Summarising Cooling Methods Post Fixed Output Temps

[Troxism]

The change to modify the way fixed output temps work is as can be already seen a pretty controversial change. Some people have said that there are basically no alternatives to fixed output temps, or that the alternatives are too situational. Overall the conversation seems to be kind of all over the place and some seem to be overlooking some cooling methods that currently exist which confuses the issue of if further changes are needed or not.

So here is a (relatively brief) summary of all the cooling methods that I can think of.

Cooling Methods Post Fixed Output Temps

Steam Turbines 

These haven't changed, and just like before are pretty much the best way to get rid of heat, or even turn it to productive use. The issues are that they require plastic to build, and for many applications have to be paired with Steel Aquatuners. These resources can be acquired fairly rapidly if you set your mind to it, and have solid game knowledge, but you still need some kind of cooling before you reach this point. and less experienced players often struggle with setting these up, or at the very least, doing so quickly. Another 'problem' is that they tend to become a one-size fits all solution to all cooling past the early game, and this does somewhat limit variety, as other alternatives just aren't as good in most cases, although this is more of a lack of good alternatives problem.

Generator Output Temps (Nerfed considerably, another patch changed this shortly after posting, gens now have min output temps of 40C for water, 110C for CO2)

Petroleum (and Gas) Generators still output at building temperature, rather then being based on the input temperature. This means if you can pay the relatively low cost to keep the generator cooled, you can reap a significant mass of very cold polluted water to use as coolant for other purposes (and the output for a Petroleum Generator can be used for more cooling then it costs to cool the generators in the first place). In fact, it is possible to cool Petrol Gens with their own output water by putting an Aquatuner in their output water, and having that cool a cooling loop that cools the generators (Gas Gens have a much thinner margin due to much lower output water mass). The only problem with this is that it does heat up the output water noticeably, so it won't be quite as cold if you do this, but it will keep it stable at least.

Heat Sinks and Mass Destruction

Basically, you can use things as a heat sink for Aquatuners/Thermoregulators and then destroy the 'coolant' once it becomes too hot to pump/handle. An example would be using the output Hydrogen from Electrolysis to cool Thermoregulators, and then once the hydrogen heats up above 120C, pump it into a Hydrogen Generator to destroy it and take the heat with it. Using steel pumps/thermoregs you could go to nearly 260C, which would be much more effective and with those, you could actually cool the output oxygen from Electrolysis using the output Hydrogen, even if you were getting 95C hydrogen/oxygen from 95C water post output temps change;

Further on the topic of electrolysis, you can heat up water to around 95C and destroy it in the electrolyser. While this will produce 95C hydrogen and 95C oxygen with the changes, as described you could either use the hydrogen as coolant, or just destroy it right away, and the oxygen has FAR less heat capacity then the water so you could literally use part of the cooling potential of the input water just to cool the output oxygen, and still come out ahead. Good sources for this initial coolant water would be the 30C salt water pools in the Tidal Pools biome, and the 30C polluted water in the Slime Biomes. You would then Desalinate/Sieve it as it started getting too hot, and even though it will pass through the sieve at high temp, you would just put it straight into the electrolyser.

Petroleum is another great thing to dump heat into and then destroy, as it can be rapidly burned in generators, and can be heated up to very hot temperatures as long as it stays in the pipes to avoid having pump heat issues. As an example, you can cycle it through a metal refinery as coolant until it gets too hot and then burn it up, without even having to pump it, so you could get it up to over 400C and delete A LOT of heat this way, although tbh at that point you may as well just use a turbine instead.

Finally, you can destroy basically any liquid or gas by just venting it into space (or using specifically designed door crushers, but that is arguably exploiting depending on who you ask). Ethanol Gas is actually a pretty good example of where this would apply, as it has a high heat capacity and is very conductive, meaning it could also be used as coolant for a Steel Aquatuner, and then vented to space once it is too hot via Steel Gas Pumps.

Lumber Based Cooling

Lumber from trees is output 300kg per harvest at a fixed 20C with a high SHC (3.470), and can still be used as coolant via putting it on conveyor rails or at least dumping it in spots that need cooling, although heat exchange with debris piles is very slow. This is actually surprisingly strong as a cooling method currently if you use the rails. The heated lumber can then be destroyed via a Wood Generator.

