How should temperature management work?

[bobucles]

2 hours ago, Grey0ne said:

The side of an object in space that faces away from the sun cools down very, very quickly.

But 90% of the cycle is daytime. Everything would heat up far more than it cools off.

Our own Earth is not exempt from hot sun either. Our simple planet's orbital ring is actually around 270C from the sun. If the planet didn't spin half the day away we'd have a BAD time.

[Wussling]

IRL: Heat dissipates too fast to be harnessed.

ONI: Heat dissipates too slow and it's causing damage.

But yeah, I think heat radiation device thing can ease heat deletion for noobs such as I. It's not like heat accumulation isn't a problem IRL, it's just that we have limited supply of carbon and every drop of heat is too useful to dump into outer space. The dupes don't have the same problem though. The plants there creates calories out of water and the geysers conjure water out of thin air. Problem IRL can translate into solutions in ONI.

[Nightinggale]

9 hours ago, Gurgel said:

1. An "air conditioner". This is a two-part device with a fluid-loop and some power need. One takes in heat and puts it into the liquid. That one is missing at the moment. The other part moves the heat from the liquid to the environment, similar to an aqua-tuner.

What I would do here is make the whole thing early-game friendly: Takes, say, 2 x 60W of power and pumping is already included in one of the parts. Moves a certain amount of DTUs per cycle. Initial loading with a selectable fluid by a dupe, no need for any "pipe magic". And automatic shut-off when either component gets withing 10C of vaporization or freezing temp. Of course, this needs to pump slower than the available pumps, and it must not be massively more efficient than the aquatuner and the like. And there would be quite a few applications for using only one of the components.  

I like this idea. I would imagine it could work something like an ice maker, but with piped input and output. It could then have a slider to select output temperature. The problem would be to nerf it enough to make sure it's not an aquatuner replacement. Maybe make it reduce cooling power the bigger the temperature difference is between the liquid's current temperature and the building. This requires the building to be cooled, but if you can't submerge it, then there will be a cooling challenge.

9 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Initial loading with a selectable fluid by a dupe, no need for any "pipe magic".

How about a bottle emptier building with piped output? Dupes will add bottles to it as long as there isn't any bottle already. If the pipe is full, it can't empty the bottle and it stalls. When stalled, the bottle won't empty and no new deliver bottle chore will be created. This would be a huge QOL for filling any loop, cooling or otherwise.

9 hours ago, Ambaire said:

Why should the ice maker delete heat? The ice maker and ice fan are ways of moving heat around.

While I agree with you (mostly), the problem is that map heats up by itself (geysers and stuff) and machines heat up. If there is no way of "cooling the map", but only move heat around, the maps will get hotter and hotter. People got around this with the water sieve to kill the newly generated heat. Now we need something else to avoid an uncontrollable heating of the map. This is particularly important now that we have volcanic active maps, which should be playable. It should be balanced and not like inputting 100 C water into a water sieve.

7 hours ago, Giltirn said:

If you can't make a 100% sustainable base then "survival" is merely just going as long as you can before your inevitable demise, with the cycle count being some dark twisted score. I personally do not want to play such a game. Sustainability is my primary focus when I play, as I expect it is for many others.

I fully agree. Imagine a world where water couldn't be produced. You would spend water and once you are out, you die. It doesn't matter how great a base you made, you are out because the game will kill you regardless of how good you are. Building large bases and having fun doing so requires knowing that the base will not be taken away from you due to some counter.

This is why heat deletion is required and it shouldn't rely on some non-renewable resource. You should be able to set up loops of production to sustain the base and then you move on to your next task. Sure you go back to already finished tasks to say increase the quality of food or increase food production because you have more dupes, but designing the game to "run out" is a bad idea. It kills the fun for the long term builder type of player.

9 hours ago, pacovf said:

My hope is that they will add some kind of pipe that allows direct exchange between a building and the pipe, no intermediate medium necessary.

I have a mod like that and there is a very good reason why I haven't released it. It completely changes the game as liquid cooled buildings is way too overpowered. I tried nerfing it, but water is way too good at cooling buildings.

We still need a decent way of cooling buildings in space (particularly robo miners), but just adding a way to liquid cool them breaks more than it will fix.

