Ah, woops. I thought transit tubes cost 25 plastic per piece, but I was thinking of plastic ladders. 100 per piece means a whole lot of plastic for a decent run.
How do thermal nullifiers work? Do they just suck in heat created in that area? So you pipe in some hydrogen, then run a pipe up there with some o2 you want to use in your base and put a thermal exchanger thing up there near the nullifier?
Yep, the nullifier just cools whatever is around it. I think my next liquid cooling solution will be to put the fluid right on the nullifier. It obviously liquefies chlorine, so experiment will proceed apace.
You could also use radiant ducts to increase the cooling effect on your pipe. That’s my current solution right now - just piping air from the base to a frozen biome, running it through in radiant ducts, then sending to back to vent near the base, where my heat has tended to collect.
Watch out; it can be flooded. If you pump chlorine gas in the top and let it condense to at the bottom, pumping out the liquid as it forms, you should be all right. You can also use radiant pipes running through tempshift plate to transfer the heat, but that requires keeping it in liquid form–risky.
So I have a remote oil refining/plastic/power generation plant, with the manual oil refinery. For the first few cycles I operated it, someone would come down at least 3-4 times a cycle and turn the crank, so it was at least running half the time. But for some reason no one has been coming down the last 2 days, and that stuff has all gone unused. The oil refinery has a priority of 9. I have 2 people in the operate profession, and additionally I gave operate a high priority to 2 more people. But it seems to just make them use the manual generators in the base more often, which only have a priority of 3. So why are my guys ignoring the 9 priority oil refinery for the 3 priority manual generators? Or why I can’t get anyone to go down there at all anymore? I haven’t changed anything about that area.
Well damn. Guess I’m gonna have to try something else. I still plan on using liquid cooling - it’s just so much more efficient. Chlorine is still the plan, as it has a decently large window of stable temperature, with roughly 60 degrees between gas and solid. Properly managed, it shouldn’t be TOO difficult to keep it in that range, which also happens to be right about where a frozen biome sits anyway.
Properly managed is the key phrase. My dwarfs can tell you that “properly managed” is more like a fantasy than a realistic goal.
I’ve had problems with the refineries too. I don’t fully understand why the dupes sometimes avoid it, but I’d make these recommendations:
The dupes are pretty diligent now with these changes. Almost too much–they work themselves into being stressed (I wish they would rotate).
I’d love if I could have the refineries powered by the main network when there’s enough juice, but switch to manual power when not (and use the manual power only for the refineries), but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Durr, figured it out. I replaced tile with mesh tile to let the pollution drain, but forgot to reconnect the oil pipe after that.
How often does stuff like this happen? All the time, that’s how often. Recommendation for update: if you’ve set a nonworkable machine to a priority of 9, a dupe turns to you and says, “You forgot to connect a pipe, idiot.”
Having the dupe call me names would be a definite perk.
I think I’ve run into a bug. Occasionally, the cook drops a piece of food in front of the grill, and dupes trying to put it into the adjacent fridge are unable to do so: they’ll move it mg at a time, apparently forever. The worst part is that it seems to make the grill off-limits, and the cook stops cooking.
I nearly had someone starve before I figured out what was going on. The only fix I could come up with was to deconstruct the floor in front of the grill, making the food fall to the level below, and then rebuilding the floor–at which point the cook went back to work.
Has anyone else seen this happen? It’s happened to me a few times.
Thanks for the tip of using a reservoir. I’ve had problems managing the output. I realize that I tend to be miserly with my use of powered machines like pumps because I’m wary of running out of energy but I guess the game can be pretty generous with that.
As for what you could do, remember that switches don’t care what they’re switching on or off or in what direction. You could put a switch on the juncture between the main power network and the local one. If you automate it, you might be able to shutoff the connection when the electrical reserves of the main power network go down too low.
E.g.: Main Generator - Main Batteries - Heavy Wire Link - Transformer - SWITCH - Hamster Wheel - Local Battery - Oil Refinery.
