Yeah–I tend to explore in straight horizontal or vertical lines out until I see the 4-stone neutronium base, then I “build” some walls around it to highlight its location, then as time permits I explore to the geyser and dig away a block or two at a time until I can see it (I learned this trick after accidentally uncovering a magma volcano on one map and rendering an area uninhabitable). So my polluted oxygen geysers aren’t functional right now.
I’m thinking about opening sandbox mode and turning one of them into a slush geyser, given how awesome those are. Cheating? Sure–but if it turns out that the only realistic alternative is restarting again, I might cheat.
I’ve depleted an entire biome. I had a slime biome and eventually fed all the algae through my machines, and used a series of algae distillers to consume all the slime. Just left with a puddle of polluted water, some clay on the ground, and a big empty space.
How do you guys go about keeping polymer presses cool? They generate a ton of heat, and eventually they just sort of stew in their own heat and begin to malfunction.
I wish I had a hydrogen vent. You’ll appreciate it when you build hydrogen rockets :).
Seriously, hydrogen isn’t so bad. Good for power. The temperature kinda sucks, but you might be able to use that to preheat your oil for natural gas production. There are lots of uses!
Mostly by not using it very often–but when I was, I stuck a few wheezeworts nearby. I recommend scouring every ice biome for more! They’re the most useful item in the game.
Good to know. I’m torn between building a massive containment chamber for it now, in order to bank hydrogen for when I need it later, and leaving it mostly buried until I need hydrogen, in order to postpone the massive heat buildup that’ll occur when I unearth it.
That will certainly come in handy–I don’t suppose you can employ surrounding abyssalite to insulate yourself from the heat? I did that with one of my natural gas geysers; only had to plug a few key spots with insulated tiles.
If I remember, I’ll try to screenshot a door setup (not of my own design) that will give perfectly insulated doors by use of vacuum. It’s very handy for any sort of airlock where you need to keep heat in/out. Normally, doors are a big heat conductor that’s hard to avoid.
My two least useful geysers are two gold volcanoes. I do want to use their heat for something (more sour gas production, probably), but it’s going to be hard to automate. The new autominer might make this possible, though.
Just a quickie tidbit–I didn’t invent this one, but I’ve found it comes in very handy. It’s a kind of airlock that is also an insulator. Need a passage from gas storage to normal atmosphere? Or need a chamber that’s kept hot or cold but still need access? This does the trick:
There are three doors in a row, with the two outer doors sitting on weight plates. The two weight signals are ANDed together and control the middle door.
What happens is that under normal conditions, the middle door is open. It stays open as a dupe walks in one side. But as soon as they pass through the middle, the signal goes low, and it’ll close as soon as the dupe clears it. When the outer doors fully close, the middle door opens again.
It’s a little tricky to explain but basically, the sequencing of the middle door ensures that it always pulls a vacuum (instead of any surrounding gases). This makes it a heat insulator. It also displaces any gases in the way, making it a good gas seal.
The only problem is that there is a fraction of a second when the middle door is locked, so if one dupe is passing through and another wants to get through, the second one will think the passage is blocked and will do something completely different. So it’s not great for high-traffic routes–just for places you need to get to for maintenance but have unusual environmental conditions. The room my screenshot is controlling access to is my new methane condenser (now storing about 20 tons of methane–should be a nice buffer).
I’m having the problem again where a dup is coming to my oil refinery, cranking the handle for just a second, and then leaving. I think I figured out last time that I connected the petroleum directly to my petroleum using stations (generator and polymer press), and so the pipes became clogged with petroleum and no more can be pumped in.
But I used an intermediate tank to solve that issue, where the oil refinery goes to dumping the petroleum directly into the tank, and then other things get it from the tank.
So there’s no pipe blockage reason for them only to crank out a drop of oil. It’s set at priority 9 so they aren’t being distracted by other things. It has plenty of power. Does anyone have any ideas?
Figured it out - I had been exhausting CO2 into that area, and the CO2 pressure built up so high that the oil refinery couldn’t output natural gas as its waste product, and so it would stop each time.
