Water Boiler

[nile_duart]

I'm confused as to why there isn't a device to heat up water. I realize that the tepidizer does just that, but it's in the name, "tepidizer". It doesn't boil the water, it just warms it up. Why isn't there something designed specifically to boil water when apparently it's a necessity? 

I'm on about cycle 1200 or so, and I've finally built a rocket. Since about cycle 1000, my base has been pretty much self-sustaining, mostly solar-powered, and I've done all the research I can without going into space. At the moment, all my dupes are doing is farming shine bugs and pacus for egg shells, making ceramic, and slowly finishing up their mastery of the space cadet designation. While they've been puttering around, I've been trying to fill the steam engine. The nearest steam/cool steam vent is several hundred tiles away. I tried running insulated pipes (tried pretty much all materials except ceramic) in insulated tiles all the way from the vent to the rocket, to no avail (cold damage to pipes about halfway there) - hence the mass production of ceramic. However, based on some preliminary tests, it doesn't look like the ceramic will hold the heat either, and it's probably going to take an inordinate amount of cycles to produce the amount I'd need anyway.

Then, of course, there're all the videos and threads from various sources that will teach you to boil water. It used to be lots of batteries in a tight space, then exploits with the tepidizer and some automation, and now it's usually based around overheating an aquatuner. While all these methods work (or used to), the more I sit in my game waiting for the steam engine to fill while my dupes run back and forth to fix the various components of my aquatuner-based water boiler, I can't help but feel the whole thing is rather silly. A couple weeks ago, I filled a pot with water and put it on the stove to make a box of mac-n-cheese, and then I got distracted by something or other, came into the kitchen 45 minutes later to find an empty pot and a cloud of steam just below the ceiling. In real life, most people's houses contain a device capable of turning water to steam in minutes, but in ONI - where you can refine metals and melt sand and build computers and rockets and solar powered jukeboxes - I can't build a stove?

I realize it very likely comes down to "that would be too easy", but if there's one thing I love about Klei (and that they're exceptionally good at), it's making things difficult - and I mean that in the best way.

But seriously, nerf it all you want, make it output 5000 tonnes of CO2 per second, have it run only on methane, whatever, but please can I just have a stove.

[dallion]

You can use any volcano near your rocket or build your rocket near it, they can boil crazy amount water for your rocket(s), the steam vent is not a good choice.

[theaspect]

1 hour ago, nile_duart said:

just have a stove.

You have 1500C magma in the bottom, with trivial automation you can easily have superheat steam, 100kg/c of steam is just byproduct of cooking dirt. You can automate it to boil water to steam.

[nile_duart]

2 hours ago, dallion said:

You can use any volcano near your rocket or build your rocket near it, they can boil crazy amount water for your rocket(s), the steam vent is not a good choice.

Nearest volcano is even further from the surface. And currently in use to power a steam generator.

51 minutes ago, theaspect said:

You have 1500C magma in the bottom, with trivial automation you can easily have superheat steam, 100kg/c of steam is just byproduct of cooking dirt. You can automate it to boil water to steam.

Yes, I understand how to make steam. That isn't the issue. The issue is that I need the steam to be in a specific place - in this case, the opposite end of the map from what you have pictured. And whenever I have tried to move steam even a moderate distance via insulated piping, the pipes break due to the steam cooling down enough to change states. That said, this sort of further proves my point; the solution you've presented to "how to boil water?" is "drop it on lava", which seems a bit silly for a game that allows you to build rockets and oil refineries, etc. I'm not looking for a simple, easy fix (and if I were, I wouldn't find one), but a machine designed to boil water doesn't really seem out of the question to me. Again, you have one in your kitchen, and I doubt it runs on lava.

[Gwido]

For rocket fuel, there's a good source of heat, not far from the place where you build a rocket.

 

A small hint, it try to broke your base and the surface.

 

But you're right. The "tepidizer" should heat liquid at any temperature according to its material.

[Vincie]

You can use hot crude oil and radiant pipes.

[nile_duart]

12 hours ago, Gwido said:

For rocket fuel, there's a good source of heat, not far from the place where you build a rocket.

 

A small hint, it try to broke your base and the surface.

 

But you're right. The "tepidizer" should heat liquid at any temperature according to its material.

Yeah, I've been tinkering with the regolith and iron that gets deposited by the meteors, but it's been a struggle to automate the process enough to get a consistent stream of steam. Moreover, it doesn't produce particularly hot steam, as regolith doesn't actually hold heat that well - dropping a few hundred grams of water onto a few tiles of regolith has gotten me a hundred grams of low-temp steam and significantly cooled regolith. 

