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WithoutTheFezOn
Aug 28, 2005
Oh no
You win.

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Panty Saluter
Jan 17, 2004

Making learning fun!

magicalmako posted:

My base is a mess, I have no idea what I'm doing but I'm having fun!

This is the essential truth of the game

Akratic Method
Mar 9, 2013

It's going to pay off eventually--I'm sure of it.

Any day now.

magicalmako posted:

My base is a mess, I have no idea what I'm doing but I'm having fun!

Same, forever. I am apparently too lazy to properly plan and comprehend this game, but I love my idiot children and their propensity for getting stuck somewhere they can't breathe.

sloppy portmanteau
Feb 4, 2019
Does anyone have a good simple critter butcher setup for hatched critters?


I have this little thing and it seems to work, mostly. But once a critter gets in the automation signal goes wild spinning between red and green and the door keeps opening and closing. I've never seen anything die in there, but critters are getting killed, or at least they're no longer in the room after looking away for a while. I tried looking around for other solutions but all I find is extremely over-engineered.

tima
Mar 1, 2001

No longer a newbie
The one I usually have has two doors on a delay timer and a mesh tile so when the critter is dropped off it will squeeze the water up to drown them. You can also add a gate to prevent it from drowning when your meat fridge is full.

tima fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Aug 11, 2022

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

You don't need the not gate as you can set the sensor to green on less than 1.
You need to power the door, else the buggers crawl out before it closes.

E: Aha, the red green thing is because you have connected across the not gate and it is Notting itself every cycle.

OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Aug 11, 2022

sloppy portmanteau
Feb 4, 2019
Door wont stay open when containing no critters with an above 0 trigger. So I had to do a not below 1.

Door is powered, and just cycles open/close when there's a critter. Always open with no critter.

Edit: nvm just saw your edit.. now.. why did I use a not gate again? Trying it without it now.

tima
Mar 1, 2001

No longer a newbie
Oh looking at it again you have a wire going through your not gate that's why it glitches.

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

Yeah, you want 'Below 1' as the setting, so only 0 is empty (ignoring eggs) = green (open)
Below 1 is the inverse logical signal behaviour to 'above 0' .

OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Aug 11, 2022

sloppy portmanteau
Feb 4, 2019
Thanks that was it, I didn't realize it was possible to connect it through to not itself.

And now I can't figure out why I used a not gate in the first place.

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

sloppy portmanteau posted:

Thanks that was it, I didn't realize it was possible to connect it through to not itself.

And now I can't figure out why I used a not gate in the first place.
Cos when you first set it up, it defaults to 'above', and unless you've seen it before, you probably set the counter to 1 and then had the exact wrong behaviour, so stuck a mot in - which is right, and would have fixed it.

HolHorsejob
Mar 14, 2020

Portrait of Cheems II of Spain by Jabona Neftman, olo pint on fird

OzyMandrill posted:

You don't need the not gate as you can set the sensor to green on less than 1.
You need to power the door, else the buggers crawl out before it closes.

E: Aha, the red green thing is because you have connected across the not gate and it is Notting itself every cycle.

Oxygen Not Included: It is Notting itself every cycle

Panty Saluter
Jan 17, 2004

Making learning fun!
Solving the Riddle of the Gordian Not

Anthony Chuzzlewit
Oct 26, 2008

good for healthy


sloppy portmanteau posted:

Does anyone have a good simple critter butcher setup for hatched critters?

I use something like this:



When a critter gets dropped off, the 3 doors in the middle open. When the critter wanders into the doors, they lock again. After a few seconds of being trapped in the door, they drop through the doors down into the water below and drown.

sloppy portmanteau
Feb 4, 2019
Got some more newbie questions. I needed to upgrade my oxygen production and I wanted to future proof it since it was a decent sized project. So I went ahead and made a 4x electrolyzer setup. I only have 14 dupes at the moment so now I'm obviously way overproducing oxygen. I was trying to figure out a way to detect pipes getting backed up and using that to just shut the whole thing down, but the whole pipe priority thing is still a bit confusing for me, so would something like this work:



Assuming I can set it up so that top unbuilt pipe would be the last to back up, probably merging overflows on it on the end. Am I right that gas would only start flowing past that bridge, and to that gas element sensor once backed up, and then clear up when released, so I could hook it up to a power cutoff and shut the system down when the sensor is triggered?