 

1 hour ago, Hedning said:

1. Cooling from farming (WW)
2. Cooling from exploration (AETN)
3. Cooling from industry (steam engine/aquatuner)
4. Cooling from game mechanics (using either mass annihilation [eg hydrogen generator] or body temp outputs [eg petroleum generator])

(I added the numbers to the quote. It makes it easier to refer to each line)

I didn't include 1+2 in OP. The issue I have with those is that they are map dependent. You by chance starts without any of those within reasonable range or some map doesn't include them at all, either consistently or by chance. This means while certainly useful, the game should be designed to allow the player to not have a horrible time without them.

4 feels a bit like an exploit like the water sieve cooling. It's much harder to do something about and it can't be exploited to the same scale as a water sieve-carbon skimmer loop, but it's still of the same nature. While it will most likely stay in the game (fixes would likely be even worse), it shouldn't be the way to deal with heat. It totally clashes with lesson #4 because it's not intuitive to the player and the game should be playable without discovering this exploit.

What's left is 3. Yes it's fine, but it's late game. Also as we learned from the... incident.... yesterday, people generally like the steam turbine, but only if it's an option. They don't like to be forced to use it.

[Ambaire]

26 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

If there is no way of "cooling the map", but only move heat around, the maps will get hotter and hotter.

Space exists. Thermo tune a geyser output then vent it to space. Bam, cooling.

[Nightinggale]

2 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

Space exists. Thermo tune a geyser output then vent it to space. Bam, cooling.

Already mentioned as a solution. It's late game, non-intuitive and with a loss of elements. This means while it should be usable, it's not the answer to make the heat management gameplay fun for everybody.

[Hedning]

1 hour ago, Darkin Coaled said:

What ONI currently is is the real world. In the real world everything runs on steam turbines.

Not really. In the real world you need heating on one side and cooling on the other. Only providing heating is going to gradually slow the process until it stops. In the real world heating is expensive but cooling is quite easy. You see those huge towers at some nuclear plants? Those are cooling towers. Other nuclear plants dump their heat into the ocean. In oni there is no atmosphere or ocean to carry away the heat. It's more like a space station. On space stations they have huge radiators radiating the heat into space. If oni were like the real world we would use the surface for radiators rather than solar panels.

[pacovf]

@NightinGale: I have to say, I did not expect that objection to cooling pipes. What would they break? A building that isn’t in vacuum is usually not that hard to cool. If you keep high gas pressure (preferably hydrogen) and put tempshift plates, radiant pipes with water are enough to cool pretty much any building. A fluid cooling pipe would mean you don’t need the tempshift plates or high gas pressure, but it’s not like it’s robbing the game of some interesting challenge to solve. It’s dealing with the heat that the coolant took away that is the interesting part, and cooling pipes don’t take away from that. Unless you consider cooling robominers in space by dropping a bit of petrol on top of them to be an interesting challenge? I would disagree, but I could see your point, I guess.

If it’s just a question of how quickly they take heat away, that can be tuned by changing the thermal conductivity of the pipes, or how much fluid can go through them at once (e.g. 1 kg/s instead of 10, or what have you). They could also come late in the tech tree, so that you have to learn to work without them for the early-mid game.

I am genuinely confused about what you think they would take away from the game.

[gotnoface]

@pacovf: As Nightingale put it, I believe he means that the tuning in his mod right now makes the pipes "too good to not use" in contrast to other cooling solutions, which are right now "finnicky at best and irritating to build at worst", which is on the opposite scale of limiting options to play. It would unreasonably skew the balance of implementation of cooling options -> everyone will start to use the easiest option.

That's my two bits.

[pacovf]

1 minute ago, gotnoface said:

@pacovf: As Nightingale put it, I believe he means that the tuning in his mod right now makes the pipes "too good to not use" in contrast to other cooling solutions, which are right now "finnicky at best and irritating to build at worst", which is on the opposite scale of limiting options to play. It would unreasonably skew the balance of implementation of cooling options -> everyone will start to use the easiest option.

That's my two bits.

Just so that we don’t talk past each other, are we speaking about cooling options in vacuum or in atmosphere?

[gotnoface]

In regards to the mod Nightinggale opted to not release - both.

In regards to unmodded game balance, the options to cool in vacuum are in the "hair-pull inducing, baldness causing" implementations. I would welcome some building which would cool tiles it is attached to - regarding the cooling solution for this.

