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Thermal generators, humidity, water distillation, rusting & other suggestions


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I've been playing this game for a while now, with a colony that's probably going to last to round 300 before I run out of filtration media. Since running out of sand now is literally a definitive game-ender, unless you somehow or rather harvest thermal energy from the environment, I've come up with a couple of suggestions which I hope the developers would consider.

 

(I) Water purification

1. Water distillation plants

Given the current need of filtration media to obtain clean water from polluted water - I think it'd be nice to provide an alternative - water distillation plants. Such plants would run on more joules of energy as compared to the current water filters and not require any filtration media; the rate of which the clean water would be produced would also be about half the rate of the current water filter. Since distillation requires water to be boiled, heat should be generated around the plant, and the plant should have an overheat temperature exceeding the boiling point of polluted water. Dirt should also be produced as a by-product.

2. Reverse osmosis plants

The reverse osmosis plant would provide another alternative to purifying water. Again, this system would run power - since reverse osmosis is a process where water is moved from an area with lower water potential to an area of higher water potential, which needs energy. This system can be used to treat brine (or salt water, if that's implemented in the future). The reverse osmosis plants would run on ceramics - which could be made from hardening clay. The salt could then be removed as a by-product. The reverse osmosis system could be used to treat polluted water but it should be noted that this should be more wasteful than using it to treat brine only.

 

(II) Humidity and rusting

1. Humidity

I feel that humidity should be something that should be added as it would add a new level of difficulty to the game but at the same time not overdo the difficulty. The warmer an area is, the higher its capacity to carry water vapour (relative humidity). High humidity levels could increase stress levels in duplicants and very high relative humidity levels would cause fogging and reduced visibility. Humidity is something the player should worry about late-game rather than early game, when rusting starts becoming an issue.

2. Dehumidifier

Dehumidifiers would be an option to deal with humidity. They consume little energy and reduce the humidity levels around them.

3. Rusting

Buildings made of primarily iron should rust when there is oxygen and water. Specifically, high levels of humidity, oxygen and high temperatures should increase the rate of which buildings rust. Hence, corrosion can generally be slowed down by using dehumidifier. Alternatively, buildings can be made out of materials that do not corrode as easily - such as gold, copper, tungsten, wolframite and silver. It should also be possible to create alloys such as stainless steel using steel (which I believe is currently being added), chromium and manganese (extracted from wolframite). 

4Fe(s) + 3O(g) -> 2Fe2O3(s) [in presence of water]

 

(III) Electricity

1. Wires with higher capacity

Currently, for my colony anyway, it's impossible to create a completely connected power grid without the circuits overloading. I think there should be an even better wire than the high-capacity wire available currently - that should at least make a single, central power grid system work properly without wires breaking all the time.

2. Thermal generators and steam dynamos

I believe it would be auxiliary to have these generators as there's a presence of magma on the asteroid the duplicants are stuck on. It should be noted though, that the steam dynamos be more effective than the thermal generators.

 

(IV) General

1. Easier replacement of wires, pipes, etc.

Say, there should be an option to allow wires and pipes be replaced. That would make redoing power grids so much easier as instead of having wires deconstructed and then building better wires, a single replacement function would be much more convenient.

 

This has been a long thread of suggestions that I've got - I'm not doing a TL;DR on this one as I think I've summarised the points above as much as I could without digressing. Hopefully the developers would consider some of these suggestions and maybe, just maybe, implement them into the game.

Thanks for reading! ;)

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Currently steam geysers are op as hell if you find one, infinite amount of water. Not that I use water, I collect tons of it because I can. Still havent used up my first pockets of water at 400 cycles. Also you can find sand aka filtration medium in any biome now. Most of it I have found In the ice biomes. I mainly relay on algae for oxygen tho.

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Rusting would add more difficulty :o but not a bad idea. Humidity i could see in the game. The plant idea to make pure water seems great but it should be a bit uneasy to find since it would make for amazing typed farms. overall I'm liking this 

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On 3/21/2017 at 3:39 PM, mr_anderson said:

Currently steam geysers are op as hell if you find one, infinite amount of water. Not that I use water, I collect tons of it because I can. Still havent used up my first pockets of water at 400 cycles. Also you can find sand aka filtration medium in any biome now. Most of it I have found In the ice biomes. I mainly relay on algae for oxygen tho.

Steam geysers are far too overpowered in my opinion - however admittedly it does make the game a lot more sustainable; it would still be nice to have some alternatives to making a sustainable colony though.

