7 really useful tricks that I would like to share with everyone!

[Z0366]

Hi guys, I know there are numerous guides out there but not many mentioning some useful little tricks that aided me for quite some time. I guess maybe gurus finds them trivial? Anyway, I would like to share some and please add more if you think that these are too basic.

1. Preplacement without triggering the action:

The picture explains better. Have you ever had the case where while you are planning a specific setup some part finished earlier than they should and started running and caused a mess? e.g. the pipe line started pumping before the wall to confine the liquid is built. You could place the power wire or pipes in single grid, then connect them later with your mouse. This is also useful if you are building a completely sealed room before you have automation, you can place the wires safely without triggering them firstly, enclose the room then come back later to trigger it without dupe work.

 

2. building through walls. A cornered  gap prevents gas or liquid leaking through but allows dupes, robot miner or sweeper to "act" through them. This is useful in many scenario. e.g. in the picture below my dupes can safely "close-in" the geyser without ever contact the steam. He will build a block, delete the one outside, build another one below that, to gradually advance inward. (micro management required though). This is also useful in settings such as regolith cleaning and mining, volcano item fetching and so on.

 

3. Under printer pacu tank

Build a door below the printer, when pacu is available, get your dupe to make the door open, IMPORTANT: you have to print the pacu while the dupe is opening the door (yellow bar is showing), earlier, the pacu may flap away. later, the printer become disabled by the openning door AND YOU LOSE THIS PRINTING COMPLETELY.  Remember to close it once the pacu drop down. You can have multiple layer of doors to drop them into your tank if you prefer.

Also, I have 48 pacus in this 3 tile tank (yes, 48), as long as they stay wild, it does not matter how big the tank is. So you get a lot of egg shell and meat free by applying this method.

4.

Door permission works even the door is kept open as shown above. Keep your door open, it helps the dupes to go through faster.

5.

Also shown above. There is no need to power your fridge, just build a basement like I did, CO2 eventually condense in and the food never spoil in CO2. Grilled food is germ-free as long as your chef is clean, so Chlorine is not essential, but it works with chlorine too (spilling chlorine can be troublesome.

 

6. Power free mechanical filter (works on liquid and gas) ( credit to the original author who showed me this trick in the SPOM design below, but forgives me as I couldn't find his post anymore.

The game allows liquid or gas to merge in pipe only if they are of the same element. With this mechanism, you can set up a filter as follows:

1.Build a loop with a valve, set the valve flow rate to 1g/s, build a bridge right before the valve on the loop ( the lower bridge in the blueprint),

2. Inject into the loop with some of the fluid that you want the loop to filter, in my case, hydrogen for the spom. The valve will circle it and fill every pipe grid with that liquid each is 1g.

3. once the loop is filled with the liquid, make your mixture go next to the loop (preferably in opposite direction otherwise the parallerity means there will be 1g left in the mixture fluid, then connect one or several bridges between your mixture pipe and the valve loop.

How it works: the priority setting forces the gas to try to go through the bridge then into the valve, however it can't as flow rate is limited so the extra gas go down out. When the mixure gas enters the connecting bridge( the two bridges up in the blue print), fluid with the same element as the loop will be pushed to the loop, and eventually moves out from the pipe below. Fluid with different element cannot enter and moves on in their original pipe. NOTE:if the removal end  is not fast enough then the loop is filled up then it looses the ability to absorb that element into the loop and the mixture will not be filtered or only partly filtered.

 

7. Flat Water airlock

If you leave a gap (or mesh tile) on both side of the water gap, and use any two different liquid to build the airlock(heavier one goes in firstly), it can stand on its own.

 

Forgot this one.

8. Regolith protective shell:

You dont have to use bunker tile to explore in space (because initially steel is rather rare especially if you do not explore the oil biome for fossile. Build a normal tile, leave at least 4 tiles from the top (maybe 3 is enough??),  yes the meteorite will damage the tiles initially, but soon the regolith build up, and 4 layer thick regolith protect the shell below perfectly anyway. Saving precious steel. You can also build bunker tile firstly, allow regolith to build up, then replace them with normal tile.

[AffinityCraft]

I would just add that if you want have a part of the base in space you need to prevent the heat from entering your base.

[Z0366]

24 minutes ago, AffinityCraft said:

I would just add that if you want have a part of the base in space you need to prevent the heat from entering your base.

To prevent heat from entering, one or two ceramic tiles below a bunker tile is good enough. Or that one can circulate polluted water then sieve to delete heat, or just use oil on the outermost layer to absorb heat and boil to petroleum. A bigger problem is actually how to keep machinery cool in space as they heat up extremely fast if no gas present to absorb the heat.

[Saturnus]

This should really be tip number 1:

Digging vertically up or down, especially for exploration and digging out large areas, is done much faster without using ladders by digging S-bends like this.

[Gus Smedstad]

RE: #3 - don’t build the door directly under the printer. Doing so, as you point out, can disable printing. Just put a pneumatic door (not an airlock) to one side, and the Pacu will flop their way forward it, and drop through it into the tank. Pacu can go right through closed pneumatic doors, but not closed airlock doors.

