I played a reasonable amount of Don’t Starve, but ultimately I’m not a fan of permadeath games. I don’t like it when one small slipup can erase many hours of work. I’m ok with permadeath for short games like FTL, but not when the consequences of dying get really huge. I don’t play games to be stressed out continuously.
I’ve played a bit of SpaceChem and a fair amount more of other Zachtronics games like Infinityfactory, TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, and others. I like them a fair amount. I’d say the main relation they have to Factorio or ONI is that they’re like optimizing one very specific room or production area. Routing all the resource lines perfectly, making it as compact as possible, not wasting anything, getting the timing just right, etc. Zachtronics stuff doesn’t have the large scale aspects where you chain together all these optimized subunits; they’re about perfect optimization of a handful of components. This degree of optimization isn’t necessary for Factorio or ONI, but it’s there if you want it.
I haven’t found a use for it yet. I mean, I know I can somehow use it for a steam turbine system, but I haven’t yet figured out how to set up a boiler and condenser system that recycles the water effectively. And also that doesn’t destroy itself immediately.
Steel bottom with insulated tiles?
Does it have to be water? I suppose you could use it to clean polluted water. You could also cool a gas into a liquid then pour the liquid onto the bottom of your boiler. Or you could pour crude oil and use the heat to turn it into petroleum or natural gas. No more dealing with the squirrely oil refinery.
Does the material of insulated tiles make a big difference? For normal tiles, I guess so but does the insulation outweigh the material so much that the material doesn’t really matter?
I tried it. Works great! Almost too great, actually… I now have a virtually infinite power supply. I converted just a tiny bit of oil and one small magma chamber (not even fully cool, but solidified) and now have an enormous chamber full of natural gas. The only tricky part is cooling it off. I sent it to an ice chamber but that will only last so long. I may need to repurpose one of my nullifiers.
I’m actually kinda running out of things to do. I guess I can try building a solar array to be totally sustainable.
Finally got a good supply of plastic going, three geysers and a thermo-nullifier utilized, a crapload of water, around cycle 250, things are going good. Next, I think I’m gonna aim for the surface.
Some questions:
Is there any real purpose to comfy beds? I see it increases stamina, but I don’t know that stamina has ever been an issue.
Are transport tubes the best use for plastic? If so, any tips about them? or will they be pretty self-evident?
One update that’d make the game seem super-polished: for each technology, a very short animation showing the item being implemented correctly. The in-game instructions can be pretty confusing to slowpokes like me.
The dupes are cute when they curl up like a tiny kitten in the middle of a huge bed.
I’d say they’ll come in very handy if you plan on building anything near the surface. They really cut down on transport time. Downside is that they melt when they get too hot, so they aren’t super useful for going down.
Use is pretty obvious. You need two stations and a tube between them. They can be hard to route since they’re buildings and so you can’t run ladders and stuff on top of them (unlike wires, pipes, etc.).
Have you managed to try the experiment yet? I’m curious what cooling rate one can get from alternative sources.
I’ve been using hydrogen for all of mine. I get about 60 K of cooling as the gas passes through the Nullifier chamber. The in-game heat capacity of hydrogen is 2.4 kJ/(kg-K) (according to Gamepedia), and I’m pumping 0.5 kg/s. That corresponds to 72 kW of cooling.
I think this is the peak since the Nullifier is going all the time–it doesn’t stop due to being too cold. But maybe there’s something else going on–there’s no guarantee that the Nullifier has a constant cooling rate. If it lowers the temperature of a gas regardless of density, then a high density gas might work better. Or maybe it works less well at lower temperatures.
I tried chlorine and CO2 in sandbox mode. They’re both worse than hydrogen–24 kW cooling power for chlorine and 46 kW for CO2. I’m kinda surprised there’s a difference at all, really. Maybe the figures on Gamepedia are wrong (they don’t match real-world figures, though that’s not a surprise).
I was going to build a cooling loop in my base by pumping out newly generated oxygen, running it up to the nullifier, then back into my base to be pumped around my base. Is that a good idea? Seems simple and uses existing infrastructure. Is oxygen sufficient for that, or is its cooling power too poor compared to other options?
It’s not a bad option. I did that for my first iteration. I suspect you’ll be running at about 50% efficiency. You can always upgrade the system later if you like. That said–since you already have to run a hydrogen line to power the Nullifier, it’s not all that more difficult to run a hydrogen loop.
