The new super coolant makes things easy–almost too easy. My previous sour gas condenser used 9 thermo regulators–7 to pre-chill the sour gas, and then 2 more with a hydrogen loop to do the final condensing. I couldn’t condense all at once since the thermo regulators can only go gas->gas without damage.
But the super coolant makes it possible to use a thermo aquatuner instead of regulator. The thermo regulators have a max cooling factor of:
1000 g/s * 14 K * 2.4 J/g-K / 240 W = 140
Whereas the thermo aquatuners can get:
10000 g/s * 14 K * 8.44 J/g-K / 1200 W = 984
So more than 7 times as efficient! And just one has more than enough capacity to cool a full gas pipe of sour gas. In fact the duty cycle is really low.
Cooling it is easy, too, since it can be immersed in water. I have a huge tank of cold polluted water from a slush volcano that I use.
The previous setup used a significant fraction of its own capacity just to power itself; the new one barely registers in the noise.
How much cooling can an aquatuner do? I finally configured my water cooling loop, but the water goes in at about 157f and comes out about 138f. Is that it? That’s all an aquatuner does? Do I need like 9 of them in a row to get the water down to a usable temp for crops?
I ran some radiant pipes around the thermo-nullifier and it’s much more effective at cooling the liquid as far as I can see than the aquatuner. What, then, is the benefit of running the aquatuner at 1200w?
It’s -14 C per loop, but it has a high throughput–it can do that at a pipe’s full 10 kg/s. So set up an insulated coldbox with a looped aquatuner on a thermostat (Outside your base! These things get hot) and you should be good.
That said, the nullifier is free cooling, so use that if you have one.
The way I’d do it:
Build an insulated box with around 4x3 internal dimensions. Inside, put a liquid pump, a hydro sensor (second square up), a thermo sensor, and two liquid vents. One of the vents is connected to your water input via a shutoff valve, which is itself connected to the hydro sensor. It’s set up to keep a constant water level inside.
The pump goes to a water bridge (using the trick that splitting the output doesn’t lead to blocking), with the output square connected three ways:
to your crops
to the the thermo aquatuner input port
to a vent that is placed above the aquatuner
The aquatuner is enabled by the thermo sensor in the main tank. The aquatuner should be built from gold so that it has a 125 C overheat temperature. It sits in its own small tank (3x2), with an open top and a hydro sensor on the bottom. Connect the cooling vent (again, pouring right on top of the aquatuner) to a shutoff, which is itself connected to the hydro sensor, which should be set to a fairly small value–say, 50 kg.
What should happen, if I’ve got it right, is that when the aquatuner gets over 100 C (still within a healthy range), the water should boil off and open the valve. Cold water will pour on top from the tank and cool it down for another cycle. The hot steam will rise and float away.
The aquatuner will run constantly until the tank is at the proper temperature, and then only periodically to maintain that temperature. You’ll use up some water for cooling but there should be plenty for your crops.
I’ve found that the water temperature basically dominates the crop temperature, so you only need to cool the water to just below what the crops will take. Any lower is basically pointless.
I think you’re playing the game at a higher level than I am. My complexity gets as far as like “stop generating power when the batteries are full” or “here’s a pipe in a cold area” while you’re making home made rocket fuel macguyver style. Still, I should look at some of these in action on youtube and figure it out.
I’ve settled on simply creating a passive system near the nullifier - a run of radiant pipes coiled around it, lengthening or shortening the amount of pipe until the output temperature is where you want, and then storing the extra water (ideally around like 70f) in a tank in my base. I thought I might go cooler - you don’t need cooler water for crops, but if I just dump 40 degree water in a tank in my base, it’ll gradually absorb heat and lower the air temp, right?
Impressively so. Hence my suggestion above that someone:rolleyes: should make a guide on Steam, once the game is fully released, so that others can benefit. I’m sure many other players would learn from it and perhaps the developers themselves would enjoy seeing how sophisticated the gameplay mechanics can get.
Yep. You can add some tempshift plates for extra effect, but even without those you’ll get decent heat transfer. It helps to give your tank a large surface area by making it wide and shallow. To be clear, though, hot water and cold air still means dead crops. Pump the chilled water through your crops first and then send the remainder to your base storage.
My programmer background gives me a leg up I think, but really most of the stuff I’m going can be broken down into relatively simple subproblems. For the water chiller I described for instance, one component is the water level maintainer. It’s just a hydro sensor, a valve, and a vent. If the water level goes below a certain point, the valve opens. Simple as that. The whole thing may have a half-dozen different subsystems, but each one is pretty simple.
Not saying it isn’t tricky to wrap your head around breaking problems apart into subcomponents or pushing irrelevant complexity out of mind to focus on one thing… just that I’m not holding the whole thing in my brain all at once, either; I’m just thinking through all the necessary pieces and solving them one by one.
And yeah, maybe I will make a guide once things stabilize a bit. Though I’m always learning better ways of doing things myself! I think I have an idea for my hydrogen problem…
Your posts are fascinating and lovely, Dr. Strangelove, even if I’m playing much more like SenorBeef. I’ve been reading the hell out of these guides (linking to the early game guide, but there are links therein to a lot more detailed stuff for the midgame).
Part of me feels like it’s cheating to just follow someone else’s recipe. However, I’m not a programmer at all, and I’ve decided that building the structures therein–for example, the structure that sets a carbon skimmer under a coal generator to work only when an atmo sensor and a gaseous element sensor connected through an AND logic gate and a time-delay filter give it the go-ahead–is more like a programming tutorial. In theory I’ll use some of the ideas I learn from following the guide in my own stuff later on. (I never would have figured how to set up the AND gate on my own).
