Oxygen Not Included Mid-Game Guide

Before you start reading this guide, here's a few things I assume you already know about:
- Overlays
- How to use most of the tools in the game
- How priorities work
- How Plumping (and venting) works.
- How the basic tiers of research work

So, you just exited what most players would call "Early game" and don't know what to do? Or you just need help figuring out how to do said stuff.
Look no further, in this guide I will attempt to explain stuff!

By exiting early game, I assume you have:
- Explored outside your starting biome
- Made a somewhat stable food production (Mealwood, Bristle blossom or dusk cap farms)
- Have a somewhat stable oxygen production (Oxygen Diffuser or Algae Terrarium, or a basic Electrolyzer setup)
- Have sufficient morale by using the different rooms
- Have researched some of the most important basic researches

More specifically, I am referring to early game as the part described in my other guide: "Oxygen Not Included Early game guide"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2816209155

While there's a sort of basic structure to how you do stuff in the early game, the further into the game you come, the more open-ended it becomes.
As such, this guide shouldn't be read from one end to the other. Instead go to whatever section you need to go to, though I will try to place the stuff you should do first at the top, and the stuff you should do later at the bottom.

For now, the best things to do would be to either Upgrade your oxygen supply, Start refining metals or start ranching hatches and other critters.
You can also explore more to get useful materials.

Until now you've probably used oxygen diffusers to get oxygen, and while there's plenty of algae at the start of the game, in time it will run out, even if you get algae by distilling slime from the swamp. By switching to a water-based oxygen production, you will be using a much more renewable resource.
First off, you'll need the "Air Systems" research completed, as well as plumping and ventilation, and while you can make a more effective system using automaton, using a simple gas filter is - well, simpler. So you'll need those as well.
Start by making a room, at least 4 x 4 (Though it should preferably be bigger). Making it so the only way in and out is with a waterlock is preferable, though it is not needed.

Then place an electrolyzer or two inside the room, and double the number of gas pumps above them.
Then, Connect Gas pumps in pairs to the input of a Gas filter set to filter hydrogen. The normal output of the filter will be where oxygen should go, and the hydrogen should come out of the filter output (the orange output).

After that, you can connect the Electrolyzers to a water supply.
You can then connect the hydrogen output to a hydrogen Generator, which could power the rest of the machine. That kind of contraption usually goes by the name "SPOM" (Self Powered Oxygen Module)

Providing both Food and useful materials, hatches are a great way to start learning how ranching works.
Start off by making a big room. Max. 96, though. The closer to this number, the more hatches you can ranch (You can make multiple rooms, though).
Then, place a grooming station, along with a critter feeder in the room, and make sure it accepts sandstone or another plentiful rock. If you want, you can even feed them sedimentary rock, which will be very beneficial for later.

Also place a Critter drop-off in the room, and set it to hatches allowed.
Make sure there's no other critters in the room, either by killing them, or wrangling them and then placing a critter-drop off with that critter type allowed at another location.

When the room is finished, find and wrangle a hatch (The more hatches you relocate to your ranch, the faster it will be up and running at full capacity).
A very simple hatch ranch

Any duplicants with the "Critter Ranching" skill will then be able to groom the hatches, taming them over the course of a few days. From then on, the hatches will eat more, lay more eggs and produce more materals.
Normal hatches will eat rocks and produce coal, though you have probably seen a few green hatches at this point. Which leads us to the next topic of Critter Ranching:

Most critters will adapt, laying eggs that will hatch into another variation of the species, if it is fed with specific foods. As an example, hatches that consume plant-based foods will lay Sage Hatch eggs: The green hatches. Sage hatches cannot eat minerals, though they can consume a wide varity of organic materials. They also produce a lot more coal compared to the normal hatch. For hatches though, we do not want them to eat organic food as minerals are plentiful and much easier to obtain. Instead, if we feed them sedimentary rocks,the hatches will lay Stone Hatchling eggs. Stone hatches will eat only select rocks, but will also be able to eat metals. Metals will in turn make the Stone Hatch lay Smooth Hatchling eggs, which are specialized hatches that eat metals only, but instead of producing coal, they produce refined metal.