Using Biome Thermal Mass as a Heat Sink

The previous examples often talk about using Steel pumps or Aquatuners, and a fair question is 'well how do I make enough Steel early in the game for that'? Personally I usually use the 30C pools of Salt or Polluted Water that are found on almost every map (or you could melt some ice from an ice biome), and use automation to cycle it through a metal refinery until it becomes too hot to go another round without bursting the pipes. At this point it can be dumped into a cold biome, like rust/ice to soak up the heat and bring the liquid back down to a moderate temperature for use in other ways. Alternatively, even if you have no cold biome nearby, you could just dump the hot liquid in an insulated and sealed 'storage area' and deal with it later once you have the tools to do so. In the case of the ice biome, it also generates extra water by melting more ice, basically feeding back into the whole process if desired. If you roll the Frozen Core trait, you get a 'free' -100C biome mostly full of ice, which makes an amazing heat sink as well. Another obvious method would be to just mine ice from an ice biome and build tempshift plates out of it to melt it into your water supply to cool it off and use that for cooling, ie bringing the cold to your base.

Obviously this method doesn't work forever as eventually you will overheat the entire biome, but can buy you a lot of time until you can set up things like Steam Turbines or various mass destruction methods outlined earlier as more permanent solutions.

Ice Makers/Ice Fans

While Ice Makers were changed to output much of the heat they take from the water they convert into ice, they still do delete a portion of the heat. Ice Fans also do destroy some extra heat (or at least are intended to, but tbh I haven't seen anyone really mess with these machines as they weren't really needed between fixed temp outputs, Wheezeworts and Steam Turbines before). These can be researched early game and aren't really dependant on specific biomes or resources, as every start has SOME water to work with, and you can just recycle the water over and over. The biggest issue is you need a decent bit of dupe labour for the whole process so it is a short term solution

Wheezeworts/AETNs

Wheezeworts were nerfed to require fertilizer, but do still function. AETNs haven't been changed at all, and delete decent amounts of heat (a lot of people build their electrolysers systems near them and use them to cool the whole operation, although I would generally try to avoid cooling the output Hydrogen if you wanted to be efficient about it and just use them to cool the oxygen via radiant pipes). These are situational and generally lower throughput methods, since not every map even has ice biomes (and therefore Wheezeworts/AETNs).

Slush/Polluted/Salt Geysers

Slush geysers output -10C water, and Polluted/Salt output at 30C, making these pretty good sources of coolant since they also tend to be very high throughput. The biggest problem is these are seed dependant and many maps do not have any of these geysers.

Commentary/My Thoughts

Technically I didn't mention Regolith based cooling, but that basically involves using Thermium and is very late game, so it's not really relevant to the conversation as most of the concern is about early to mid game.

Something that obviously jumps out is that some of these methods require having the ice biome on your map (wheezes, AETNs, using the ice biome as a heat sink), or at least glaciers/frozen core. Not every map has the ice biome, although even those maps can roll glaciers/Frozen Core (glaciers are also currently bugged and start at the biome's temp, but that seems clearly unintended). Slush Geysers also kind of trivialise the difficulty of cooling, but again, are very random. This means the main method of cooling in the very early game that isn't dependant on specific maps is Ice Makers/Ice Fans. Klei will have to look at them carefully to see if they are sufficient for early game needs, and the question is really going to come down to what player experience pans out. It is also worth considering if having such powerful cooling methods like Slush Geysers is too much of an RNG 'swing' on overall difficulty. Might be worth considering improving the alternative methods, but nerfing Slush Geyser outputs.

I will admit I do find the decision to nerf Wheezeworts/Ice Makers a bit confusing in the context of these changes as a lot of people relied heavily on the sieve and it's a pretty big shock to have to completely change everything you are doing, so nerfing the fallback options seems odd.

I will say that running bases without relying on fixed temp outputs was already possible before with these various methods (proven in practice, and without any cold geyser types), so the question is more about if it needs to get easier to play without fixed temp outputs, rather then if it is possible.

