How should temperature management work?

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, BaloneyOs said:

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.

I don't really see that as a sustainable method of cooling. Yes, it works (especially with the new trees), but before then it was extremely tedious to plant, dig up, transfer heat to the seeds, then plant again.  I have a feeling that the trees will soon be changed to drop branches at the temperature of the tree itself, rather than always 20c -- which means that you can't use a growing tree to cool am ethanol distiller.

[Nickerooni]

1 hour 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. Earlygame solutions should focus on efficient duplicant labor, which of course becomes progressively more impractical as you scale up your colony..

Well said. Excellent suggestion.

I just double-checked to make sure the Ice-E fan wasn't doing this already :). At 32 kDTU/s cooling, it would probably wouldn't be game breaking to have it magically thaw ice at even half the speed it does now. Dupe labor for the impact of a couple of the older wheezeworts.

[BaloneyOs]

6 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I don't really see that as a sustainable method of cooling. Yes, it works (especially with the new trees), but before then it was extremely tedious to plant, dig up, transfer heat to the seeds, then plant again.  I have a feeling that the trees will soon be changed to drop branches at the temperature of the tree itself, rather than always 20c -- which means that you can't use a growing tree to cool am ethanol distiller.

157 kg PH2O + 4.5 kg phosphorite = 2100 kg lumber at 20C. If they changed tree to drop at dynamic temperature you could just cool down the trees and profit off the huge mass surplus of ~15C lumber. Either way planting trees will likely guarantee that your base stays below 30C which is the threshold for some other plants, and maybe for when critters' "comfort temperature" becomes actually implemented.

Just like IRL plant some trees save the environment and profit in the long run.

[KittenIsAGeek]

13 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

157 kg PH2O + 4.5 kg phosphorite = 2100 kg lumber at 20C. If they changed tree to drop at dynamic temperature you could just cool down the trees and profit off the huge mass surplus of ~15C lumber. Either way planting trees will likely guarantee that your base stays below 30C which is the threshold for some other plants, and maybe for when critters' "comfort temperature" becomes actually implemented.

Just like IRL plant some trees save the environment and profit in the long run.

I apologize, I wasn't thinking of the irrigation factor.  Dumping heat into polluted water which is then destroyed by the growth process of the plant could be a very significant method of cooling.  It falls into the same category as using a hydrogen generator to remove heat -- you're basically moving the heat elsewhere, then letting a magic machine remove that heat from the game.  In fact, because its polluted water, with a high heat capacity, and the trees are currently dropping branches at 20c, this could probably be an extremely powerful method of cooling your base.

However, that isn't the same as planting and digging up, which was how I took your original response.

[BaloneyOs]

7 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

However, that isn't the same as planting and digging up, which was how I took your original response.

It's fine, tbh I'm surprised the method you mentioned was ever used because plants have such tiny mass it would actually be negative heat deletion due to dupe labor.

[natanstarke]

19 hours ago, EnderCN said:

I don't have an easy answer but I will say the answer should be that you have to give up map resources in order to reduce heat and if you aren't careful you should use up too many resources and get yourself in trouble.  Loops that are completely self sustainable should not be a thing, you should always be worried that you are going to run out of something in the long run with every action you take in game.  The game was advertised as a limited resources can you survive game and that is what I want.  If you can make your base 100% self sustainable the game is broken imo.

You can only achieve that very late game so its a well worth prize for me. Early and mid especially forest maps you can die to heat famine or water easily " especially new players". 

[RonEmpire]

23 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Well, two things I can think of are

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.  

2. A "heat sink". Basically a well-insulated fluid tank that has a very high specific heat and heats up or cools down very slowly. Needs to use a lot of material (some stone) and if you deconstruct it, you get the heat in the parts.

I do like the idea of having an AC machine  similar to the ones that plug into a window/wall.   It's one of those AC boxes that sucks up heat inside and cools it and also spits it outside.    Maybe call this the  Portable AC.  BUT have it cap at a certain temperature where it won't cool anything down beyond a certain point.  It has a temperature dial range.   Similar to the portable AC.    It's not a heat deletion it only lowers temperature of the oxygen (or anygas)  provided and returns half the oxygen cold and the other half hotter (basically exchanges heat) and outputs the hot oxygen in the back.   There's no heat deletion. Maybe the machine can get hot but only the back side  - so the back side might get hotter.  