Most critters have variations, some of which are incredibly useful. As the stable fills up with hatches, they will begin feeling cramped, which makes them lay less eggs. This is not good for your ranch, and so you may want to limit the amount of hatches there can be the room. The best solution would be to construct a conveyor rail and an auto-sweeper that takes all of the eggs and relocates them to another room, though just setting the critter limit to a low number and turning on auto-wrangling, and then making a room with another critter dropoff, should be fine for the time being.

While this is not the best solution, it will make the ranch a lot more effective for now, with a lot less micromanaging.

As you want to construct more advanced buildings and equipment, refined metal becomes a must.
Refined metal can be obtained in a few ways:

Rock Crusher
The rock crusher may very well be the easiest way to get refined metal, however it is not very effective: Half of the metal will be converted into refined metal, while the other half gets converted into sand. This is good enough if you want only small amounts of refined metal, however it's not a good idea to use it if you need a lot of it.

Metal Refinery
The upgrade to the Rock Crusher, the metal refinery converts metal to refined metal at a 100% rate. It, however, requires you to cool the refinery down using water. The Refinery will create a lot of heat, which will be dumped into the water. For now you shouldn't have a problem with heating, but at some point you will have to think about temperature and cooling. If you find an ice biome, you can dump the hot water produced by the refinery there, as a temporary solution.

You can also use the heated water in the electrolyzer, as the electrolyzer outputs its products at 70°C (Or more if the water is above 70°C). What this means is that by using hot water, you're creating less heat than if the water was cold.

Do note that the metal refinery requires large amounts of electricity, and you will need either heavi-watt or conductive wires to power it.

Smooth Hatches
Another way to get refined metal, is by ranching hatches, specifically smooth hatches. Smooth hatches will eat metal and produce refined metal. While they are only 75% effective compared to the metal refinery's 100%, they do not require much duplicant labor, nor do they produce any heat.

Once you have gotten yourself a good oxygen supply as well as some refined metal, you can start exploring further by making exosuits. Exosuits will enable your duplicants to enter locations with low amounts of oxygen for extended periods of time.

Place the exosuit docks, along with a checkpoint, so that the only way outside of your colony is through this point.
Then either connect your oxygen production to the docks, or make a seperate oxygen production for the exosuits.

As you explore, you may stumble across new biomes, which will most likely contain useful resources.

Do note that what whether or not you have spaced out enabled, as well as what asteroid type your colony is located on, will affect what biomes you can find.

The Tundra is full of ice, and is one of the only cold biomes in the game. It contains many useful resources, such as wolfram, wheezeworts, and the Sleet Wheat. The Tundra is also the only place you can find anti-entropy nullifier.
If you are running low on water, you can excavate the ice from the tundra and bring it down to your colony. If you make them into Tempshift Plates, it will melt much faster.
If you find a Tundra and want to explore it, skip ahead to the "Tundra" section of this guide.

Spaced out content!
The wasteland is probably one, if not the, easiest biome to explore. No dangers, no toxic gasses, nothing. But there's not much to gain either. Unless you want to domesticate Sweetle's or grubgrubs, it's just a useless location.
If you do however want to obtain what few resources the wasteland holds, skip ahead to the "Wasteland" section of this guide. The Barren biome is essentially just a pile of rocks. However, it's actually not as useless as it sounds, as you can find refined iron here.

The Tide Pools is Oxygen Not Included's ocean biome. Here you will find large quantities of salt water. The critters in this biome can be aggressive sometimes, so skip to the "Tide Pools" section of this guide before venturing into this biome.

The tundra is mainly made of ice, and some granite. At least in the base game. If you have the Spaced Out DLC, it will also have rust and salt in it, but in both versions, the most important resources are present: There's 2 different plants that can be found in the Tundra: the Wheezewort and the Sleet Wheat. For the Wheezewort, it can be used to cool down areas. Just dig it up and relocate it to your colony, or wherever you need cooling. The Sleet Wheat, however, should just be left alone. As long as the Tundra isn't heated too much, it will continue growing, giving lots of food for free (Requires an electrical grill to make the sleet wheat into frost buns). The anti-entropy nullifier is a machine sometimes found in the Tundra. It has a gas intake. When supplied with hydrogen, it will cool down the nearby area.
By constructing an insulated pipeline, with segments made of radiant pipes, you can make a circuit that goes from the nullifier to your base, with the radiant segments where you want your colony to be cooled down. One of the best resources found in the tundra is ice. By bringing ice back to your colony you can both cool down your colony, as well as obtain large quantities of water. By placing Temp plates made from ice in your base, your colony will be cooled down quickly and when the plates melt, you will get a lot of water (The plates should be placed in such a way that the water runs down into your water supply, or a new water reservoir. Wolframite is a metal found exclusively in the Tundra Biome. It is very useful for late-game builds, so it should be saved for that.

