Ice Makers, Fans, an Interesting Situation and Arbor Trees

[Corpserule]

So, Recently I've been dealing with an interesting map

Seed: OCAN-A-1969841624-WLH

The jist of the map is

-Misplaced Pod placed me right above the oil biome with no abyssalite border between me and it (it's pretty hot)

-A Fairly large amount of exploration has been done and there's no ice biomes nearby. I've reached the right-side border (the wall of neutronium is visible), it's misplaced, placing me in the bottom right corner

The best answer might be just to keep looking until i find an ice biome so that I have some easy cooling, but im at the limit of scouting without bringing oxygen with me, so it could be a long search, reguardless currently I'm fairly confident in my ability to survive here, but it begs the question. On a map with no wheezeworts, no anti-thermal nullifiers, what would be the best method to cool down?

The pages on the wiki for ice-makers and fans are a little misleading, they tell you the jist of what the objects do, but the fan-page is kinda inaccurate and the ice-maker page doesn't do a good job of expressing how the fans cool down. So I did a bunch of tests on these two objects. I hope to confirm that my understandings are correct here. Maybe update the wiki page after as well? I felt there wasn't enough there and had to go into the game to check.

So Firstly, The Fan doesn't destroy heat, and redirects all the heat from it's 32kDTU output to the ice, rapidly heating it up, it has a net gain of 0kDTUS, only redistributing how the heat is distributed. (wiki implies the environment is heating it, not true, i think this is kinda important, even if it's a note!) The Ice maker note doesn't make any sense, based on this.

The Ice maker is a bit more legit, but it's hard to make out any long term data based on the information currently there. It drops the temperature of the water by 20DTUs per second (yeah it's 20% heat destruction is legit, tested), ~4'C is lowered from water per hour, rapidly speeding up once the water becomes Ice (since ice has a lower Thermal Capacity) Duplicants need to input the ice, but are not required to stay there to operate the device, therefore, for maximum cooling and reduced labour. It's best to input higher temperature water, since duplicants will not need to visit the ice maker as often, and reduces the total down time of the machine. It should be noted that its total heat destruction is 4kDTU per ice maker, when combined with a coal generator, it's ~3kDTUs instead. (most of this information is absent from the wiki)

Technically, to minimize duplicant labour, you're better off just moving the ice, rather than actively fanning it, but it does put ice into water bottles rather than splurting it out of whatever container it is, so the fans have "some" merit for passive cooling. But it's probably better designed for rapid one-time cooling.

I've known about the water sieve cooling for a while but it seems to have fallen out of fashion? I was trying to look it up, and it seemed to have been nerfed at some point?. does anyone have the kDTU on that, as I assume it still has "some" on the premise that polluted water has a (slightly) higher capacity on it.

I know I can use aquatuning -> steam turbine for pretty good cooling, but it's a bit far down the tech chain. So i was looking for more early game options. Is Ice making the best option?

Also as a not too related finishing note. I was looking on the wiki at Arbor trees, and it bothered me that its mass creation was viewed as heat-multiplying. Whilst It's true that when viewed from 0'C it would be heat multiplying in the form of "it's a lot harder to reduce its temperature to 0'C" However, 0'C is kinda an arbitrary number when it comes to cooling. Rather, wouldn't Arbor trees be slightly heat reducing? If you placed an Arbor tree in a room that's 70'C and it kept making mass at 20'C (would require a bothersome setup to keep the branches at 20'C whilst staying in a 70'C room, im not suggesting it's a GOOD cooling system, lol) As you kept adding mass to that room at 20'C it would slowly cause the room to drift towards 20'C. It seems to be a heat stabilising effect more than anything, as the longer you keep producing mass, the harder it is to drift away from 20'C.

Anyway, I wanted to hear anything about any of these heating/cooling topics. Anyone got anything to add?

(Note: I dont really want to hear if there is an ice biome nearby, anyone can get that by entering this map in sandbox and revealing the map, that's a bit against the spirit here)

[Steve8]

The water sieve used to output at a constant temperature. So you could feed it hot water and get cold water. Thankfully that is no longer the case.

[Corpserule]

Jeez, and here i thought it would just be toilet abuse (fixed temp), or a large change in specific capacity, the level of heat destruction was even higher than I imagined.

[malloc]

Ice Maker is the only real early game option if you don't have a cold sink (ice biome or at least some cool water puddles nearby).  Your image is quite small but looks like you have some salt water at the top.  It's usually a decen temperature to dump some heat into.

If the oil biome is too close/too hot prevention might be the more prudent option i.e. speed research insulated tiles and block it off.

In theory any water you can heat up and get used in your research or food production will destroy that heat but it's hard to scale very much until you can build an aquatuner.

Once you can build an aquatuner you can build a gold one in some water (cold water or LOTS of water if it's not cold) and use that to target cool what you need to until you get to the mid-game and can setup proper steel aquatuner/steam turbine setups.

[chemie]

the fan takes a lot of dup labor and only cools the gas.  Using ice shift plates gives cold water which is very effective in cooling the floor tiles and the gas.  the dup labor to mop is much less and the cold bottles continue to chill the area.  never use fans and remember the ice makers delete almost no heat.

[Corpserule]

I'm aware these options are ****, hence the entire problem at hand of "i dont have an ice biome, what now"

My normal opinion is "keep heat generation to a minimum, avoid everything that makes a lot of heat until you have an ice biome". But my base is being heated against my will.

