What is the ideal balance as a beginner?

There isn't really a fool proof way to transition into mid game. You kind of need a little bit of everything and managing it all at the same time is quite difficult. The best tips I have is to expand quickly. If you just dig and dig and dig then you shouldn't ever have much trouble with metal and it's more likely that you can find good sources of water or cooling from cool slush geysers or more ice biomes.

Sometimes trying to expand a lot can be daunting because it takes a long time without good priorities. Making sure your dupes are prioritizing the things they're best at and ignoring things that would take then awhile is a great thing to work on as you transition to mid game. Automation is key to all this because you can knock out a lot of trivial things that take a lot of time. Have a dupe that takes all day running around filling algae and coal plants? Put down a few autosweepers and containers and the dupe won't have to do any of that. Just a little automation on coal generators goes a long way in stopping a dupe to walk 20 seconds back and forth just to do a 2 second task.

Metal refinment and managing the immense heat comming with it is the first large challenge of the game, alongside running cooling systems and the power supplies requirements that come with it.

For me, I like to establish a hatch ranch (solves food and power) while digging for algae and more coal. My stash of algae will support my base until I can get industrial materials like steel and plastic for heat management. I also find a bunch of water sources for the switch to electrolyzers.

Early game is all bout basic survival:

• Learning how to met your dup's basic needs (ie. food, air, bathroom, and sleep)
• Most of your time is building and research
• Only heat management you need to worry about is maybe insulating your starting biome
• Remember that dups can handle heat pretty well. You only really need to worry about heat near your plants.
• Just keep your plants away from your energy producing buildings.
• Dirt tempshift plates can also do wonders transfering heat out of the air into your walls

The next phase is exploration:

• Here you are starting to dig into slime and other biomes
• Don't be scare of slime lung, just use deodorizer to clean up polluted oxygen so it goes away
• You are mostly focus on water sources, since you will eventually run out of your starting pool
• Once you find it, people generally switch to electrolyzer and atmo suits
• For heat management, focus on trying to cool your oxygen before piping it in your base
• At this point, you can also pick better food to grow (ie. dark caps, ranches, brittle blossoms, etc)

Now, you can move to the Midgame and start looking at steel production:

• You need atmo suits to get to the oil biome
• With crude oil you can start getting more power production and running other refineries
• Steel is usually the first thing you make, since you need the overheat properties to run steam turbines
• With steam turbines you can make super efficient cooling loops to make run other machines

After steel, is space exploration. After space is just bigger and bigger projects that keep you interested. Or restart.

Automation is not that important. Little sprinkle of it is good, but most of the crazy stuff people do to avoid dup labour is not important.

Focus resource chains and loops as they are the important part of the game. Basic chains are:

• Water -> C02 -> Pwater -> Water
• Water -> Oxygen and Hydro -> Energy
• Crude Oil -> Petro, Pwater -> Energy, Water -> Crude Oil

https://oni-db.com/ Is a great link to investigate all the elements/buildings in the game and how they interact.

By then I run into several walls, depending on the game it might be nutrition, metal scarcity or a lack of oxigen.

then you're not exactly out of early game. Yes midgame is about tier2 resources like plastic and steel, but it's more than that.

If your base is at risk of running out of oxygen, then you're not really into midgame, and you should address that first. I.e. locate a suitable water source and build a SPOM. The same applies to food. You should have a safe, scalable (if you haven't reached your target polulation), reliable, long term (not necessarily infinitely) sustainable food source. Eg. you have 20 dups and 5 fully automated stone hatches stables with egg handling (8 unpowered incubators and an evolution chamber with automated egg and meat collection and transportation). A working food distribution with infinite storage is nice too.

You should also have most of your dups in suits, making exploration much easier. You may need a bit of steel and a bit of plastic for taming the water source for your SPOM, if it's cool steam vent (if it's salt water, you're good).

If you're food source is crop, then you should have a cooling solution in place for your base. That can be left for later in case of hatches.

All the above means you should also have a temporary setup for a metal refinery, and a temporary setup for oil refinery and plastic press. Or, glossy dreckos and smooth hatches if that's more your style.

And of course stable power. If I'm into stone hatches than up to certain power level, with proper CO2 handling in place (whatever that means), coal power is sustainable long term. In my current base I've build a coal power block... with CO2 trapped inside. It's still building up but as far as I'm concerned that's reasonable handling of it. :) Or, consider geothermal. If you have magma at the bottom, that's a huge source of power. Very long term.

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One possible definition of midgame is when it's no longer clear what to do, because you have a stable solution for everything important. At that point, it's up to you, your choice.

imo my list of priorities is

1. smart battery production system
2. spom
3. water sieve and de-germer
4. down down down
5. water source
6. petrol boiler
7. metal volcano
8. space

for me it's usually mealwood food ->algae air-> coal power-> atmo suits -> natgas power-> mushrooms for food -> oil for plastic-> oil for power-> Steel -> active cooling a metal refinery (aquatuner/steam turbine) ->space -> etc

there are materials you get from space that change the way you can play the game, fullerine to make supercoolant and niobium to make therium. now that i've done builds with those materials, i am always looking to get back to that point.

always keep digging, usually left and right first for me, then down when im ready for oil, then up when im ready for space. im usually hitting f3 for thermal view to try and spot the neutronium base of geyers and the like.

i like to build 3 vertical transport chimneys in the centre and extreme left & right, so i can run services like gas and fluid piping over large distances without interfering with other builds

good luck!

Tip: Midgame - You can dig down to the oil biome to let CO2 filter down. Make sure to have atmosuits when you get there and quickly free any trapped slicksters. I use both a ladder and firepole and skill scrub my diggers for atmo suit use and hard digging. Dig-up the oil biome and place mesh tiles down to prevent the slicksters from drowning. They should help reduce CO2 while you pump oil out to make petroleum. You may need to ranch them for several cycles and then release extra into the biome.