The Wasteland, while not having a lot of useful resources, is a pretty safe biome to explore. With no hazardous gasses or germs it is very easy to just enter it and start excavating.
The biome itself is mostly made out of sand and various rocks as well as copper and sulfur. Sucrose is sometimes found here as well. Sweetles are small bug-like critters that eat sulfur and produce sugar (sucrose). They also have a special relationship to the spindly grubfruits plants. Sweetles will tend to spindly grubfruit plants, which will cause them to produce grubfruit instead of spindly grubfruit. It also increases its growing speed. When sweetles tend to grubfruit plants, it will cause them to lay grubgrub eggs. Grubgrubs, while part of the same species, look a lot different from the sweetle. They also behave almost the same, except the grubgrub can also eat sucrose and they produce mud instead of sucrose. They also give a larger growth speed boost to plants they tend to.

The Tide Pools are Oxygen Not Included's ocean biome. Most of the Tide Pools are filled with salt water, sand, sedimentary rock and granite.
Salt and Bleach stone can also be found here.
The atmosphere is made of hydrogen, which will give major eye irritation to duplicants who enter without atmo suits.

Pokeshells are crab-like creatues that live in the Tide Pools. They eat Polluted dirt and produces sand, and when they grow and whne they die, they leave behind a shell that can be crushed into lime at a rock crusher, which is used for steel production.
They, however, are aggressive towards duplicants when an egg is nearby.

If you want to ranch pokeshells, autosweepers should be used to pick up the eggs as soon as they are laid, to avoid duplicants from being harmed by aggressive pokeshells.

The waterweed is one of two plants found in the Tide Pools, the other being the pincha peppernut, which is also found in the jungle. 2.5 Waterweed is enough to feed one duplicant, and can be combined with dusk caps to produce mushroom wraps, a high-quality food.
Waterweed only grows when in water, but not too much water. The maximum amount of water is around 700 kg, and the minimum is 1 g.

this means you can put a lot of water (Or salt water) in a room and just let it drain through a hole. The leftover water will be enough for waterweeds to grow.

They also require a steady supply of saltwater through hydroponic farms, and also bleachstone, which should be plentiful in the biome.
Bleach Stone, however, evaporate into chlorine, though this can be prevented by storing it underwater, just like how you would store slime.

Salt can be found scattered around the Tide pools, and can also be obtained by using salt water in a desalinator. Salt can be used at a rock crusher to obtain table salt, which duplicants will use when eating. Eating salt increases duplicant morale by 1.

At some point, your base will start to heat up. This is usually caused by exploration into warmer biomes, along with electrical equipment. And while your duplicants should be able to withstand these higher temperatures for quite some time, your plants aren't as lucky.
at 30°C most plants you may have been using will start to wilt, which means your food production will come to a halt. Something you want to avoid.

Short term solutions consists of transporting ice from the tundra into your base, which will cool the surrounding area, or simply switching to another food source, such as hatch ranching. In the long run, however, you want a more permanent solution.
The two easiest ones are the following:

Anti-entropy Nullifier
By making a Liquid pipe that loops around your base and back to the anti-entropy nullifier, you can cool down your base by supplying the nullifier with hydrogen from your oxygen production. This of course requires you to have found an anti-entropy nullifier in the first place, though they shouldn't be too hard to find.

Wheezeworts
Wheezeworts are plants (Actually, in lore they are animals, but for gameplay purposes they are a plant) found in the Tundra. What's special about Wheezeworts is their ability to cool down air around them. By placing a few wheezeworts around your colony, it will slow down, or even reverse the heating. They do require Phosphorite, which can be found in large quantities in the Jungle, or you can make a drecko farm, as dreckos produce a decent amount of phosphorite.
Note!
If you play with the Spaced Out DLC enabled, wheezeworts give of a significant amount of radiation. This means you should place them in low-traffic areas to avoid radiation sickenss.