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

The electrolysers won't produce if they are overpressured, and the pumps won't operate if the pipes are jammed, so it will automaticaly turn itself off once it reaches full saturation. You don't really need any sort of cutoff for the setup as a whole.

BrainMeats
Aug 20, 2000

We have evolved beyond the need for posting.

Soiled Meat

sloppy portmanteau posted:


Assuming I can set it up so that top unbuilt pipe would be the last to back up, probably merging overflows on it on the end. Am I right that gas would only start flowing past that bridge, and to that gas element sensor once backed up, and then clear up when released, so I could hook it up to a power cutoff and shut the system down when the sensor is triggered?

An issue with that bypass up top is gas is likely going to flow out from the bridge and then up over the sensor as it goes back to the bridge input. Put another bridge on the bypass before it merges back to enforce the flow direction.

And all the electrolyzer setups I've had, it's no issue if oxygen backs up as that will just shut down the whole system due to overpressure. It's when hydrogen backs up and overflows into your breathing space that things get ugly.

WithoutTheFezOn
Aug 28, 2005
Oh no
On the bridge/priority thing in particular, it took me a while to get it down and I found the picture in this post helpful:

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/102326-pipes-bridges-priority-cheat-sheet/

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

My usual setup because I cannot be arsed doing the weird gas separation by tile thing, is to build the electrolysers in the middle of a tall room (15-20 tiles, depending on how safe you want to be) so that I can use natural fractionation to separate hydrogen and oxygen, and then set up some automation systems to detect, at the top and bottom of the room:

1. gas pressure, which i keep around 1.5kg
2. gas element, which I position such that it sends a green signal when the desired gas for the top or bottom has backed up close-ish to the center.

Combine these inputs with gates and you can essentially detect when there is a healthy pocket of either hydrogen or oxygen and activate/deactivate the pumps for each as necessary (if gas is backed up away from the pumps and maintains a desirable pressure, it is safe to activate those pumps) This ensures that however much of each you use, you can ensure that the room will remain correctly fractioned, with neither element reaching the opposite outlet. Though you do still need to use both gases in roughly the same amount they are used because if one side backs up entirely it will shut off the other side as well to stop the gases from ending up in the wrong place. The automation just makes sure the room holds at a normal pressure and the desired fractions in the desired areas.

Combined with the natural shutdown of the electrolysers on reaching overpressure this has produced a quite robust system, only had one or two packets of hydrogen/oxygen go out the wrong pipe in hundreds of cycles and that's because I probably should have made the room a bit taller cos occasionally you get a rogue pocket of each that goes walkabout near the gas interface.

It's also fairly easy to service too if you want to add floral scent producers later down the line (as it connects to the whole base) and you can also add cooling/heating loops for the oxygen portion quite easily, which allows you to use the oxygenation system as an AC system as well, I usually blast cold oxygen into the base just to draw the temp down generally. Put the entrance door at the bottom and it will be in the oxygenated section and if you set the pressure to be near ambient you really only want a door to stop CO2 falling into the lower pumps from the rest of the base during normal operation.

Also if you haven't already I would strongly recommend hooking all pumps up to pressure sensors, to prevent them from running when there is not a large amount of whatever they are pumping, to move. Sump pumps for example will run very inefficiently if you make them pump the sump dry, so tell them to activate when there's more than a few hunded kilos of fluid to be pumped and shut off otherwise. It costs the same amount of power to run a pump regardless of whether it's shifting a few grams per second or kilograms.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Aug 13, 2022

HolHorsejob
Mar 14, 2020

Portrait of Cheems II of Spain by Jabona Neftman, olo pint on fird
How do you manage stress on satellite colonies? There's the easy/mid-late game way, which is something like "permasuit, cap skills, and send berry sludge".