But with the current game mechanics and available tools - you could technically build your own  "Central Air Conditioner" system,  

[DarkMaster13]

57 minutes ago, RonEmpire said:

I do like the idea of having an AC machine  similar to the ones that plug into a window/wall.   It's one of those AC boxes that sucks up heat inside and cools it and also spits it outside.    Maybe call this the  Portable AC.  BUT have it cap at a certain temperature where it won't cool anything down beyond a certain point.  It has a temperature dial range.   Similar to the portable AC.    It's not a heat deletion it only lowers temperature of the oxygen (or anygas)  provided and returns half the oxygen cold and the other half hotter (basically exchanges heat) and outputs the hot oxygen in the back.   There's no heat deletion. Maybe the machine can get hot but only the back side  - so the back side might get hotter.  


But with the current game mechanics and available tools - you could technically build your own  "Central Air Conditioner" system,  

Isn't that already in the game?  The thermal regulator?  I've never used it, but if it's power consumption is fairly low it will do the job.

[Gracefulmuse]

7 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Isn't that already in the game?  The thermal regulator?  I've never used it, but if it's power consumption is fairly low it will do the job.

Exactly what I was thinking. Unless I'm crazy, the thermal regulator is basicly a central cooling system. 

It takes air, and lowers it by a set temp, then spits the air back out. 

It does not delete the heat, simply heats the machine up instead. 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

 

1 hour ago, RonEmpire said:

I do like the idea of having an AC machine  similar to the ones that plug into a window/wall.   It's one of those AC boxes that sucks up heat inside and cools it and also spits it outside.    Maybe call this the  Portable AC. 
 

Like I have said before: The AC machine you plug into your window/wall is a heat moving device.  It doesn't actually cool the room -- it moves the heat from the room to the outside.  You don't really have an "outside" in ONI.  The reason AC works so well for us here on earth is that the earth has a HUGE amount of mass compared to the people who are using AC.  The environment soaks up the heat from your bedroom with no noticeable change because it gets quickly distributed across vast systems with lots of thermal inertia.  If we scale the outside environment down to something similar to ONI, it would be like a room in an office building that dumps its heat into the room behind it.  That room would get hot just as quickly as your room cools down.  

The aquatuner and the thermo regulator are EXACTLY the equivalent of our real-world AC system.  The "problem" everyone has is that in our world, that heat seems to magically disappear because of our extremely large and complex environment.  The ONI asteroid situation means that the heat doesn't have anywhere to go.

[Giltirn]

3 minutes ago, Gracefulmuse said:

Exactly what I was thinking. Unless I'm crazy, the thermal regulator is basicly a central cooling system. 

It takes air, and lowers it by a set temp, then spits the air back out. 

It does not delete the heat, simply heats the machine up instead. 

 

Indeed but given that both it and the aquatuner have a fixed 14C cooling factor, using an aquatuner to move heat around is much more power efficient. An aquatuner can shift 585kDTU/s (with pwater) for 1200W according to the wiki, whereas a regulator can only shift a maximum of 34kDTU/s (with hydrogen) for 240W.

[KittenIsAGeek]

5 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

Indeed but given that both it and the aquatuner have a fixed 14C cooling factor, using an aquatuner to move heat around is much more power efficient. An aquatuner can shift 585kDTU/s (with pwater) for 1200W according to the wiki, whereas a regulator can only shift a maximum of 34kDTU/s (with hydrogen) for 240W.

They each have their use.  Yes, the aquatuner moves heat much more quickly, but if you need to cool a small space a thermal regulator can be very effective.  For example, you can throw a thermal regulator into an oxygen feed right before it goes through a vent into, say, a bristlebloom farm.  In this way, you can farm the plants earlier in hot maps like Aridia without having to spend time setting up cooling pools and power generators to run an aquatuner system.

[Giltirn]

3 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

They each have their use.  Yes, the aquatuner moves heat much more quickly, but if you need to cool a small space a thermal regulator can be very effective.  For example, you can throw a thermal regulator into an oxygen feed right before it goes through a vent into, say, a bristlebloom farm.  In this way, you can farm the plants earlier in hot maps like Aridia without having to spend time setting up cooling pools and power generators to run an aquatuner system.

Sure but it's hard to dismiss a 3x improvement in power efficiency for just a little extra work. The aquatuner doesn't need to run all the time. For me power is always by far the most difficult thing to obtain in the early to mid game, so efficiency is king. I honestly don't know how everyone else manages it.

[KittenIsAGeek]

15 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

Sure but it's hard to dismiss a 3x improvement in power efficiency for just a little extra work. The aquatuner doesn't need to run all the time. For me power is always by far the most difficult thing to obtain in the early to mid game, so efficiency is king. I honestly don't know how everyone else manages it.

Power is somewhat difficult on many maps.  On the traditional map, I move to coal right away and that gets me quite a bit into the game.  My current map has no coal, and its too cold to grow wood.  So I'm stuck with dupe power until I can get to other sources.  In the very early game (below cycle 50), its relatively easy to run a device at 240w.  Yes, an aquatuner is 3.4x times more efficient at moving heat -- but it takes 1200 watts.  I don't have the resources (refined metals) nor the generators capable of running one long enough to be useful. But I can easily run a thermo regulator or two, at least until I can improve my base's power infrastructure.   

