Jump to content

Thermal Update Coal generator problem.


Recommended Posts

Well, many people seem to have a lot of problems with coal generators in the new update, so i wanted to write a few things about this.

As it stands, Coal generators are definitely a huge problem, not viable in any way, they will burn not only trough coal, but also your metal store.

Making them out of copper is definitely no option, as they will break nearly instantly from overheating, but even using Gold Amalagam which gives basically an extra 50C threshold before taking damage, they still break fairly fast.
So, I tested out several options to keep them from doing so:

Flooding them (slightly): Doesn't change the problem, the water begins to evaporate rather soon, as soon as it gets too high the generator stops working and even if you can keep the level optimal, it still takes damage.

Pumping out the heated carbon dioxide: Still doesn't change the fact that they overheat. I tried placing them inside a vacuum, with an air lock in front to keep gasses from entering, both being kept in permanent vakuum state as well as possible. They still overheat and take damage.

Flooding the room with extremely cooled gas: This idea was fairly advanced to do, and required a lot of work to even set up, requiring more energy then the generators produce. So besides not being a viable option to do in the first place, the problem persisted. They are still taking damage.

The things I observed:
The problem isn't the surrounding temperature, but their innate one which keeps them above 200C in an active state. As soon as they start to be active, their own temperature breaks them without any way to stop them from doing so, at least I have found now way.
Coal generally is a rather advanced setup for ONI, as the produced Carbon dioxide needs to be taken care of, the generated heat needs to be tend to, and the coal needs to be given to them, but all of that is quite feasable if you just think a few moments about it. The breaking clearly isn't, and I don't think it's something which was intended to work in this way.

The conclusion (Until someone finds a solution or it is patched):
Coal generators are broken in this build, also making hatches fairly unusable (besides of their nice decor boost). They break fast, take up a lot of manpower, and even hurt your dupes close to it (Haven't bothered with clothing yet, so if that helps it would be nice if someone mentions it.)

The solutions:
The easiest solution definitely is to lower their innate temperature, which I personally find a bit 'meh' since they wouldn't heat up the surrounding space as much anymore.
The second is to introduce a new material which actually can withstand their temperature better if everything is taken care of properly.


If someone has other solutions how to get rid of the problem, or even has a way to make them work under the current build, I would be glad to hear them, as I have fiddled around ~2 hours with them by now, but the problem always persists. They seemingly need more work to be put into them then Hydrogen generators at the moment (which are actually fairly easy to handle in this build), which surely wasn't intended, or at least I don't think so.
Before it would be the mid-tier power solution to keep manpower at bay while setting up the high-tier solution (Hydrogen generators). Right now this part isn't possible, so you either keep manually powering several networks, or set up the Hydrogen system fairly fast, water isn't a problem anymore after all.

Last but not least:
I will update the starting post with every failed solution, and every possible way to switch the system whenever someone posts it, so go ahead and discuss it, and let's give our awesome developers something to think about and make the game even better then it is! :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, Risu said:

Remember there is a third option: iron ore.

Edit: Guess even the developers forgot about it being generated.
There are no bonuses for iron ore. Not even decor.
 

Wolframite is also an option, but since it doesn't do anything for the coal generator problem at hand I haven't mentioned it here :)
They are surely able to do something in the future, as steel is already in the list, but for now it's just a random metal as any other.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm glad it isn't just me. I just gave up on a colony, but not before cursing my coal generator. A simple gas pump kept my batteries ice cold (built next to an ice biome as well), but it didn't even slow down the damage to the coal generator.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I bugged mine somehow. I thought if I put it in the new ice biome that it would help with the heat...well the air didn't help with the heat other than cooling off the heat it creates in the atmosphere. However after a few seconds of running, something above it either melted or a cold item fell on it and it instantly went from like 100C to -20C and stayed there forever. I ran it all day and night and up until I quit playing around cycle 150. It never once overheated. I attempted to figure out what happened with a couple more generators and couldn't replicate it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

27 minutes ago, Josiphine said:

I'm glad it isn't just me. I just gave up on a colony, but not before cursing my coal generator. A simple gas pump kept my batteries ice cold (built next to an ice biome as well), but it didn't even slow down the damage to the coal generator.

Yes, I tried out the Ice biome + cooled gas approach. It keeps you safe for a short amount of time, but none at which it is safe to operate indefinitely. I'll make a more complex one in my new colony, as I wanted to sustain the old one with hatches generating coal from all the materials which I won't ever need. Didn't work properly. If I find a good setup, I'll immediately post a screenshot of it thought.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is a bit ironic that we're showered with hatches but coal generators are pretty much useless. Although I must say that I've always found them rather pointless to be honest. They're never been needed and are really just more trouble in the long run than they're worth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Use water to cool your coal gen, but be careful, if you make so many coal gen, you can make steam, and use amalgame gold ore for your coal gen, i save my gold just for that and can profit hatch farm :D

 

I have more probleme to cool down my water from geyser, i don't knwo how to make it (cool water), if someone have a tips ^^'

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The only real use I can see for coal generator is to make CO2 that can be scrubbed and turned into polluted water which can then be turned into fertilizer which is needed to sustain your bristle blossom farms unless you plant them in the wild.