[Nightinggale]

43 minutes ago, pacovf said:

I did not expect that objection to cooling pipes. What would they break?

When I tested energy conservation, I made a water pipe, which cooled an aquatuner and then the water went through the aquatuner. The end result was water at the same temperature as when it started. The energy is constant, but that amount of cooling from one cell is a bit overpowered.

Tuning down the cooling power uncovered a problem in the math. If you have 10 kg/s water to cool and you cool 1 kDTU/s, the water will increase 0.024 C. It's not a question of thermal conductivity when the real problem is that the water doesn't actually increase in temperature. If you accept your water to heat up 10 C, then you can cool 417.9 kDTUs/s.

I thought about using gas and while better, hydrogen can cool 1 kDTU/s while only heating up 0.41 C.

This means cooling through a pipe has a massive capacity and it will effectively allow you to ignore local cooling for buildings everywhere in your base and only use pipes unless it's some extreme building like the aquatuner.

I haven't figured out how to make a space cooling system without adding a bunch of exploits to other building cooling, hence no mod release.

[Nebbie]

Temperature management should mostly work like now, but I'd like to be able to radiate heat away into space without the added hurdle of having to lose mass doing so (not that losing mass is all that bad, just that it's more complicated as you can't have closed loops and it means reliance on geysers, which are map-dependent, pushing things too much towards steam turbines).

I think the ice maker's heat deletion should be moved to the ice fan (otherwise there's very little point to ice fans) and then increased a bit (not as good as domestic WW, but better than wild); the ice maker itself should add some heat overall, but the ice fan should more than make up for it. Earlygame solutions should focus on efficient duplicant labor, which of course becomes progressively more impractical as you scale up your colony, forcing you to then switch to complicated automation setups to expand; right now duplicant labor with the ice fan doesn't seem to be worthwhile and the main approach is an ice maker or two (low labor) until you can find something like a cool slush geyser or rush turbines/petroleum. I must note in relation to something I saw on Reddit about an old exploity setup ("We used to use fertilizer synthesizers for power; now we use them to make fertilizer") that the current status is "we don't use ice makers to make ice; we use them to delete heat".

I would also like cool slush geysers to be rather rare, as cold polluted water is a bit crazy for its ability to soak up heat for deletion.

Finally, I think we need to lose heat deletion from the petroleum and natural gas generators long-term, as it's a completely counterintuitive place to have heat deletion, but this should only happen after the other things I've mentioned or else options will get too limited.

[gotnoface]

@Nightinggale: Pretty much what I thought. This solution is too easy to implement and too powerful, when compared to other available solutions. It would become the lazyman's answer to all machine heat problems.

[pacovf]

1 minute ago, Nightinggale said:

When I tested energy conservation, I made a water pipe, which cooled an aquatuner and then the water went through the aquatuner. The end result was water at the same temperature as when it started. The energy is constant, but that amount of cooling from one cell is a bit overpowered.

Tuning down the cooling power uncovered a problem in the math. If you have 10 kg/s water to cool and you cool 1 kDTU/s, the water will increase 0.024 C. It's not a question of thermal conductivity when the real problem is that the water doesn't actually increase in temperature. If you accept your water to heat up 10 C, then you can cool 417.9 kDTUs/s.

I thought about using gas and while better, hydrogen can cool 1 kDTU/s while only heating up 0.41 C.

This means cooling through a pipe has a massive capacity and it will effectively allow you to ignore local cooling for buildings everywhere in your base and only use pipes unless it's some extreme building like the aquatuner.

But that’s the case whether or not we have pipes that cool a building directly, or that cool a building through the intermediary or the atmosphere/liquid it’s in. The math works out the same.

[gotnoface]

Well I said it a couple of times past these three days, but this is not only problem of efficiency of available cooling solutions, but mostly the problem that apart from steam turbine we do not have a single dedicated building to take care of the heat that builds up not only from geysers, but also from running pretty much every machinery.

Klei, if you're reading these threads - MORE BUILDINGS PLEASE! This is a long standing problem with the heat in this game and I'm not saying that water sieve as it was okay, it was not. But you should've took it out, once you introduced some other solutions to this problem.

I sure hope they have some plans for this.

Also slush should just stay the way it is. We are all but guaranteed to have maps with geysers that add unlimited amounts of heat, it's only fair that we have geysers which do the opposite.

