Well, there’s that too :). I once managed to kill two of them in a collapsing sand dome. In fact I got to them almost right away but they still couldn’t dig out in time. As I’ve said, though, I’ve no problems reloading an old save when the dupes do something colossally stupid.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
Hmmm… I have a cool slush geyser right next to an iron volcano. I wonder I can throw the slush into the volcano to cool the iron enough to grab it without burning my dupes. I guess if I’m going to sacrifice the slush to a volcano I should check to see if it is a virgin or not…
Pull the balance off right, and you can:
A) cool the iron
B) run a steam turbine
and
C) produce glass as a byproduct
all at the same time.
I’m not nearly as far along in the game as most here (I hate it when everyone’s been playing a game in early access and then I don’t get it until its official release by which time all the discussion has already been had,) but if your goal is to get phosphorite, you don’t need to feed them balm lilies, which means you don’t need a chlorine atmosphere. You can feed them mealwood plants, which makes them more likely to reproduce as glossy dreckos. Put a little hydrogen at the top of the room, and you get free plastic.
Anyone have a good tutorial on base cooling? I’m at the point where I need to start dealing with it, and most tutorials I’ve found are based on earlier versions of the game in which, I gather, there were a whole lot more exploity options for cooling. I’ve found two anti-entropy thermo nullifiers, but don’t really understand how to use them. If I set up a cooling loop and run water past them in radiant pipes, won’t the water eventually freeze in the pipes?
Yeah, don’t use water, use gas pipes. I usually have one with hydrogen (that just loops forever) and another with oxygen which I pump into hot spots.
Using water is fine, as long as you also use automation - a bypass valve that is activated when a pipe temp sensor drops to just above 0C + however much cooling is getting done by the AETN will work fine. You’d also want a water reservoir building along the loop somewhere for temperature balancing.
Or you could use a fluid with a lower freezing temp, such as ethanol or oil. You’d still need the bypass eventually, or you’d end up with too much cooling.
That’s what I’m hoping for. To date, I’ve produce 3000 mg of glass. Yay? 
It is so strange to see my industrial area a nice shade of green to greenish yellow 
Normally it is a deep deep red to maybe an orange at best.
Ahh, but then I need dirt. And while I do have a lot of dirt, it’s fundamentally a finite resource. Of course, I can use Pips to make dirt, but Pips need Arbor trees, which need polluted water (quite a bit of it). And I have no polluted water geyser. I do have some CO2 geysers, which I am now scrubbing to get polluted water, but I need to do the math on what that can support.
Overall, I do try to “role play” the game a bit and try to build systems that are fundamentally sustainable, even if the resource in question is reasonably abundant. I don’t want to leave my dupes to die after I stop playing the game…
Build a little chamber around the nullifier and pipe in hydrogen. It won’t freeze and has great heat capacity for a gas. I typically put a pump in the room, pipe it up to what needs cooling, and then going back to the chamber it splits between the nullifier itself (which needs hydrogen) and a high-pressure vent. Then, a separate low-pressure vent acts as a fill port and pipes in hydrogen from the source. This way, the fill port keeps the system topped off at a reasonable pressure, but it also doesn’t run into weird overpressure bottlenecks, since the high-pressure vent can always discharge.
Generally, though, I use steam turbines. A turbine sits in an insulated box above another insulated box, each 5x3 units. The lower box contains a steel aquatuner sitting in a layer of petroleum, and then some water. The aquatuner cools water or supercoolant from a separate reservoir controlled by a thermostat. The coolant passes by the turbine on its way back to the reservoir to keep it cool, since it will overheat after a while otherwise. A separate thermostat disables the aquatuner if it gets above 230 C. The output from the turbine pours right back into the steam box to reheat. You can see a few examples in my screenshots in post #546.
It’s an incredibly powerful self-contained cooling unit. With water, it can cool at 585 kDTU/s, compared to a nullifier at 80 kDTU/s or a wheezewort at 12 kDTU/s. With supercoolant, that goes up to 877 kDTU/s.
Can’t you also get dirt from sieving the polluted water from your industrial processes, and composting renewable organic material? Of course, I haven’t done the math on whether that would provide enough dirt.
Thanks. It’s a little intimidating to think I need to be making enough power for that 1200 watt aquatuner to run continuously, in addition to all my other equipment, though. I guess I need to take the plunge and build more power plants. Fortunately, I have two natural gas geysers. But first I need to set up a system for dealing with the polluted water runoff.
Can anyone tell me exactly what the “glum” vs. “overcrowded” debuffs on your critters do? I found a post on another message board saying “overcrowded” slows their reproductive rate, while “glum” slows their metabolism (e.g., hatches will produce coal more slowly.) Is that it? The wiki doesn’t say.
My power generation is mostly hydrogen, so I don’t get PW from that. I have a petroleum generator as a backup but it doesn’t really ever kick in.
I don’t have much food waste, so compost doesn’t help much there, but my other base has a robust Pip/lumber/distiller/ethanol/compost cycle. Pips make dirt, and the distillers make polluted dirt that can be composted. It was very productive but I’m a ways off from that on the new map.
It won’t run continuously–because there’s so much cooling power, it’ll likely be at a low duty cycle. Plus, the turbine gets you much of that back.
In fact, with supercoolant it’s almost breakeven. The turbine generates almost enough power to drive the aquatuner. Although the aquatuner is 1200 W and the turbine makes 850 W, the aquatuner produces so much heat that has to shut down some of the time (hence the 230 C limit). It runs about 2/3 of the time so the total average power is similar.
With water, it’s less efficient. But still, you can get very effective base and crop cooling with maybe a couple hundred watts average power.