And honestly, I don't have any issue with the tepidizer; it's called that for a reason, it's not designed to boil water. That said, I feel the game could benefit from something similar to the tepidizer, but designed to actually boil water. Maybe a similar structure to the tepidizer, but it would require both power (maybe 1.6K to 2K, or more) and some sort of fuel input (maybe crude oil or petroleum), and would have a gas output (maybe sour gas), and it could only be built out of high-end metals (i.e. steel, niobium, and thermium). Essentially it would still be a mid-late game structure and would still be expensive to build and run, but would eliminate all of the exploity-hackiness of creating steam in the various ways we do now.

[Sasza22]

28 minutes ago, nile_duart said:

hat said, I feel the game could benefit from something similar to the tepidizer, but designed to actually boil water. Maybe a similar structure to the tepidizer, but it would require both power (maybe 1.6K to 2K, or more) and some sort of fuel input (maybe crude oil or petroleum)

There is the aquatuner. It cools the input and outputs heat around itself. Works submerged. Can withstand up to 125^oC before overheating (with no material buffs). It can be used to boil water using water as "fuel". You can use some semi hot water and both cool it down for your base and heat it up for your rocket at the same time.

Takes a lot of power to run and produces best results when using super coolant (most heat output). So i guess it`s the machine you are looking for.

[impyre]

it would be more efficient (power wise) if we had something specifically for heating things up(as opposed to aquatuner), like a beefed up space heater that works in both gas and liquid. A heating element. Dirt cooking, water boiling, etc... granted, if you have a volcano nearby (or some other heat source that's reliable) that's clearly the more efficient way to go... but having zero alternatives for boiling water just kinda sucks.

[nile_duart]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

There is the aquatuner. It cools the input and outputs heat around itself. Works submerged. Can withstand up to 125^oC before overheating (with no material buffs). It can be used to boil water using water as "fuel". You can use some semi hot water and both cool it down for your base and heat it up for your rocket at the same time.

Takes a lot of power to run and produces best results when using super coolant (most heat output). So i guess it`s the machine you are looking for.

Yes. I believe I stated several times that I'm currently using an aquatuner to boil my water. The point is that the aquatuner is not designed to boil water - nothing in the game is. This feels like an oversight seeing as boiling water becomes a necessity at some point for most players.

1 hour ago, impyre said:

it would be more efficient (power wise) if we had something specifically for heating things up(as opposed to aquatuner), like a beefed up space heater that works in both gas and liquid. A heating element. Dirt cooking, water boiling, etc... granted, if you have a volcano nearby (or some other heat source that's reliable) that's clearly the more efficient way to go... but having zero alternatives for boiling water just kinda sucks.

Exactly! A "heating element" is precisely what I'm interested in - something that is designed to create heat for the purpose of boiling water or other liquids, not just something that happens to output heat (usually in inconsistent amounts or as a result of exploiting or breaking the machine) as a byproduct.

[Coolthulhu]

The tepidizer is such a needlessly overspecialized building.

Just scrapping the stupid max temperature and submerge requirements would make it much less terrible at being a worse aquatuner. We have automation for temperature control.

[Gwido]

6 hours ago, nile_duart said:

Yeah, I've been tinkering with the regolith and iron that gets deposited by the meteors, but it's been a struggle to automate the process enough to get a consistent stream of steam. Moreover, it doesn't produce particularly hot steam, as regolith doesn't actually hold heat that well - dropping a few hundred grams of water onto a few tiles of regolith has gotten me a hundred grams of low-temp steam and significantly cooled regolith. 

I was not talking of this source of heat.

[impyre]

I actually really like @Coolthulhu's idea better I think.

[D.L.S.]

About tepidizer... It is stupid to burn fuel in generators and then waste electricity to generate heat, why not just burn fuel to heat directly? Electricity to heat conversion of tepidizer is unrealistically high. Fuel consumption of generators(coal, petrolium, even hydrogen and natural gas) very high as for their power output. Why do all this in such weird way.

 

Ah yes, you can use exploit to bypass tepidizer's max temperature limit, it will work 2 times slower but will boil water.

[Lurve]

15 hours ago, nile_duart said:

The point is that the aquatuner is not designed to boil water - nothing in the game is. This feels like an oversight seeing as boiling water becomes a necessity at some point for most players.

A big chunk of the game is about constructively utilizing byproducts and waste.  It would defeat the purpose if there were a specialized building for every task.  I think it'd be nice if the tepidizer had its cap removed, but I wouldn't regard that as an oversight.  Boiling water is far from an insurmountable problem.