Before I can arrange all of that, though, I often get stuck in a trap where a lonely dupe in a bare-bones base is constantly getting soaked, stink-eyed, burned, and frozen while eating absolutely hideous food and spending half their time getting massages and the other half on the verge of exploding from stress. I've found that making progress on the second planet is incredibly slow and painful. How do you manage that first dupe you send over?


e: edited for clarity

HolHorsejob fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Aug 13, 2022

WithoutTheFezOn
Aug 28, 2005
Oh no
"Early game" and ""permasuit" don't go together to me, are you talking about getting to an asteroid via the teleporter or a rocket?

If you're talking about the swampy world you get through using the teleporter (on default), I think a key is to use the existing infrastructure to create quick rooms. The far right room has enough room to put in a water cooler, one or two mess tables, and a hanging plant so bam, fairly instant great hall without needing an artist. The middle part is easy to make into a bedroom, and I generally rush to build a small bathroom. So there, pretty easily is +8 morale. Combine that with a skill-scrubbed dupe that only has the skills they "need" on the new world, and they're generally all right in my experience.

After that, for me stress basically only shows up if they're constantly getting wet. I try to make major walkways dry.

sloppy portmanteau
Feb 4, 2019

BrainMeats posted:

An issue with that bypass up top is gas is likely going to flow out from the bridge and then up over the sensor as it goes back to the bridge input. Put another bridge on the bypass before it merges back to enforce the flow direction.

Good point. With that, I found that this works as needed:


Although I'm not using it now since it should stall out with the overpressure. But it might be useful for something else!

WithoutTheFezOn posted:

On the bridge/priority thing in particular, it took me a while to get it down and I found the picture in this post helpful:

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/102326-pipes-bridges-priority-cheat-sheet/

This is super helpful!

OwlFancier posted:

My usual setup because I cannot be arsed doing the weird gas separation by tile thing, is to build the electrolysers in the middle of a tall room (15-20 tiles, depending on how safe you want to be) so that I can use natural fractionation to separate hydrogen and oxygen, and then set up some automation systems to detect, at the top and bottom of the room:

1. gas pressure, which i keep around 1.5kg
2. gas element, which I position such that it sends a green signal when the desired gas for the top or bottom has backed up close-ish to the center.

Combine these inputs with gates and you can essentially detect when there is a healthy pocket of either hydrogen or oxygen and activate/deactivate the pumps for each as necessary (if gas is backed up away from the pumps and maintains a desirable pressure, it is safe to activate those pumps) This ensures that however much of each you use, you can ensure that the room will remain correctly fractioned, with neither element reaching the opposite outlet. Though you do still need to use both gases in roughly the same amount they are used because if one side backs up entirely it will shut off the other side as well to stop the gases from ending up in the wrong place. The automation just makes sure the room holds at a normal pressure and the desired fractions in the desired areas.

Combined with the natural shutdown of the electrolysers on reaching overpressure this has produced a quite robust system, only had one or two packets of hydrogen/oxygen go out the wrong pipe in hundreds of cycles and that's because I probably should have made the room a bit taller cos occasionally you get a rogue pocket of each that goes walkabout near the gas interface.

It's also fairly easy to service too if you want to add floral scent producers later down the line (as it connects to the whole base) and you can also add cooling/heating loops for the oxygen portion quite easily, which allows you to use the oxygenation system as an AC system as well, I usually blast cold oxygen into the base just to draw the temp down generally. Put the entrance door at the bottom and it will be in the oxygenated section and if you set the pressure to be near ambient you really only want a door to stop CO2 falling into the lower pumps from the rest of the base during normal operation.

Also if you haven't already I would strongly recommend hooking all pumps up to pressure sensors, to prevent them from running when there is not a large amount of whatever they are pumping, to move. Sump pumps for example will run very inefficiently if you make them pump the sump dry, so tell them to activate when there's more than a few hunded kilos of fluid to be pumped and shut off otherwise. It costs the same amount of power to run a pump regardless of whether it's shifting a few grams per second or kilograms.

