Troubles with overproduction

[Gus Smedstad]

You’d think that producing too much of something would not be a problem. You just stockpile it, and if the stockpile gets too large, you stop. The problem I’m encountering is that my end-game base (cycle 1354) depends a fair bit on recycling, and overproduction is disturbing the equilibrium.

I’ve got a sleet wheat farm, which requires dirt. Dirt I get from cleaning polluted water, and I used to produce more than enough. I get polluted water from petroleum generators, natural gas generators, and carbon skimmers converting CO2 creating by the above.

I’ve been spamming steam turbines, not for power, but for various cooling reasons. Enough of them produce a net positive power production that my controls turned off the petroleum generators. This indirectly turned off my oil wells, because they stop to avoid flooding other stuff (the wells themselves operate even if flooded). This meant no natural gas production from their periodic blow offs.

As a result I’m completely out of dirt.

I could force the petroleum generators back on... but I’m also massively overproducing water. I have approximately 300 tons of water stored, and my steam geyser containment is going to start flooding again soon. The 140 ton hot water tank I thought would be enough of a buffer for those filled up.

I’m not sure what to do with the extra water. Short of just venting it to space. About the only thing I can think of that uses pure water and nothing else is berries. I guess I could grow more and let them decompose for dirt? It’s too bad that reeds use polluted water, rather than pure water, because I could use more reed fiber for insulation.

[Yunru]

Could always open up some more ports on your steam turbine to make them not net positive.

[Coolthulhu]

Spam rockets, power them with LH2

Every kg of LH2 is like 9kg of water, so this should soak it up pretty quickly. The oxygen will probably go to waste, though.

[impyre]

You have to shunt the excess when you feed a system with a constant input but need to reserve processing throughput for recycling activities. Wasting power by overproducing is a good method. If using steam for cooling, I'd recommend venting the steam instead of recycling it. You could set up automation to allow recycling steam only if water is below a certain threshold. This would create even more power excess, but it would make cooling more efficient and help keep water overflow from being as much of a problem.

[Gus Smedstad]

1 hour ago, Yunru said:

Could always open up some more ports on your steam turbine to make them not net positive.

That's not really the problem - I could force my petroleum generators on all the time regardless of steam power production. In fact 3 of the 5 generators are keyed not to battery state, but to water supply. The issue is that if I force them on, my water oversupply problem becomes worse.

I can, of course, vent water to space. That's just as effective as, for example, venting the steam to space as Impyre suggested. Venting's not even that hard a modification; due to the design of my water system, the backup occurs with the geyser water, since backing up recycled water would shut down filtering polluted water for dirt. It's easy enough to set up the geyser overflow tank to send water to the surface if it's full.

I was mostly just expressing how ONI systems tend to be interconnected, and speculating as to what I could do with the water that would be more productive.

Coolthulu's suggestion of electrolyzing it for rockets is more productive than venting the water, but it's still pretty minor usage. Rockets don't just consume that much, given how long they take to return. I guess it'd add up if I were to, say, add 5 more to my current fleet of 3, and instead of running a mix of petroleum and hydrogen rockets, ran hydrogen only and threw away 86% of the oxygen.

I'm hampered a bit by being extremely short of high-quality insulation ("insulation" or ceramic insulation). Lots of projects tend to demand those. I'm completely out of clay, though I could get a trickle by sending rockets to the terrestrial planet, and my insulation production's limited by my drecko herd, not by space materials.

Really, it's probably time I just retired the colony and either started over or waited for the next update that adds significant content. Like those new biomes we're supposed to get in May.

[SharraShimada]

Simple solution: Switch from sleet wheet, to brizzle berrys and pincha peppers. The consume a lot of water (problem water solved), and stuffed berrys are +4, while pepper bread is +5. Not all your dupes need +5 food. 

 

[Saturnus]

With a bit of redesign steam turbines can delete 10kg/s steam meaning they'll completely delete water as fast as you can pump it in. At any rate, if worst comes to worst, vent into space is a solution until you have a more permanent fix. Another way to delete massive amounts of water is to grow thimble reeds.

[Zarquan]

You could vent any excess in to space.  That is the easiest solution, but also the most wasteful.

Another alternative with is to have an overflow setup, where if you are making too much, you use it in a way you otherwise might not. 