Glad you enjoy the posts. Hopefully they provide some inspiration without spoiling too much. I’ll skim various forums myself, but mostly avoid direct tutorials–often, just knowing that something is possible makes it possible for me to converge on a solution. Still, if you’re trying to familiarize yourself with gates, etc., a tutorial is going to be super helpful.
Happy to answer any and all questions, of course. As well as phrasing answers in a requested level of detail (i.e., I’m happy to give out more subtle hints if people don’t want direct spoilers).
The most important thing is to experiment, of course! Most of my stuff doesn’t work on the first try, or even the third. I can always reload if I get myself into too much trouble.
So I have one wheezewhort seed. I made a flower planter in one of my farms. When I select which seed to plant in it, I see wort seed (1) and bristle seed (18). The “plant” button when the wort seed is selected is grayed out, but I can plant the bristle seed just fine. Does anyone know why this is?
Alright, so the seed is in the ice zone still. I order it to be swept at a priority 9, but no one will go get it, even though it’s reachable and people are working in the area. I dig up to another wheezewort, uproot it, and the same thing happens - the seed just sits there, and no one will sweep it. Hmm.
Do you have a storage container that is set to accept seeds? I have found that dupes can be very lazy about uprooting/planting seeds at default priority, but usually they’re pretty quick when I bump the priority.
Wheezewort needs a flower pot, not a planter box. Make sure it has a 1x3 area to grow in (i.e., no paintings or whatever blocking the top).
Ha, I figured it out. I had put a flower pot underneath a ceiling light, giving it 2 squares of space instead of the three it needed. Hence the “plant” button was greyed out for wort, but not for bristle seed, which only needs 2 spaces. And the reason they wouldn’t sweep up the seed at priority 9 was because of what you guessed - I had no storage container set to accept it, so they just left it there. That wasn’t a factor before, because I just went directly from uprooting it to planting it in a flower pot with no storage container in between. So it took both things going wrong.
Anyway, I’m going to start making plastic, which means setting up an oil refinery. Rather than run power all the way down there, I figured I’d just get a local power plant there to power the refinery and the presses. But you can’t use the oil to run a petroleum generator at first, since that seems easy and obvious. You need plastic to build the petroleum generator. Which you only get for already processing crude oil. Which requires another source of power before you get to that point. Minor temporary hassle.
Also, hatches poop out coal, right? I’ve got a stable with hatches now, but I never see them actually drop coal. How does that work?
Yup, the hatches poop coal. You need a critter feeder, though–they need to eat to poop. Make sure it’s set to distribute the food your hatches want (minerals, mostly). If you’re doing that already… maybe your dupes are just collecting the coal before you notice it. I think they’ll preferentially pick it up when supplying your coal generators.
On cycle 100 with my latest game, and I’ve uncovered five geysers. There’s natural gas and cool steam, of course. But the remaining three are a hot polluted air geyser, and two infected polluted air geysers. (I also have two thermo nullifiers very near my base).
Those geysers are terrible, right? I’ve got a gray water reclamation system going, so my water is being preserved–but that cool steam geyser is dormant for 45 cycles. The lack of a water geyser until cycle ~140 has me worried. Sure, I’ve got plenty of dirty air coming in, which shouldn’t be too hard to handle–but I’m not sure that makes up for the crappiness of the geysers.
Think it’s worth pushing through, or restarting and hoping for better?
That’s one of the kinds of problems this game is based on.
Isn’t the mouse wheel just the tool for the kind of situation where you need rudimentary power?
I can see the attraction of getting local power but I’ve much preferred keeping the oil refinery and polymer press close to the living area (with insulation in-between). It means my Dupes can get to them faster. I’ll have to run a continuous connection in one form or another from the oil source to the living area anyway.
Ew. Another water geyser, polluted or not, would certainly be handy. I don’t have any air geysers on my map. Looking at the geyser stats, the oxygen vents don’t even seem that great; a single dupe needs 100 g/s of oxygen and that’s about what one vent produces. Hardly seems worth it.
I guess I’d keep looking for the remaining geysers–there should be something like 14 of them, including metal volcanoes. Maybe the remaining ones will be nicer.
To cover the slack periods, make some giant reservoirs. Really big, like 25 units on a side. Just clear out an area, build some walls (insulated if you need; avoid sandstone for liquids), and some pumps at the bottom (make sure they can take the heat). If it’s a liquid geyser, just surround the geyser, keeping it at the top. For gas geysers, keep the geyser itself in a separate chamber and pump the gas into the reservoir. That way it can take a full 20 kg/tile instead of the 4ish kg/tile that will shut down the geyser.
Once you get really fancy, you can condense the gases into liquid :). I think that might be one of my next efforts; to use liquified gas storage for everything and not need giant chambers for natural gas, etc. But that’s overkill even for “early late game”. There’s plenty of space on the map for reservoirs.
What’s wrong with sandstone for liquid? I thought the only material differences were listed when you select the materials (thermally reactive, overheat temp, etc).
Are there supposed to be 14 geysers on every map? Because I’ve explored what is probably half the map on mine and only have one.
Sandstone leaks. Not sure about gases, but water will leak right through.
There’s a list of the “rules” for geyser spawning here. I’m not sure what the minimum count is exactly but you should have several at the least. Look for their bases–they (almost) all have 4 neutronium blocks beneath them. Most of them will be covered by rocks/ice but you’ll be able to spot them from the neutronium.