My bases are often quite organic.  I set up an early system to deal with a problem on a termporary basis. Once I am able to do it more effectively, more efficiently, or simply on a larger scale, I rebuild that system.  So, on Aridia, I used thermo regulators early on to cool down my mealwood farms.  My dupes didn't mind having a slightly warmer base, and my plants weren't going dormant due to the heat.  Maybe 30 cycles later, I upgraded the system to use an aquatuner. The improvement in efficiency let me cool more of my base and build bigger farms.  However, without the thermo regulators, my only other alternative to keep from starving would been to run ice-e fans -- which would have used constant dupe time.

[Giltirn]

4 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

However, without the thermo regulators, my only other alternative to keep from starving would been to run ice-e fans -- which would have used constant dupe time.

I started my testing on the release build with a Volcanea run where I had to madly scramble to research insulation to prevent my base from being overrun by a spreading stain of 300C+ heated rock. I was able to keep my mealwood farm cool just by sealing off an area with insulation and every so often building an ice sculpture in there. Ice-makers actually delete heat and use very little power so I was able to keep this going for plenty long enough.

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 minute ago, Giltirn said:

 Ice-makers actually delete heat and use very little power so I was able to keep this going for plenty long enough.

Yeah, my current play style is avoiding heat deletion when I can.  So I'm not currently using the ice maker.  I'll dig up ice from an ice biome, though.

 

... and currently my problem isn't trying to keep things cool. Its trying to warm things up.

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

[RonEmpire]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

 

Like I have said before: The AC machine you plug into your window/wall is a heat moving device.  It doesn't actually cool the room -- it moves the heat from the room to the outside.  You don't really have an "outside" in ONI.  The reason AC works so well for us here on earth is that the earth has a HUGE amount of mass compared to the people who are using AC.  The environment soaks up the heat from your bedroom with no noticeable change because it gets quickly distributed across vast systems with lots of thermal inertia.  If we scale the outside environment down to something similar to ONI, it would be like a room in an office building that dumps its heat into the room behind it.  That room would get hot just as quickly as your room cools down.  

The aquatuner and the thermo regulator are EXACTLY the equivalent of our real-world AC system.  The "problem" everyone has is that in our world, that heat seems to magically disappear because of our extremely large and complex environment.  The ONI asteroid situation means that the heat doesn't have anywhere to go.

Technically there is an outside in ONI. It's called space.  You can send the heat there.  

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, RonEmpire said:

Technically there is an outside in ONI. It's called space.  You can send the heat there.  

Yes, but that requires venting a resource.  For some maps, this won't be a problem. For others, it can definitely be an issue.

[RonEmpire]

2 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Isn't that already in the game?  The thermal regulator?  I've never used it, but if it's power consumption is fairly low it will do the job.

Yup.  it can be used to setup the central AC system.    You just have to manually setup a temperature automation to check gas temperature-  sucking up gas and if its warm send it to the thermal regulator and if it's not hot then you recirculate it.

Like any neat device, you got to manage the heat of the thermal regulator.
 

[Nebbie]

35 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Yes, but that requires venting a resource.  For some maps, this won't be a problem. For others, it can definitely be an issue.

Which is why we need the ability to radiate heat into space, either with a specific machine/pipe or with a mechanic whereby heat travels across vacuum tiles slowly and can disappear into space background, so that closed loops can be used to bleed heat into space.

[6Havok9]

21 hours ago, EnderCN said:

We want very different games then.  I'm fine with changing the focus from getting supplies on your asteroid to getting them from space, but eventually everything on your asteroid needs to run out or what is the point.  If stuff isn't going to run out you just have another boring old building game.  Scarce resources is kind of this games thing imo.

There are ways to make resources scarce, by increasing your duplicant requirements and picking a hard map with bad traits. Sustainability should be achievable by default, you then have the option of crankin it up a notch if you like to live the hard (and probably short and miserable) life =)

As far as heat management, I think that new players would benefit from tutorial entries in the in-game onipedia. And clear tooltips.

[bobucles]

5 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Which is why we need the ability to radiate heat into space, either with a specific machine/pipe 

That would be nice. The space layer has hot competition for gantry space or solar panel space. If there was a cooling machine that needed to see the sky, it would definitely make the space biome more crowded and force more decisions on what is important. The best part is that it is limited, because the amount of sky access on any map is limited.

[Nightinggale]

 I think I got it. What we need is an ice ecosystem!

