Poluted water consumptions of reeds.

[Mutineer]

Does anyone think that 160KG polluted water cycle to grow reeds is a way too much?

I almost think it is misentered, 16kg/cycle would be much more reasonable.

[Nebbie]

Yes, they're even thirstier than trees, and look utterly ridiculous compared to dreckos unless the intention is specifically to delete heat rather than get reed fiber.

[DepravityCat]

Thimble reeds have been around for a loooong time, so it's safe to say the 160kg is intentional. They also only take two days to grow, so 16kg a day would be effectively free. 

I use them as overflows for my toilet loop, soaking up the excess polluted water that is produced and slowly giving me a reed or two as a bonus. 

[Gus Smedstad]

Thimble reeds are a very expensive source of fiber.

That said, I decided to pursue them anyway in my present asteroid, at least for the short term. I feel like I'm not in a good position to create a Drecko ranch yet, and I desperately want a handful of fibers for enviro suits. The enviro suits will make it safe to screw around with slime, and they'll let my Dupes breath comfortably in a hydrogen filled Drecko ranch for long term fiber production.

At present I have a huge surplus of polluted water, because I'm still using algae terrariums for oxygen (it's quite early). I deliberately did not create a polluted water collection pool so the bottles are sitting around emitting polluted oxygen which I scrub with deoderizers.

Hence I feel I can spend the 320 KG of polluted water per fiber for a short time. I figure once I've got about 10 fiber or so I'll uproot the reeds. It's not at all sustainable in the long term, but I can easily afford a 3 ton one time expenditure. The way I see it, domesticated thimble reeds are a temporary bootstrap to other things.

Wild thimble reeds have no cost, of course, but I wasn't lucky enough to find any so far.

My long term plan is a Drecko ranch fed by balm lillies, which have zero upkeep even when domesticated. What's stopping me, ironically, is that none of potential sites is hot enough! Minimum temperature for balm lillies is 37 C, and I don't have a lot of heat pollution yet.

[Elidrin]

In the grand scheme of things you don't need tons of reed fiber and it's an easy way to get rid of excess p-water. While building up the reserves for art and suits. Honestly 1 plant is plenty and 2 overkill the way I play.

[Gus Smedstad]

I've been resisting using thimble reeds as a polluted water sponge, because water's a pretty important resource, particularly before you get renewable water from geysers. I think they're fine for a one-off project, but I don't want them to be a permanent part of my toilet loop.

[FantasticMoose]

The fibers are incidental.
I use reeds as a PW dump, when the cooling loop gets too cold for pinchas.

[Gus Smedstad]

I can't really fathom throwing away water, just to throw it away. Yeah, late game you're probably running a surplus, but once you move beyond algae and mushrooms, water is your source of oxygen and food. It takes quite a while to get to the point where your renewable water production catches up with demand.

[Nebbie]

If it really came to growing them, I would just rely on pips to plant them. With such a fast growth time, wild growth is no issue.

In fact, on Verdante, it is very, very easy with all the seeds you get from the slime biomes around  being planted by pips to end up with hundreds of reed fibers lying around that you don't know what to do with...my recent Verdante base never ended up with hydrogen in the normal drecko stable and I just left them naked.

Just now, Gus Smedstad said:

I can't really fathom throwing away water, just to throw it away. Yeah, late game you're probably running a surplus, but once you move beyond algae and mushrooms, water is your source of oxygen and food. It takes quite a while to get to the point where your renewable water production catches up with demand.

One thing people like to do is to dump heat into polluted water made from geyser water, then shovel it into plants. Solves the problem of the geyser water being hot while getting you tons of pincha peppernuts. Personally, my wasteful use of water in my most recent lategame (300+ cycles) base was to dump it on my space equipment, so that everything stays around 100 C or less (if it heats up, the steam carries the heat away as new cold water comes in; and pumps can carry some of the steam to early rocket engines too).

[Gurgel]

I think it is ok. Also, wild ones do grow nicely even without using pips to plant more.

[Gus Smedstad]

I'll  have to think about dumping heat into pincha peppers and thimble reeds this time. First game I sort of flailed around for a long time, my mid-game heat management was wheezeworts and probably some unintentional heat removal via fixed-temp water sieves. Second game I got steam turbines relatively early and the problem went away.

I probably still won't do it this time, but I'll try and keep it in mind if the situation looks dire before I get turbines.

[thejohn1567]

They're way easier to set up and forget than a drecko farm. Like people have said you also don't need a huge amount of fiber anyway.

[M.C.]

1 hour ago, thejohn1567 said:

They're way easier to set up and forget than a drecko farm. Like people have said you also don't need a huge amount of fiber anyway.

...until you start making insulation, at which point no amount of fiber is going to be enough.