For example, if you are making too much petroleum, you can send it to petroleum generators on the grid without any automation on them, wasting the power potentially, but getting the water and saving other power resources.  If your crude oil source is finite, then you should stop making petroleum when you have too much petroleum.

If you are making too much water, you can make fertilizer with the excess, which costs dirt, but also saves dirt if you are using fertilizer synthesizer (and you are growing sleetwheat).  Alternatively, you could send it to electrolyzers for the hydrogen (assuming you have enough oxygen).  Then, you can get power/fuel from the hydrogen and vent any excess oxygen (or oxylite it with dense pufts/refinery).

This, or use infinite storage exploits.

[suicide commando]

Go for berries, set it up so once harvested the berries get transported into an area with pO2 to speed up the rotting process, then ship the rotted gunk to a compost heap.
I'm planning to set up something like this as well, so I can set up a sustainable sleet wheat farm. Making dirt with pH2O like you do is not an option for me, because I run on Solar power.

[Soulwind]

If you need more reeds, set up a polluted water converter (sinks and dupes carrying polluted dirt back and forth type setup), then run that to a reed farm.   Takes care of some of your water excess and gets you reeds easy. 

I just run my toilet output to a reed farm from the get go.

[Gus Smedstad]

8 hours ago, nakomaru said:

I sublimated most of the polluted water in the slime biomes before electrolyzing this time, so consider doing a bit of that next time to never run out of clay again.

Some people use their petrol rocket exhaust to convert their water to pwater, which you could use for fiber, clay or dirt. You get enormous CO2 quantities if you capture it.

I haven't really examined how practical it is to do polluted water -> polluted air -> deoderizers -> clay and oxygen. It's not something I can afford right now because end problem is a lack of dirt, which in turn is caused by a lack of polluted water. My massive surplus of pure water doesn't help that.

If I had significant overproduction of polluted water somehow I might try doing that to make clay, though I'm skeptical because of the very low throughput of the deoderizers.

Capturing the CO2 from my petrol rockets has crossed my mind. I'd need to do something about the temperature though, since straight out of the rocket it's too hot even for thermium skimmers.

 

7 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Simple solution: Switch from sleet wheet, to brizzle berrys and pincha peppers. The consume a lot of water (problem water solved), and stuffed berrys are +4, while pepper bread is +5. Not all your dupes need +5 food. 

I've been running stuffed berries as a backup to my sleet wheat all along. I just let the berries decay if my dupes are eating enough pepper bread and barbecue.

You're incorrect about food quality. It's not +4 and +5. It's +12 and +16 morale, respectively. Though at this point, morale is so high from all the miscellaneous things, I could switch back to berries as my primary food source at any time. I still want to do something about my dirt / polluted water shortage, though.

4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Another way to delete massive amounts of water is to grow thimble reeds.

Thimble reeds want massive amounts of polluted water, not pure water. I mentioned thimble reeds and why I can't use them in my original post.

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Thimble reeds want massive amounts of polluted water, not pure water. I mentioned thimble reeds and why I can't use them in my original post.

You can convert pure water into polluted water.

[Gus Smedstad]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

You can convert pure water into polluted water.

Using carbon dioxide, yes. Which requires a source such as a petroleum or natural gas generator. In my original post, I discussed how my sources of carbon dioxide shut off because I was producing power from steam, and how forcing them back on would increase my water production.

Since my ultimate issue was lack of polluted water to convert to dirt, using polluted water for reeds would be counterproductive. The pollutants are valuable, even if the water itself is not (at least, not at present).

I've since revised my base. I added a mechanism to detect a dirt shortage, and forced all 5 of my petroleum generators on if it's low. I also added a pipe to vent water to space once my hot water reserve gets full. I also added another 20 bristle berry plants, just to convert pure water into compost, though I doubt they'll make much of a dent.

I may still yet take a stab at capturing CO2 exhaust from my petrol rockets. One issue is they're packed quite closely, and I don't have any room to add such a mechanism to rocket #2. There's space next to my science rocket, but since that takes long trips and thus doesn't launch that often, I doubt it'll make much difference.

[Saturnus]

17 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Using carbon dioxide, yes. Which requires a source such as a petroleum or natural gas generator.

It's not the only way. You can make a hygiene hamster wheel.

Or you can make a dupe do endless chores in jet packs and use the exhaust CO2 to convert water into polluted water using a carbon skimmer.

