We need more tool to manage the heat

[Junksteel]

15 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

Is this a way of saying that Sieve and Wheezewort were fun and engaging, or we are looking for new cooling methods?

 

I guess nobody is missing the sieve to delete heat because it wasn't its original purpose.

In the other hand, Wheezeworts lost their purpose completely. They were in fact pretty engaging because justified a great portion of the exploration. Although many could find them not fun because of their 'magical' properties.

I think the large majority would be even more happy with new cooling methods introduced to the early-mid game. But I think it's important to give WWs a fix and hence a purpose. Sieve is prefectly fine as it is.

[Sasza22]

2 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

We should have new methods of cooling. The water sieve was a poor design and certainly not intuitive. However it was simple. This means you could just set it up in very short time and move on. Now that we have cooling solutions you have to spend way more time setting up, it's just not good enough to make them "just as good as the water sieve". If you make a time consuming game mechanic, the demands for "fun" is much higher than if it's something, which is dealt with in no time and the player moved on.

Nothing comes even close to how effective the sieve was. And how easy it was to set up. Now we got options but they are a league lower and most of them require more complicated setups or operation. We lost the easiest way to manage heat and it has become harder overall. Now it`s an ongoing problem that needs a system that gets improved over time rather than a sieve that handles it all. It`s no longer a set and forget.

That said we could use more options. I`m thinking about a fan tool for manual cooling stuff at the expense of dupe time (with a minimal temperature of 25^oC). Making stuff like thermoregulators more effective would help as well.

 

[miauly]

19 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

Is this a way of saying that Sieve and Wheezewort were fun and engaging, or we are looking for new cooling methods?

I personally thought that for example cooling generators like it's done in John Francis videos was fun and engaging. I did a lot of things wrong even despite I replicated a setup that was already designed, so the "assemble - find a mistake - disassemble - fix mistake - assemble - test - find a mistake" loops took me a couple of hundred cycles. During which I had a first-hand feeling how many different things play or do not play together. I have built a turbine + tuner setup too and it was not nearly as interesting. So yes, using fixed output for me personally was way more fun.

[mathmanican]

5 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

Ice and the Ice-E Fan certainly help, but they're awkward, and don't scale well unless you're deep into the darker sections of automation.

Pretty soon we'll use the power of the dark side, along with berry sludge, to obliterate heat.  

On a side, note, NOSH BEANS do not decay (unlike sleet wheat). More fun to be had.

[Nightinggale]

3 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

The real issues is having tools available.  Not a variety of tools, just any tools at all.  Ice and the Ice-E Fan certainly help, but they're awkward, and don't scale well unless you're deep into the darker sections of automation.

That's pretty much what my ice "industry" idea aims to cover. Ice starts out the same (more or less), but with a few more options added around the tech tree it can scale much better than the current ice system, eventually allowing an automated dupe free mass production of ice, which is usable far into the game.

7 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

One thing I feel I need to stress is that suggesting things like the Thermal Nullifier and geysers doesn't help.  The player isn't guaranteed to have them, and the ones they do have may not be accessible.  Piping everything halfway across the asteroid really isn't an effective or scalable  long-term solution in the early-mid game.  As for natural heat sinks...  In my current game, my starting area is completely surrounded by hot biomes.  Using natural heat sinks would actually heat up my base fairly quickly.

This is what I have been saying for a while. Most proposals ends up being either late game or not present on all maps. Heat management needs to be all over the tech tree, meaning you shouldn't end up in a situation where you suffer heat death because the heat management is too high tech for your current base.

7 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

Nothing comes even close to how effective the sieve was. And how easy it was to set up. Now we got options but they are a league lower and most of them require more complicated setups or operation. We lost the easiest way to manage heat and it has become harder overall. Now it`s an ongoing problem that needs a system that gets improved over time rather than a sieve that handles it all. It`s no longer a set and forget.

Agreed. We will not get the easy days back and we shouldn't aim for something similar. What I wrote was why it wasn't a problem before, which is precisely because it was a "set up and forget" kind of system. If it isn't fun, but you only have to deal with it for a few minutes and then you can move on, then you don't complain. If you have to spend 10 minutes or more every hour as an ongoing problem, then people complain, perhaps even if the ongoing approach is more fun than the "set up and forget" approach, simply because the longer you have to spend on the task, the more important it will be to make the task fun.

This has created the odd situation where people start complaining after the water sieve has been removed despite the fact that everybody agrees it was the right move. We just need to find the right solution to what to do instead.

[goboking]

3 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

I think the large majority would be even more happy with new cooling methods introduced to the early-mid game. But I think it's important to give WWs a fix and hence a purpose. Sieve is prefectly fine as it is.

I think more early game options undermine the utility of the ice maker, which was explicitly created for the purpose of early game heat management.  I haven't started a new base in a while; is it not still adequate in that role?