 

8 hours ago, VillaEnders said:

Rusting would add more difficulty :o but not a bad idea. Humidity i could see in the game. The plant idea to make pure water seems great but it should be a bit uneasy to find since it would make for amazing typed farms. overall I'm liking this 

I suggested rusting mainly because currently most of the problems you have to resolve to make a sustainable colony are life-threatening to the colonists as of now - it would definitely be nice to have problems with lower magnitude which still require to be fixed but do not immediately demand attention from the player right from the start of the game (such as how oxygen and water do).

 

Another suggestion that I have though, is that the air scrubber produces carbonic acid (H2CO3) instead of polluted water - it would definitely make this game more scientifically accurate though I totally understand that this game couldn't be 100% accurate scientifically as it would make the game even more challenging than it already is [such as hydrogen generator using oxygen and hydrogen to release energy and producing water in real life (see fuel cell)].

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On 21/03/2017 at 3:32 PM, ChocoParrot said:

1. Easier replacement of wires, pipes, etc.

Say, there should be an option to allow wires and pipes be replaced. That would make redoing power grids so much easier as instead of having wires deconstructed and then building better wires, a single replacement function would be much more convenient.

i'm pretty sure you just lay the hi-wire over the top of the existing circuit lo-wire without deconstructing them.

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16 hours ago, Kruleworld said:

i'm pretty sure you just lay the hi-wire over the top of the existing circuit lo-wire without deconstructing them.

Yeah but I think the wires overlap if you do so? I've seen this happening to pipes before, where there could be 2 pipes in the same tile.

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1. Water distillation plants

What is the point of this when this can be done with the physics system and designing your own plant (other than from geysers)? I think having to design your own plant than having a building you plop is more interesting and fun.

2. Reverse osmosis plants

You got it reversed form real life, any filter that can remove salt can be used to clean polluted water as salt is harder to remove than waste/bacteria. And thimble thread is not nearly a small enough filter for it to be considered reverse osmosis. If it were a ceramic that would make sense.

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22 minutes ago, AlexRou said:

1. Water distillation plants

What is the point of this when this can be done with the physics system and designing your own plant (other than from geysers)? I think having to design your own plant than having a building you plop is more interesting and fun.

2. Reverse osmosis plants

You got it reversed form real life, any filter that can remove salt can be used to clean polluted water as salt is harder to remove than waste/bacteria. And thimble thread is not nearly a small enough filter for it to be considered reverse osmosis. If it were a ceramic that would make sense.

1. Granted, designing one's own plant would definitely be more fun - but as of the current moment, getting a water distiller going on is practically impossible (i.e. using magma to distill water). Again, would like to reinforce that I totally agree with you on construction of one's own distillation plant and it would be nice if the developers added something which allowed us to heat water to above the boiling point of polluted water without the machinery breaking itself.

2. Ceramics would be interesting, and yes, more practical a material to use than thimble thread. The thing is, though, I don't think people usually use reverse osmosis to clean polluted water in real life - usually it's used on water filled with ionic contaminants, such as the salt that you mentioned. I believe polluted water is usually filtered first before it's placed into the reverse osmosis plant to remove the dissolved contaminants instead of right into the latter. I hope I'm not mistaken on this part, but please correct me if I am. Apologies for the vagueness. Also, it would be nice if thimble thread could be used for some other purposes such as filtration.

(Changed reverse osmosis section in OP)

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1 minute ago, ChocoParrot said:

1. Granted, designing one's own plant would definitely be more fun - but as of the current moment, getting a water distiller going on is practically impossible. Who literally uses ambient magma heat to distill water? Again, would like to reinforce that I totally agree with you on construction of one's own distillation plant and it would be nice if the developers added something which allowed us to heat water to above the boiling point of polluted water without the machinery breaking itself.

2. Ceramics would be interesting, and yes, more practical a material to use than thimble thread. The thing is, though, I don't think people usually use reverse osmosis to clean polluted water in real life - usually it's used on water filled with ionic contaminants, such as the salt that you mentioned. I believe polluted water is usually filtered first before it's placed into the reverse osmosis plant to remove the dissolved contaminants instead of right into the latter. I hope I'm not mistaken on this part, but please correct me if I am. Apologies for the vagueness. Also, it would be nice if thimble thread could be used for some other purposes such as filtration.

