Latent Heat Cooling for farming on Aridio

[avc15]

Hi guys, I'm on Aridio and I've tried a few different things for food production now. Ranching is a pretty obvious choice but I didn't like how long it took to start collecting eggs. This is about how to bootstrap a farm with reasonably low effort and the least upkeep possible.

Before everything - (edit) I originally had some ice-ee fans in here, they were needed to get things set up & had to be run just once in a while. Eventually the system cools faster than you need to the point where the fans should be deconstructed for more farm plots. You might even stop supplying ice every once in a while because you'll find the area gets over-cooled a bit on its own. Efficiency and all that, turn off the ice maker.

Okay. I needed to switch away from mush bars as quickly as possible. My game started with only about 30T of water, and I have about half left. It's enough to fund exploration for a geyser:

So here's what it's about. Melting small amounts of ice you can water-cool your farm. It doesn't tie up much water at all, a few hundred kg of manufactured ice is all. And this lets us leave our cooling fans idle almost all the time, only turning them on briefly now and again.

First your dupes' starting attributes are critical. I started with a +7 researcher, a +3/+3 farmer/plumber (who is set to delivery during construction) and a +3/+3 excavator/builder. YMMV. Later on I took 3 additional dupes with desirable skills.

Here's the thing, be a minimalist. Over-building, over-digging, etc will kill your colony by heat, suffocation or starvation.

 

So here's the idea. All 4 compactors hold ice from the ice machine. Turn the ice machine off when you have over 300kg or so on hand, it just becomes a waste of power.

The compactors on the left are set to a moderate priority (6) and the ones on the right are set to a high priority (8). The compactor on the right of each row only holds 5 kg, the other two are at about 300kg each. This way, as the heat creeps in, that 5kg melts and a little drip of cold water goes into the basin. Your dupes will come down and move 5kg more to the right, and it starts all over. Drip, drip.

You can automate everything later, except the ice-e fans.

(edit) Now, the ice-e fans: I had some here at first to forcefully cool down the area, and then I needed to run them for a couple minutes each every few cycles for a while. But at some point they become completely unneeded and I since deconstructed them.

(edit) This picture is at cycle 150, after I've kind of just moved on to other things. The system has been running happily for a long time.

You can start harvesting mealwood at around cycle 20 using this approach as long as you don't try to build the whole thing at once. If you're careful, you'll barely use any dupe time at all to prep the area, and keep your ice machine running, but you'll spend a fair bit of time researching the techs you need and building the thing.

One last thing. The *lowest* effort way to get oxygen in the first 50 cycles is to scavenge the scorched biomes for algae, especially since I was already using water to make food at first. I suggest only cultivating oxy vines after finding a more sustainable source of water.

(pictures from cycle 50 below)

 

[Darkin Coaled]

you don't need the fans. I've tried something like this after you posted it and I put my ice melting container on one side of the farm submerged in the water channel. of you seal the farm off a bit more then the coldest bits will be on the edges and the middle will cool down once and never heat up again much due to new air and cold water flowing in from the cold edges. Can't make a screenshot at the moment.

[chemie]

19 minutes ago, Darkin Coaled said:

you don't need the fans. I've tried something like this after you posted it and I put my ice melting container on one side of the farm submerged in the water channel. of you seal the farm off a bit more then the coldest bits will be on the edges and the middle will cool down once and never heat up again much due to new air and cold water flowing in from the cold edges. Can't make a screenshot at the moment.

agree.  The fans are useless.  The ice is what you want and a way to deal with the melted water.

[Lurve]

 

16 hours ago, avc15 said:

Here's the thing, be a minimalist.

Hold my liceloaf and watch this.

Your start POI is cool.  Cool enough to chill down a farm just above that printing pod.  Absolutely no extra infrastructure necessary.

Spoiler

Where you DO need to cool, a little extra insulation and a single ice maker will do you just fine.  Use a pump to pick up the melted ice and irrigate with it.

Spoiler

 

[avc15]

42 minutes ago, chemie said:

agree.  The fans are useless.  The ice is what you want and a way to deal with the melted water.

Indeed, I didn't seem to need them at all anymore once the area was correctly set up. A few cycles later I deconstructed them and added more farm plots.

23 minutes ago, Lurve said:

Your start POI is cool.  Cool enough to chill down a farm just above that printing pod.  Absolutely no extra infrastructure necessary.

My map wasn't having it. I had a couple spots where wild mealwood was growing at first but the moment I disturbed those areas everything stifled.

[Lurve]

4 hours ago, avc15 said:

My map wasn't having it. I had a couple spots where wild mealwood was growing at first but the moment I disturbed those areas everything stifled.

Yeah, I have a map like that now.  After another disappointing Volcanea start (I got 30 cycles in before thinking to check if any heat was leaking - it wasn't), I went back to Aridio.  I'm very happy with my current seed: 817795410.  It has both volcanic features and boulders that pierce the abyssalite in a few places, which will be a problem to fight eventually.  But the start biome is TINY and you're at ~35C from day 1, so it's much more of a challenge.