Is polluted water OP?

[Chained Phoenix]

I have now replaced cooling and oxygen generation with off gassing from polluted water.

I use the off gassing to cool my plants (battery pictured but also power and industrial machines) at the top of the map (picture one).  You just need to pump some coolish (30-40 degrees) polluted water into liquid reservoirs, wait until they are full, destroy them, and it's the perfect cooling system, rinse and repeat as necessary.  Easy to do if you have a polluted water geyser on the map as it comes out at ~30 degrees and you don't care about the food poisoning as it's all just venting into space and taking the heat with it.

I then use the near unlimited supply of warm polluted, but germ free, water on the map to do the same except I store it in a room below a heap of deodorisers, which also gives me unlimited clay for ceramics (picture two).

Even the germy water I just clean by throwing it onto a oil geyser which cools the geyser down and wipes out all the germs from my dups sewage (picture three pumping from the germy water on the right to the geyser on the left then out again).

I feel once I worked out how to abuse polluted water, and the fact that even though I use nice pretty clean oxygen in my base there is almost no down side to polluted oxygen (as long as no germs get in obviously), it was way too good.  I like the off-gassing idea but you just get so many advantages from it the game almost becomes too easy

[lowrent_Trent]

I don't get it. What happens when you destroy the full reservoirs in picture 1?

[Khullag]

29 minutes ago, lowrent_Trent said:

I don't get it. What happens when you destroy the full reservoirs in picture 1?

you get 5t bottle of pollutted water to offgas

[badimo]

I would say deodorizer is more likely overpowered but I’m not exactly sure how to change it.  If you nerfed it too much you won’t be able to convert slime biomes to liveable in a reasonable timeframe.  Adding power and heat to deodorizer might make it more fair.

There used to be a limitation on deodorizers because sand was finite but now it is unlimited so something else needs to change to balance it.  Just my two cents...

[Chained Phoenix]

1 hour ago, lowrent_Trent said:

I don't get it. What happens when you destroy the full reservoirs in picture 1?

You get a bottle of polluted water that pumps out polluted oxygen at the same temperature the water was (~30) which means it is then sucked up past the batteries and transformers keeping them cool.  Otherwise if you have them sitting in the near vacuum with no airflow past them they will eventually overheat.  This works even better for power plants where they generate even more heat while operating so need more cooling.

24 minutes ago, badimo said:

I would say deodorizer is more likely overpowered but I’m not exactly sure how to change it.  If you nerfed it too much you won’t be able to convert slime biomes to liveable in a reasonable timeframe.  Adding power and heat to deodorizer might make it more fair.

There used to be a limitation on deodorizers because sand was finite but now it is unlimited so something else needs to change to balance it.  Just my two cents...

Agreed, the use of power would be a nice balancing act.  Maybe instead of having them as just a single square item you can throw everywhere to suck in all the polluted oxygen to filter to clean oxygen make it something you have to pipe gas through to clean it?

I think they did change them a little bit, I've noticed that they always seem to hold a tiny bit of polluted oxygen and germs in them now so once you've finally cleaned out a slime biome you can't just delete them as it will bring some slimelung and polluted oxygen back into the environment.  I don't remember it doing that before the latest patch but maybe I was just less germ conscious back then.

[Sasza22]

So the offgassing is based on the mass of the bottle? Sorry i don`t know the proper maths on that. Does it mean that huge bottles are just offgassing in an insane rate? I thought the offgassing is a flat amount per bottle. If it`s not then maybe it should be.

[Chained Phoenix]

Correct it's based on the amount of water, so a 5t bottle of polluted water will off-gas 200g/s.  It will slow down as the bottle gets smaller and smaller but this will last a while (my first screen shot showed a bottle which was down to under 3t and was off-gassing 110g/s) , certainly long enough for the geyser to generate enough new water to fill up the replacement reservoir and start the cycle over again.  I haven't timed how long they last, I've just been looking at the temperature every now and then and if it's higher than 70 degrees I'll break open then replace a few more reservoirs.

[Cypher-7]

Unless it’s changed recently is polluted oxygen not labeled as (very toxic)? Why can dupes breath it at all without harmful effects? Would punishing players for using polluted water as oxygen generation not help with this balancing act?

[Chained Phoenix]

1 minute ago, Cypher-7 said:

Unless it’s changed recently is polluted oxygen not labeled as (very toxic)? Why can dupes breath it at all without harmful effects? Would punishing players for using polluted water as oxygen generation not help with this balancing act?

It would when people are too lazy to clean it, but as it's so super easy to clean into fresh oxygen why wouldn't you?  I was super surprised when I first started playing to learn that "toxic" actually meant nothing and that hopefully will change soon but until then it's basically just gross looking oxygen that can carry germs.

[Glassyfo]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

So the offgassing is based on the mass of the bottle? Sorry i don`t know the proper maths on that. Does it mean that huge bottles are just offgassing in an insane rate? I thought the offgassing is a flat amount per bottle. If it`s not then maybe it should be.

