Jazz's Guide to Xenobiology

[Jazz]

This is all up for opinion but using these methods I can generally (aside from bad RNG or RnD) get bottomless slimes relatively early (depending on how fast RnD gets the upgrades). The secret to success is dumping monkeys into the pits so there's no time wasted between them breeding and you feeding.

The Setup

• Grab 3 glass, a screwdriver, a wrench, a large beaker and a small beaker (in the beaker box), a dropper, and that 1 sheet of plasma from scichem.

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• On your way back or to xenobio, grab a biobag from the closet in the airlock

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• Fill your biobag with both boxes of monkey cubes and fill the right monitor. Group the two grey's into one cell (preferable the top left) and feed them 4 monkeys. Grab a dead monkey from the pen and place it next to you, either on the ground or in the chair, the chair looks funnier but you can't walk over it.

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• Put the plasma you got from scichem and the plasma from the table into the grinder, grind it, eject the beaker and throw it on the ground next to your chair. Grab a syringe from the syringe box and fill the beaker you grabbed from scichem with blood from the monkey. Place this on the table in the top left corner then drop it next to your chair. Also place the small beaker in the top right corner of the tile. Don't fill it with blood.

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The Kill Pit

• Wrench both the slime processor and fridge at the same time, grab a fire extinguisher, then drag the slime processor so its one tile beneath and to the left of your chair (the right chair), and the fridge so its one tile beneath and to the right of your chair. Wrench both of them back into place and stand between them. Use the glass you got from scichem in your hands and make directional windows in every direction except for the top and bottom. Screw them all in place. Drag the water tank to right of the right most slime monitor. You can now get every slime in the game without unbuckling yourself from the chair, or even exiting the slime management console.

 

Actually Doing Xenobio

I cannot stress enough how much you need to either bug RnD or get the parts yourself for that slime processor upgrade for this all to come together. The default parts yield one core for every one slime, meaning if you plasma inject a grey slime extract and re-process it, you won't get anywhere. The second you get 1 pico manipulator and 1 super matter bin, however, things start to become profitable.

In the meantime though, have four grey slimes breeding for monkey cubes at all times. Any more than this and you end up spending all your cubes on greys and make 0 progress on other varieties. Spread out the slimes into their pens by species and feed them two monkeys per one baby slime. Remember, your managing your own economy of monkeys so play it smart. If you need more greys then hold off on feeding other varieties. All of this is void the second RnD gets you upgrades.

Put garbage species in the windows. Xenobiology is not useful for the rest of the station except for (arguably) three slimes: light pink, yellow, and bluespace. As @EvadableMoxie pointed out, if the station's goal is DNA vault it is good to get some DNA from gold slime mobs. Any slimes that don' t lead to the golden three go in a window for any other xenobiologist who wants to mess around with whatever they wanna do (I'm excluding gold since being a sentient mob is really just for kicks and nothing useful. Go ahead though if you want to when your done, especially since you'll have unlimited monkeys when RnD gives you upgrades).

Life before upgrades really sucks, you need to manage your slimes cost-effectively. This means don't try and breed 5 red slimes pre-upgrades. Always ALWAYS keep your 4 grey slimes well fed for more monkeys. Immediately kill or move all other colored slimes from the greypit so they don't eat the grey slimes' food. Post upgrades management doesn't matter since you'll be swimming in monkeys. When you get upgrades you can just kill off all your greys since your going to be using synthetic breeding rather than the natural way.

If you have a preceding species to a target one, and your post upgrades, just dump like 10 monkeys in the pen and let them breed themselves to the target slime. If you get bluespace, dump like 15 slimes in the pen since they can only mutate into themselves (extremely profitable).

How to get Fat Loads of those Strapping Young Primates

RnD finally came through or you barged your way in and printed the parts yourself? Here's how to get stupid amounts of monkeys with the blink of a syringe.