If you wish to slow down future heating, you may also make use of insulated tiles. These can be placed around temperature-dependant stuff, such as your farm, so even if the temperature keeps rising, it will take longer for it to affect your food production. You may also surround your entire colony with insulated tiles, but this will take a lot of time and is not recommended.

As your duplicants become increasingly more skilled, it is important to make sure they have a high morale to not only prevent stress, but also reap the rewards of overjoyed responses. By far the easiest way to increase morale at this point, assuming you have already made the basic rooms such as the great hall and barracks, is to improve decor.

By far one of the easiest ways to improve decor is to simply put a lot of Flower pots and Hanging pots all over your colony, especially in high-traffic areas and places that are used a lot, such as any hallways in the middle of your colony as well as your great hall, Barracks and Wash room.

Do note that buddy-buds give less decor in a smaller radius, but does provide direct stress-reduction to nearby duplicants. It also triggers allergies in duplicants with allergic reactions.

If you haven't already made a big storage room, now could be a good idea to do so. Stuff that's lying on the ground counts as debris, which is something your duplicants dislike.

If you want to invest heavily in decor, you may want to get one of your duplicants to be able to create masterwork-level paintings and sculptures. These will greatly improve decor, especially if placed in high-traffic areas as mentioned earlier. It is a heavy investment, though, having to spend 3 skill points, which will further increase morale need for one duplicant, so keep that in mind.

At some point, you may want to ranch dreckos, as they are extremely useful critters. Not only do they give almost free meet, they can also produce plastic when morphed into Glossy Drecko's.

To make a drecko farm, you will however need to make a room that gasses cannot exit or enter, by constructing a waterlock or other mechanism for keeping the gasses where they should be.

If you fill the room with tiles, and then construct the waterlock, you can demolish the tiles afterwards which will create a vacuum. You can then pump the gasses needed into this room.
Drecko ranch under construction. By placing tiles, you can fill up the waterlock with water, then demolish the tiles to create vacuum. Remember to make sure duplicants have to wear atmo suits to enter. First you'll have to choose:
Normal or Glossy dreckos?
Dreckos are special critters: They can walk upside-down, climb on walls, produce phosphorite and they have scales. It is specifically this last point that is important for drecko ranching. Dreckos will regrow their scales when in a hydrogen atmosphere. Normal drecko scales are made of reed fibers while glossy dreckos have plastic scales. This means you can get either reed fiber or plastic very easily.
Reed fiber is a pretty useful material, as it is used for paintings and atmo suits, while plastic can be used for advanced technologies. Plastic is especially important if you have Spaced Out enabled, as plastic is used when conducting the highest tiers of research. If you wish to make a normal drecko ranch, you will have to fill the room with chlorine. By doing this, you can plant balm lilys. Balm lilys only requirement for growth is that they are in a chlorine atmostphere. If you fill half the room with 50% chlorine and 50% hydrogen, the dreckos will also regrow their scales. To ranch glossy dreckos you will have to feed your dreckos mealwood. This causes them to lay glossy drecko eggs. Mealwood grows can grow in either oxygen, polluted oxygen or carbon dioxide atmosphere. Any of these should be fine, and it is not important which one you use. By pumping in 50% hydrogen and 50% of your other gas, the dreckos will be able to regrow their scales.

If you have a lot of refined metal, you can automate your ranches. While you could just let the critters be in their ranch and let the eggs they lay hatch into new critters, this means you're missing out on a lot of food, such as meat and eggs, as well as egg shells which are useful for steel production.

By placing an auto-sweeper in the ranch, with coverage of all of the floor, you can send the eggs to another room, so that the critters in the ranch can continue to lay eggs.
You can then use one of the following designs to make sure that the ranch is fully-automatic or at least make it so you need to micromanage it less.

The most simple solution is to make each ranch contain 3 rooms: The main ranching room, a hatchery and a disposal room. By placing a critter dropoff in each room with different priorities, you can choose where the hatches should go.

This design utilizes priorities, a very useful tool for telling your duplicants what task they should focus on first.
(Not to be confused with the priority tab that deals with what type of task each duplicant should do first)

The priorities and settings should be as follows:

Main room: Should contain at max. 6 - 8 critters, auto-wrangle may be turned on, but it should not be necessary. Prioritiy should be 7.