From my understanding bottled polluted water offgases at the same rate as a pool of polluted water, just all the time.

[Chained Phoenix]

44 minutes ago, bleeter6 said:

From my understanding bottled polluted water offgases at the same rate as a pool of polluted water, just all the time.

The biggest advantage of the bottles is that they aren't effected by a thin layer of water forming on the top which is what usually stops my pools of polluted water from off-gassing (unless I'm careful).  Plus the bottles are easy to remote should you want it to stop it for whatever reason and they can be controlled by only destroying as many reservoirs as you need and having others ready to go at a moments notice, you don't get that level of control with a giant body of water you would have to pump away.  Also the max surface area of a polluted water square is 1.01t while a bottle is 5t in the same space.

[beowulf2010]

45 minutes ago, bleeter6 said:

From my understanding bottled polluted water offgases at the same rate as a pool of polluted water, just all the time.

In my experience, this seems to be correct. Plus, the ability to stack multiple 1,000kg+ bottles in the same tile that would only hold 1 1,000kg tile of unbottled water. 

[chemie]

If you feel it is OP, don't use it.  one could argue the mechanic you describe is an exploit so just don't exploit it and it isn't OP

[Chained Phoenix]

5 hours ago, chemie said:

If you feel it is OP, don't use it.  one could argue the mechanic you describe is an exploit so just don't exploit it and it isn't OP

An exploit is using something that is a bug, like putting a gas vent on the ground with water in front of it so you can massively over fill a room with insanely high gas.  This is as designed, I'm just questioning if they thought through all the things you can do with it.  I would be happy for liquid reservoirs to work the same as the gas ones so that when you destroy them it just leaks everywhere would be an easy fix for example.

[impyre]

@Chained Phoenix

There are a few problems with your statement.

A) You can exploit gameplay imbalances that hardly count as bugs

B) As designed doesn't mean as intended

From Merriam-webster:

2 : to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage

This is the definition most people are using when they use the word "exploit" in this way, except that in the special case of software it implies a flaw in the software. These flaws can be design flaws and/or code flaws. Bugs are specifically code flaws... code acts in an unexpected or unpredictable way. Duplication bugs are common exploits in many games. Design flaws represent more over-arching problems. These occur when the code works as expected, but the players use the features in an unexpected way leading to imbalanced gameplay which trivializes the challenges the developers intended for them to struggle with.

In this case, I think it counts as an exploit... and i'm almost certain it will be addressed. Most likely by putting in some effect from inhaling toxic fumes. If I had to guess, I'd say it would affect health somehow... or the immune system. Also, increasing the amount of sand consumed might help deter players from using pO2 as a primary source of oxygen, without terribly affecting our ability to process slime biomes. Of course, if you're using water for oxygen generation, simply venting the pO2 is also an option. It doesn't *have* to be converted.

[ChickenMadness]

19 hours ago, Chained Phoenix said:

It would when people are too lazy to clean it, but as it's so super easy to clean into fresh oxygen why wouldn't you?  I was super surprised when I first started playing to learn that "toxic" actually meant nothing and that hopefully will change soon but until then it's basically just gross looking oxygen that can carry germs.

Hopefully they will make the polluted oxygen and other gasses actually 'toxic' once they start adding in flammable gas and explosions in future updates..

Another example is that in reality duplicants walking through chlorine gas without an exosuit would be dead. They would have to close their eyes to prevent burning and going blind at the very least. Game mechanics-wise chlorine gas should be impassible without suits or goggles lol. Or rapidly damage duplicant health when walking through. It would give you a reason to seperate gasses and prevent certain toxic gas (chlorine) coming into your base.

I would really like there to be more realistic dangers to duplicants in the game. Really the only way you can get duplicants killed is by doing something really stupid and preventable like sending them into the oil biome without a suit.

Or from the games annoying and buggy building mechanics (entombing them in tiles while building).

Slimelung is also really under-powered right now. The only way you can use the 'hospital' mechanics of the game to deal with disease without deliberately sabotaging your colony is by playing on maximum difficulty (for disease immunity). Unless you're on maximum difficulty you can have your duplicants working inside the slime biomes 24/7 and not become diseased. It's not even a threat having the slimelung come into your base.

I hope they rebalance this whole area at some point. There should reallllly be some actual dire consequences to letting 'deadly diseases' inside your colony.

I've never needed to use the hand sanitsers even though I really want to be able to use them somewhere. Even when I play on max difficulty (for immunity) I've never needed to build them.

And playing on maximum difficulty in general (all settings) doesn't make the game more difficult in a 'fun' way. It's just artificial kind of difficulty increasing numbers everywhere.
Having a setting that makes slimelung spread all over the place faster and also come into contact with food and infect duplicants that way would be a very fun challenge for example. (same for food poisoning, but vice versa)