The Liquid-Gas Bypass - A pump that swaps elements around corners

[mathmanican 2,290]

When crud clogs the flow, get a bypass. I present a new percentage-based pump, capable of teleporting both liquids and gasses diagonally. 

The Liquid-Gas Bypass

Before jumping in, let's see some uses in picture form (more details later). 

The official name is still pending - comment below if you have a nice derpy name that beats "the liquid-gas bypass pump" or just "the bypass" for short. 

Short important history (reading this will help you understand what's going on)

When building liquid stacked airlocks, I noticed that if you dig out the side wall from top to bottom, then the lock holds.  However, if you dig out from bottom to top, then the liquid on the top often falls to take the place of the dug out tile (see below - green is good, red is bad). @nakomaru's post last week reminded me of this observation, and sparked further study. 

• Take Away: Liquids can flow diagonally downwards through walls. 

While trying to make an infinite liquid storage facility, I forgot one tile. The liquid forced the trapped gas out of the holding cell, causing the gas to move diagonally upwards. My storage facility was destroyed, but this pump was born. 

• Take Away: Gasses can flow diagonally upwards through walls. 

I immediately built the following (left diagram) and let time pass (middle diagram) and watched the water interchange places with each gas as the water found it's way to the bottom (right diagram). 

• Take Away: Liquids and gasses literally swap places diagonally under certain conditions.

Time for the gory details/mechanics (How does the liquid-gas bypass work?)

If you need the intro picture again, expand this spoiler. 

Spoiler

• First we stack two different liquids on each other (for example, crude oil on the bottom, and water on top).
• Pick a side (either left or right). On that side, make sure there is a solid tile (not airflow or mesh) next to the top liquid, but no tile (or mesh) next to the bottom liquid. 
• Make sure there is gas next to the bottom liquid on your chosen side. If there is vacuum, then swapping stops.
• The top liquid and diagonally down gas swap places diagonally. Yes, they literally swap places. Keep feeding in new liquid on top, and the swapping happens repeatedly. 
• The swapping occurs with any amount of liquid a valve can produce (minimum 0.1g). If the contents are 10g or above, then the swapped liquid forms a bead and starts falling (obeying the same principles as the bead pump).  If the liquid content is less than 10g, then the liquid vanishes (yes, literally vanishes), yet still allows swapping to happen. 
• The swapping can occur on either side (symmetry allows for the OCD in all of us - not quite true for the bead pump). If both sides are available for swapping, then the water will swap down to the right. Liquid prefers to go right (not a surprise). For simplicity, I generally box off the side I don't want to use. 
  Spoiler

         

  Notice the beads (water blobs) occur every fifth tile. This suggest the beads form during one of the 5 ticks of the game that happen every second. The beads always go right if both sides are available for swapping. 

• If you set a valve to 0.1 g, then you can use the bypass without having to clean up any liquid mess. At a rage of 0.1g per second, a single 10kg segment of pipe will let this run for 166.666... cycles. If you know you won't be playing a base to more than 2000 cycles, then leave a 12 segment block of pipes, fill them with liquid, and then delete the liquid feed (no new pump needed). Or set up automation to send a signal to allow a 1 second burst of 10kg of liquid every time the pipe runs dry (every 166 cycles). 
• The pump works best in a single gas environment. It does work in a multi gas environment, though if a gas cannot be pushed out of the way by the incoming liquid, then the gas is destroyed (along with the incoming liquid) at the same rate the liquid enters. The pump can, and will, suck an area to vacuum that has more than one type of gas, provided you don't care if some of the gas gets deleted. 
• A mechanical door, on the bottom side of the pump, will stop the pump from working (or a shutoff to prevent new liquid from entering). 

How can I use this?

1. High pressure gas storage. Putting the valve at 0.1g allows you to ignore cleaning up any liquid waste (convenient). The pump will instantly pull out each 1000g deposit of new gas, so you'll never see a "vent over pressure" error message. This will still work even if at some point the "liquid over vent" exploit is patched out of the game. Here are several examples:
   • Caputure CO2 at the bottom of your base early on without a door pump.
   • Store all your gasses in a compact gas storage facility, without needing the liquid over vent trick.
   • Capture C02 from meteors at alarming rates (thanks @Zarquan for the idea in the bead pump),
   • Harness all gas from a chlorine or natural gas vent (or any other). Just remember to use naptha and petro if you are going to tame a super hot 500C vent.
   • Capture the entire output of a cool steam vent as 110C steam for later use in a turbine, without it over pressurizing. This requires using several bypasses to keep up the huge volume, but it can easily be done. 
   Spoiler

   Here is a compact storage unit. The liquid, if set to under 10g (so at 0.1 g), vanished after making the gas swap.  You won't ever see an overpressure warning. 

