How does ice really work?

[Darkin Coaled]

So, following somebody else's post about basic farm cooling on aridio I built my own. And then I found out that I don't know anything about melting things in this game.

First lets just mention the red arrow. Recently I finally went to take a look at the resource conversion/duplication bugs that Manic is trumpeting about. If I hadn't I would have been very happy with my setup on the bottom, it melts the ice quickly and I get my guys fed. Unfortunately what I end up doing is making extra water appear. Nice cold water that makes the whole thing cool down a bit faster.

Now the blue arrow. I don't understand how a small chunk of ice inside a container exchanges temperature and with what exactly it exchanges temperature WITH. 2kg of ice heat up from -40 (this is printing pod ice, not ice maker ice) to 0 in about three minutes. During that time nothing else the ice should be interacting with changes temperature even a little bit. the granite container stays at temperature, the CO2 in that tile stays at temperature, where is the ice getting the heat from?

After having dropped the ice from EITHER of the containers the speed at which the ice heats up doesn't change. Nothing, and that includes the water in the bottom corner tile) changes temperature while the ice melts. Additionally a 5kg chunk of ice sitting in a 0.7kg deep puddle turns into 10.7kg (again, extra water bug) of water at just a few degrees less than the original 0.7kg puddle (18 -=> 14 degrees for instance.)

How does this work?

[Coolthulhu]

Items exchange heat with the tile that contains them (almost always gas or liquid) and the tile they're lying on, if it's solid. When in container, they are treated as if they were lying on the ground on said spot. Mesh tiles aren't solid, though it's possible that the item instead exchanges heat with the gas/liquid inside the mesh tile.

Notably, items do not exchange heat with their storage container.

If you want ice to melt fast, keep the lower tile of the container in water, oil, hydrogen, polluted water etc. Avoid having it in CO2 or oxygen. Alternatively, place it on solid metal or diamond tile. I use diamond tiles below my containers for metal from volcanoes and it really helps them disperse heat.

[Darkin Coaled]

Quick update:

So I had to tap space really fast to find that the ice melting in water does in fact appear at near 0. Problem is I have that big chunk of granite in the same tile and it takes about 3 frames for the whole lot to equalize temperatures. And it definitely creates +10kg from 5kg of ice.

On the other hand, if I wanted to not multiply matter I'm left with very slow melting of 2kg of ice and a bunch of hardworking duplicants eating dirt...

So yeah, farm cooling with bugs, so I can take my swing at alcohol fuelled petroleum generators and other map-specific features without caring about food.

[Nebbie]

Hmm, interesting that containers don't heat exchange with their contents, and instead are skipped over in favor of surroundings; that's counterintuitive behavior I would hope gets fixed.