(Changed reverse osmosis section in OP)

Reverse osmosis have been used to clean wastewater (stuff that goes down the toilet), but yeah it usually have a prefilter to remove the bulky particles like bacteria and anything larger so as not to clog the reverse osmosis filters as they are more expensive. Thimble thread could be used as a stage 1 filter for large visible particles tho if you really want it to do something. Then it goes through stage 2 micro filtration followed by the reverse osmosis stage 3. You could even add a sterilization stage 4 with chlorine or UV.

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I like the humidity aspect. Dehumidifiers would also generate some water since it's taking it from the air around it just like they do in real life.

Putting hi-wire over the top of existing lo-wire will just replace it. Same as when you put a Gas Permeable tile over a normal Tile or Pipes over other pipes with different Material. Ex: Sandstone Pipe being replaced by Obsidian Pipe. I think the pipes overlapping is a bug in the game, but I have not encountered it myself just yet.

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43 minutes ago, Duvinn said:

Putting hi-wire over the top of existing lo-wire will just replace it. Same as when you put a Gas Permeable tile over a normal Tile or Pipes over other pipes with different Material. Ex: Sandstone Pipe being replaced by Obsidian Pipe. I think the pipes overlapping is a bug in the game, but I have not encountered it myself just yet.

Yeah I replace my wires like this too. I think they even mention it in one of the patch notes.

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On 2017.03.21. at 6:32 AM, ChocoParrot said:

1. Water distillation plants

Given the current need of filtration media to obtain clean water from polluted water - I think it'd be nice to provide an alternative - water distillation plants. Such plants would run on more joules of energy as compared to the current water filters and not require any filtration media; the rate of which the clean water would be produced would also be about half the rate of the current water filter. Since distillation requires water to be boiled, heat should be generated around the plant, and the plant should have an overheat temperature exceeding the boiling point of polluted water. Dirt should also be produced as a by-product.

 

I'd love the idea of having water distiller as a structure instead of making a huge building with heat generators and liquid and gas pumps.

Bio distiller is a thing, so why not water distiller!

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who wouldn't want to add more difficultly into a game? :P. also another idea

for your machine to get rid of humidity how about it can slowly produce small amounts of water?

also what about decay? like i know food spoils and all but it kind of disappears (correct me if I'm wrong) what about meats that spoils turns into rotten meat which produces tons of bad air and increases stress. a way to get rid of it is to put it into a new machine to make it turn into normal meat but will give off less cals. for plants if not kept right can also decay same with their food

*not only can foods decay but so can old machines?

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Filtration media is not a game ender. You can clean oxygen by liquefying it. You can clean water by boiling it (and this really can be done with just a battery array). You can also get water from geysers, which is much easier. You can freeze CO2. Algae is also technically renewable via Pufts and the Bio Distiller but that's not very practical as far as I can tell.

Otherwise seems legit, although some of this would probably be hard to implement.

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On 4/6/2017 at 7:28 AM, VillaEnders said:

who wouldn't want to add more difficultly into a game? :P. also another idea

for your machine to get rid of humidity how about it can slowly produce small amounts of water?

also what about decay? like i know food spoils and all but it kind of disappears (correct me if I'm wrong) what about meats that spoils turns into rotten meat which produces tons of bad air and increases stress. a way to get rid of it is to put it into a new machine to make it turn into normal meat but will give off less cals. for plants if not kept right can also decay same with their food

*not only can foods decay but so can old machines?

That's an awesome idea! Dehumidifiers should produce little bits of water at times - this would make recapturing water possible and what not.

Yes, decomposition would be an amazing thing to have, too. Currently unrefrigerated bristle berries rot and turn into polluted dirt, but it definitely would be nice to see other types of food spoil.

Also, wouldn't it be nice if the duplicants got sick of one type of food? It would be nice if it was mandatory for one to source out other food alternatives or see their stress levels rise dramatically over time if one keeps on stuffing the dupes with the same kind of food.

 

On 4/6/2017 at 11:11 AM, Ciderblock said:

Filtration media is not a game ender. You can clean oxygen by liquefying it. You can clean water by boiling it (and this really can be done with just a battery array). You can also get water from geysers, which is much easier. You can freeze CO2. Algae is also technically renewable via Pufts and the Bio Distiller but that's not very practical as far as I can tell.

Otherwise seems legit, although some of this would probably be hard to implement.

I don't see why one would have to build such elaborate designs in order to replace sand - dosen't sound exactly logical to me. Certainly, you can boil polluted water to get clean water and dirt using magma, and you can (presumably) cool down contaminated oxygen to liquid oxygen.