To preserve the power of the local network’s battery when the main network is active, you could have: Main Network - SWITCH_1 - Oil Refinery - SWITCH_2 - Local Network.
With SWITCH_1 being on when SWITCH_2 is off and vice versa. That also can be automated.
Or just, you know, use the hallowed design principle of brute forcing it and move a coal generator to power your oil refinery. I think I’ll do that.
I don’t think I (or anyone) linked to this earlier: Useful Construction Patterns. These are some lovely ways to set up, for example, a room to utilize a steam geyser, or to cool water, or to generate power from a natural gas geyser, or whatever. They’re pretty complicated, but I’ve been trying some of the ideas, and in doing so have been learning about some of the more abstruse things you can build and their effects.
I haven’t run out of coal yet, but I’m starting to have to go out of my way for it, and I want to save some for steelmaking. I think you have the right idea about the switch network; I can also use it to disable the hamster wheels when there’s enough power available. The only other thing I’d like is for the backup batteries to have a “diode” so that they can be charged by the grid put can’t put energy back onto it (only the refineries).
I finally found a natural gas geyser but it has the same dormancy periods as steam geysers, so it’s only useful for reducing oil use, not as a real replacement. Maybe there’s another, but I’m actually starting to run out of map.
My lower reaches have become super-pressurized with CO2 and I’m having to pump it out into space now…
Are you farming hatches? Stone hatches can produce about 1/4 of a coal generators requirements per cycle.
I am, but I tend to forget about my farm and it’s always on the verge of dwindling away to nothing. Really, I should exclude the eggs from being picked up. If I just let them sit around in the farm they’d do all right.
I spend more attention on my slickster farm since they produce oil from CO2.
That happened to me–I had a good eight or nine hatches, but then I got obsessed with building around a geyser, and by the time I checked on the farm again, it was empty, and I had a bunch of dupes sick of eating eggs.
I took eggs off the grill menu.
I’m actually not exactly sure what’s going on in my case–I don’t have an egg cracker, so I didn’t think it was possible for the dupes to eat the eggs. I just find broken shells outside the storage cabinets. I think they’re just dying after a while. Or hatching and dying immediately? I can’t tell but they aren’t being born normally the way they would if I left them out.
I store my eggs in food boxes sunken in CO2 (so they never spoil, nor incubate) and yeah, after a long while they just break on their own - I guess they die. I’ve taken to just not collecting eggs before I have ranching tech, to try and save the glowbugs.
Nice idea. I don’t recall offhand–can dupes grab items through non-pneumatic doors? It would be nice to have a CO2 “fridge” that doesn’t use any power, but ideally it wouldn’t leak too much gas into the central part of my base. If I could fill an area with CO2 and leave dupes the ability to get at it without actually opening it, that would be ideal.
I think you’d have to use the conveyor system which can retrieve things from one room to another without opening a door.
That would work for retrieving items, but what about placing cooked items? A dupe on the storage side would have to grab them from the receiver and put them in the ration box.
You don’t need doors or conveyors - it’s very low-tech :). You simply dig a little CO2 “trap” under your kitchen. Something like this :
#H######
#HSFFFF#
#HSFFFF#
#H######
#HSFFFF#
#HSFFFF#
########
(where H is a ladder, S is egg storage and F are the foodboxes).
Either build it where there’s already CO2 as your base is getting off the ground, or let it fill up naturally from your cooks breathing (in that case you need to leave the top a little more open so gas exchange can happen faster, at least until the deeper layer is good and sterile, it’ll be a while before you need all 4 boxes anyway), or pump concentrated CO2 in with a temporary pump in the CO2 pit which you can then dismantle when the room is saturated.
As long as you don’t put an O2-emitting device too close to the opening, the base’s pressure shouldn’t “invade” the hole (the 1-tile opening makes that a little bit harder too), and over time it’ll just fill up with concentrated cook’s breath anyway. Since CO2 is the heaviest gas and dupes only come in from the top it should never leave the pit barring weird fuckery (like a pufft or morb going down there or somesuch)