I haven't tried using gas pressure sensors yet since I felt like I needed to constantly fiddle with them. But I have been using liquid element sensors a tile above my liquid pumps, I guess a pressure sensor makes more sense there. For now I'm using mechanical filters on the two hydrogen pumps, but I'll have to see how it handles getting backed up and I might try out gas pressure instead depending. My worry with the mechanical filters now is that they'll keep pumping hydrogen to the generators even when oxygen is backed up, possibly tipping the scale and leaving the system out of hydrogen to power itself once it needs to get back to work.

WithoutTheFezOn
Aug 28, 2005
Oh no

sloppy portmanteau posted:

This is super helpful!
Cool.

One thing that may not be obvious at a glance, notice the bottom of the pic where E+F go into 6. E and F are only half full (since a pipe can hold 1000g/segment but a pump only puts out 500), but after the bridge each pipe segment is full. Each pipe kind of backs up on itself before going through the bridge.

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

sloppy portmanteau posted:

I haven't tried using gas pressure sensors yet since I felt like I needed to constantly fiddle with them.


The automation stuff is like starting a very old car, bits to adjust while it warms up - but the aim is to get it ticking over by itself with no interaction if possible. Bigger ONI machines are the same, but even with the monstrous gas boiler I posted back a page, there's only really a couple of actual controls, and these are usually in terms of limiters. You can also use them to turn stuff on and off without dupes (set it to green for above 20k gas pressure = off, below = perma-on) In action, stuff like oil boilers or O2 makers should just hum along like the engine of the car idling, then you can ignore it - until the source geyser goes dormant, the inputs fail, it overheats and next thing you know you have pockets of lead gas in your base. Then the next time, you remember to add a sensor to the input, and attach that to the lava gate logic for example, or add a temp sensor.

A SPOM is the first ONI machine you make, and the main issue you will have is that unless you can provide easy outflow for ALL the gas you are producing, you will not be producing enough hydrogen to keep it going, so you will be burning power on O2 that you wont use. You don't need overpressure protection, as the electrolyser has a top limit built in, but the pumps will happily suck on almost nothing and burn nearly 2kW of power. The pressure sensors just limit the on-time of the pumps to when it is worthwhile. This also lets you run them quite hard - I have them set down at 300g - so that it makes a near-vacuum to pull the gas off the electrolysers and let them work at full rate. But when they have sucked up a full load, they tend to sit for a few seconds and let the pressure recover, saving a huge amount of power in the long run, enough that the hydrogen produced is enough to power the whole thing with a dribble extra.

However, the danger with SPOMs like that is they are sensitive to overpressure in outgoing O2 causing pressure buildup and the electrolysers stop, and you are then not producing quite enough H2, and unless you have a fallback power supply, it can run out. Or overpressure in the H2 line (that dribble of excess builds up! ) will cause hydrogen to leak out into the O2 lines which can cause element damage to sensitive buildings.
E: The pressure sensor you list is perfect for the hydrogen line. Have the generators fire up when the battery calls AND when the overflow sensor trips so it cabn burn off the excess. The next advance is maybe a separate H2 generator that feeds into your main battery bank, but tbh - get it working glitch-free and safelyfor 500+ cycles is a good ONI milestone.

OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Aug 13, 2022

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

quote != edit

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Once you tunnel up to space you can also connect both lines (or the oxygen line at least, unlikely you would run out of uses for hydrogen when you can turn it into electricity) to vent into space, so then you only have to worry how much water you're using.

LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

sloppy portmanteau posted:

I haven't tried using gas pressure sensors yet since I felt like I needed to constantly fiddle with them. But I have been using liquid element sensors a tile above my liquid pumps, I guess a pressure sensor makes more sense there.

It's not a bad idea to wire both of these together with an AND gate, as a hedge against some kind of unthinkable malfunction or spill hundreds of cycles down the line. I've accidentally left colonies running while doing things of various duration, and these kind of system failsafes are the difference between "ok well it's been six dozen cycles of mostly upkeep, frustrating" and "do I just start over, or try to salvage this from the oldest available autosave?"