 

1 minute ago, Nightinggale said:

This is what I have been saying for a while. Most proposals ends up being either late game or not present on all maps. Heat management needs to be all over the tech tree, meaning you shouldn't end up in a situation where you suffer heat death because the heat management is too high tech for your current base.

The game is full of stopgap techs.  Algae diffusers are stopgaps until you have a renewable source of water to produce oxygen, panter boxes are a stopgap until you have a piping system in place to irrigate your crops, etc.  Why should heat management be any different?  What's wrong with ice makers and thermo regulators being a stopgap until you get a more efficient means of heat management up and running?

[ONIfreak]

34 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

I fully agree. There are plenty of direct and indirect heatsinks, but they aren't fun. I feel like most of them are water sieve kind of design flaws, like using near boiling water for plants and then cooling the air to avoid overheat plants. It's really hard to prevent from a game mechanics point of view, but using it feels more like bug exploitation and it isn't fun.

Depend what you describe by "fun". I personally find quite entertaining trying to figure out how to "shift heat" engaging different fluids and trying to balance heat between them to use hot stuff where heat does not matter and use lower temp where it does. It might be just me though. I agree that it would be interesting to have more "machinery" to move heat around ( not just "up") and dealing with heat force gamers to actually engage planet as whole not just build smart system to delete heat or sink it to space. However in (again) my opinion it would be more beneficial to rather "nerf" existing systems ( like slicksters to give lower temp crude oil or chlorine gayser to be naturally cool etc) instead of just adding another piece of equipment. So it will force players to use planet to deal with heat not just machines but make it less tedious ( also these small changes can open brand new ways of dealing with stuff based on existing tools rather than adding new ones)

[Nightinggale]

2 minutes ago, goboking said:

The game is full of stopgap techs.  [snip]  What's wrong with ice makers and thermo regulators being a stopgap until you get a more efficient means of heat management up and running?

Nothing. There should be stopgaps in the tech tree. That's the whole point in a tech tree. You should be able to gain a number of techs and then have fun playing without gaining more techs for a while. If only a full tech tree results in a fun game, then it means the whole early game is broken.

What I did write in the post you quoted is in fact proposing adding more stopgap techs/buildings. Start with a primitive solution like right now, but instead of sticking to that solution for ages and then suddenly get some super fancy tech, add a bunch of steps on the way. Not to replace, but to supplement. The goal of this would be to make a game with a partially researched tech tree more engaging and fun.

[Junksteel]

13 minutes ago, goboking said:

I think more early game options undermine the utility of the ice maker, which was explicitly created for the purpose of early game heat management.  I haven't started a new base in a while; is it not still adequate in that role?

Ice maker is pretty good if combined with conveyor belts. From a noob perspective, it generates a bunch of heat while not droping the ice on the ground, being a problem by itself if poorly managed. Is Ice-E Fan viable in any shape or form? It would be nice to see it being used.

[Grimgaw]

9 minutes ago, goboking said:

I haven't started a new base in a while; is it not still adequate in that role?

 

It's -32kDTU so like 2.6 QoL WWs.

[BaloneyOs]

30 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

I fully agree. There are plenty of direct and indirect heatsinks, but they aren't fun. I feel like most of them are water sieve kind of design flaws, like using near boiling water for plants and then cooling the air to avoid overheat plants.

Unfortunately that was only part of it. IMO Klei dropped the ball hard when they tried to balance too much around the 40C sieve output (which again, was admitted to being artificial difficulty and we could all see how it's a huge newbie trap). Let's see why that waste of a temperature made early game cooling more necessary:

1. Bristle blossoms are FAR less gatekept by water sources mid-game now.

2. Wheat vs beans. The potential cost of needing to cool sieved water is now dramatically reduced therefore making beans seem worthless. There were situations where use pumping cold PH2O to beans could be cheaper than sieving and cooling H2O for wheat.

3. The base design trap of "whoops I have 40C liquids running in my base now" no longer exists so new player are also less likely to get tricked into using stuff like fans which are also of even more limited use now.

There are way more nuances but point is that early-mid game heat management may need to to depend on things other than minimum output temp, map choice, and map features.

40 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

It has to be something more.. interesting. Something you need to think about and build without resulting in a single design you just build over and over. Something, which is intuitive and doesn't feel like exploiting some other game mechanic.

This so much. I'd still give this problem the "EA" benefit of the doubt though since complete in-game info and tutorials are probably on the last of their list.

38 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

Is this a way of saying that Sieve and Wheezewort were fun and engaging, or we are looking for new cooling methods?

Nope, that's outright gaslighting on your part since I didn't make any comparisons to pre-nerf sieves or worts (or any pre-heat-deletion-nerf mechanic at all). And yes, I'm advocating alternatives to dethrone steam turbine setups if even just a little bit.