   

   This storage facility uses the 0.1g setting on the liquid valves, so there is no liquid clean up (yes, it wastes water, but at 10kg per 167 cycles, I think it's well worth it). The gas is sorted with a mechanical filter. The hydrosensors turn the gas pumps on/off. A few dupes may have been inadvertently killed while making this.... It was for science! 

   

   A single bypass can keep most vents completely underpressure. 

   

   A cool steam vent produces so much steam that a single bypass won't be enough (in fact, two may not be enough either if your vent is quite active). So after a two pump example (may not be enough), we use 4 bypasses to easily tame a very active beast. Notice also that one side of the bypass can be completely gas, and it still works perfectly.

    (may not be enough, use the picture below)

   

   Use any form of this pump, up in space, to capture more CO2 from meteors than you could ever use. Here is probably the slowest configuration you could build, and yet it slurps up CO2 extremely fast. Pop some molten slicksters inside, and use petro with a 10g flow to increase the intake with bead power, You could build similar devices lining the walls of every rocket silo, to capture most of whatever gas the rocket emits.

   

    

2. You can pump an area to vacuum without ever entering it. You could drain slimelung infsted PO2 into an itty bitty room, or contain a sporechid (I gotcha @metallichydra) infection before cracking open the walls. You can choose to keep the gas or destroy it once the room is empty.

   Spoiler

   The PO2 below will eventually be completely sucked up into the tiny chamber.  If I don't want the PO2, then I can just corner build when the pump is done. 

   

3. You can drain liquid from a region without letting any of the gas inside leave. You will add some extra gas to the region, but you don't have to worry about any gas leaving. This is useful to get polluted water from a slimelung infested cavity without having to worry about the PO2 leaving, or draining  ethanol, slat water, etc, without having to deal with the gasses above them. 

   Spoiler

   First set everything up, with a liquid reservoir above you.  Then let it drain. For this one, the liquid vent is not actually needed, so it could be moved one tile up closer to the actual liquid reservoir you wish to drain. Note: the airflow tile to the right of the ladder forces the beads to pop, dropping in teleportation form to the place prepared ahead of time to receive the liquid. Without the airflow tile, bead mechanics will take over and you may find yourself with liquid come out and spreading more rapidly than you want.

    

4. You can destroy gas and liquid, on purpose, without going to space. I'll leave the details of this one out for now, and let those interested explore and discover. 

5. If you are in the habit of creating massive high pressures oxygen chambers, you can use this pump and some automation to service your base with oxygen at appropriate pressures and temperatures, without needing to use a door pump.

6. I'm excited to see someone put together a nice efficient way to suck out gasses from a hydrolyzer without needing to put liquid over it. This will require learning to deal with two gasses (I think you can train the pump with some more shenanigans to work with 2, but not 3, gasses). i'll get around to a post on this if no one beats me to it. There is quite a bit more to explore here. 

7. The pump does a decent job of preserving temperature differences between the top side and bottom side.  The only connection between the two is the tiny bit of liquid on the bottom tile, so it effectively throttles all temperature transfer. Ethanol might become my new liquid of choice, with its nerfed SHC, to put on the bottom layer. I am playing with this in a steam turbine setup to utilize a tepidizer to get gasses to 125C (using @Blazing Falken's power shutoff pulser NRGFREE-freezer) and then bypass this gas to another chamber where aquatuners bump the temp above 125 to get the turbine going.  I figure one tepidizer and one aquatuner can keep over 15 turbines running at more than 1/4 power, That'll be another post.

   Spoiler

   Here's the design and post. It can be optimized further. 

   

    

I'm sure you'll all find more cool uses.  For now, this seems like a fun mechanic to play with that I haven't yet seen posted on the forums. If someone has video's to a YouTuber or somewhere else, where they've abused this, please share.  I'll add them to the top of the list. 

What do we call this?
If it's completely new, then we need a fun name.  Feel free to add suggestions below. Here are some names (some more stupid than others). 

