Alright, I need to get this off my chest. This is my highly opinionated take on germs in the game.

Food Poisoning Germs Are Overrated

Germs, especially food poisoning germs, really don’t matter that much. But for some reason, a lot of guides and content creators keep saying wash basins should be a priority on cycle one. Honestly, I think that’s bad advice.

Wash basins only do one thing: remove food poisoning germs. In return, they eat up research, use your clean water, and produce polluted water bottles that create polluted oxygen. That polluted oxygen is actually more of a problem early on because it can give your dupes the Yucky Lungs debuff, which is way more dangerous to the colony—especially on maps where you aren’t using algae distillers for oxygen.

Yes, there are ways to deal with polluted water, like dumping it in storage with a layer of clean water on top, but doing that in the early game is just a waste of time when there are more important things to do.

And food poisoning? It’s basically a irrelevant. All it does is make a dupe spend a little more time in the bathroom. From my experience, no more than one dupe gets it at a time anyway.

Wash Basins? Nah.

I don’t think you ever need to build wash basins. You’ll get through the research tree quickly enough to unlock sinks, and if you really want your dupes to wash their hands, you can just wait until then.

Personally, I don’t even bother with sinks until later in the game. By cycle 200–500, when I’ve got a fully self-sustaining colony, I’ll finally throw some sinks in on the way to the Great Hall. By then, I’m storing food in a chlorine deep freezer, so there’s literally no chance for germs anyway—though food poisoning germs might still come from the hands of dupes. At that point, it’s just about seeing the infection number at 0 because it looks nice.

Germ Mechanics Make Food Poisoning Even Less of a Problem

Here’s the thing: duplicants only get food poisoning if they ingest food poisoning germs. That’s it. This makes the whole "keep clean water and germy water separate" thing completely unnecessary.

Here’s why it doesn’t matter:

• Water coolers for the Great Hall bonus? Disable them. Problem solved.
• Hydroponic farms (e.g., bristle berries)? Germs don’t stop plants from growing, so who cares?
• Advanced research stations? Germs don’t matter there either.
• Sinks? Clean hands.

In my opinion, germy water and clean water aren’t all that different, at least when it comes to food poisoning.

Slimelung and Zombie Spores

While this rant is mostly about food poisoning, I want to quickly touch on slimelung and zombie spores.

Slimelung

Slimelung used to be scary, but now it’s just annoying. It can’t kill dupes anymore, so it’s not a big deal. You can just dig through a slime biome, slap down a few deodorizers, and boom—no more slimelung germs.

Zombie Spores

Zombie spores, though, are a whole different story. They’re actually dangerous, so don’t mess around with them. Here’s what you can do:

• Create a vacuum to suffocate the sporechid.
• If the sporechid is in a slime biome, you can sometimes let slimelung germs out-compete the zombie spores if the sporechid is dug up.

Just make sure you’re always using atmo suits around zombie spores. Better safe than sorry.

Just disable disinfect. Whether you’re using sinks or not, there’s no reason to have it enabled.

Again, these are just my personal opinions, and I’m no expert. I’ve got just under 1,000 hours in the game—so take this with a grain of salt. But that’s how I feel about germs.