Hatchery: Should be set to have at max. 0 critters, and have auto-wrangle turned on. Priority should be 5.

Disposal: Should be set to max. 20 critters (Maximum) and have auto-wrangle turned off. Priority should be 6.

This way, when an egg hatches in the hatchery, a duplicant will come and wrangle it. If there is room in the main ranch, it will be released there, otherwise it will be taken to the disposal room where it will starve to death.

You may need multiple disposal rooms, or a way to kill the critters.

This design works for most critter ranches, except for pufts.

Another design would be to create an incubator-based system. By instead placing a storage bin that accepts eggs, along with an incubator, you can crack any unwanted eggs, while making sure your ranch always has the right amount of critters.
In this design, the eggs will be transported to the hatchery, just like in the previous, but instead of letting them hatch, they are put into the incubator. If there's already an egg in the incubator, it will instead be put into the storage bin, where it will crack over the course of 10 cycles.

Having an auto-sweeper in the hatchery is a good idea, to prevent any eggs from hatching on their own.

Do note that eggs sometimes hatch on their own in the incubator, though this shouldn't happen too often. If it does happen, you can let it stay in the room, as it will die of starvation at some point.

At some point you will stumble across a natural structure called a "Geyser", or a "vent". These vulcano-like piles of rock come in various forms, and all of them share the same trait: They produce materials.
Besides the obvious difference in appearnece, the name actually just implies in what state the material will be produced in: Vents produce gasses, while geysers produce liquids. Volcanoes also produces liquids, but the difference here is that they produce extremely hot liquids that would normally come in solid form, such as metals and super-heated rock.
For this guide, I will refer to all of them as "geysers" unless talking about a specific type of geyser, vent or vulcano.
(A few geysers and vents does not follow this naming convention, but for most this is how their names relate to what they produce) Geysers essentially gives free resources. Geysers will erupt at certain times and be inactive at others. You can read the specific times by clicking on the geyser.
By placing gas or liquid pumps, you can transport the resources from the geyser to your colony, where you can use them for whatever you want.

A water geyser can provide a lot of water for free. Just remember to use gold or steel for the pump, to prevent them from overheating.

Do keep in mind that most geysers produce resources that are very hot, so you will need something to cool the resources down before they enter your colony. An example of this would be to use wheezeworts to cool water from a water geyser down.
An alternative, would be to use the Tundra to cool down the product, though this won't work in the long term.

Geysers also have Dormant and active periods. During active periods, the geyser will erupt at certain times, then be inactive, then continue erupting after some time has passed and so on. When a geyser is dormant, it won't erupt until it becomes active again, which can take a long time, sometimes over a hundred cycles You can't see how long these lasts for, unless you send a scientist with the "Field Research" skill to analyze it.
In any case, making sure you can store a lot of whatever the geyser produces, to use during dormant periods, is a good idea. Some geysers are simply just not worth it. Here I will list and explain why some of these geysers should be left alone.

• Hydrogen vent: Hydrogen vents produce too little to be useful, one barely being able to power a single hydrogen generator!

Natural Gas is one of the most common geysers, and can be found in the jungle or swamp biome. The Natural gas they produce can be used to generate power with a natural gas generator.

Natural gas generators produce a lot of power, as well as polluted water and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide will be taken via pipe, however the polluted water will leak out of the machine. This means there should be mesh tiles underneath the generator.

Do keep in mind that the carbon dioxide and polluted water is very hot.

When you have explored for some time, you will probably stumble across the two last biomes not covered yet:
The Surface and The Core

The surface is located at the top of the world where you will find a lot of regolith, as well as mafic rock.
If you're playing the base game, asteroids will periodically rain from the sky, which brings with them lots of regolith, as well as metals.
If you wish to know more about the Surface, and perhaps start exploring space, skip to the "Surface" Section of this guide.

The oil biome is located near the bottom of the world. It is home to the slicktsters, as well as the dangerous Sporechid. You can also find oil wells which you can use to obtain oil at the cost of water.
Proceed with caution and skip to the "Oil and The Core" Section of this guide if you plan on exploring the oil biome.