I did some calculations on how much energy it would take to cool down polluted oxygen. According to the wiki, a thermo-regulator takes uses 240W of power and cools down the air piped through it by 14.0°C. Polluted oxygen has a boiling point of -183.0°C. Say, you were to cool down said air, which is usually at 30°C or so to the condensation point, you would have to cool it down by 213°C - which is equivalent to at least 16 thermo-regulators. Calculate the amount of energy used by that and you get a whopping three thousand, eight hundred and forty watts - and that's excluding the wattage used by the pump to pipe the stuff in.

Taking listed numbers into consideration, it would take 5 hydrogen generators or 7 coal generators or 10 manual generators running constantly just to keep that thing working. The heat output of the regulator would also create huge issues and you probably would need an entirely separate elaborate cooling system with loads of wheezewhort plants to prevent the machine from overheating. I'm not even done. The amount of oxygen you would produce would be at best 1000g per unit tick. Compare this to a water filter-electrolyser-pump-gas filter set-up, which would only use 600W of electricity to produce approximately the same amount of oxygen per unit time. The electrolyser would also pump out hydrogen, which you could pipe into a hydrogen generator, further decreasing the net power consumed.

There is, admittedly, currently an exploit which lets you cool down polluted oxygen and liquefy it which involves cooling hydrogen down and using it to cool other gases, but I do expect this to be fixed as energy would be destroyed through this exploit. Obviously, if you manage to pull the cooling system off without the exploit in a base while playing on the Thermal Upgrade, kudos to you and do share your set-up with the rest of us.

Regarding heating water till it vaporises: you need magma to do that. Magma is definitely a good option, but it requires digging down approximately 100 squares to the bottom of the map, and honestly, boiling and purifying water using magma sounds ridiculous to begin with; alas, it is currently viable. The temperature of the magma would also eventually cool, leading to the same water shortage problem again. You would also have to cool down the water that comes out of it, which itself is another problem.

Getting water from geysers is one thing, utilising that water is another. Geyser water is boiling hot - usually at 80°C at best, but sometimes going as high as 93°C. Sure, there are ways to cool down geyser water, by having it melt ice or using other alternatives, but again these use elaborate plans and it would be better if Klei just added a water cooler.

Algae is renewable, yes, and it is somewhat a good solution. Using a bio-distiller to purify slime is a good idea - using the water to power electrolysers and so on. However, you're faced with the same problem - elaborate design. Having Pufts congregate into an area is not an easy task, but it is nonetheless still doable.

 

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Might be infeasible to add another property to each block.  This would be another property that the engine would have to check every time a block interacts with another.  I think in current mechanics any water vapor has to be coded as steam, due to blocks of different elements not really mixing Rusting is a great mechanic though.  Say in steamy/polluted environments, metallic objects incur damage over time, pipes carrying polluted water could "rust" over time, leading to them "leaking"

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4 hours ago, ChocoParrot said:

There is, admittedly, currently an exploit which lets you cool down polluted oxygen and liquefy it which involves cooling hydrogen down and using it to cool other gases, but I do expect this to be fixed as energy would be destroyed through this exploit. Obviously, if you manage to pull the cooling system off without the exploit in a base while playing on the Thermal Upgrade, kudos to you and do share your set-up with the rest of us.

My impression from watching videos before actually using a thermoregulator myself was that it *always* destroyed energy. So to my surprise I found that just one thermoregulator for cooling my oxygen (and my bristle blossoms) is already quite hard to cool. Accordingly it does sound like this H2 cooling thing is an exploit (any idea how the exploit works internally?) This makes it seem like wheezeworts are pretty much the only non-exploit way to cool your base.

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5 hours ago, ChocoParrot said:

There is, admittedly, currently an exploit which lets you cool down polluted oxygen and liquefy it which involves cooling hydrogen down and using it to cool other gases, but I do expect this to be fixed as energy would be destroyed

The game could not possibly work if there was not energy destroyed in it. Obeying conservation laws, the colony would inevitably end up in thermal equilibrium, unable to produce any further energy, and the resulting temperature would be quite high as all energy stored in materials would be turned to heat. Almost everything in the game breaks conservation laws in some way but it's there to make the game playable and fun.

Hydrogen as most efficient cooling medium is not an exploit, it's how the game is set up. Since thermal regulator cools whatever it ingests by 14 C, the gas that has the greatest thermal capacity per blob is the most efficient. And right now it is hydrogen, because all gases have the same density and a blob is 1000 g.

