Gases and preferred direction

[M.C.]

I'm trying to build a glossy drecko farm (QoL Mk II) by filling a room with hydrogen and carbon dioxide. It seems to work very poorly: after a few dozen cycles, almost all CO2 is on the right side of the room and the left side is now 100% hydrogen. It's like CO2 prefers to go to the right instead of spreading equally. I've never had such problems in QoL Mk I. Has anybody else noticed weird stuff like this?

[Neotuck]

looks fine to me

[6Havok9]

1 hour ago, M.C. said:

I'm trying to build a glossy drecko farm (QoL Mk II) by filling a room with hydrogen and carbon dioxide. It seems to work very poorly: after a few dozen cycles, almost all CO2 is on the right side of the room and the left side is now 100% hydrogen. It's like CO2 prefers to go to the right instead of spreading equally. I've never had such problems in QoL Mk I. Has anybody else noticed weird stuff like this?

Is the floor absolutely flat? Are you using airfloor tiles or mesh tiles? I've had this happen twice in about 300 cycles in QoL Mk I, and it fixed by itself once, albeit slowly: it took quite some cycles and co2 kept a strong bias towards the right side, in the order of kgs per tile, with the occasionally stifled plant on the left side due to underpressured gas.

The second time I grew impatient, vacuumed out the room and filled it again with almost exactly 2kg of gas per tile using normal gas vents, with a row of mechanized airlocks separating the two gas zones, co2 being only a 1 tile tall layer. Then I opened all the doors at once. Now it's perfect, never failed again.

I suspect it may be due to gas displacement from airflow tiles on save/load, or the proportion between gases. Or maybe some water leak. Also, I'm confident that heavy gases do still prefer going slightly to the right.

[M.C.]

6 hours ago, 6Havok9 said:

Is the floor absolutely flat? Are you using airfloor tiles or mesh tiles? I've had this happen twice in about 300 cycles in QoL Mk I, and it fixed by itself once, albeit slowly: it took quite some cycles and co2 kept a strong bias towards the right side, in the order of kgs per tile, with the occasionally stifled plant on the left side due to underpressured gas.

The second time I grew impatient, vacuumed out the room and filled it again with almost exactly 2kg of gas per tile using normal gas vents, with a row of mechanized airlocks separating the two gas zones, co2 being only a 1 tile tall layer. Then I opened all the doors at once. Now it's perfect, never failed again.

I suspect it may be due to gas displacement from airflow tiles on save/load, or the proportion between gases. Or maybe some water leak. Also, I'm confident that heavy gases do still prefer going slightly to the right.

The floor wasn't flat (the room looked almost exactly like Neotuck's, except the buildings were in a recess one tile deep). Once I made the floor flat, the effect stopped and now I have a nice stable layer of CO2 at the bottom.

I would have never expected an uneven floor produce such effects, to be honest. It makes no sense.

[Neotuck]

9 minutes ago, M.C. said:

I would have never expected an uneven floor produce such effects, to be honest. It makes no sense.

by preventing the bottom layer of CO2 from moving left to right you are preventing the pressure from equalizing which is why you have more on one side

[M.C.]

5 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

by preventing the bottom layer of CO2 from moving left to right you are preventing the pressure from equalizing which is why you have more on one side

That... makes no sense whatsoever. The room is symmetrical. Gas shouldn't favor one side or the other.

[Neotuck]

Just now, M.C. said:

That... makes no sense whatsoever. The room is symmetrical. Gas shouldn't favor one side or the other.

game physics man, just roll with it

[M.C.]

Just now, Neotuck said:

game physics man, just roll with it

Heh. I guess. I just wish it modeled the reality a bit better.

...Uh, I am perfectly fine with my nifty perpetual motion machine (looks at his SPOM). Why'd you ask?

[tzionut]

My friend. Why you try to make that dreko farm inside your base? Make it outside whit a liquid lock and you will never have problem whit co2. This is my dreko storage area. I prefer my drekos wilds. Under is the area for balm lilies if i want phosphor in future. I disable it because balm lilies grow and for now i can't get rid of the the flowers. 

[Neotuck]

35 minutes ago, tzionut said:

My friend. Why you try to make that dreko farm inside your base? Make it outside whit a liquid lock and you will never have problem whit co2. This is my dreko storage area. I prefer my drekos wilds. Under is the area for balm lilies if i want phosphor in future. I disable it because balm lilies grow and for now i can't get rid of the the flowers. 

kinda derailed from the main topic there

[6Havok9]

5 hours ago, M.C. said:

That... makes no sense whatsoever. The room is symmetrical. Gas shouldn't favor one side or the other.

Co2 appears to go down, then slightly to the right because of how the game tries to distribute a portion of the mass in a tile to adjacent tiles. If there's a conflict between gases, the lighter gas wins when going left and the heavier gas wins when going right.

If you have your buildings in a recess one tile deep, co2 will try to go there, because it's further down. Eventually the layer above will become a conflict zone, if hydrogen pressure is sufficient. If the floor is flat, co2 will have nowhere to go, and will stay in the bottom layer. However, if something happens that causes enough hydrogen to occupy a tile on the bottom layer it can lead to the situation you described, which can take a long time to fix itself.

https://imgur.com/a/HvW7LmQ explains gas distribution a little in a section. It's black magic, literally