[bobucles]

 it's only fair that we have geysers which do the opposite.

Geyser. One. No other geyser type outputs any viable amount of cold material.

[Nightinggale]

5 minutes ago, pacovf said:

But that’s the case whether or not we have pipes that cool a building directly, or that cool a building through the intermediary or the atmosphere/liquid it’s in. The math works out the same.

I effectively ditched a week worth of modding by not releasing (getting it to not create or delete heat is actually really hard without Klei's documentation on the heat system). Let's just say when I abandoned/postponed, I had done quite a bit to get it balanced. It takes way more than a quickly written forum post to change my mind.

Also this is kind of off topic. It has very little to do with the actual problem for this thread.

12 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

I think the ice maker's heat deletion should be moved to the ice fan (otherwise there's very little point to ice fans) and then increased a bit (not as good as domestic WW, but better than wild); the ice maker itself should add some heat overall, but the ice fan should more than make up for it.

Sounds reasonable, but wouldn't that make the ice maker overheat? If it doesn't delete heat, it will heat up more meaning it needs more cooling.

15 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

I would also like cool slush geysers to be rather rare, as cold polluted water is a bit crazy for its ability to soak up heat for deletion.

I disagree. One way to make maps unique is the different set of geysers. If we start to make rare geysers, we will move towards more identical maps, hence a greater tendency to do the same in multiple games. Providing a very different set of geysers is one way of avoiding repetitive maps/gameplay.

18 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

right now duplicant labor with the ice fan doesn't seem to be worthwhile and the main approach is an ice maker or two (low labor)

This means the cooling isn't strong enough.

[bobucles]

Does the Ice fan even delete heat? I mean it melts ice as the main ingredient. I can melt ice by putting it in a box, so what's the point?

[Gracefulmuse]

11 minutes ago, bobucles said:

 

 

Geyser. One. No other geyser type outputs any viable amount of cold material.

The co2 geyser outputs very cold.

[gotnoface]

3 minutes ago, Gracefulmuse said:

The co2 geyser outputs very cold.

The code word here is viable.That geyser is just pissing into the ocean.

[Red Shark]

I think I agree with the observation that heat management needs to be re-framed from "an obstacle to be overcome" to "a resource to be managed". And while Steam Turbines are definitely part of the end-game solution to that, that's a long way off from being approachable for new players.

I think the best way way to teach that heat is a resource is to give the player a reason to care. Consider the Algae Terrarium - it's 10% more effective in light.

Let's consider a mid-tier food plant that grows 10% faster in Temps > 40c (consuming heat to do so; I checked, Photosynthesis is endothermic, so we're "plausible" from an actual physics standpoint). Trying to get that 10% means the player is going to start experimenting on moving heat around (and incidentally, removing some small amount of heat), which is the kind of thinking we want to encourage, right?
 

8 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

How about a bottle emptier building with piped output? Dupes will add bottles to it as long as there isn't any bottle already. If the pipe is full, it can't empty the bottle and it stalls. When stalled, the bottle won't empty and no new deliver bottle chore will be created. This would be a huge QOL for filling any loop, cooling or otherwise.

I actually have a working prototype mod for this. I should polish it up, I think. That something folks would be interested in?
Edit: And... uploaded!

[bobucles]

1 minute ago, Gracefulmuse said:

The co2 geyser outputs very cold.

Yes, all 15grams/second of it, at 0.85 specific heat, for a net cooling of...

assuming a comfy 20C ideal...

less than 1kDTU cooling.

It is perfectly fair to say the slush geyser is the only geyser in the game that produces cold.

[pacovf]

5 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

I effectively ditched a week worth of modding by not releasing (getting it to not create or delete heat is actually really hard without Klei's documentation on the heat system). Let's just say when I abandoned/postponed, I had done quite a bit to get it balanced. It takes way more than a quickly written forum post to change my mind.

I am not trying to diminish your work, if anything I am trying to convince you that it wasn't a wasted effort!  I just don't currently understand your argument against this. I appreciate that you've spent time working on it, so I assume there must be a good reason, I just don't see it clearly in the arguments you've written. To me, any heat transfer is a question of DTUs in, DTUs out, and a cooling pipe doesn't change that. But you seem to be implying otherwise?

 

8 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

Also this is kind of off topic. It has very little to do with the actual problem for this thread.