[SharraShimada]

Sure, fridges work without power, but they wont signal if the are full. And so the dupes will cook and cook and cook forvever. Whats the use of trillions of calories?

[Z0366]

31 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

Sure, fridges work without power, but they wont signal if the are full. And so the dupes will cook and cook and cook forvever. Whats the use of trillions of calories?

I never know that fridge had signal output!!! So they can disable the grill? Amazing! But again, if the source of food is not managed, it's either trillions of calories or kgs of pincha or meat.

49 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

RE: #3 - don’t build the door directly under the printer. Doing so, as you point out, can disable printing. Just put a pneumatic door (not an airlock) to one side, and the Pacu will flop their way forward it, and drop through it into the tank. Pacu can go right through closed pneumatic doors, but not closed airlock doors.

Yes you are correct. I used to do that. but sometimes they take ages to flop to the wrong direction and flop back. I hated that too much. Personally I prefer airlock, your method is better that it takes less monitoring.

6 hours ago, Saturnus said:

This should really be tip number 1:

Digging vertically up or down, especially for exploration and digging out large areas, is done much faster without using ladders by digging S-bends like this.

This is a good one, I forgot this. Yes, I only figured it out after about 200 hours of play...

[Gus Smedstad]

I didn't find that the Pacu took all that long to reach water. They seem to have pathfinding toward water while flopping, though there also appears to be a random element, so they occasionally flop the wrong way.

That said, one possibility would be to link a mechanized airlock door to a critter sensor. The drawback being that critter sensors can't distinguish between Pacu and other critters. In which case you want a two-stage setup like the one you have, so that everything falls on a pneumatic door, which the Pacu will go through and other critters and eggs won't.

EDIT: Note that a critter sensor will require that you turn the area around the printer into a room. It's open in your screenshot and a critter sensor won't work.

[SharraShimada]

36 minutes ago, Z0366 said:

I never know that fridge had signal output!!! So they can disable the grill? Amazing! But again, if the source of food is not managed, it's either trillions of calories or kgs of pincha or meat.

There´s a simple solution: I power my fridges, 1 for food, shutting down the grill. And one for pinchas. If the pincha, fridge is full, it cuts the water to the pincha-farm. Works also for berrys. Water off, cooling (if needed) off, lights out. 

[Gus Smedstad]

I've done a setup where a refrigerator sensor turns off water to a pincha farm. It worked really well, cut down on my polluted water consumption considerably.

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I've done a setup where a refrigerator sensor turns off water to a pincha farm. It worked really well, cut down on my polluted water consumption considerably.

Can do the same for any crops.

Have a refrigerator for each crop.  And one for cooked food to turn off the grill 

[Z0366]

1 hour ago, SharraShimada said:

There´s a simple solution: I power my fridges, 1 for food, shutting down the grill. And one for pinchas. If the pincha, fridge is full, it cuts the water to the pincha-farm. Works also for berrys. Water off, cooling (if needed) off, lights out. 

I see. Make sense. Saving a considerable amount of dupe work too. Thank you for the tip

5 hours ago, Serjik16rus said:

You can build up solar panels from meteorites and turn off car repairs from them, panels will break but meteorites and regolith will not be missed.

Depending on the play style, by the time one starts building steam engine, it is unlikely that they would have got all the glass for the setup as glass is not used ( as a functional material) elsewhere. So tiles might be more convenient. But your solution saves the initial repairing so it is certainly a good trick if one has abundant glass.

[Saturnus]

Instead of having the fridge on constantly. Just check it once per cycle.

A clock sensor on 1% duty cycle turns the power shut off on which powers up the fridge. The clock sensor signal also goes to the set input of a memory gate.

After being powered on the fridge then sends a signal out if it's full. We delay the signal with a 2s buffer gate before sending it to the reset input of a memory gate.

The output of the memory gate will now be negative if the fridge is full, and will remain so until next cycle where the fridge is checked again.

Likewise the output of the memory gate will be positive if the fridge is not full, and will remain so until checked again next cycle.

[Z0366]

25 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Instead of having the fridge on constantly. Just check it once per cycle.

A clock sensor on 1% duty cycle turns the power shut off on which powers up the fridge. The clock sensor signal also goes to the set input of a memory gate.

After being powered on the fridge then sends a signal out if it's full. We delay the signal with a 2s buffer gate before sending it to the reset input of a memory gate.

The output of the memory gate will now be negative if the fridge is full, and will remain so until next cycle where the fridge is checked again.

Likewise the output of the memory gate will be positive if the fridge is not full, and will remain so until checked again next cycle.

So true! Unlike many other machinery, the fridge consumes 120W constantly which is quite a lot. (my 600 cycle base with 3 rockets on average consumes 2000W/s, things go on and off, so 120W constantly is not little). This is also a method that can be applied to many other domains too! Nice!

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

Instead of having the fridge on constantly. Just check it once per cycle.

