will sustain even 8 dupes. Set the outhouses and wash basins to priority 9, because you want them unclogged as fast as possible, so that the Dupes don’t make a mess. Build deodorisers in your bathrooms (once you have researched them) so that polluted oxygen doesn't spread all over your colony. (this will be important later.)

By now, it is probably night, and your Dupes are sleeping on the floor. So, when they wake up, dig out an area above the printing pod and build some cots for the Dupes, so that they don’t get sore backs next time they sleep.

Choose an area where you can make a long ladder column, and dig a 3 tile wide shaft with a ladder in the middle as you expand your colony into the above and below biomes. (If you play “Terraria," this is pretty similar to a hellevator.) Making one long ladder with a space on either side will give you room to eventually put fire poles and transit tubes for even faster travel, making a superhighway in your colony.

Dig into nearby caves filled with oxygen for an early game supply, before you make generators.
As soon as you have toilets, beds, and a water supply, start building electrical systems. Build a manual generator, an oxygen diffuser, and a research station beside each other, as well as some batteries, which you may wish to place further away due to their negative decor. All of these buildings are made with copper ore, and need to be connected with wires, which are also made of copper ore. You can find copper ore in blobs similar to how you find any other starting resource. Click on the research station when it is built, and open the research menu.

Build oxygen diffusers anywhere the oxygen pressure is low, and connect them to your existing circuit with more wires. You will likely replace these with a different oxygen source as your algae reserves deplete, but they are great early-game.

The first thing you want to research is the first 2 tiers in the farming branch, as they will let you grow your own plants for a food source. Once your researcher dupe has finished researching (you can set them to have higher research priorities in the top right bar, under “priorities”) you can build farm tiles. You will need about 4-5 mealwood plants to feed each dupe in your colony, and it is the easiest food source. They require dirt to grow, which your dupes will automatically bring.

Build an electric grill and attach it to your electric circuit, and set what recipes you want to cook. On “Terra,” you should set the following recipes to infinite:
Gristle Berry
Cooked Seafood
Barbeque
Pickled Meal
Fried Mushroom
This means that whenever any of the ingredients are available to make the cooked food, your dupes will automatically bring it to the grill and have a duplicant cook it.

Your food will start spoiling, so build a ration box in a pit full of carbon dioxide, or, if you have a nearby cold area, you can put it there. If you have an extremely cold area with a sterile atmosphere you can stop food spoilage altogether, but it is unlikely that you will have such an area near your base. Even just a sterile atmosphere will leave plenty of time for your Dupes to eat the food early game. Later on, you can make a freezer room, which combines streile atmosphere with cold temperature.
Here is an example of a pretty early game freezer setup, you just need automation wire and a thermo sensor. (This can be modified later to work with conveyor rails if you have an auto sweeper in your kitchen.)

When entering a marsh biome, you need to be careful of slimelung, which is a disease. If you dig the slime tiles, they will start to offgas polluted oxygen filled with slimelung germs, so you have a few options:
1: Build storage bins completely submerged in water, and set them to only hold slime (you can also set them to hold polluted dirt, as it releases polluted oxygen as well.)
2: Make the entrance of your marsh biomes really small, either 1 or 2 tiles, and build a few deodorisers in a corridor leading up to the entrance. Make sure the corridor is 3 tiles high or lower, otherwise the polluted oxygen can pass over them without getting purified. It is probably overkill, but I usually build 5 or so deodorisers, as they use up so little power and sand, and produce clay as a byproduct. (Clay can be made into ceramic, which has extremely low thermal conductivity.)
2 1/2: Build deodorisers everywhere that there is even a small amount of polluted oxygen, as the only way slimelung can spread is if it is in a polluted amosphere, otherwise it slowly dies out.
3: Avoid digging slime tiles in the first place unless you have to, because slime isn't necessary for anything in the early game. (It can be useful for making biodiesel, or refining into algae, but I mostly don't utilise it until late in my colonies.)
4: Move any morbs far away from your base, and close them off in a small area. You can also relocate pufts, but if you only have a small amount of polluted oxygen in your colony, and an offgass-proof storage for slime, they might actually help! They consume polluted oxygen, and produce slime as an item, which will have some germs and start offgassing, but your dupes will come and pick it up and store it, making it inert.

That was my guide to early game Oxygen Not Included. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, or tell me what I missed. I hope this was useful!