2 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

My long term plan is a Drecko ranch fed by balm lillies, which have zero upkeep even when domesticated. What's stopping me, ironically, is that none of potential sites is hot enough! Minimum temperature for balm lillies is 37 C, and I don't have a lot of heat pollution yet.

Isn't that what heaters are for?

[Kermack]

I just get reed fibers from the wild until the printer gives me one of those pips.

[Gus Smedstad]

4 hours ago, M.C. said:

Isn't that what heaters are for?

Yeah, I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. Not in the chamber itself, since balm lilies require chlorine, which is effectively an insulator, but I could install heaters below the farm plots.

I have some blind spots, and one of them is that I'm so used to heat being a problem that I'm averse to creating it via heaters.

[dereq]

9 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Yes, they're even thirstier than trees, and look utterly ridiculous compared to dreckos unless the intention is specifically to delete heat rather than get reed fiber.

farm plots do not delete heat, the excess heat from the water/polluted water/salt water is transferred directly to the farm plot and the plant. You can test it with insulation pipes made of insulation in sandbox mode which i already did.

[Gus Smedstad]

Are you absolutely sure about that? The farm plots heating up isn’t proof by itself. Farm plots have a storage capacity for water. I’m assuming that the farm plots exchange heat with the water in that storage. The question is, what happens to the energy in the water as it’s consumed? In every other thing that consumes liquid, the heat energy is deleted. For example, petroleum generators delete the heat in petroleum as they burn it.

You can’t prove that the heat is being transferred, rather than deleted, without doing calculations based on the amount of energy is theoretically being transferred. You want something with a really high consumption rate for the test, which means thimble reeds are probably your ideal subject.

[Nebbie]

1 hour ago, dereq said:

farm plots do not delete heat, the excess heat from the water/polluted water/salt water is transferred directly to the farm plot and the plant. You can test it with insulation pipes made of insulation in sandbox mode which i already did.

Farm plots store excess inside their own internal storage, which they exchange heat with (same as, say, ethanol in the petroleum generator), so the insulation in your pipes doesn't mean much if you don't have a valve limiting to the consumption rate of the plants.

In addition, exchanging heat with a stored input and gaining the heat energy of a consumed resource are not the same thing; heat will always be deleted if a resource is consumed with how ONI works because the resource itself vanishes and the game forgets about the heat energy it contained. Sure, some heat may leak out of it first, but you're still deleting heat, and probably quite a bit of heat if it's water.
Now, some processes in ONI preserve temperature from inputs to outputs, like electrolysis, in which case heat is only deleted if the SHC of the outputs is lower (it is ridiculously so for electrolysis, actually, but not for something like sieving water), but most things instead output at the building/critter/plant temperature (sometimes with minimum temperatures, as is common with power generation and related buildings).
If that building, critter, or plant is colder than what you put in (oh hello hatch eating near-magma igneous and pooping 20 C coal), or if its outputs have less SHC (that's the idea with pincha peppers), or even just less mass (salt to table salt used to not also make sand, and petroleum refining in the building actually about halves mass still), then you've got heat deletion that you can exploit to your heart's content. Since [polluted] water has crazy SHC, it's a preferred choice to dump heat into before deleting, and growing some plants as a byproduct is more useful than venting it to space.

[Mutineer]

9 hours ago, DepravityCat said:

Thimble reeds have been around for a loooong time, so it's safe to say the 160kg is intentional. They also only take two days to grow, so 16kg a day would be effectively free. 

I use them as overflows for my toilet loop, soaking up the excess polluted water that is produced and slowly giving me a reed or two as a bonus. 

They simply forget about them. Drekos
Now we have maps with extremely limited source of water and very hot surrounding. You can get reeds seeds from the printer and then you can not use them. Really, 1 reed consume more than all Toilets produce?
I even do not talk about the amount of mass disappearing. It is gross.

[Nebbie]

38 minutes ago, Mutineer said:

They simply forget about them. Drekos
Now we have maps with extremely limited source of water and very hot surrounding. You can get reeds seeds from the printer and then you can not use them. Really, 1 reed consume more than all Toilets produce?
I even do not talk about the amount of mass disappearing. It is gross.

It's kind of funny actually, I tried to take advantage of a leaky oil fissure when I came back to ONI a few months back, trying to get over my hatred of the messiness of all the oil-related production stuff (random natural gas from refinery, plastic production being super duper finnicky or you get useless NAPTHA, etc.), and then I realized after a while that even with a cool slush geyser output cooling the polymer press before the rest of my base, it couldn't run often enough to compete with my basic glossy drecko ranch. Then I noticed the launch update beta, and got in right as wheezeworts started needing drecko poop to work. at a time when trees were OP (domestic they produced water overall with the ethanol system) but also needed drecko poop...
Dreckos are cool and all, but one of these days I'd like a really good reason to invest in smooth hatches or consider tame shine bugs not something to kill on sight. You might say "but smooth hatches don't produce heat or cost power to refine your iron", to which I must point out that refining iron actually makes so much heat that it produces power overall with a steam turbine in the mix. I don't particularly feel like ranching something that sacrifices a quarter of my metal to also deny me 200W of power.