Btw, I've previously stated that you'd eventually run out of stuff to feed the hatch. That's not accurate as they will eat timble weed. You just need to find a way to fit the 250 aquatic planting pods needed to sustain one hatch on your map.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, bzgzd said:

Maybe something like this in cold biome with enough space at bottom for CO2.
It filled those 8 batteries without going over 40 °C

C9ZyOBU.png

http://i.imgur.com/Op8jvlD.png

I'll test that out right away when I'm finished with my setup! It looks promising, even thought I'll definitely use clean water for it to not ever give one of my dupes stress (I hate stress).
I'll post the setup as soon as I'm far enough to build it, and my base is sustained 100%, so after I got a steam vent up and running.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

The only real use I can see for coal generator is to make CO2 that can be scrubbed and turned into polluted water which can then be turned into fertilizer.

Too much work.  You get 50 Kg of polluted water per dupe per day.  This is 37.5 Kg of fertilizer, which is more than enough for your growing needs.  Indeed, you can just over grown your flowers and let them rot.  10000 kcal / 18 days = 100 Kg of Polluted dirt / 18 days.  You need an extra 5/3 day to turn the polluted dirt into fertilizer.  You use 36 Kg of fertilizer to grow the fruit.  Thus you net (300/59) - 2 = 182/59 Kg / cycle of fertilizer ~ 3 Kg / cycle.  So one rotting flower can support 1.5 flowers.  You need 1.8 flower per dupe, but you need to grow 2.  So you need two rotting flowers.  Thus to make it sustainable on rotting food to fertilizer, you will need 4 flowers per dupe.  This will give you a net of 56 Kg / 18 days of fertilizer.  You have fertilizer for days!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Fatmice said:

Too much work.  You get 50 Kg of polluted water per dupe per day.  This is 37.5 Kg of fertilizer, which is more than enough for your growing needs.  Indeed, you can just over grown your flowers and let them rot.  10000 kcal / 18 days = 100 Kg of Polluted dirt / 18 days.  You need an extra 5/3 day to turn the polluted dirt into fertilizer.  You use 36 Kg of fertilizer to grow the fruit.  Thus you net (300/59) - 2 = 182/59 Kg / cycle of fertilizer ~ 3 Kg / cycle.  So one rotting flower can support 1.5 flowers.  You need 1.8 flower per dupe, but you need to grow 2.  So you need two rotting flowers.  Thus to make it sustainable on rotting food to fertilizer, you will need 4 flowers per dupe.  This will give you a net of 56 Kg / 18 days of fertilizer.  You have fertilizer for days!

Nice. Thanks. I have been given the advice to just let food rot. I didn't make the calculation though so I didn't know it was a positive feedback loop. I just went on casual observation and concluded that it at least broke even.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

I'd love to see what your solution is for feeding the hatches indefinitely if not for the endless timble weed fields I mentioned above

Oh, that's easy, algae from slime destilles, since producing hydrogen for the immense power needs of my finished base will give off massive amounts of excess oxygen anyway, probably enough for me to have it stored in liquid form somewhere, using integer overflow of gas after heating it up to not endlessly need more storage space.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I assume said slime will come from Pufts then? And in that case. Good luck keeping them alive. No matter what I've tried, keeping them as natural cage as possible with water locks, or even just in the wild, I've never seen a Puft make it past 500-600ish cycles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The problem for pufts is their missing ability to sustain hot or cold temperature even for short times. The trick is to fill the room only with pre temperatured polluted oxygen, either chilling or heating it up beforehand to get it juuuuust at the right temperature. This can be done with a rather complex system of thermal switches and isolated pipes, but is definitely possible. The rooms have to be insulated with abysallite thought definitely, then nothing should go wrong, even over extended times, at least as long as it is under a self-contained system. The water entrance is a second safety measure, but if you do it with every puft like this you get huge amounts of free slime and a little bit of extra oxygen over time. Also less power consumption for cleaning the polluted oxygen from the morbs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, kambing said:

Why would 200C break a machine which sole purpose is to burn stuff? This makes no sense.

Ic you never see how your power plan runing :) its logic all made by human will broken right event dupe ahhaah

for coal power plan they use tons water and keep watch for repair . Some one from my family told me when the generator broke they rush into burner with extrem hot for fix it 

 

hey thanks for sugestion pouring water inti steam . I use ice biomed and 4 cooling plan to take care of it

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Vilda said:

Water cooling is the way to go for generators

20170317221113_1.jpg

I'll test this right away, seems good

In the basic game, I've had the habit to enclose the coal generators to avoid CO2 to expand everywhere in my base but now I can't do it this way as their temperatures rise up very quickly :/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, Mishi21 said:

I'll test this right away, seems good

In the basic game, I've had the habit to enclose the coal generators to avoid CO2 to expand everywhere in my base but now I can't do it this way as their temperatures rise up very quickly :/

Yeah, they actually have about 3kg of CO2 per tile under. I just build some scrubbers to deal with that, cause there's is a crapton of water coming from 4 geysers I don't know what to do with right now.

For one thing it is freezing pretty instantly, in 80ton bulb, but that might not be the intended behaviour, I might just wall it and pump clean water out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Finally caught some heat exchange going on. 20170318163324_1.jpg

This piece of Ice is heating up from the generator, and surrounding layer of water too. So generator itself is going up.

I suspect the magical maximum number for heat transfer is a mass of 1 ton.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...