The Core is located bellow the oil biome, and is essentially just a giant pool of lava. Unless you want to exploit the enourmous heat energy that is located here, you should not enter it, as it is very hot.

The Oil Biome is found in the deepest layers of your asteroid, and it contains a lot of useful materials. Not only oil, but also lead, fossils and sometimes even diamonds. You can also find oil reservoirs and slicksters, as well as the sporechid.
It's also full of carbon dioxide, and is pretty hot, so remember atmosuits.

Crude Oil (Oil) can be found either in giant lakes, or you can extract it by using oil wells. Oil wells consume water to produce Oil, as well as small amounts of natural gas.
This oil can then be pumped to an oil refinery to turn it into petrolium and natural gas, which can then be used at a petrolium generator to produce power, or turned into plastic at a polymer press.
If you research Hydrocarbon Propulsion you can also use it as rocket fuel. Slicksters is a critter found in the oil biome. They consume carbon dioxide and produce oil. They, however need high temperatures to survive.

When slicksters are in high temperature environments, they will lay Molten Larva eggs, which will hatch into Molten Slicksters. Molten slicksters require even higher temperatures, but produce petrolium instead of oil.

Other useful resources include Diamonds, which is a substitute for glass that provides much higher decor value.
You can also encounter sporechids, plants that only live in carbon dioxide, but provide a high amount of decor, the highest of any plant. They, however, release zombie spores. This means that care should be taken when handling sporechids. Atmo suits will keep your duplicants safe, and uprooting them will prevent any more zombie spores from being generated.

Note
Zombie spores don't actually turn your duplicants into zombies. They will, however, get a hefty stat reduction for 18 cycles.

The core is at the lowest layer of the map. The Core is essentially just a lot of magma, and a bit of obsidian. The only reason to ever breach the abyssalite border of the core is to make use of the heat from the magma

When you have gotten access to oil, you can start producing petrolium. Petrolium is the only way to use oil, so building an oil refinery is a must.

The oil refinery has a liquid intake for oil. This oil will then be converted at a 50% efficiency to petrolium, as well as small amounts of natural gas that will leak from the machine. The petrolium will be deposited from the machine's liquid output. A petrolium generator operates in much the same way as a natural gas generator, except with liquid petrolium instead of natural gas. This means you'll need to keep the heat in mind, as well as add mesh tiles underneath the generator. Instead of using it as fuel, you can use petrolium to create plastic. Plastic is a very useful material that is used for many late-game buildings, such as Transit Tubes, Steam Turbines as well as Comfy Beds. In Spaced Out it is even more important, being required for the latest tier of research.
The polymer press also produces small amounts of steam, as well as hot carbon dioxide. The Steam will leak out of the machine.

Just before you reach the surface, you will find a huge layer of mafic rock, ice and other materials. By continuing to dig upwards, you will eventually reach the surface. If you're playing without the "Spaced Out" DLC, you will instead find a luge layer or regolith and mafic rock.

At the surface, there's no background layer, which means any liquids or gasses will vanish. To counter this, either make a waterlock or use drywall wherever you need to use gasses or liquids.
If you're playing the Base game or Spaced Out on a Classic-mode asteroid, the surface will be made out of regolith, while the Spaced Out version is just a layer of abyssalite.

Base Game Only! If you have access to glass, you can gain electricity by putting up solar panels. If you're playing the base game, putting up solar panels will be much harder, as meteors showers will occasionally happen.
Besides that, you will need a high amount of batteries, as solar panels, as the name implies, only produces power when the sun shines.

Glass Production
To make glass, you will need to research "Superheated Forging", which in Spaced Out will require you to use materials study. If you're playing spaced out and haven't started conducting Materials Science Research, skip ahead to the "Materials Science Research", and then come back here when you have read that.

When you have Superheated Forging researched, you can make a glass forge. The glass forge consumes a lot of power, and glass is produced in liquid form. It will quickly cool down once exiting the forge, via pipes. You should use insulated pipes to lead it to a place where it can cool down. Water that is about to be used in an electrolyzer is a good option.