The hygiene hamster wheel is the most effective one as it converts 1000g/s, 3.333(3) times more than the carbon skimmer method.

[Kiros]

Electrolyze it and liquify the oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel?

[fredhp]

Water overproduction? Never happens to me And, if it happens, i probably just expand the Bristle Blossom farm

 

[caffeinated21]

Hydrogen loop to a steam turbine is a simple way to suck the heat out of the rocket silo. No phase change to worry about

[AndreyKl]

16 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

but I’m also massively overproducing water.

Just freeze it (Or electrolyze and freeze). You can store a lot of ice in comparison to liquid/gas storage.

[Gus Smedstad]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

The hygiene hamster wheel is the most effective one as it converts 1000g/s, 3.333(3) times more than the carbon skimmer method.

That thread says it's 340kg/cycle, which is 500 g/s. It's also very labor intensive, a carbon skimmer require no dupe labor, and you can build as many as you want... provided you have the carbon dioxide, of course.

Back of the envelope it's clearly more labor intensive than just ranching Dreckos, if you're using the water for reeds. If the objective is food, ranching produces meat, but not very quickly. Except for Pacus, which aren't sustainable in the late game since they need algae.

19 minutes ago, caffeinated21 said:

Hydrogen loop to a steam turbine is a simple way to suck the heat out of the rocket silo. No phase change to worry about

I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking I'd do some sort of thing where I cooled tiles along the edges of the silo.

5 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

Just freeze it (Or electrolyze and freeze). You can store a lot of ice in comparison to liquid/gas storage.

I've never really gotten the hang of thawing ice. I've got lots of it stored, and I never think of it when I'm in a water crisis.

I guess the most effective method would be, what, build a storage unit where you want it, set it to high priority so dupes move the ice there, and then disallow ice so it falls on the floor?

[Saturnus]

6 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

That thread says it's 340kg/cycle, which is 500 g/s. It's also very labor intensive, a carbon skimmer require no dupe labor, and you can build as many as you want... provided you have the carbon dioxide, of course.

There's been other builds posted that get the full 1000g/s (or very close to it). This was just the only one I could find with a quick search but I know there's a version where a dupe moves slime from a conveyor receptacle to a conveyor loader continuously. Each time he picks up or delivers slime he washes his hands. He literally just stands in one place picking up slime, washes hands, delivers slime, washes hands, rinse repeat, all day long.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Wild or tame, Pacus require no labor and no food to reproduce 1:1 indefinitely.

Yup. They only require algae if you more them to produce more than one egg in it's life cycle. Otherwise you just get meat.

[pacovf]

4 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Wild or tame, Pacus require no labor and no food to reproduce 1:1 indefinitely.

They have a small chance to breed into gulp fish, which will likely die due to their temperature requirements. So they will go extinct eventually, if you don’t breed them every so often.

[AndreyKl]

27 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I guess the most effective method would be, what, build a storage unit where you want it, set it to high priority so dupes move the ice there, and then disallow ice so it falls on the floor?

Big chunks of ice melt too slow. You need to make it into smaller chunks to increase melting speed.

Conveyors probably are the best option - just let dupes dump ice into conveyor system that goes through warm room and 'backlogs', so each individual piece of ice is relatively small and stays on conveyor until they melt. Such system is much easier to scale and heat up.

[Saturnus]

17 minutes ago, pacovf said:

They have a small chance to breed into gulp fish, which will likely die due to their temperature requirements. So they will go extinct eventually, if you don’t breed them every so often.

 

15 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Yeah they die if you kill them.

What nakomaru means is keep the water between 15C and 25C, and there's no chance of ever dying out (except for game glitches which does happen).

[Gus Smedstad]

Pacus are kind of unstable, in my experience. Sometimes they just seem to die off for no obvious reason.

You know how the printer will dump out 8 Pacus on occasion? I built an aquarium under the printer figuring I'd let them just live and reproduce there. It's empty now, they all died without reproducing.

Aside from the barren printer aquarium, I have two others. A breeding aquarium with a feeder, and one where I dump extra eggs. They're both kind of muddling along, even though I'm completely out of algae and slime to feed the breeder.

Dupes aren't allowed into any of those aquariums. All egg shell, meat, and polluted dirt pickup is done by auto-sweeper. The main reason being that Dupes will grab eggs if you allow them in and there's any storage that can take them, and of course the eggs go bad eventually if left in storage.