That much is true. We can continue it in a thread I made about it some time ago, if you prefer.

[KittenIsAGeek]

18 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

The problem is cooling. It's dupe heavy and it actually moves heat much more than it deletes. Next tier is aquatuner, which also moves rather than deleting. Top tiers are steam turbines and venting into space.

I really like your post and has a lot of useful thought put into it.  I agree that heating is not really an issue.  Put energy in, get heat out.  Its about as straightforward a mechanic as possible.  I also agree that cooling is difficult.. but it is in the real world as well.

Take, for example, the traditional window-mounted Air Conditioner.  From an end user point of view, its actually just as straightforward as heating: Put machine in window, turn it on, get cool air inside.  However, from a physics standpoint, its a completely different beast.  All it is actually doing is moving the heat from the inside to the outside.

In ONI, there really isn't an "outside" for much of the game, especially the early parts.  You're stuck INSIDE an asteroid, so any heat you create is also stuck inside the asteroid.  The average asteroid (in ONI) has hot spots (lava) and cold spots (ice biomes) as well as several spots that are somewhat in between.  They're somewhat insulated from each other, most of the time, but as your base development goes, you'll definitely break through and suddenly the heat distribution changes.

Basically, what I'm saying is that with the traditional air conditioner we're all familiar with, it "feels" like we're removing heat because our house is getting cold, but really we're just moving that heat somewhere else.  Since our world is huge compared to the house, that heat doesn't (noticeably) affect the "outside."  However, the world of ONI is small, so moving the heat elsewhere makes a big difference.

This leaves us with only a couple real choices for dealing with heat:

1. Move it Elsewhere, preferably somewhere that won't be a problem for a while.
2. Move it into space, where it will disappear like magic.
3. Use heat-destroying devices that make physicists cry.

The first is your traditional aquatuner build.  You build two pools, put an aquatuner in one, run some coolant through the pipes to cool down the other pool.  The pool with the aquatuner gets hot -- hopefully slowly enough that you can ignore it for a while.  Later, when you've built up your infrastructure and discovered various technologies (plastics, steel, etc) you can remodel your pool to feed a steam turbine -- which is sorta #3.

The second option means you lose matter.  Sometimes this isn't a problem.  Sometimes it is.  For example, it is counterproductive to dump heat into water, then vent the water into space, when your base is already short on water.  But, hey, its a solution.

The third is where a large number of the posts on these boards originate.  Wheezewarts and AETNs are specifically designed to destroy heat.  Another method was fixed-output buildings such as the water sieve (which has been very recently changed).  In older versions of the game, the "drip bug" which turned into the "Borg Cube" was yet another method of violating physics to remove heat.

In most of my bases, I generally move the heat elsewhere until I can do something with it.  Some examples of using heat to Do Something are the steam turbine which turns heat into power.  Its not that great at providing power, but it is simply AMAZING at removing heat.  We're talking "Hey, look, I can cool this volcano!" levels of cooling.  Another method is building a boiler system for either crude to petrol, petrol to NG, or polluted water to clean water.  There's probably others, but those are the big ones.  For petrol and water, it'll take quite a bit of heat energy to run the system, more than you'll get back -- especially if you have an inefficient design.  Some NG builds I've seen were over-unity -- as in you could use the heat from the process itself to keep the process going.  I'm not sure if that's still the case, as I haven't worked with NG for a while.  Anyway, using the heat to do work is probably always going to be a method of removing heat from your base.  Its also going to be the most complicated solution.

[BaloneyOs]

2 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

 

1. Move it Elsewhere, preferably somewhere that won't be a problem for a while.
2. Move it into space, where it will disappear like magic.
3. Use heat-destroying devices that make physicists cry.

4. Spawn mass at low temperatures. I'd like to think that spawn temperatures are deliberate for the purpose of maintaining the climate as well, with the most straightforward example being large masses of 20C logs that you could choose to grow with zero material input. Critters and their eggs also spawn at a fixed temperature and resets once on maturing. Both plants and critters can even delete matter if the player so chooses. Considering how hard they tried to push the heat aspect with min temp outputs, it wouldn't be surprising if agricultural cooling is meant to be one of the long term and potentially self sustaining heat regulators as well.

Which is why it would be really nice to have a seed planting function but just balance it so that pips still have their niche.