Of course, it's not something unique to old systems; consider the rust biome, which provides some great resources...but comes with a plant and critter that eat the chlorine away rapidly but without anything to give them more, a plant that needs cold temperatures but has nothing cooling it, and dreckos that have nothing to eat and no hydrogen while they freeze to death for some reason. I definitely expect a few updates to eventually address very odd system imbalances.

[suxkar]

Domesticated Reeds are good in low numbers early game to get few atmo suits and snazzy suits.. Moving to mid game I'd keep 3-4 of them domesticated to keep on producing seeds and pip-plant all the rest.
It is also very useful to have a pump in the top 2 tiles of your main pwater storage dedicated only to some Reeds in hydroponic tiles: they make sure excess pwater doesn't overfill your reserve and produce more Fiber in the process.
Late game Insulation is not 100% essential, but being able to produce 10-20 tons is very useful, so.. start early .. Wild ones just require space (and micro management).
Having many domesticated ones is not very sustainable in the long run, that's why you have pips!

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

It's kind of funny actually, I tried to take advantage of a leaky oil fissure when I came back to ONI a few months back, trying to get over my hatred of the messiness of all the oil-related production stuff (random natural gas from refinery, plastic production being super duper finnicky or you get useless NAPTHA, etc.), and then I realized after a while that even with a cool slush geyser output cooling the polymer press before the rest of my base, it couldn't run often enough to compete with my basic glossy drecko ranch. Then I noticed the launch update beta, and got in right as wheezeworts started needing drecko poop to work. at a time when trees were OP (domestic they produced water overall with the ethanol system) but also needed drecko poop...
Dreckos are cool and all, but one of these days I'd like a really good reason to invest in smooth hatches or consider tame shine bugs not something to kill on sight. You might say "but smooth hatches don't produce heat or cost power to refine your iron", to which I must point out that refining iron actually makes so much heat that it produces power overall with a steam turbine in the mix. I don't particularly feel like ranching something that sacrifices a quarter of my metal to also deny me 200W of power.

Of course, it's not something unique to old systems; consider the rust biome, which provides some great resources...but comes with a plant and critter that eat the chlorine away rapidly but without anything to give them more, a plant that needs cold temperatures but has nothing cooling it, and dreckos that have nothing to eat and no hydrogen while they freeze to death for some reason. I definitely expect a few updates to eventually address very odd system imbalances.

Agreed about the smooth hatches. I used them in my first game. They seem nice an all compared to the early game rock crusher, but considering how much time they take to have a meaningful output besides food, you are just beeter off sticking to stone hatches and tech directly to metal refinery/steam turbine. Same thing for Glossy Drekos

[Gus Smedstad]

7 hours ago, Nebbie said:

 (random natural gas from refinery, plastic production being super duper finnicky or you get useless NAPTHA, etc.)

I’ve never had any problem with melting plastic in my polymer presses.

My first time, I got super paranoid because I knew nothing about how they worked, and the polymer press had a reputation for running hot. So I created an overkill cooling system involving a steam turbine, and was taken aback by how heat wasn’t a problem.

The second time, I did something far simpler, which I saw suggested here. I used the input petroleum to cool the room with the press, and used an auto sweeper / conveyor to move finished plastic out of the room. Absolutely no heat problems at all, all the excess heat from making plastic went into the petroleum, where it was promptly deleted as it was used by the press.

The natural gas output from the refinery’s pretty much like the polluted water output from the natural gas generator. You have to build a “drip tank” for the gas below the refinery where you can collect it. I wish the refinery had a gas output connection so collecting the gas were cleaner, just as I wish the natural gas generator had a liquid output instead of just peeing on the floor.

[dereq]

13 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Farm plots store excess inside their own internal storage, which they exchange heat with (same as, say, ethanol in the petroleum generator), so the insulation in your pipes doesn't mean much if you don't have a valve limiting to the consumption rate of the plants.

 

I did not give details on the experiment, I did put liquid valves, conclusion is the same farm plots dont delete heat, they heat until getting to the max temperature allowed  which happens really quick.

Deletion heat caused by slow transfer is maybe existent, but not important. Creating a farm that deletes heat and automated is possible, I will leave it for people like Brothgar that make great design in debug mode that take 40 cycles to build in survival.