I’m trying to build some transit tubes and the polymer press is definitely the bottleneck. I put it in an area that’s only about 113 degrees which isn’t that hot, but the damn thing overheats in like 30 seconds. I can’t even create a good on-off cycle, because the thermo sensor detects atmospheric temperature which doesn’t change that much, and the clock sensor is only for long term things (you can’t go on 1 minute, off 2 minutes with it - only a daily cycle) so I’m constantly having to turn the damn thing on and off to generate plastic. I even stuck 4 wheezewhorts next to it, one to either side, and while it cools down faster, it doesn’t spare me from having to turn it on and off all day.
I used a cooling loop which was on the same toggle button as the polymer press itself. You may still have to watch if your cooling loop is effective enough and an imperfect safety may still involve a heat sensor with auto shutoff.
ONI’s mechanics are often about concentrating, refining and channeling (including temporal channeling=storing), whether it’s resources, energy or cooling so the answer will likely be there. The wheezeworts could be in their own airtight insulated room instead of either side. Once you have your very own 9th circle of Hell, it’s a game of pumps & pipes.
Related: Is there much point to having 2 layers of insulated tiles? Is sucking the air out of tiles to create a vacuum an effective way to prevent heat transfer?
Try putting the press in a shallow pool of water. Too much and it will stop working, but something like 100 kg/tile should be ok (it will say the machine is flooded . As for keeping the water cool, you can:
Create a circulation loop with some other water reservoir. Watch out for your crops, though.
Let it boil off to steam. Will still keep your press under 100 C, so it should survive. Can build out of steel to bring the temp limit to 175 C if you need the extra margin.
Use tempshift plates and/or metal tiles to transfer the heat elsewhere–say, a room full of wheezeworts.
Use radiant pipes on a loop with a thermo nullifier.
Same thing, but with a thermo regulator/aquatuner. Still need to cool the machines, though…
With the latest update, yes–at least potentially. It used to be that abyssalite tiles had literally zero heat conductivity. Now, that’s not an option. According to the wiki, insulated tiles have a conductivity of 1% the normal rate. That’s not huge, but also not trivial for big temperature differences. I use two tile widths for my cryogenic liquid processing. It’s probably not strictly necessary but I don’t think the effect is zero, either.
Yes, this works very well. The door example I gave above uses this technique. I also use it in areas where I want to maintain dupe access (i.e., not completely fill the region with insulated tiles), such as a cross-flow liquid/gas heat exchanger.
Almost missed this–in fact it’s possible. Chain together a BUFFER gate, a FILTER gate, and a NOT gate in a loop. Branch the BUFFER output to your machine. Control the on length with the BUFFER delay and the off length with the FILTER delay. I use this setup for all kinds of things and it works great.
BTW, wheezeworts work best in a hydrogen atmosphere (due to its heat capacity). If you can close off a room and pipe in some hydrogen (even just partially replacing the atmosphere), they’ll be more effective than in pure oxygen or other elements.
Sick of all those hot gas vents, I restarted with an old seed that I knew had a cool slush vent just above the starting point, and a steam vent fairly close below the starting point. I’ve researched both and, at cycle 99, gotten a pretty good pool of very cold water going on.
Here’s my thinking:
Build a pump in the bottom of the cold polluted water.
Pump that cold water all the way down to the steam geyser, and send it through that room in order to cool the steam down and condense it.
Pump the warmed polluted water back to the cold tank and run it through the water sieve sitting on top.
Pump the warm clean water through a snake-pipe throughout the tank, cooling it back down.
Pump the cooled water into my clean water reserve.
This is a crapload of pipes–does anyone see an obvious flaw in this plan before I do it? Am I wasting perfectly good cooling capability by doing it?
Sounds reasonable enough. One possible problem you’ll have is that the polluted water comes out of slush geysers at like -3 C or so, and will freeze clean water. Not a problem if you polluted water tank is a little warmer already, but could be an issue for the first several cycles.
You’re wasting a bit of cooling capacity in that you might not want your condensed steam to be much below 100 C, but you don’t have good control over this (though you can adjust the length of radiant pipe). And you also don’t have good control over the temperature of your chilled water–you might be overcooling it if you just need 30 C water and not 5 C, say. But as a first draft this sounds fine. You can always build more advanced setups later :).
Incidentally, hot water is good for input to electrolyzers–the gas output is 70 C no matter what the input temperature. There’s no point to cooling the input to much below 100 C.
I read this and thought it sounded familiar. I went back to one of my old threads and found this in response to a question about how to improve GPU efficiency: