My oxygen goal % seems to creep up very slowly...

• The "Vented" statistics shows about 1.5B units vented, and it is red - what does it mean when the number is red?
• The description mentions countereffects from venting things "like hydrogen or methane" - is there a formula for that? What else reduces oxygen score?
• Can I see the contribution of algae, grass and trees somewhere? Is it helping a lot, or a little?

I like the idea but the whole thing seems to be quite intransparent?

Have you looked at the description of hydrogen or methane? It tells you how much oxygen it counteracts, and so does anything else that has the same effect. Descriptions of things are important in this mod. Occasionally people play with debug mode or mods that disable descriptions and are missing key information.

Red means that you'll probably need to do more. As the vented number goes up it will get increasingly yellow and then increasingly green. When it's a deep green you're hitting diminishing returns and would likely benefit more from other methods of increasing oxygen. Beyond 100%, algae/grass/trees are similarly color coded. Unlike other goals these stick around past 100% until your oxygen goal is completed, since further increasing them will accelerate oxygen progress. It's most effective if you use all 4 methods of increasing oxygen rather than going all in on a single method.

The late game provides you with a few methods for producing oxygen at massive scale solely to vent it and make faster progress on the goal. Note that electrolyzing water isn't one of these methods, since if you're doing it just to vent, the surplus hydrogen will cancel it out. But the new carbon dioxide electrolysis/deposition recipe chain will release a lot of oxygen. It gives you surplus carbon to deal with, but there's an often overlooked set of solid waste recipes to automate disposal of massive amounts of landfill, and a carbon landfill recipe you can use to get rid of all the carbon. Another method is to build an array of algae tanks just to release tons of oxygen. Which may also give you some carbon byproduct, but less. And if you work toward your carbon sequestration fossil fuel goals (coal and oil) that will naturally consume a lot of hydrogen and result in more oxygen venting.

Thanks, I appreciate the reply. I missed the part about the descriptions, though the coloring of the text could use an explanation - it is not really obvious what it means, especially as long as Vented is the only number with colors.

I finished the game just now (208h, yay) - the oxygen goal was the last thing completed. It does feel a bit overtuned to me - I finished with algae 150% and gras and trees 175%, and it still took a good while get to 100% oxygen. For me, the engaging part about the mod is terraforming the world and creating Nauvis "from scratch"; watching the oxy number go up ever so slowly isn't really the fun part, honestly. Same also with the 75% goal, it gates a lot of tech, so for hours there's no progress in the tech tree, and I was considering just shelving the mod again.

With that being said, thank you for the mod, super unique setting :)

You're meant to intentionally produce oxygen to vent, using the late game recipe chains provided for that purpose. If that's happening too slowly you can build more. Algae, grass, and trees at 200% are all good, but you still also need venting. The oxygen-related checkpoints, including the carbon sequestration one, are a wakeup call to catch it earlier if you're lagging and not leave it until the last thing you do, build out everything you need except that, and then get stuck waiting around for the difficult one that you were meant to be making progress on all along.