• Diagonal Pump
• Gas teleportation pump
• Flip flop pump
• Gas porter
• Gas porter pump
• gas passing pump (for the teenage boy in some of us)
• diagonal gas pump
• liquid locked gas pump
• liquid-gas swapping gas pump
• lgsgp
• diagonal liquid/gas swapper. 
• Diagonal teleportation pump
• Insanely power efficient liquid-gas swapper gas pump. (ipelgsgp)
• The gas bypass pump (bypass pump for short) 
• Diagonal gas bypass
• The liquid gas bypass (it moves both liquids and gasses) - rhymes, Maybe "The liquid-gas bypass pump", or just "a bypass pump" or "a bypass" (drop pump all together). Then we can say "just build a bypass to let your gas flow..." or "just build a bypass to drain your PO2 from the swamp biome without ever even opening it up ..."

Of all the ones above, I prefer the liquid-gas bypass, or bypass for short. I'd love to hear others. 

Edited August 10 by mathmanican
formatting, added SSSTC

[nakomaru 1,343]

A very subtly frustrating and confusing mechanic very simply explained once again. Awesome work!

My first thought was displacer pump, but I like liquid-gas bypass too.

Edited August 10 by nakomaru

[Machenoid 96]

As long as it doesn't duplicate matter, i'm certain Klei's coders are not screaming... As much.

[Saturnus 3,311]

The Jebaitor.

EDIT: For those not knowing, jebaiting is an amalgamation of bait-and-switch where you tease with something but actually want something else. In this case you tease with 0.1g of liquid which vanishes but in it's place you make the gas switch places with the teased liquid.

Edited August 10 by Saturnus

[mathmanican 2,290]

1 minute ago, Machenoid said:

As long as it doesn't duplicate matter

This one I don't consider a bug at all (I'm sure some will disagree).  It appears to be part of the physics engine. I'm surprised it hasn't shown up in the forums yet (as I'm guessing it's been there for years). This one, to me, seems no different than any other one-element-per-tile mechanic, though this one definitely utilizes a gas/liquid interaction.

[Machenoid 96]

14 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

It appears to be part of the physics engine.

Matter teleportation is the main reason why electrolyzers sitting in liquids are able to spawn the hydrogen and oxygen without mixing them. It is unexpected to see matter teleportation elsewhere but it's not really surprising it would be possible.

It's these fun sorts of gimmicks the one-element-per-tile design provides are what makes ONI a joy to play; discover a rule, then bend it, then break it and do crazy things with it. Personally i hope the physics engine never changes to allow more than one element in a tile, otherwise all these neat engineering features it provides will disappear with it.

Edited August 10 by Machenoid

[nakomaru 1,343]

I fully support that sentiment Machenoid.

I don't think tricked electrolyzers are teleporting materials. They output in a 5 tile plus sign, and they cycle through each tile each tick. If it can't output, it doesn't.

Tricking it just gives each element one tile choice. I don't know why that bypasses pressure though. Hmm.

After using debug slow-motion, it seems not really true for the hydrogen. See below.

Edited August 10 by nakomaru

[abud 474]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

While trying to make an infinite liquid storage facility, I forgot one tile.

Ah, I thought infinite liquid storage only need 1 tile gas like this, that's why I confused how you manage to magically discover LGB.

Spoiler

Is this one not going to work anymore for infinite liquid storage room?

[mathmanican 2,290]

8 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

I don't think tricked electrolyzers are teleporting materials.

There are ways to overpressurize it without teleporting, and ways to do it with teleporting.

Spoiler

Without 

With

Notice the top of the cross shaped region is blocked, so the hydrogen has nowhere to appear. It first appears inside the middle of the cross and then ports diagonally upwards to the right (visible by rapidly pause/unpausing). 

 

 

5 minutes ago, abud said:

Is this one not going to work anymore for infinite liquid storage room?

This one works fine. However it requires you use a pump to fill it.  The other one I linked to (or a much smaller version without a geyser attached) can slurp up entire biomes using just downward motion.  You can literally slurp up the entire oil biome in one of them without ever using a pump. 

[nakomaru 1,343]

@mathmanican Well I'll be. Didn't know about the teleporter one. I'm very surprised it works if it's generating hydrogen directly beside oxygen. (Wait, maybe they are both doing that. Oh my god they do. Why does this work!)

Edited August 10 by nakomaru

[mathmanican 2,290]

7 minutes ago, abud said:

LGB

Hmmm....  Maybe the Jebaitor is the way to go.  We'll have to give everyone a day or so to cast their vote. 