Regarding oxygen liquefication, the main reason for hydrogen is not that it's efficient but that its own boiling point is lower than that of oxygen, so it can be brought below oxygen boiling point without itself turning to liquid. We can't have liquid hydrogen I'm afraid because there's nothing that can safely cool it down below its boiling temperature.

According to my calculations, one regulator running at full capacity (with hydrogen) can turn about 100 g of 30 C warm oxygen to liquid per second. Using the most efficient setup possible, it might be a viable way of getting oxygen. But with geysers and electrolyzers and hydrogen generators it's rather just a fancy way of getting rid of polluted oxygen.

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51 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

 

The game could not possibly work if there was not energy destroyed in it. Obeying conservation laws, the colony would inevitably end up in thermal equilibrium, unable to produce any further energy, and the resulting temperature would be quite high as all energy stored in materials would be turned to heat. Almost everything in the game breaks conservation laws in some way but it's there to make the game playable and fun.

There are two ways to handle global heat. One is to have it build up, so that eventually everything collapses. This is not a bad thing, it's the way of quite a few games; when it collapses you just start over and try to get more dupes or last longer.

The other is to remove it from the asteroid. Currently this happens inside your base: wheezeworts, thermoregulators acting on hydrogen, and hydrofans remove heat without moving it somewhere else. In real life this loss would have to happen at the boundary of the asteroid, through radiation. Setting something like this up is totally possible with the game engine as it stands.

Personally I agree that the hydrogen thermoregulator system is an exploit. I don't think that every conservation law violation is an exploit, because some of them are clearly intended by the developers. For example, neither hydrogen generators nor coal generators make physical sense. Yet using thermoregulators on, say, oxygen requires you to cool them separately (e.g. with hydrofans); you can't make the thermoregulators cool themselves.

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7 hours ago, ChocoParrot said:

That's an awesome idea! Dehumidifiers should produce little bits of water at times - this would make recapturing water possible and what not.

Yes, decomposition would be an amazing thing to have, too. Currently unrefrigerated bristle berries rot and turn into polluted dirt, but it definitely would be nice to see other types of food spoil.

Also, wouldn't it be nice if the duplicants got sick of one type of food? It would be nice if it was mandatory for one to source out other food alternatives or see their stress levels rise dramatically over time if one keeps on stuffing the dupes with the same kind of food.

 

 

 

:o. great idea. eating the same food everyday is so tiring. but also they should have if food was grown in a nasty area dups can get sick. and it would suck if all you can eat is the same exact berry or lice everyday. so yeah give foods to the dups xD

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47 minutes ago, Ciderblock said:

you can't make the thermoregulators cool themselves.

I have heard that regulators warm up differently depending on what are they cooling, regardless of what their description says. So you should be able to make them cool themselves with any medium. Haven't tried that, though. But with Wheezeworts in the game ... I don't think doing things the hard way counts as exploit.

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57 minutes ago, Ciderblock said:

In real life this loss would have to happen at the boundary of the asteroid, through radiation. Setting something like this up is totally possible with the game engine as it stands.

The game does not support radiative heat transfer. So no, void on its own does not absorb heat. It may absorb hot matter but then you have to heat things up before you send them away. And since what comes from geysers is steam at above 100 C, you'd need to warm steam even more and then displose of it to actually get rid of heat. Might be possible with current game engine, but not quite with current tools.

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21 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

I have heard that regulators warm up differently depending on what are they cooling, regardless of what their description says. So you should be able to make them cool themselves with any medium. Haven't tried that, though. But with Wheezeworts in the game ... I don't think doing things the hard way counts as exploit.

It's true, wheezeworts are definitely the easy way. Still, it physically doesn't work, and it doesn't work with other materials, so it seems like it is probably not deliberate. The phenomenon would presumably disappear if thermoregulators removed x J, or perhaps x J/g, rather than removing y C.

 

11 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

The game does not support radiative heat transfer. So no, void on its own does not absorb heat. It may absorb hot matter but then you have to heat things up before you send them away. And since what comes from geysers is steam at above 100 C, you'd need to warm steam even more and then displose of it to actually get rid of heat. Might be possible with current game engine, but not quite with current tools.

So we already have objects (wheezeworts, hydrofans) that delete heat. That makes this particular concept (not radiative heat transfer in general) easy to implement: you have a special type of tile that can only be built touching the void that deletes heat at a certain rate depending on its temperature.

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