If we look at lesson 4, the goal isn't to design a new system. The goal is to design something, which fits into the current system and is intuitive to the player. Lesson 10 tells us that the player should build the solution meaning the game should provide tools for player creativity.

Ice is actually a really good mechanic for cooling. It's intuitive, it can be controlled by dupes (chore heavy) and it's possible to expand on it gradually to end up with some late game setup with fully automated ice making, conveyor rail distribution and automation sensor controlled distribution. This means ice cooling can be made a valid option for early game to rocket "era" and matching every step in between.

What is needed to make this work:

Ice dropoff building: An automatic dispenser, which only accepts ice. It always drops the ice (never stores anything) and the automation signal turns delivery chores on and off. Unlock this early, perhaps at the same time as the ice maker.

Ice-E Fan: as already mentioned, cut the ice usage in half meaning you get twice the cooling. It has to provide noteworthy more cooling than just letting the ice melt because otherwise it will be a waste of a dupe. Sure it creates cooling out of nothing (heat sink), but manual generators creates electricity out of nothing, which is also balanced because they requires dupes to operate them. The spent resource is dupe time.

Dupe free ice makers: High tech large scale ice making shouldn't require large scale numbers of dupes to operate them. One way to do this could to be add a PassiveElementConsumer to suck up water from the floor. If the ice maker can still be flooded, providing enough water without flooding becomes a challenge in itself. One solution here could be to simply add the PassiveElementConsumer component to existing ice makers once the player discovers the computer tech or similar. It would actually be really nice if a building could have components, which turns on or off depending on tech level.

Rapid water cooling: Right now if you dump a lot of ice into a lot of hot water and wait a bunch of cycles you still have ice in hot water. Ice would be much more useful if the heat transfer was faster. It could be something as simple as a massive thermal conductivity multiplier. However if ice makers have water on the floor, that water shouldn't instantly melt the newly dropped ice. This could be solved by applying the multiplier if the mass of the water is higher than 200 kg or something.

 

Each of those changes might be a minor tweak by itself, but together they provide just enough to make ice cooling both a challenge and rewarding for a significant part of the game. It also feels very ONI like in the sense that ice management becomes kind of like the coal generator: starts out as very dupe intensive and tricky to control accurately (particularly if playing without coal generator delivery fixes). Automation wires allows better control and eventually a transfer arm allows dupe free operation. Same building, same mechanics, yet suitable for a multiple development stages of the base due to interacting with the other mechanics of the game.

Also the ice cooling becomes a "user designed cooling machine" in the sense that it's not just ice makers and ice-e fans. The user builds the entire system with a high degree of design freedom while maintaining that players can rely on just ice makers and ice-e fans if that's what the player wants.

[BaloneyOs]

3 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

Dupe free ice makers: High tech large scale ice making shouldn't require large scale numbers of dupes to operate them.

It feels like dupe labor at least in this example exists as a bottleneck to make industrial scaling difficult or impossible. Think about how stupid the pitcher pump design is for late game. I think the reason pitcher pump doesn't have a late game alternative so far is because they want you to deal with pooling a body of water and also dupe labor. If they wanted ice makers to simulate old heat deletion (which it kinda did pre-nerf except for the manual aspect) they could've just made it piped. Kinda same story with wheezeworts.

[Nightinggale]

1 minute ago, BaloneyOs said:

Think about how stupid the pitcher pump design is for late game. I think the reason pitcher pump doesn't have a late game alternative so far is because they want you to deal with pooling a body of water and also dupe labor.

There is a late game alternative, which is called liquid pump. Early on you need a pitcher pump and a bottle emptier to move water. Later you can use a liquid pump and a liquid valve to accomplish the same task. This means the pitcher pump is reduced to deliver to buildings requiring bottled water. Hydroponic farms and sinks means the bottle requirements will drop. While bottles will not vanish entirely, most water tasks will transform into dupe-less tasks.

8 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

If they wanted

Unless there is some Klei statement I don't know about, then "what they want" is pure speculation and shouldn't restrict creative thinking on the forum. I will not rule out that you are right, but at the same time the whole deal with the reaction to the water sieve change is unlikely to have gone unnoticed. What Klei wanted a month ago might not be precisely the same as what they want tomorrow.

After the whole water sieve "discussion" it became clear that there are a lot of "I don't want that", but it contained very little of what people actually want. This thread is to brainstorm for ideas and figuring out what people actually want other than just being against whatever happens. Quite frankly, whatever Klei wants is irrelevant to this thread. This is about what we want and we need freedom to voice whatever idea we can come up with (good or bad).

Sure it's possible Klei will read this and go "we will never do that", but that's for Klei to decide. Since we don't know what they want, let's just assume they want to read whatever we can come up with.