I haven’t run the numbers but I think it may be more efficient than nullifiers, even though the nullifiers seem to be “free”. Gas pumps are power hogs, and you just don’t get that much cooling out of one setup. A water pipe has enormous cooling capacity compared to a hydrogen gas pipe.
Oh dang, get on that right away! Two gas geysers are great. At the least, get a start by piping the natural gas into a storage container.
That sounds right to me, but I’m not 100% sure either.
Well, this is a new problem. My crops are dying… because it is too cold in my base! My base is turning blue!!! LOL
Time for some thermostats! Some thermo sensors and shutoff valves should do the trick.
My water cooling system does have a nice advantage in that as long as I keep the reservoir at a constant temperature (about 20 C), then I can pipe it anywhere and it will cool only that low and no lower. Or even heat, if necessary.
Thankfully heating things back up is much easier than cooling them down. I use valves in most of my setups so I just cut them down to minimal levels (30 g/s to keep the nullifier at status quo). Things should heat back up pretty quickly.
Where would you put the thermostat sensor to turn it off–in the pipe of coolant itself, or in the region of the base you’re trying to cool down? I would think it would run for a long time at first while it got the temperature down, before it started cycling on and off.
I checked out the screenshots of your base. Very impressive. So in your steam turbine setups, you put the petroleum to be heated by the aquatuner, and the water to be boiled into steam, in the same chamber? I think the guy who made those guides to Surviving the Early/Mid Game that were cited earlier put crude oil below with the aquatuner, then above it a row of metal tiles, then the water/steam chamber above that. Any advantage to doing it one way vs. the other?
Also, it looks like in your screenshots, you’ve got some steam turbines where the chamber below doesn’t have an aquatuner, just a liquid vent and a gas pump. What’s going on there?
I put it in the water reservoir–basically a buffer tank that stays at the target temperature. My previous base had a giant tank, like 24 tons or thereabouts, which indeed took a long time to cool down (though like I said, with supercoolant there’s hardly any net power use). The tank doesn’t have to be that big, though; a partially-filled 4x1 tank (say, 2000 kg) is sufficient to get started, as long as slightly larger temperature fluctuations are ok. You need room for a liquid pump, a hydro sensor, and a thermo sensor.
That’s right. I went through a bunch of variations but this proved to be the simplest. The petroleum acts as a buffer and heat exchange agent for the aquatuner (the aquatuner can’t get rid of heat fast enough with pure steam). And it’s easy to fill up. I use the liquid vent that was already there as the turbine output, and then build a little filling pool outside the unit. I pump in about 1000 kg of petroleum, for 200 kg per tile inside, and then 200 kg of water (40 kg per tile). The water quickly turns to steam, and the petroleum just sits on the bottom spreading the heat around.
Oh yeah, and I also put a 5x2 array of tempshift plate in both the turbine room and the steam chamber, though I’m really not sure how necessary that is. I may try building one without that.
Early variations. In these, I used metal tiles as heatspreaders and put the aquatuner beside it in a separate pool of petroleum. These work fine but are bigger and more complicated than they need to be. The combined version works great and is almost as small as it could be.
You may note that my steam chambers have a pump in them. I do this for an initial pumpdown to vacuum so that gas doesn’t interfere with the steam. However, on one version I accidentally left some oxygen in there, and it seemed to disappear over time–so the pump may not be necessary. I should experiment more here as well. Always trying to optimize more!
I did a bit of experimentation in sandbox mode–and I’ve been overbuilding my cooling setups.
Two unnecessary bits: the tempshift plates and the petroleum bath. The tempshift plates spread the heat out a bit, but really there’s not much point to them. As for the petroleum bath, “common knowledge” was that gases aren’t sufficient cooling for aquatuners, but it turns out that high pressure steam is just fine. It has the same heat capacity as water and a decent thermal conductivity. The aquatuner stays just a degree or two hotter than the steam.
I did run into one curiosity. I tried making my steambox smaller, to 5x2 tiles. This meant the aquatuner was right under the turbine inputs. It worked fine, in the sense that the aquatuner ran at full speed. But somehow the steam never got very hot and the turbine never went full blast. At the same time, the aquatuner was going full blast, so it was constantly taking 900-1000 W, even though it should have been more like 100 W net.
Somehow, the geometry caused it to permanently delete heat, without even going generating power. I suppose this is good for cooling purposes, but it kinda sucked because it turned into such a power hog.
So, I think I’ll stick with a 5x3 setup, even though it doesn’t seem like it should be necessary.
One other finding–pumping down to vacuum is in fact a good idea. Sufficiently large traces of O2 do interfere with the turbine. So the gas pump is necessary; fortunately, it’s also cheap.
Obvious advice of the day: Geysers will stop producing gas (e.g. hydrogen or natural gas) when the pressure gets too high (5 kg). I used to pump it back into the same room but through a high pressure value. This mainly worked; however, now I pump it into a series of gas reservoirs. This works so much better, and yes, completely obvious. 
For the first time, I’m doing some serious building in the space biome. I’ve built up about 7 tonnes of steel. I’m trying to get observatory going. I’ve started setting up the upper tier of the colony so that atmo suits won’t be required. Once we have oxygen, power, food, etc. I think I may move a crew up to the top so that they don’t have so far to travel since that’s where most of the work is happening anyway.
Nice! That should be more than enough for a starter rocket and silo. You’ll need a few thousand for the rocket (2000 for the basic steam engine is the big one), and then maybe 1500 for the silo roof (at least 2 bunker doors, plus some surrounding bits).
It sounds like you’re going for a more “luxurious” space area than I usually go for–my dupes stay in their suits when they’re up there. But I should really consider making it more comfortable up there.