[Eternal Firesea]

4 minutes ago, goboking said:

The game is full of stopgap techs.  Algae diffusers are stopgaps until you have a renewable source of water to produce oxygen, panter boxes are a stopgap until you have a piping system in place to irrigate your crops, etc

Oxygen Diffusers aren't a a stopgap.  They're the staple means of producing oxygen in the early game.  Planter Boxes aren't a stopgap  They're the basic platform for farming until you tech up.
This is what we were talking about:  People keep offering tools from the totality of the game, without thought to whether those tools are currently available.  I'm at the stage of the part of the game where I'm struggling to stop the hatches form eating my copper because I don't have the research to relocate them yet.  Talking about my irrigation system at this point is just nonsense.
We don't hate Steam Turbines, we don't hate Thermal Nullifiers, and I personally have no problem with venting hot gasses into space.  The issue is we can't use those yet.  There just aren't heat-related tools for the earlier stages of colony development like there are for other things.

[Grimgaw]

7 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

Nope, that's outright gaslighting

I'm sorry you felt this way. Can you share what cooling methods were/are fun and engaging?

3 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

There just aren't heat-related tools for the earlier stages of colony development like there are for other things.

Ice-E fan.

[goboking]

3 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

Oxygen Diffusers aren't a a stopgap.  They're the staple means of producing oxygen in the early game.  Planter Boxes aren't a stopgap  They're the basic platform for farming until you tech up.

That's what a stopgap is, by definition...a temporary solution.  When you say oxygen diffusers are staples in the early game and planter boxes are basic platforms for farming until you research something more advanced, you're saying they're stopgaps.

 

5 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

I'm at the stage of the part of the game where I'm struggling to stop the hatches form eating my copper because I don't have the research to relocate them yet.  Talking about my irrigation system at this point is just nonsense.

You don't have the research to build a storage compactor?  You'll have to clarify that for me.  In either case, if you're at a stage where sweeping copper away from hungry hatches is a pressing concern then I'd be surprised if you're generating enough heat for it to be an issue.

[BaloneyOs]

53 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

I'm sorry you felt this way. Can you share what cooling methods were/are fun and engaging?

No worries. It's not about being you being sorry or how I felt. I simply called you out on what you tried to do.

 

This game allows for many archetypes of heat management.

1. Geyser placement, where closely placed geysers with lucky rolls could lead to highly efficient megafacilities that serve multiple purposes, where one of which is often heat management.

2. Selective digging, where on maps where heat is an issue you might opt to simply dig out problem areas to halve their mass while keeping cold areas intact. Also in choosing whether you dig out conductive materials to manipulate heat transfer for very cheap.

3. Stabilizing vs deleting. Basically like how most plants harvest and critters spawn at fixed temps which makes trees exceptional for climate control without using outright heat deletion.

4. Without the power of magical heat deletion there could even be incentive to instead move the heat to those previously bad 500C geysers to pool up extreme temperatures for industrial puposes. If for any reason you start breaking 500C those geysers will end up as cooling mechanisms in your specific operation.

5. Abyssalite formations. Geodes are the best example I can think of since they conveniently provide a well-shaped room for a modest but exceptionally insulated facility as soon as you can dig up the geode without annihilating your base.

Mechanics such as these feel intuitive, rewarding, and more appropriately costed for their effect compared to old WW and sieve-like heat invalidation. They also balance heat management around optimizing map generation in addition to just optimizing your facilities, therefore greatly fueling design variety while not making an optimization compromise feel forced. For forced optimization mechanics you can look at non-deconstructible POIs.

[avc15]

Pump heat into some spare fluids or gases by circulating clean water through an aquatuner. Water because it has the highest shc of any early game material so it's also the most power efficient choice. Cool your base and equipment with this 1C water.

Dump the hot exhaust you've created out into space.

I'm using CO2 as the primary medium for my hot exhaust, and a little bit of water here and there when I don't have high enough CO2 pressure to absorb the amount of heat I need.

This is a low tech solution. Only requires a few techs unlocked: liquid tuning (A/T), advanced automation (control doors for CO2 intake or drip some water), brute-force refinement (metal tiles to keep voles outside, steel is not needed to get started). It does require you to dig a chimney to space & insulate it, which can be time consuming. Can be put into operation as early as cycle 100.

[pacovf]

7 minutes ago, avc15 said:

Pump heat into some spare fluids or gases by circulating clean water through an aquatuner. Water because it has the highest shc of any early game material so it's also the most power efficient choice. Cool your base and equipment with this 1C water.

Dump the hot exhaust you've created out into space.

I'm using CO2 as the primary medium for my hot exhaust, and a little bit of water here and there when I don't have high enough CO2 pressure to absorb the amount of heat I need.

