Outhouse and wash basin in Oxygen Not Included

My friends, today we’re going to cover early game sanitation. We’ll make sure our little Duplicants like Max can do their daily cycle bio stop and clean their hands and everything.

When should I care about toilets?

Like, right away.

Duplicants need to go to the bathroom once a day, at the end of the day. And if you haven’t built a place where they can get their daily relief by then, they’re going to do it on the floor.

And then their morale will go down and you’ll need to clean it up. And it’s going to be full of food poisoning germs, so you’re going to get a headache as they go all around contaminating stuff.

So let’s get a nice, clean bathroom before the end of day 1!

Building the outhouses and wash basins

The best way to go with them is to isolate them in a room with a door. I recommend going for two of each at the beginning of the game.

The dimension of an outhouse is 2x3 which is the same as wash basins, so try to make a door followed by a 8x3 space to make room for everything. The wash basins should be built near the door and the outhouses should be built farther away.

Like in our picture with Max :

The reasoning there is that you want the Duplicants to wash their hands after using the toilet when they want to leave the room. They’ll use the wash basin when exiting the room if it is on their way.

Once you’ve got your room with a door, outhouses and wash basins, you’ll notice the room becomes blue when using the room overlay (upper right of the screen). This means that the Duplicants receive a morale bonus when they use a toilet in the room.

Great!

How it works

So when a dupe goes to the outhouse at the end of a cycle, 200k food poisoning germs are generated and some of them end up on the little guy.

Those are eliminated when he uses the wash basin. If he doesn’t, they stay on him and get spread around on things he touches, including food. Which leads to food poisoning.

Each outhouse have a capacity of 15 pooping and after that, a Duplicant needs to brave the noble task of emptying the toilet.

How to empty an outhouse

Let's head over to Lindsay for a sec, who's busy doing the noble task :

Now if you've made two outhouses on the first day, you're going to have maybe seven or eight cycles before needing to clean them.

You'll notice there's an arrow on the right side of the outhouse. The more the toilet is full the more it goes up, and when it reaches the red line it stops working until it is emptied.

It can also be emptied before getting full by clicking on it and using the “clean the toilet” button. The cleaning takes a lot of time and generates a bunch of polluted dirt, which you'll also need to deal with.

How do we deal with the dirt?

The best way in the early game is to create compost, which turns polluted dirt into dirt slowly over time.

So yeah, we're going to compost our characters poop.

If you don't want to carry it all over the base, a good trick is to create the compost very close to the toilets. You can even add it to the same room as it will not break the room's morale bonus.

Here is my improved early game latrine, with compost nearby on the right side. One advantage here is that the Duplicant that brings the polluted dirt to the compost will be able to wash his hands when leaving the room :

This looks usable for the early game.

Eventually, the outhouses and wash basins will be replaced by lavatories and sinks, as the upgraded versions generate fewer germs and require way less maintenance.

But for that, we will need water access and plumbing.

That's another article!