Another problem I touched on is that there seems to be a lack of variety in cooling methods on the high end, as basically all of the best cooling methods rely in either turbines or mass destruction of some sort. This is something that could maybe use a second look.

Either way I am generally positive about the change, but I do feel certain alternative cooling methods could use a second look now that fixed output temps are gone in order to ease the transition, and there might be room for the addition of another cooling method simply for the purposes of variety.

[camelot]

Carbon skimmer still output polluted water at 40 degree C right?

[BabiesWitRabies]

Just create a radiator and cool everything so the output temp is already low...

I do this already and didn't even notice the change.

[Troxism]

28 minutes ago, camelot said:

Carbon skimmer still output polluted water at 40 degree C right?

Haven't tested, but they should be clamped at 40C, so feeding 95C input should give 95C output, but anything below 40C should give 40C. It's possible they were overlooked however, but even if that is the case it is likely it will be changed shortly.

[nakomaru]

Great synopsis and concerns. Especially the ice maker nerf was silly. I'm fine to tech to turbine cooling and enjoy building powerful systems with them, and having them as The Best Cooling is fine (there will always be something), but now that's all I see worth the effort, which is sad.

Bring back decent ice maker heat deletion! Reconsider wild wheeze changes. Thank you.

[camelot]

3 hours ago, Troxism said:

Haven't tested, but they should be clamped at 40C, so feeding 95C input should give 95C output, but anything below 40C should give 40C. It's possible they were overlooked however, but even if that is the case it is likely it will be changed shortly.

By this logic, outputs of all generators and electrolyzers should be changed too (Petro, NG, Coal, Wood...), except for Steam Turbine because its main purpose is to cool things down. So they will need to change a lot of things

[lunazone]

I like the push they're trying to do to make players use the proper equipment for the job.

[Nightinggale]

8 hours ago, camelot said:

Carbon skimmer still output polluted water at 40 degree C right?

The change is to the ElementConverter component, not the water sieve specifically, meaning the "heats up, but can't cool" apply to a bunch of buildings, including the carbon skimmer. Generally speaking, it applies to everything, which has input X, output Y kind of setups and isn't restricted to just buildings since it can also be used by plants and critters. However there are cases where they "heat up" to 0 K or use body temperature, meaning making a list of affected buildings will require reviewing of each case where ElementConverter is used and I'm not doing that.

What does catch my eye is the polymer press. Now the plastic will have the same temperature as the input oil. This means you have to really cool the output of your oil cooker or you will end up with melted plastic.

[Dosephshih]

I remember oil well output temperate is also fixed, so now we can have some cool oil output? 

[chemie]

A good way to destroy heat is to feed 85C PW to peppers which provides indirect cooling via tuners dumping to the PW.

 

I did not realize the electrolyzer change.  So is gold mandatory now to avoid overheating electros (when feeding geyser water)?  What do you do early game, before steel, on maps without gold now?

[Gurgel]

6 hours ago, Squeegee said:

I like the push they're trying to do to make players use the proper equipment for the job.

And I dislike it. In fact, if they keep pushing this, they will push me to stop playing their game. Rule-following is boring and uninteresting. 

Also, in actual engineering, there is no "proper" equipment. There are just primary and secondary functions and it is entirely common to use some piece of equipment for one of its secondary functions, thereby, incidentally, making that the primary one.

[chemie]

6 hours ago, Squeegee said:

I like the push they're trying to do to make players use the proper equipment for the job.

What proper equipment?  You basically have to have a bunch of steam turbines all over to deal with heat.  For example, the metal refinery.  That is a lot of heat to delete.  

I think for new players, heat will be the death of their game and their interest in ONI.

[Junksteel]

46 minutes ago, chemie said:

A good way to destroy heat is to feed 85C PW to peppers which provides indirect cooling via tuners dumping to the PW.

 

I did not realize the electrolyzer change.  So is gold mandatory now to avoid overheating electros (when feeding geyser water)?  What do you do early game, before steel, on maps without gold now?