For a sump pump in particular, I'd run the output from the AND gate through a Buffer gate as well, so the sump is constantly cycling between almost full and halfway (or whatever) full.

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug

HolHorsejob posted:

How do you manage stress on satellite colonies? There's the easy/mid-late game way, which is something like "permasuit, cap skills, and send berry sludge".

Before I can arrange all of that, though, I often get stuck in a trap where a lonely dupe in a bare-bones base is constantly getting soaked, stink-eyed, burned, and frozen while eating absolutely hideous food and spending half their time getting massages and the other half on the verge of exploding from stress. I've found that making progress on the second planet is incredibly slow and painful. How do you manage that first dupe you send over?


e: edited for clarity
A carpet tile really helps and you only need one underneath the cot. You can also skill scrub them down to only the essentials before you send them. I also highly recommend sending oxygen over and putting vents everywhere; a constant 2k of oxygen pressure will crowd out the nasty gasses or at least force them to separate.

Beyond that, just giving them a break from digging out the horror areas and tidying up the liveable areas can get that stress down to manageable levels.


For my sump pumps, I always put a hydro sensor at 200kg or so.

Bhodi fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Aug 13, 2022

Panty Saluter
Jan 17, 2004

Making learning fun!
hnnnng so close

Rescue Toaster
Mar 13, 2003
In regards to the kill chambers, I setup this one for crabs recently, because of how awesome the sanishell is, but of course they can't be drowned, they have to be cooked.



The upper right is the incubators, with typical 60/600 timer (not cycle!). They are enabled when the farm is below 8 crabs. Eggs drop just to the left of the incubators near the dropper. The dropper uses a weight plate to detect the crabs. When they stop on it, the doors to the left open and the one to the right closes, so they only way they can move is left onto the open door, which then causes it to close on top of them and force them down. They drop into 150C petroleum, which is kept hot via hydrogen loop from a nearby steam chamber, the main cooling loop passes through the loader to keep them cool and prevent heat from escaping, but the carbon dioxide is a decent insulator anyway.

The little dupe motion sensor doesn't really work (idea was to keep dupes out of the dropper, they get stuck) and instead I just use door permissions to keep them out of the room the eggs drop into, as they can reach past the door. That same door between the egg drop and the incubators is held open when crabs hatch from an incubator and aren't picked up, eventually they become adults and pop out, and wander over into the dropper. At which point the door closes again to keep dupes out. I can't remember if dupes obey permissions on a door held open by automation, if so this is probably unnecessary. Just keep them out and hold the door open.

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Rescue Toaster posted:



The upper right is the incubators, with typical 60/600 timer (not cycle!).

This... would be a lot easier and cheaper than the gas passer I developed to accomplish roughly the same incubator powering. About the only benefit to my design is it keeps each incubator on exactly long enough for a dupe to hug it.

Rescue Toaster
Mar 13, 2003
Yeah using the regular timer with a 600 second 'off' time allows it to 'slip' every cycle since the dupe won't get the errand to travel to the incubator until it activates, so it falls slightly later and later each day. But it will turn off even if they don't get there in time. So it's a real nice and easy setup once you have enough power for the little bit of wasted on time, and for when you have two ranchers on different schedules so one can cover the other's sleep. Works really great after that point for basically zero effort.

Panty Saluter
Jan 17, 2004

Making learning fun!

Dareon posted:

cheaper than the gas passer

i try to avoid flatulent dupes, op

HolHorsejob
Mar 14, 2020

Portrait of Cheems II of Spain by Jabona Neftman, olo pint on fird

Panty Saluter posted:

i try to avoid flatulent dupes, op

God, flatulent is annoying. Thankfully not game-breaking most of the time though. Do they fart through suits?

Rescue Toaster
Mar 13, 2003

HolHorsejob posted:

God, flatulent is annoying. Thankfully not game-breaking most of the time though. Do they fart through suits?

Farts stay inside the suit until they take it off. Unfortunately I believe they will fart when holding their breath too, which means they can't work in a vacuum at all until they have suits.

