Missing Tutorial

Too much CO2? There are several ways to deal with it, many of THOSE solutions create a secondary problem such as heat. (I like to build as a "heat miser", trying to minimize heat production, opposed to "generating lots of heat and dealing with lots of heat").
Here are a few ways to deal with CO2 in order of feasibility.

Dig a gigantic basement, and keep building it down. The CO2 is heavy and will sink into it. But you need to build passageways wider than one square so the gasses can circulate because materials won't share a hex, so a one square wide shaft would be very difficult (impossible?) for gas to exchange through, the co2 would take a LONG time to settle down. A shaft two squares wide is possible, a shaft three squares is usually needed to exchange gas at a sufficient rate. This also applies to the entire base - if you are expecting O2 to move around, and hydrogen etc to get where it needs to go, build three square wide shafts or wider.

Oxyferns are excellent but slow, but hard to come by. I always choose them from the lottery, but you'll never have enough.

Terraria deletes CO2, but uses lots of water. By the time I can build a terrrarium farm, usually a better solution comes along. But they are fun to build with automation to create "ebb and flow" to water them but also remove the water so dupes don't get a debuff from wet feet when plunging them.

Slicksters eat LARGE quantities of CO2 which is great, while producing oil and meat but requiring heat. This is more of a late-game solution because you need to find the slicksters, and also manage the heat associated with their living conditions. If you are clever you can dump heat into the CO2 before feeding it to slicksters to delete heat, but often their environment is sending heat back so it's difficult to make the heat exchange profitable.

A CO2 scrubbers deletes CO2 and generates heat. You'd have to deal with the heat. Most people choose this. I don't think it's reality based and feels to "magical" to me. Correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Bottle the CO2 to deal with it later. (You can do this by filling a tank then deleting the tank), Generates the heat of the gas pump and also the energy requirement. Best when basement is full of CO2 and can't yet vent to space nor feed to slicksters.

Dump it to space. Do this for eternity and your asteroid will shrink in mass. Just kidding, that doesn't seem to be a problem in this game.

Generally, you want to buy time by getting the co2 out of the breathing area without actually doing anything with it, and then actually deal with it later when you have the tech to do so. So just make a temporary solution and deal with CO2 later when you have more abilities.

Just like in real-life, everything you do in this game makes heat. Even cooling an area locally, creates heat, just like running a refrigerator or an air-conditioner - you are cooling locally but actually increasing the amount of heat (loose energy) in the universe and in your room. In other words, leaving the refrigerator door open actually heats your house.

For our purposes "heat" is a "low-useable" form of energy and typically undesirable. Unless radiated to space, even Earth would overheat quickly. So heat is a real problem. You can't just dump it to space because heat does not transfer in a vacuum. The game does not allow for convection. But you can eject hot material. But normally you don't even have to do that.

The beginning of the universe was the most useable form of energy, and it's all been downhill from there. Globally, everything in the universe takes more-useable energy and transforms it into "less useable" forms of energy. What is the meaning of life? Life exists because life is good at converting highly-useable energy into less-useable energy. Life is a mechanism to speed entropy. This will continue until all energy is equally distributed throughout the universe and everything in the universe is dead.

We can't do anything about that for the moment, so for now, we want to get the heat out of the dupes garden area. Dupes tolerate medium heat, so don't worry about the dupes themselves, but dupes need food. Thistles only tolerate low heat. As long as you are farming thistles, you need to be able to cool the area where they are growing. You need to "get rid of heat" (though except for a few exceptions, this mostly means "moving the heat to somewhere else").

Early game, a great way to move heat around is to mix the heat with the frozen biomes.
Wherever you need to remove heat from, build temperature-conductive liquid piping there.
Then build insulated pipes toward the cold biome. Then build temperature-conductive pipes in the cold biome. This setup heats the fluid in the pipe, runs it to the cold biome, where the cold pipes suck the heat out. PH2O (pee-water) is great for this because it has a high heat-capacity. Later you can research better materials.
As for conductive metal is great, until you have enough, you can use sandstone or granite to somewhat conduct, they both have the best conductive properties of the minerals.

Unlike real life, you only need to start the liquid flowing once, and it will continue forever because there is no friction in this game.
Be careful because if you leave this fluid running, and the hot area cools down or you turn off whatever machinery is generating heat, eventually the liquid will freeze in the pipes in the cold zone. Or the target area will cool down too much.

You will need switches and bypasses and tanks and thermometers to be able to stop the water from going to the cold zone when the liquid is too cold upon return, and risks freezing. This gets tedious to manage by hand and you'll make mistakes, so better to automate using thermometers to control the switches. (For example, when the liquid returning to the cold biome is below 10C, divert it into a tank instead of going through the cold zone again, which then returns the cool water to the warm zone until it does get warm enough to be run through the cold zone.)

The cold biomes will last a lot longer if you do not dig the ice. It is twice as effective to allow the ice to thaw away, then rebuild pipe in the newly cleared zone, and repeat when needed. You can dump a LOT of heat into a single cold biome.
This is because digging a material erases half the mass, which means you lose half the cooling ability. Better to melt the cold material instead of digging into it.

Thawing the cold biome gives you food, water, and building area. It's a good idea to melt all your cold zones before building any fancy heat-deleters (AETNA, turbine).

If you are using a shutoff valve and the wrong stuff is going through you probably have a pipe connection a difficult to see incorrect pipe connection (usually connected behind the shutoff-valve). Delete all the pipe and lay it again and it will work.

If any machine doesn't work, you probably have one speck of the wrong fluid blocking the machine. Delete the pipes and relay with the known to be correct fluid and it will work.