......  ......  It's so beautiful... 

How have I not even thought to try something like this? 

[Gus Smedstad]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Instead of having the fridge on constantly. Just check it once per cycle.

But then you're losing any refrigeration, and you'll get food decaying. Unless you're storing in chlorine, I guess, but I don't do that personally.

[Sasza22]

One trick i like to do earlygame is not building floors for the rooms until i get all of them done. The i stard doing the floors from the top to bottom. The debris will fall down each time and end up at the bottom of my base saving me a lot of time dupes would spend sweeping it up.

[habuky]

18 hours ago, Z0366 said:

7. Flat Water airlock

If you leave a gap (or mesh tile) on both side of the water gap, and use any two different liquid to build the airlock(heavier one goes in firstly), it can stand on its own.

 

Isn't the mesh tile making your water lock obsolete here? Mesh tiles aren't blocking gas as far as I know.

[KittenIsAGeek]

18 hours ago, Z0366 said:

3. Under printer pacu tank

Build a door below the printer, when pacu is available, get your dupe to make the door open, IMPORTANT: you have to print the pacu while the dupe is opening the door (yellow bar is showing), earlier, the pacu may flap away. later, the printer become disabled by the openning door AND YOU LOSE THIS PRINTING COMPLETELY.  Remember to close it once the pacu drop down. You can have multiple layer of doors to drop them into your tank if you prefer.

Also, I have 48 pacus in this 3 tile tank (yes, 48), as long as they stay wild, it does not matter how big the tank is. So you get a lot of egg shell and meat free by applying this method.

Hahaha.  That's a great idea, but not completely necessary. If there's a navigable path to water, the pacu will consistently flip-flop towards it.   I watched them flip-flop their way across the room, out the open door, fall down the ladder, then splash into the pool.   I should re-load an old save and see if I can make a gif of their progress.  It was very amusing.

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Hahaha.  That's a great idea, but not completely necessary. If there's a navigable path to water, the pacu will consistently flip-flop towards it.   I watched them flip-flop their way across the room, out the open door, fall down the ladder, then splash into the pool.   I should re-load an old save and see if I can make a gif of their progress.  It was very amusing.

That's what I do too. No need for complicated set ups. Here's what I typically do.

[estrogenesys]

15 hours ago, Z0366 said:

I never know that fridge had signal output!!! So they can disable the grill? Amazing! But again, if the source of food is not managed, it's either trillions of calories or kgs of pincha or meat.

16 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Yup. Put a NOT gate between the grill and the fridge. I have 2 grills connected to two fridges- one has cook orders for bread and bbq for my high morale dupes, the other for fried mushroom and gristle berry for everyone else.

[rafker]

5. I just usually use a freezer isolated room (2 wheezworts is enough), and get rid of all CO2

8. Too, usually I cover all space with bunker doors (with diamond tiles just under them) and sun power generators, so I can use them at max potential (built a logic system that closes doors at meteor showers, opens and recloses doors after it stops to get rid of stuck regolith ie. deleting it (cuz it is essentially blocks the sunlight), and then opens again). The only downside is that every meteor shower diamond tiles are getting damaged and need to be fixed, But I never had problems with it (mostly infinite diamonds and glass).

[Z0366]

7 hours ago, rafker said:

5. I just usually use a freezer isolated room (2 wheezworts is enough), and get rid of all CO2

8. Too, usually I cover all space with bunker doors (with diamond tiles just under them) and sun power generators, so I can use them at max potential (built a logic system that closes doors at meteor showers, opens and recloses doors after it stops to get rid of stuck regolith ie. deleting it (cuz it is essentially blocks the sunlight), and then opens again). The only downside is that every meteor shower diamond tiles are getting damaged and need to be fixed, But I never had problems with it (mostly infinite diamonds and glass).

If you use mesh tile, it actually is better than diamond, diamond block 10% light while mesh tile let 100% through. In space mesh tile is itself perfect insulator and never heat up too (due to no gas or liquid inside).

[DaveSatx]

On 4/20/2019 at 12:43 AM, Saturnus said:

This should really be tip number 1:

Digging vertically up or down, especially for exploration and digging out large areas, is done much faster without using ladders by digging S-bends like this.

THIS.  when i saw it was like a bolt of light.. lol  so obvious

 

[Skrivener]

On 4/20/2019 at 2:16 PM, Saturnus said:

 

Spoiler

There's another one in @Saturnus image - pneumatic doors use 100kg metal ore vs two mesh tiles which use 100 each for 200 total. So if you're short on metal or haven't researched mesh tile yet or want the faster build time use doors, and lock them if needed to prevent dupes climbing over when you stack doors. Just remember that falling material will pass through doors when it wouldn't through mesh tiles.

I believe he's also opened the active pneumatic doors (though this could just be automation) - in many cases setting them to open saves a bit of time as dupes don't have to wait for them to open. It won't disable access permissions to do this (though at one point in development it did).

I tend not to use these if I can get away without, but there's nothing wrong with doing it if you prefer to or need to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from your base.