Normal dupes can work in a vacuum without exhaling, since they don't produce CO2 while holding breath. But oxygen masks break that and discharge CO2 all over the place which makes oxygen masks not safe for vacuum work. (They fart in an oxygen mask too, not that it matters because of the CO2)

Panty Saluter
Jan 17, 2004

Making learning fun!
May I present for your enjoyment: the Total Loss Rocket Cooling Solution



Stick a big rear end tank of water under your rockets. Let the rocket superheat the liquid. Steam escapes and cools everything to an absolutely frosty sub 200 C. Enjoy the residue (salt, as seen here).

Is it optimized? lawl. is it wasteful? buddy, you better believe it. but does it work? yes, by god.

Dunno-Lars
Apr 7, 2011
:norway:

:iiam:



In a previous game, I placed a block of diamond tiles under the rockets which I then circulated hydrogen through into a steam chamber. I had a bypass valve to keep the temperature under 200*C inside the chamber. Free power and "cooled" down all the tiles to a nice and cool 800*C on average. Had fewer melted tiles after I installed this heat spreader-cooling system.

HolHorsejob
Mar 14, 2020

Portrait of Cheems II of Spain by Jabona Neftman, olo pint on fird

Dunno-Lars posted:

In a previous game, I placed a block of diamond tiles under the rockets which I then circulated hydrogen through into a steam chamber. I had a bypass valve to keep the temperature under 200*C inside the chamber. Free power and "cooled" down all the tiles to a nice and cool 800*C on average. Had fewer melted tiles after I installed this heat spreader-cooling system.

I liked to set tungsten mesh tiles under rockets and make a chamber full of germ sensors to melt (germ sensors are mostly plastic but melt to metal, handy if you're missing metal volcanos)

Dunno-Lars
Apr 7, 2011
:norway:

:iiam:



HolHorsejob posted:

I liked to set tungsten mesh tiles under rockets and make a chamber full of germ sensors to melt (germ sensors are mostly plastic but melt to metal, handy if you're missing metal volcanos)

That is amazing. Turning Dreckos into metal in a very ONI way.

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OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

As we seem to have a few new players, I thought I would terrify them with a series of effort posts about building and running a magma powered petrol boiler.

Why do a petrol boiler in the first place?
Well, it's buildable early - all you need is a few tons of steel and a minor volcano, as that is the best source of pure 'heat' you can get pre-space*
A design like this is intended to use the physics in the game to make a dupe free, maintenance free, infinitely running machine.
And the game further rewards you for this by literally doubling the amount of petrol you get.
Mid-game goal is multi-kW power, this is the answer to that problem. Mid-late game, petrol engines are the workhorses of mid range rocketry.
And dealing with volcanoes is an essential skill, and once you can do that, you can do literally any environment**.

The secret? Vacuum. Everything is done in atmo suits in a vacuum, as that way no heat gets conducted. Golden rule when dealing with lava - obsidian and steel only. Anything else will melt, and if you are very unlucky, vaporise too. And that's when the trouble really starts because atmo suits only work up to 727C, and then the dupes start getting scalded. Which means, that if ANYTHING on the really naughty list (lead, water, sulphur, etc...) touches magma, everyone inside that chamber is going to die, and you will be unable to get the corpses for hundreds of cycles.
On that happy note, lets crack on!

1) Surround your target volcano in a box, with a water lock. It makes little odds what we use, if it goes wrong, it's going VERY wrong, but oil is liquid of choice really, as there is a chance it won't vaporise at the first sign of trouble.

Note the square marked should be left un-mined if you don't want the geyser spewing hot stuff all over your dupes while you do this. Seal it up, and pump out all the atmosphere. Keep this initial box small and it won't take too long. (EDIT: Ignore the steam turbine, this is a sulphur geyser and I want the output so I need cooling)


2) Magma has a special way it flows. Water will equalise across columns, but lava will not - it will just dribble out in a long tongue and stop after 10 tiles. This is really good, as we can use this to limit the amount that gets released when we have a steel door open/close as our outlet control. So we build a 'containment vessel' like this:

All tiles are made from obsidian, the door/automation/power are made of steel, and once you get this little bit in, you can honestly call it a day and go have a few cycles breather. You've done the hard bit. Remember to uncap the volcano, and then you can seal it up completely and 90% of the lava danger is gone. Note the back end of the door is in vacuum still. It will heat up to >1700C so best not touch it now. Now you can safely*** build the next part while this safely fills with lava. Note also the 2 tiles of insulation. 1 tile is not enough long-term to contain the heat from magma, but 2 tiles is.