The problem is: there is no "before steel". I'm playing in Arboria (no gold) since release and this change just makes everything so steam turbine focused that I don't even want to play my saves or start a new one. I never used water sieve as a cooling method but I was just considering it because of the recent nerfs. Now it's not even an option. All we have is that damn steam turbine. I know how to build that setup, it's just boring having it as a mandatory thing to do in order to not cook the base.

[nakomaru]

1 hour ago, Nightinggale said:

it can also be used by plants and critters. However there are cases where they "heat up" to 0 K or use body temperature, meaning making a list of affected buildings will require reviewing of each case where ElementConverter is used and I'm not doing that.

I'm gonna have to check out those plants. Previously all plants dropped at fixed temperatures, which would actually throw off the heat balance for wild farms.

I hope they keep body temp if so. Much more intuitive for a 35C pincha plant to drop 35C produce.

[Junksteel]

30 minutes ago, chemie said:

I think for new players, heat will be the death of their game and their interest in ONI.

Not only for new players I dare to say.

[natanstarke]

41 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

And I dislike it. In fact, if they keep pushing this, they will push me to stop playing their game. Rule-following is boring and uninteresting. 

I agree ill not stop playing but the game is more and more having the feeling of  " you have to fo this way or youre doomed". Before you had cool choices good for every situation i liked to use ice from ice machines to cool my main pool and my main base generators, worts to cool the output oxygen of electrolyzers early game, then later switched to thermo regulators late game and used this same worts next to steam turbines to cool space or volcanos. The only building i do not used too much was aetn and icefan but i liked them both as options for some setups like using the icefan for cooling crops in emergencys are a cool concept! Im feeling that now i need to rush turbines, dreckos, glossy dreckos mealwood giant farms and oil/ice biome always. " in maps with mishroom and slime things got way easier". All things consider icemaker nerf could be rerolled and the rest i will need to test more to talk more " my game was crashing non stop because of pipes change so i need to see when possible.

 

[Nightinggale]

Just now, Gurgel said:

And I dislike it. In fact, if they keep pushing this, they will push me to stop playing their game. Rule-following is boring and uninteresting. 

I agree. What makes ONI special is the sandbox gameplay and player freedom to do stuff the game designers didn't even consider. I think my modded sensors are in the true spirit of ONI. They are more like lego bricks than single purpose built. Sure some uses are more obvious than others, but it's up to the user to figure out how to put them together to get the result you want. In fact when I got a savegame in a bug report, I looked around and thought "oh yeah, they can be used for that too. I didn't think of that".

The new water sieve does the polar opposite of that. Players figured out a way to use it and then the update killed that approach. It doesn't add to the player freedom. Instead it takes away from the player freedom.

However mods can't solve the real problem here because most players will play without mods. Klei needs to make temperature controls easier to handle or they will get plenty of "unavoidable heat death" reviews.

25 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

I'm gonna have to check out those plants. Previously all plants dropped at fixed temperatures, which would actually throw off the heat balance for wild farms.

I hope they keep body temp if so. Much more intuitive for a 35C pincha plant to drop 35C produce.

The dropping of harvested stuff (seeds, food, lumber etc) isn't done with ElementConverter and should be unaffected. This is about mass per second conversions. So far I located OxyFerns and Gulp Fish and they both output at body temperature.

[bobucles]

 So far I located OxyFerns and Gulp Fish and they both output at body temperature.

That actually sounds pretty neat. It'd be fun to use critters as a method of temperature management. 

[Coolthulhu]

2 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

I agree. What makes ONI special is the sandbox gameplay and player freedom to do stuff the game designers didn't even consider.

The new water sieve does the polar opposite of that. Players figured out a way to use it and then the update killed that approach. It doesn't add to the player freedom. Instead it takes away from the player freedom.

The problem is, it became the meta and trivialized temperature management, also making worts and AETNs pointless and rendering obsolete the idea that you should avoid producing heat.

Player freedom doesn't come from being able to do "anything" - there's debug mode (and mods) for that, so you can already do that. It comes from being able to choose out of multitude of viable, sensible options. Being able to do something you don't want to do doesn't add much to that, and sieving was so strong, it made subtler methods pointless. Sometimes "removing freedom" is the best way to end up with more actual freedom than before - this is one of those cases.