To prevent the solar panels from overheating, it may be a good idea to put glass tiles above them, enabling you to keep gasses in the room. This causes the solar panels to be able to exchange heat with their surroundings. You can then keep a wheezewort in the room to make sure the solar panels will keep working.
A simple Solar Panel Setup for Spaced Out. In the base game, meteor detection, as well as bunker doors, are needed. By placing a telescope with access to space (No obstructions), your duplicants can start analyzing nearby planets, asteroids and other interresting locations in space. This is where Spaced Out and the Base game differs massively. Well, not with the telescopes, but with space exploration.
The Starmap as seen in Spaced Out

If your asteroid has regolith on the surface, there will be shove voles as well. Shove voles can dig through most tiles, except abyssalite and metal tiles (They also won't enter liquid of high enough mass). Shove voles will eat regolith and dirt, and produce solid blocks of whatever material they eat.
This means they should be kept at the surface. Make sure there's no tiles they can burrow through.

As you prepare to send your first rockets into space, you may want to start producing steel. Steel is used to make rockets (Though you can use other metals if you're playing with the Spaced out DLC enabled).

To make steel, you'll first need refined iron. By this point you'll probably already have a way to produce refined iron, so this should be fine.

You also need refined carbon, which you make out of carbon at a kiln. Kilns produce a lot of heat, but they require no electricity, so you can just place them far away from your colony, or use a wheezewort to cool the area down. They also require almost no duplicant labor.

The third ingredient, Lime, however, is a bit more tricky. If you have a hatch ranch, or any other ranch for that matter, it will be much easier. To obtain lime you will have to crush egg shells or fossils at the rock crusher. Fossils can be found in the Oil biome and the Tide pools.

Once you have obtained enough of these three ingredients you can start producing steel at the metal refinery.

While space travel in the base game is hard and require more materials, as well as having a much more difficult rocketry system, this guide will not cover space travel for the base game.
It will, however, cover space travel for Spaced Out, at least up to a certain point.
If you do not have spaced out, this guide is essentially over at this point.
If you do have Spaced Out, keep on reading.

If you have Spaced Out, spacefaring will be much easier than in the base game. First, make a rocket platform, either at the surface, or a rocket silo. You'll need to research "Space Program" to make a rocket platform, which will also give you access to some of the basic rocket modules needed for basic space travel.

You can then select the modules you have access to. You'll need a nosecone, a command module and an engine. For now, a solo spacefarer nosecone should be fine, which will function both as a nosecone and a command module. For engine, I suggest you research "Advanced Gas Flow" for a carbon dioxide engine or "Advanced Combustion" for a sugar engine. You can also research "Renewable Energy" to gain access to the steam engine.

Simple Rocket with Solo Spacefarer Nosecone, Trailblazer module and Carbon Dioxide Engine, made for one-way colonization of nearby asteroids

Once you have these you can send a rocket into space!
Though, maybe first you should figure out what to do with the rocket before you do it.
So do research "Crash Plan" before you send up a rocket into space, as you will need the modules it gives access to.

For you to gain access to the last tier of research, Data Analysis Research, you need to get data banks, using Orbital Data Collection Labs. You can place Orbital Data Collection Labs inside your rocket, and will produce Data Banks while in orbit around a planetoid, at the cost of Plastic and Power.
You can also gain a small amount of data banks from analyzing geysers and inspecting buildings in ruins. If you analyze all geysers at your starting asteroid, you will get enough to research at least 2 - 3 of the researches requiring Data Analysis Research. By placing a trailblazer module on your rocket, your duplicant will be able to land on a nearby asteroid, albeit without the rocket. A simple rocket design for this is a solo spacefarer nosecone, a trailblazer module and a carbon dioxide engine. obviously this will be a one-way trip, so do keep that in mind. You can also choose to just go with a solo spacefarer nosecone and an engine, though you will need to blow up the rocket to get your duplicant down onto the asteroid then.
A simple rocket consisting of a carbon dioxide engine, a trailblazer module and a solo spacefarer nosecone can be used to send a single duplicant to a nearby asteroid for colonization. A rocket needs an engine, and for now all you have access to is carbon dioxide engine, sugar engine and steam engine. Both the sugar engine and the carbon dioxide engine have a range of 6 hexes while the steam engine has a range of 10. This range is the maximum range when the engine is fully fueled. Having less fuel means less range. Whatever engine you're using, you'll need some fuel for it. Most of the basic engines uses easy-to-get fuel, and for now basic short-range engines is what we need.

