Fault Inc’s disastrous first colony taught us a few important things; namely that Planetbase has a pretty fast moving day/night cycle and that colonists asphyxiate really quickly when their solar powered life support all shuts down.
So for colony #2 I try to avoid this problem by building not only a solar panel but also a decent sized wind turbine right as soon as we land.
Which reminds me, did you know your colonists bring construction robots with them to each colony? They don’t seem to work any harder or faster than your human construction experts but more helping hands is always useful and I guess it’s nice not having to worry about providing them with food or air.
Our cute little construction bot puts the finishing touches on a solar panel.
Turbine probably not drawn to scale.
I had hoped using winds as a backup energy source would solve all my nocturnal oxygen problems but it turns out that the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day on this particular planet (which took me by surprise; living in Oklahoma has given me weird ideas about “normal” weather). So my overnight electrical supply was more or less random and that meant life support was on and off all night as well. Fortunately while the colony’s oxygen levels got dangerously low on multiple occasions the electricity always kicked back in before anybody actually died. Admittedly a night like that should probably have left everybody suffering from the side effects of CO2 poisoning and partial brain death but I’m pretty sure Planetbase doesn’t simulate any of that so let’s just pretend I didn’t bring it up.