If steam turbine and generator output temp stop being heat deleters, heat management will finally become a challenge.

[Prince Mandor]

Another two cooling methods:

Magically convert hot steam in extremely cold hydrogen

Create Icy-cold water by mass duplication

In case, this water is too cold for our purposes, we can magically heat it up to 40° by using scimmer-sieve

[Junksteel]

18 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Player freedom doesn't come from being able to do "anything" - there's debug mode (and mods) for that, so you can already do that. It comes from being able to choose out of multitude of viable, sensible options.

The options were severely nerfed. Now output isn't a heat deleter but a heat increaser.

What are those viable options besides steam turbine? I can't see anything effective. World traits and rigged seeds? Sounds fun...

[Gurgel]

2 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

It comes from being able to choose out of multitude of viable, sensible options.

And who decides what "sensible" is? You? I don't think so. If a machine has a certain functionality, then it is sensible to use it. And if a water sieve cools stuff under certain conditions, then to use it for that is entirely sensible. An engineering prof of mine called that "cooperating without mercy". It does fit. Whatever some device does, it is not only fair game to use that, it is mandatory to do so for good engineering. In actual engineering, everything that works is acceptable and deserves respect.

I really don't get all the insistence that everything has to be "proper", "sensible" and "follow the rules". The whole approach is broken and the definition used for "sensible" and "proper" are that of a bureaucrat, not that of an engineer. If you want a nice "proper" simulation of a bureaucracy where everything follows the rules and there is only obvious behaviors (i.e. the very definition of a dysfunctional environment), this is not the place to find that.

Incidentally, the new and devalued water sieve is just as "broken" as it was before. That is if you think it was broken before. I do not. You just need to turn things around and use it as a heater (e.g. on Rime) and you get the behavior some people apparently have deep emotional troubles dealing with. 

[Nightinggale]

4 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Player freedom doesn't come from being able to do "anything" - there's debug mode (and mods) for that, so you can already do that. It comes from being able to choose out of multitude of viable, sensible options. Being able to do something you don't want to do doesn't add much to that, and sieving was so strong, it made subtler methods pointless. Sometimes "removing freedom" is the best way to end up with more actual freedom than before - this is one of those cases.

I didn't ask for debug mode. What I'm saying is that ONI is the kind of game where it's possible to find 10-20 different solutions to the same problem. Yes they should be balanced to make most of the solutions reasonable. Some will always be better than others, but restrictions in techs, construction cost, size, power etc should mean there should be a place for all of them.

The problem here is rather than rebalancing commonly used approaches, they nerf or remove solutions in order to push all of us to use whatever they had in mind. This takes away the freedom of the player and ONI becomes more of a "do as you are told" type of game, which is precisely the type of game the typical ONI player wants to avoid.

11 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

The problem is, it became the meta and trivialized temperature management, also making worts and AETNs pointless and rendering obsolete the idea that you should avoid producing heat.

While I like the idea of controlling temperature by controlling heat production, everything you said there falls completely apart if you play on a volcanic active map. They nerfed heat deletion and added volcanoes at the same time. You can't turn off vents/geysers, meaning you have a heat source you can't control. Without active heat deletion tools, geysers and particularly volcanoes will result in certain heat death.

[Trego]

2 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

And who decides what "sensible" is?....

Incidentally, the new and devalued water sieve is just as "broken" as it was before. That is if you think it was broken before. I do not. You just need to turn things around and use it as a heater (e.g. on Rime) and you get the behavior some people apparently have deep emotional troubles dealing with. n

Klei decides, obviously.  The new water sieve is not just as 'broken' as it was before.  heat creation machines are tuned to be much more powerful than cooling machines are, in the world of ONI.  since the tepidizer is ridiculously more powerful than the AETN, the water sieve is much less broken than before, and is only broken on 1 of the nine asteroids.

[goboking]

6 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

What are those viable options besides steam turbine?

• Wheezeworts (though less so now)
• Ice Makers
• AETNs
• Thermo Regulators
• Aquatuners
• Radiators

Any combination of the above will work fine for keeping a base cool.