it is. i had to restart like fifteen times before i got anywhere. doesn’t help that the simulation is quite janky and you have to understand its anachronisms to really get anywhere.

things like:

• gases don’t mix with each other, meaning you can have one tile of carbon dioxide block a vent so that oxygen isn’t replenished in a room, or have one errant tile of methane periodically moving over a gas sensor causing a room to overpressurize way over what should be possible from the vent, eventually exploding the walls of the room and filling the base with sour gas (ask me how i know)
• the same applies to liquids, meaning you can stack a liter of salt water on top of a liter of water to get a solid wall of liquid. this also blocks gas, making it an airlock.
• doors push gases and liquids away when closing, but only if there’s free space. this means you can set up a series of doors to act as a compressor. if there’s no free space, the material is simply deleted.
• every process produces heat, but the result of a process is always at a set temperature. for example, there’s a machine that splits water inte oxygen, which you need to breathe, and hydrogen, which you need to get rid of. the gases are always produced at 70°C or so, which means you need to cool it down to make it useful for breathing. you can cool it with a heat exchanger, but heats the area around the heat exchanger instead. so what do? well, you can dump that heat into the water going to the splitting machine. the input being at boiling point doesn’t matter, the output is still the same temperature, meaning you just deleted 30C worth of heat energy from the game. this is crucial for not overheating your base with all the machines you need to run.
• there’s germs everywhere, but chlorine kills germs, but no mixing means you can’t chlorinate the water and only the tiles in contact with the gas get disinfected. but if you put the water in a tank inside a chlorine atmosphere, somehow all the water touches the chlorine and it gets disinfected very quickly.
• some solid tiles let gas through but not liquids. if the gas cools enough to become liquid when moving through the tile, the liquid will simply teleport out somewhere

the entire game is like this.