[DraconicSiege]

3 hours ago, Lurve said:

A big chunk of the game is about constructively utilizing byproducts and waste.  It would defeat the purpose if there were a specialized building for every task.  I think it'd be nice if the tepidizer had its cap removed, but I wouldn't regard that as an oversight.  Boiling water is far from an insurmountable problem.

I honestly don't think that boiling water should be a problem to begin with. It should be as simple as having a machine for it since it is such a simple concept and is something that is employed everywhere in human society. What you do with said steam is where the ingenuity should play out and require critical thinking skills.

[nile_duart]

19 hours ago, Gwido said:

I was not talking of this source of heat.

Okay. I mean, you could just say what you're talking about, cuz I'm not interested in guessing.

8 hours ago, Lurve said:

A big chunk of the game is about constructively utilizing byproducts and waste.  It would defeat the purpose if there were a specialized building for every task.  I think it'd be nice if the tepidizer had its cap removed, but I wouldn't regard that as an oversight.  Boiling water is far from an insurmountable problem.

I'm not asking for a specialized building for every task. I'm asking for something that is obvious and necessary. As DraconicSiege said, it's employed everywhere in human society - you have one in your kitchen. Moreover, I think saying that a piece of technology designed to do something simple and necessary is "defeating the purpose" is kind of nonsensical. Say your feet hurt from walking around barefoot; do you put on shoes, or carpet the entire world?

Additionally, for me, creating steam in the quantities and locations that I need it is an insurmountable problem, as I explained in my original post. I realize this might sound like the sort of comment to which you might respond "git gud", but to be fair, you basically already said that, so...

[Neotuck]

@nile_duart

this is a trick I did last year for boiling PW back when sand was limited

by dripping water slowly (under 1kg/s) on a tepidizer you fool it into thinking it's under 70C with every drop of cool water

that allows it to heat up surrounding water past it's boiling point

note this was done a long time ago so I'm not sure if this glitch was patched or not

[Alfons100]

I figured of an idea of a simple, cut and clean ”Burner” structure, which can burn things from coal, petroleum, etc etc, and turns it into a lot of scalding heat and whatever exhaust, if it has any to begin with.

At the moment, if I want to use Petroleum as a simple heat source, I have to make a rocket engine to fly off into space, instead of just, you know, burning it. It would add a good alternative if you dont have any volcanoes on your map.

[Sasza22]

On 8.12.2018 at 5:51 AM, Coolthulhu said:

The tepidizer is such a needlessly overspecialized building.

Just scrapping the stupid max temperature and submerge requirements would make it much less terrible at being a worse aquatuner. We have automation for temperature control.

I think just adding an option for it to "enable boiling" would be a nice fix. It could still be used to heat liquid and stop lets say 10^oC under boiling point and when set to boil it would stop 10^oC above the boiling point. This would also make it only work when submerged (since oxygen boils in pretty low temps).

[dallion]

Regolith is the best way to make steam near space, make a closed isolated room,  use automation drop regolith into the room, pump some water into the room, you will get steam very stable.

[nile_duart]

On 12/8/2018 at 9:19 PM, Neotuck said:

@nile_duart

this is a trick I did last year for boiling PW back when sand was limited

by dripping water slowly (under 1kg/s) on a tepidizer you fool it into thinking it's under 70C with every drop of cool water

that allows it to heat up surrounding water past it's boiling point

note this was done a long time ago so I'm not sure if this glitch was patched or not

That looks a bit exploity to me - which is fine, to each their own. But I try not to use anything hacky or exploity; I don't build things on top of doors or use the four door airlock trick or anything like that. To be fair though, this doesn't look as hacky as a lot of the stuff I've seen, and I've been getting so fed up with the steam engine I'm willing to try pretty much anything. Thanks for the tip

[Craigjw]

On 08/12/2018 at 3:43 PM, D.L.S. said:

About tepidizer... It is stupid to burn fuel in generators and then waste electricity to generate heat, why not just burn fuel to heat directly? Electricity to heat conversion of tepidizer is unrealistically high. Fuel consumption of generators(coal, petrolium, even hydrogen and natural gas) very high as for their power output. Why do all this in such weird way.

Like burning fuel in a generator to make electricity at about 40% max efficiency, then send that to a consumer, who recharges there car and turns it into motion power, again at about 40% max efficiency, therefore, we have a 40% of 40% conversion, which is about 16% efficient electric cars compared to regular fuel burning cars, which work at about 35% max efficiency.

Fuel cars FTW.  Electric cars are just inefficient fuel guzzlers....

On a more relevant not.  I can't remember the last time I started a fire in my kitchen to boil the kettle.