Heat is my bane again. Building surface stuff requires steel (it’s the only thing that holds up), and that makes a crapload of heat. I think I’m going to reconfigure some things (like my oxygen generators) to be a bit more heat-efficient; maybe then I can free up a Nullifier for other ends.
I’m actually just about to run it in sandbox mode. My biggest issue is getting enough chlorine. A single cell in a pipe is 10 kg, or roughly 10 full cells of chlorine gas at regular pressure. That’s a lot, especially if you need to keep pipes full to prevent damage.
Experiment run - it’s workable, but not as efficient as I had hoped. There is a roughly 9 K drop running radiant pipe through every square of the nullifier. With a .48 J/(kgK) heat capacity, and 10 kg/s, that’s roughly…43 W of cooling. You might have added a k in there, from the looks of things.
Are you pumping gas through pipes? I wonder how well it would work to just seal the nullifier in it’s own room, put a gas vent on one side of the nullifier, a pump on the other, and let pressure differential cool the entire thing. Since I can’t just submerge the damn thing in liquid chlorine and go for broke.
I get the feeling I overengineered a cooling solution. Back to the [del]dead dupes[/del] drawing board!
It’s 0.48 kJ/(kg-J), or equivalently 0.48 J/(g-K). So definitely in the kW range. Hydrogen is 2.4 kJ/(kg-K).
This is exactly what I’ve done. See here and here. The low-pressure input is the “filler”. It takes in gas until it reaches steady-state. The high-pressure input does as you say–it completes the loop, while the gas pump pulls it from the other side. I get around 60 K of cooling with a flow rate of 0.5 kg/s.
It would be cool if you could run the electrolyzer on something to get chlorine out. Salt water would make the most sense but polluted water would be reasonable (it seems to be a stand-in for water plus various contaminants).
I’m envious of your neat network laying. Mine looks like spaghetti.
It turns out that you don’t even need a boiler, just crude oil which is close to magma. A single tile of abyssalite/igneous rock can hold in the magma and transfer heat to the oil which then turns into natural gas like this: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
The gas pump is up the ladder with an airlock on top.
Transforming more oil into natural gas will probably involve very carefully nibbling at the two tiles left of the magma.
Is there a way to activate an automated system whenever there’s anything in a pipe? Not a specific element but anything. I’m trying to automate filters and I can hardly use the presence of a specific element in the feeding pipe as trigger since I can’t be sure of what will go into the filter (otherwise I wouldn’t need a filter).
A trick I’ve found useful: If you’re going to build a significant amount of ladders or tiles and don’t want to have long supply runs, look around the area in which you intend to build for the most common mineral. Mine that in priority 7 then order the ladders/tiles in priority 6. That will provide you with nearby building material and make the process much faster.
It’s not all as clean as that! But I’m trying to improve things around the base. One problem with dense layouts like that its that they’re hard to cross (no multi-pipe crossers).
Yeah, I kinda discovered this after I built the boiler. Oh well; the insulated tile should cut down on heat loss a bit. And really, the single tiny magma chamber that I used up already should keep me going for a long time (I filled a huge chamber with gas at 25 kg/tile).
Yeah. Be careful :). One advantage of a boiler (even without extra tiles) over just letting a big pool of oil run into the magma is that you don’t waste any heat to the unconverted oil. By letting the oil get close to the magma, some of the heat is being lost to the big pool of oil (including oil that will never get converted). If you instead dribble in tiny amounts of oil at a time, you don’t run into this problem.
I don’t think you can quite do that–but if the pipe is always full of something, then you can detect the element you want and use a NOT gate to turn on the filter. I.e., to filter out everything but oxygen, then detect that and invert to turn on your filter.
This is an excellent tip. It took me a few hundred cycles to discover it! Really, there’s usually enough debris laying around that I don’t need to mine anything first. Just find the few closest piles and stuff and build with that.
Everything else is beyond me, but this has an easy solution. Run your single pipe down, and use bridges on the parallel pipes. Now, if you have an intersection of multi-pipes…well, you’re on your own, at least until larger capacity pipes are put in (if they are, no sign that it’s a thing, just a hope).
I should have added: difficult to cross when they are insulated or radiant types. There’s no insulated bridge, unfortunately.
However, reading around a bit it appears that gas/liquid never actually enters the bridge; it goes directly from input to output, and hence the type is irrelevant. I have not tested this yet, but if true it makes my life a lot easier!