Carbon Dioxide
If you choose to use a Carbon Dioxide engine, you will need large amounts of CO2. If you have dug a pit for CO2 collection, and not placed a carbon skimmer, you can use this CO2 to power your rocket's first trip. Otherwise, if you have a fossil-fuel based power supply, you can collect the CO2 produced by it.

Steam Engine
While water is somewhat easy to get, heating it up may prove a bit harder. You will also have to take into account the fact that if it is cooled down, it will turn back into water. Using insulated pipes will help with this during transport, and once inside the rocket, it will stay in gas form.
If you find a vulcano near your rocket platform, you can use it to heat up water until it becomes steam.

Once you have made your rocket, simply click on the Control Module and choose a destination, then make sure your crew are inside, and everyone else outside. You can then press the "Begin Launch Sequence" Button to send your rocket into space.
A rocket is launched into space

You may want to put an atmo suit inside of the rocket and/or pump oxygen inside before you launch, as otherwise your duplicant will suffocate.
Other stuff you may want to pack is food, building materials, seeds and critter eggs, though you will have to blow up your rocket to get it onto the asteroid.

When your colony has become somewhat sustainable, you can concentrate on other stuff, such as further exploration of space. Setting up a telescope there will enable you to see what is near your second colony.
You can also place a cartographic module on a rocket to map out space far from your asteroids. When a rocket with a cartographic module is next to an unexplored hex, it will be revealed.
Alternatively you can place a telescope inside a your rocket, which your duplicants can then use in outer space to map out nearby areas.
A simple rocket with a telescope.

On a final note, if you're using regular telescopes, you may want to replace them with enclosed telescopes, as they have a longer range.

Spaced Out Only!
A duplicants lands on an unexplored asteroid

When your space rocket finally arrives at your chosen location, you can choose to blow it up, or use a trailblazer module if you have one in your rocket, to get your duplicant(s) onto the nearby asteroid. When they have landed safely, you should quickly get them to dig towards a nearby source of oxygen (Either a small cave with oxygen or oxylite tiles).

You can then look around for materials to use for construction of basic buildings you will need to survive, such as outhouses, oxygen production and food production.

From then on, you'll just have to expand your new colony and make it sustainable. You can even make a Mini-Pod and start printing new duplicants (All printing pods share the same cooldown, so if you print something on one asteroid, you can't print something on another for 3 cycles).

At any point, you can switch between your colonized asteroids (And any rockets you have) by clicking on their name in the "Planetoid" Section.

Spaced Out Only!
At some point you'll need to research even higher tiers of science, and to do that, you need materials science research. First, you'll need to build a materials study terminal.

For your materials study terminal to work, you need radbolts. Radbolts are generated by a varity of sources, the most simple one being the manual radbolt generator. To use it, place the generator like so and make sure it points in the direction of the materials study terminal.

When fabrication of radbolts is queued, a duplicant will use the generator to produce radbolts at the cost of uranium. These radbolts will then be sent in the chosen direction (In this case towards the materials study terminal). These radbolts can then be used to research stuff requiring Applied Science Research.

Uranium can be found either in the radioactive biome or in geodes found rarely around the asteroid.
If you do not want to use the manual radbolt generator, or simply wish to not use uranium, you can instead use a radbolt generator. This machine will use nearby radiation to generate radbolts. A major downside to this is the fact that if the radbolt generator loses power at any time before it has produced 50 radbolts, all radbolts will vanish. Make sure that you have a big battery connected to it beforehand.

Sources of Radiation
If you do use a Radbolt Generator, you will need a source of radiation. The more radiation, the faster generation of radbolts.

At this point, one of the best radiation producers is actually the wheezewort, with a radiation output at around 300 each cycle at a short distance. By planting a few wheezeworts around your Radbolt Generator, you can get a lot of radbolts each cycle.

If you have a somewhat stable colony on a planetoid with a crushed satelite, you can conduct all of your radbolt-requiring research there, as crushed satelites are incredibly useful for generating a lot of radbolts.

Once you have gotten a somewhat sustainable colony, you can begin on improving it, making life easier for your duplicants. Maybe even start sending out rockets? Colonize the rest of the asteroids if you are playing Spaced Out?
Whatever you do, I hope you found this guide helpful.