3) There are 2 ways to do these builds, and tbh they both take about the same time - ages. So you need to have your colony pretty much ignorable at this point. Renewable oxygen and food supplies (or at least 100+ cycles), no heat threats looming. You should be vaguely comfortable to walk away and leave it running and be 90% certain noone will be dead when you get back. You can either seal in the area then pump it out, or tile up the area and hollow your way in. The first is easier, and not too bad if the area is kind of small, but air pumps can use up a fair whack of power. Switching to mini pumps for the final stage can save you time and energy tho.

Here I am just finishing off the area for the tile method. Once he builds that last tile, that single square of natural gas will be deleted magically, and I can start destroying the tiles to get pure vacuum, and a whole bunch of material already where I want to build stuff!

4) The crucible
So, magma is going to dribble out the end of our lava shaft like the worlds worst porn, and we want to extract the heat from it. My favourite method is a steam crucible, as it is easy to make and reliable to infinity. Mesh tiles made of steel, regular obsidian tiles below them, and temp shift plates to the left of these tiles:

So the lava will dribble into the mesh tiles, maybe 100, 200kg. It will fall through the mesh tiles, and land on top of the obsidian. The diamond tempshift plates that are diagonally down-left will suck heat out the lava instantly, and cause the lava to solidify into igneous rock, which can't live inside the mesh, so it falls to the bottom of our little crucible. Now to start it up, there is a liquid vent, and I filled it up with water so it would have a nice steam atmosphere when running. I always used to agonise about how much steam is good. and what is bad. The answer - It doesn't matter. >20kg/tile means you cant use atmo sensors any more, but pressure-wise, gas pressures are miniscule compared to 1000kf/tile pressures that liquids exert, so there's no real gas pressure problem. I actually forgot about this one, and it filled up until the vent stopped (3 tons!). That's why there is >200kg/tile. It did make the steam room take longer to heat up, but also it takes longer to cool down so it's all good. And by the time the next part is built it will be well up to operating temperature. You don't need to use diamond shift plates, this room should never get >1000, so igneous rock is fine. I run it at 600+ here for a sour gas boiler, for just petrol, 500+ is fine for in here. I also made a single shiftplate out of lead, so once it hits 328+C, it fills the bottom with a row of liquid that massively speeds up the heat transfer from the hot rocks. The walls do need to be either diamond or steel for conduction.

Obviously a setup like this will need fiendishly complex automation:

The long path is just because I had sealed up the inner path before I remembered to add it. Meh.
Anyway, that's all for part 1, for part 2 I'll be describing the weirdest poo poo you ever did see.


Edit - be EXTREMELY careful when finally attaching the automation to the door. Accidentally opening the door when the crucible isn't sealed, or opening it for too long, may result in 'accidents'. Also watch out as it warms up. Fiddle with the thermostat to just let in blobs of lava until the lead melts, then let it sit and stabilise till you add more. You can add a timer, say 2s green 20s red and an AND gate on this so the door can only ever let a teeny bit through. That makes the crucible behave better thermally. Without it, when the temp drops low enough mine will let in maybe a ton of magma, and the temp shoots all the way up to 650C or so, and slowly dribbles back down to the 600 trigger. But again - it doesn't matter. It is well within the tolerances of the materials used, the things attached will be doing their own thermal management anyway, so I keep it simple.

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*Once you get into space, you get new metals - niobium and thermium which can be used to build aquatuners that can generate 6-700C on demand, and you use them as heat sources for these devices instead. Easy mode!

**Spaced Out introduces radioactivity, which is a new level of hazard that is not covered here and will cause new and interesting deaths.

*** haha

OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Aug 15, 2022

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