Unlike reality, in this game, two types of materials cannot occupy the same square. It's for simplicityies sake and it's not how things work in the real world - but get used to it. If this game DID model the real world then you would need all the processing power in the universe to properly model the world. This game is designed to work on single crappy computers. So materials don't mix. Get used to it. It's still roughly correct. It's a game.

The most valuable resource in this game is the dupes time. You want to automate as much as possible. The goal of the game, as indicated in the first dialogue box, is to dig to the surface and "escape" (more will be revealed when you get to the surface).

Liquid and gas Bridges. I thought these were simply overpasses aka "bridge" since that is what they named, but they are also something else, and more, very confusing I know. They also control direction, and they also control priority. "Bridges" are the only way to accomplish many pathing choices.

1. if a bridge joins another line, the joining bridge will ONLY flow when there is "room" (aka the "main" line takes precedence). You can use this to sort materials, or to use one source first and the backup only if necessary, but only when you understand how priority works, it's not obvious.
2. Bridges control direction. Green goes to white, if you place a white between two greens flow will stop because they are both trying to get to it.
   If a lane won't flow, place a bridge to guarantee direction, and delete the pipe)underneath the bridge. If you think a line should flow and it's not, it's 100% because there are two greens "fighting" for a white, so place a bridge to guarantee direction.
3. A bridge leaving a pipeline says "all flows through this FIRST until it is full, THEN flow past it." A bridge has higher priority than the mainline.

All these rules apply whether you want them to or not (for example if you want a simple bridge to only skip over something, too bad, all of these rules are going to ALSO apply, and could affect the way things work downstream. My advice is to understand how non-intuitively bridges work, or you'll get frustrated.

4. oh yeah, and bridges can also be used as bridges.

Green can flow past green if there is a white down the line. White can flow past white down a path unopposed by green (or orange). But a white with a green on each side can cause confusion because they both want to reach it. Better to join the two greens before meeting the white. Or drop the white part of a bridge between the two greens. It doesn't exactly work like real life.

When you deconstruct a bridge it doesn't drop any liquid so it's good to have some now and then for when you want to change the piping (which you will want to). All these rules apply to liquid gas and solid-conveyor.

Power doesn't behave the way I guessed it would. It's not like extension cords, it's more like one big circuit and the same current is running through the entire circuit.
Each appliance attached gets the full amount on the line - you cannot run a line to an appliance that only supplies as much as needed. Instead they all sip off the same line so you have to be careful to not put more devices than the line can handle, or to not supply more power to the circuit than the wire can handle. You can do things such as running only certain machines at certain times, turning off machines or subcircuits, using automation to open and close circuits. You can't afford to build the big wires all over the place, also they take a lot of space. So you need to get creative with the small wires. At least until later. You can also build some subcircuits of short lengths of thick wire for large machinery. But it has to be separate or has to have transformers that don't allow it to overload the small-wire circuit.

Basic line is good for 1k, if you draw more than that, you short the line. A transformer can be used to only allow 1k to that circuit, to prevent shorts. (You can have more than 1k worth of machinery as long as they aren't all on at the same time). It's not a normal transformer, it's more like a limiter, all it does is limit the amount of wattage through.

Power does NOT trickle back from the supply side of the transformer to the generating/storage side. It allows 200j per 1/5 of a second, which is the time of a "tick" or moment of the game.

Do not create a loop because then the battery can feed the transformer which feeds the battery recursively, overloading.

In the early game, use the pedowheels for a while to generate power. Then you can add a coal burner, but it's going to generate CO2 and heat so avoid using it as much as possible. Until you can deal with the CO2 and the heat. Coal should be a backup power, only.
Natural gas is better but creates pH20, which can be a good thing when you are able to filter it into O2.,
Solar is great but limited. You want to use automation to help store solar to batteries that gets used during the night then kicks on coal when solar runs out.

Petroleum makes a LOT of power and a LOT of CO2 and a LOT of heat.

Ideally you can make a room under a steam turbine and in that room is a volcano AND foundry and other heat producing machines such that all the heat generated is converted to energy, instead of having to treat it as a "problem". Of course building such a room is a big deal and requires medium-high technology level materials.

I like to run my base with the minimum of dupes, typically as low as eight.

I choose one rancher, one cook, one machiner, and one digger/builder, one pilot, all with only the one skill so that it can get to the max value (when they have more than one skill, each skill will have fewer points)

the other three are only runners (forgot name of that skill)

then, after 1 ranching point, and 1 grill point, and one digger point, all dupes get two points of research (so they speed their skills and all other traits) and i equally level them all up in research as possible (using mostly obstructed sky scanner etc)
they all get points assigned to their skill (if any), and then then max running and carrying

When morale becomes an issue then I remove the two research points by skill-scrubbing and reassigning points (only running, carrying and their unique skill path). They should now have some science traits which they won't lose from scrubbing. I keep leveling them all up until each dupe has 5 points of science. The science points speeds up chosen skill leveling, and also more slowly all other activities they do. They can max out at 20 points in any ability, besides the points from a bonus or assigned skill.

To keep leveling science points, I give a dupe enough science points to research volcanoes, and use telescope. If you use a mostly obstructed telescope then it will take longer which is good because the dupe acquires science for longer which is good, in my opinion.

when morale gets under control i'll make one of them into another digger, another into a builder, and another rancher. and the cook will also be doctor. but also need rancher to also be doctor to fix the cook. Cook and rancher aren't allowed far from base. I use disease restored so the doctoring is required

I kinda wish the dupes would die from old age sooner so that I had to cycle and choose new dupes more. I only need 8 to run a base and finish game, so I'm never choosing a duper after turn 50 or so, so the dupe selection thing seems antiquated