Kill off all your baby greys, and feed the adults one more monkey so they become babies for more slaughtering. You can keep breeding a couple to keep the flow going if you really wanna ramp up production. Use wirecutters on the grill and stand where the grill used to be to do your magic. Don't worry, you can still access the beakers from where they are (just not the slime processor). Turn on the slime processor and place 9 ish slime cores into your kill pit. If you already have an assload of cores you probably don't need to do this yet but if you do 9 is a reasonable number to go with (81 monkeys). Use the dropper to transfer 1u of plasma into the empty small beaker, then fill your syringe with plasma from the small beaker and use it in your hands to switch it to inject (z). Then, with the fire extinguisher in your other hand, quickly inject the core, press x to switch to the extinguisher, and put that slime to sleep. Do this for all 9 cores using the alt+click menu and grind up the greys. Alt+click the slime processor with all the grey cores and one by one inject the cores with blood from the beaker. Leave one left for later monkey gathering (DO NOT FORGET THAT), and transfer all of your newfound cubes into the slime console. Your biobag should fill up, so make sure to unload used extracts into the fridge as well as unload cubes into the console. Again, just use the alt+click menu to click on the cubes for quick and ez transferring. If you run out of monkeys, simply work your way up with the one extract you saved (or like I said keep a couple of greys breeding). You can always get plasma refills from mining (1 sheet = 20 dust) and or injecting dark purple slimes with plasma to get more, but the 80 you spawn with should be enough (as long as your using droppers). If you wanna get some gatfruit then your definitely going to need extra plasma...

Which Slimes to Breed

Again, if your post upgrades go ahead and waste monkeys on fun slimes, but here the real slimes you wanna breed for: light pink, yellow, and bluespace. Pre-upgrades should only focus on these, and again make sure your only breeding two of the slimes leading up to your target slime otherwise you'll run out of cubes. For example, lets say one my greys conceives an orange slime. I would take the orange out and into its own pen, feed it two monkeys (two monkeys per mutation/child birth), and that let sucker grow. Any further orange slimes would go in that same pen. Any more than two orange slimes and they get put out (unless you can afford the monkeys for more than 2 feeding at a time). If a yellow get's mutated, isolate it and finish the breeding cycle of the oranges (feed pregnant ones one more monkey, put down babies). Give that new slime two more monkeys and rinse and repeat. Use these tactics for the golden three, and throw all other excess slimes in the windows of each pen (just keep one of each type). This goes for species your done with, such as you already having red and yellow which voids the use of orange.

I got all three Slimes, Now What?

If your like me and you don't wanna bother giving mobs sentience, the first light pink you get just slaughter it. If you want to go the other route just breed it so its not lonely and then kill its brother. Inject the core with plasma and hand-give it to RnD for karma. Do the same with yellows, except don't kill the first one. Breed both yellow and bluespace up the wazoo until you get at least 5 yellows and like 10 or more bluespace. Proceed with a mass slaughter and pump the yellow cores with plasma. Hand-give one charged core to RnD, and the rest to robotics. As for the bluespace, take 15 cores and give them all blood. Go upgrade the station bluespace floor tiles, cause why not it's not like you have better things to do. Also inject a few with plasma and take the crystals to RnD (if you really wanna milk that karma hand-give them the crystals). If your like me, you might wanna take 10 of those crystals and go make the quantum pad network. Here's a map of handy tiles that should be bluespace floor tiles:

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Also if you didn't already know the shortcut for placing floor tiles is having a crowbar in other hand and clicking the floor tile with the new floor tile.

 

 

Please comment suggestions/argue with me!

 

 

Edited March 11, 2019 by Jazz

[EvadableMoxie]

The only thing I'd add is the importance of station goals. For the DNA vault, Xenobio should breed gold slimes and inject with blood or water to create a bunch of unique animal DNA samples.  For the BSA, they'll want to make a bunch of bluespace crystals out of bluespace slimes as it might be hard for mining to come up with the 20 needed for the BSA.  It also takes Quad Caps to build both which generally require yellow cores, but as you point out, Xenobio should be making yellow cores anyway.