[abud 474]

I write anything you decided in the title. Because it is long and I'm lazy, I just type LGB

[mathmanican 2,290]

1 minute ago, nakomaru said:

I'm very surprised it works

When I build the teleporting one, I never have issues. I've had the non-teleporting one backfire on me before and start putting oxygen in my H2 supply, though that has only happened when I leave BOTH tiles above the electrolyzer open. Somehow a blip of O2 moved upwards and displaced my H2, probably because I had super high pressure O2. I can't reproduce this issue at will, but I do tend to prefer the teleporting build.

[nakomaru 1,343]

I've also seen it bug out when using oxygen on the bottom layer. I'll try the teleporter next if hydrogen on the bottom also bugs out.

After watching in slow motion it seems that the oxygen is directly output to the oxygen layer, and the hydrogen gives up and forces the liquid aside. Then the liquid immediately flows left and pushes the hydrogen into the hydrogen layer. So I was wrong about both elements going directly to their own layer.

Edited August 10 by nakomaru

[Mullematsch 218]

I feel like I need to pay mathmanican for the amount of cool stuff he keep coming up with. Also the detail in your posts is great, always a pleasure to read. 

[metallichydra 1,852]

*looks at notifications

"mathmanican mentioned you in a topic"

*can't wait to see mathmanicans newest exploity fantastic machine, and clicks on the notification

*looks at wall of text

I just can't read this wall of text - so sad - but I guess I have to say something ... so ... its nice ... I guess

of course I can read it

I'm just too lazy

[Saturnus 3,311]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Hmmm....  Maybe the Jebaitor is the way to go.  We'll have to give everyone a day or so to cast their vote. 

You're worried (and rightfully so I may add) that people start calling it the LGB thingie, and pretty soon it'll be abbreviated to just LGBT?

[mathmanican 2,290]

26 minutes ago, metallichydra said:

I just can't read this wall of text - so sad

Haha.  Well, if all you want to do is expand the spoilers and then read the short one liners, go for it. Maybe I should just show pictures and put all words in spoilers.....

8 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

it'll be abbreviated to just LGBT?

You mean the liquid-gas bypass transporter.... 

[Lifegrow 1,519]

18 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

Haha.  Well, if all you want to do is expand the spoilers and then read the short one liners, go for it. Maybe I should just show pictures and put all words in spoilers.....

You mean the liquid-gas bypass transporter.... 

C'mon guys, it's 2019...

I think you mean the : Liquid gas bypass transporter - quixotically quantifiable in actual abundant pressures.

Or the LGBTQQIAAP for short. I think.

[Loscil2 80]

Woah. Awesome. Thanks! As for the name I suggest LCD: Liquid compression diagonally.

[Dan_Daniel2000 36]

26 minutes ago, Loscil2 said:

Woah. Awesome. Thanks! As for the name I suggest LCD: Liquid compression diagonally.

Make sure to not swap that around though, I think its too soon for a Diagonal Liquid Compressor (or DLC for short).

[Nebbie 298]

How fast does this pump compared to a conventional pump? Rather...how well will this work for an airlock design that puts any gases back out to their respective sides without using any power to pump them?

[mathmanican 2,290]

13 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

How fast does this pump compared to a conventional pump?

It's a percentage based pump, limited by how rapidly gas expands to fill the vacuum tile created after swapping (about 10-12% per second based on gas type). If you place the pump on a gas source (as done with the vent diagrams above), then it works much faster.

• If you have large pressures then it completely stomps on a conventional pump, outclassing any fixed rate pump.
• If you have low pressure, then it works really slowly. 

[Sigma Cypher 64]

16 hours ago, mathmanican said:

If I don't want the PO2, then I can just corner build when the pump is done. 

Wait - can you?  If gases can escape diagonally ...you have to corner-build low to high I guess?

This is awesome btw.  Thanks

[mathmanican 2,290]

38 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

you have to corner-build low to high I guess

The diagonal movement requires both liquid and water. You can corner build the gasses and delete them after they have been pumped out of your region.  Have fun playing with it.  

On a side note, an electrolyzer build will never see 100% uptime with this.  Since the pump is percentage based (10-12%), and the electrolyzer caps at 2000, then each pump will suck out at most 240g/s. You could surround a single machine with 4 - 6 of these, as done with the cool steam vent or something similar, but at that point you've built a huge monster to try and squeeze out miniscual amounts of gas. Not worth it.