This is a low tech solution. Only requires a few techs unlocked: liquid tuning (A/T), advanced automation (control doors for CO2 intake or drip some water), brute-force refinement (metal tiles to keep voles outside, steel is not needed to get started). It does require you to dig a chimney to space & insulate it, which can be time consuming. Can be put into operation as early as cycle 100.

This is cool, but I think we all agree that you have to pretty much be an expert of the game to be able to set this up so quickly. I don’t know how long it takes for the average player to even just *reach* the surface, but I doubt it’s 100 cycles.

[zarklord_klei]

1 hour ago, Eternal Firesea said:

Oxygen Diffusers aren't a a stopgap.  They're the staple means of producing oxygen in the early game.  Planter Boxes aren't a stopgap  They're the basic platform for farming until you tech up.
This is what we were talking about:  People keep offering tools from the totality of the game, without thought to whether those tools are currently available.  I'm at the stage of the part of the game where I'm struggling to stop the hatches form eating my copper because I don't have the research to relocate them yet.  Talking about my irrigation system at this point is just nonsense.
We don't hate Steam Turbines, we don't hate Thermal Nullifiers, and I personally have no problem with venting hot gasses into space.  The issue is we can't use those yet.  There just aren't heat-related tools for the earlier stages of colony development like there are for other things.

except for the map that starts you in a hot zone, heat is a non issue until you can have the entire tech tree researched, I don't know what world you live in where you need to start managing heat before cycle 300.

[avc15]

that's fair, but there's only a rush for time on volcanea / aridio (even a bit moreso on aridio in my opinion)

In any other start you can pick a single abyssalite-encased area and store heat in there, just lock an A/T into any cool rust biome, cold glacier, what have you.

Your "heatsink" biome will continue working well into the 500s of cycles or so, a when it stops working you can build something more advanced then.

-----

I hope klei holds onto this current paradigm of all buildings add more heat than they remove, excepting the ice machine which can't really be exploited easily on an industrial scale. Let the crowd cope with the changes for a while, they will adapt. Not everyone should survive aridio with magma channels and volcanos, it should be a real race against time.

[Eternal Firesea]

44 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

Ice-E fan.

The Ice-E Fan requires advanced research, takes up a fair amount of space, and it eats a dupe.  It certainly does work, but I've always looked at it as more of a reaction tool for dealing with emerging hot spots. than an ongoing solution, and it certainly doesn't scale well on its own.
 

3 minutes ago, Zarklord said:

except for the map that starts you in a hot zone, heat is a non issue until you can have the entire tech tree researched, I don't know what world you live in where you need to start managing heat before cycle 300.

I live in a world where my duplicants do things?  Do you not research?  Generate oxygen?  Generate and store power?  Refine metal?  Ranch?  Cook food? Tap geysers or volcanoes?  Even now that the Sieve no longer fills your base with hot water, there's are still tons of things that add heat to your base.

[pacovf]

While I agree that the heat game is definitely playable right now (I have always played without sieve-cooling, and I’ve been fine), it’s undeniable that a large proportion of forum posters don’t think it’s particularly fun right now. That is reason enough for Klei to address the issue, IMHO.

Personally, my wish list, in no specific order:

- have the thermoregulator’s efficiency buffed

- ideally have both the thermoregulator and AT be DTU based instead of temperature based

- move heat deletion from the ice maker to the ice fan, but severely buff its heat deletion to compensate for dupe time

- have the ice fan and thermoregulator both be one tier earlier in the research tree

- not have both WWs and AETNs spawn in the same biome

- space radiators!

 

[Yunru]

3 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

End of "discussion". All I can see here is I have to "acknowledge" that you are right and that the game is perfect because "it's in the game".

Umm... whut?

You started out at the position that we were only left with two options for cooling. You acknowledging there is a third is something perfectly valid to point out, as it runs counter to your whole argument.

[zarklord_klei]

2 hours ago, Eternal Firesea said:

I live in a world where my duplicants do things?  Do you not research?  Generate oxygen?  Generate and store power?  Refine metal?  Ranch?  Cook food? Tap geysers or volcanoes?  Even now that the Sieve no longer fills your base with hot water, there's are still tons of things that add heat to your base.

I do all of those things, and heat never started to be a problem till cycle 300~

[bmilohill]

My question is has anyone actually lost a base to heat since the update?

I remember a year ago when I was first learning the game where half of my colonies wouldn't make cycle 100 because of heat (while the rest wouldn't make it for other reasons). These days because I know what I'm doing, I can't imagine losing a base on any of the asteroids. 

Heat deletion has changed, so there are new things to learn. We should spend a few months figuring out the best strats before making statements like 'there are no heat management options.'

[Yunru]

I personally have gotten by just fine using the Ice Maker for cooling.

That said, I wouldn't mind something mid-tier (used to be wheezeworts).