I feel like "a single wheezewort" could maintain my base, but unfortunately, I cannot find one. I'm afraid of the 30'C lowest temp killing all my plants.

So I'm even looking at waterweed, purely for its higher temp cap XD. Doing so gives me the heat buffer of 75% of the  map, as opposed to the 5-10% I have now. (map is literally 10+ salt biomes) The problem with that is largely bleachstone, i have to go decently far to get a puft, and it would take me at least 20 cycles to get the combination of prince, puft for the squeaky puft.

Aquatuners and steam turbines is an interesting combo that would let me exchange water for cooling, which I have a lot of, But it's pretty brutal tech-wise, not to mention the amount of build time and space required. (it's not too big, but it contains a lot of small things to automate properly)

Tame Hatch farming, honestly is probably one of my better options, but it's pretty harsh metalwise, and it feels like i'd be tossing away the very easy natural gas geysers for power, I'd prefer not to use them, but I could.

[Grimgaw]

I feel like you're trying to play non default map as you would default. If you find yourself in situation like this best thing is to adapt.

Can't grow plants because it's hot? Ranch.

[Corpserule]

yeah I'm actually looking at that, i made an edit at the same time. All these options stall, as eventually it will scald, but i could ranch until steam/rocketry.

That answer is useful as it confirms what I thought, "it's very rough to cool without an ice biome"

[Grimgaw]

47 minutes ago, Corpserule said:

Tame Hatch farming, honestly is probably one of my better options, but it's pretty harsh metalwise, and it feels like i'd be tossing away the very easy natural gas geysers for power, I'd prefer not to use them, but I could.

Why do you think hatches are "harsh metelwise"? Isn't Oceania packed with Sedimentary rock? And why would you be throwing NG away? 

You're ranching them for meat not coal, don't feel forced to use that coal.

[Corpserule]

Ranching Hatches, or, really any critter in a way where they are not pseudo wild, aka, you want to eat them, as your primary food source, requires one of 2 things. Incredible Focus or automation.

Automation has a high metal cost, even whilst being minimalist, whilst most buildings can be maintained by duplicants by alternate methods, the best setups I can think of for ranching take at least 1T metal per stable, and I'm fairly sure I'm lowballing it, As I'm only thinking of the most critical pieces of automation.

Do I have enough metal to do it? probably... almost certainly. Why don't I want to use it? because I know that using this solution could significantly slow down the pacing of my entire game, probably by a good 50%, when compared to even a poor man-made solution for heating.

Using ranching means forfeiting heavy reckless use of the oil biome, which would otherwise make my game a lot shorter.

If I come away from this thread with the knowledge that, as far as primary cooling is concerned, I'm limited to ice biome things (wheezeworts and endo-thermal machines) and steam cooling, then I consider it worth it. I want to reinforce what I understand about the game, as sometimes, if you neglect to search, you may overlook something simple, because as far as I know, my knowledge of cooling is fairly complete. I would take this map as a challenge and focus my full attention to beating this map.

I also wanted to point out the problems of the wiki article on this issue as a side note

[chemie]

1 hour ago, Corpserule said:

yeah I'm actually looking at that, i made an edit at the same time. All these options stall, as eventually it will scald, but i could ranch until steam/rocketry.

That answer is useful as it confirms what I thought, "it's very rough to cool without an ice biome"

sorry but no.  I did not even use ice biomes for cooling back when we only had one map.

There are easy ways to get cooling for mealwood early game.  Two regulators or aquatuner cooled by polluted water from a slime biome. You can dump a lot of heat into caustic or slime biome tiles so just recycle the PW over a large number of tiles.  Won't work forever but enough to get an aquatuner/steam gen running for long term solution.

[Grimgaw]

8 minutes ago, chemie said:

There are easy ways to get cooling for mealwood early game.

To be fair you don't even need to cool it, just insulate it and it will last for very many cycles.

[chemie]

13 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

To be fair you don't even need to cool it, just insulate it and it will last for very many cycles.

not on Arido.  But there you can take water gifts from the POD and pour onto the floor and then insulation keeps it cool.  OP:  Add to my list POD gifts which spawn at -30C.  Water and brine are valuable cooling.

[Corpserule]

Heat pocketing is something I've thought of, using insulation and storing heat in other areas.

I may have overlooked regulators, I didn't use them in my first game. That's some of the information I was looking for when I asked about this overall. So i'll look into it more and consider what I can do with it.

Aquatuners I've used a fair amount on my first run, I noticed you kinda need steel for them, otherwise they break in almost any environment, due to heat dispersal speed. I'm aware there's other solutions, but i know it's fiddly enough, that it would be a hassle when it generates the steam.

 

Without a proper outlet for the steam, it can cause large problems, with only decent insulated tiles, it can get through at pretty decent speeds, vacuums can be used, but reguardless, the investment in building proper chambers for them are rather large. It can be done without steam turbines, but it's more like "if you got everything else, this can make your life a lot more convenient"

That is, it's done with a lot of technology in the automation area, refined metals, space and time.

Which is what i assumed was the strat like between the water sieve nerf and release (i.e you can vent steam to space or get perfect insulation). Again, doesn't require ice biome, but it is essentually the steam strat. However, keep in mind that whilst release did allow steam turbines as a manmade way to kill heat, im pretty sure it's also the cause for my existing problem, since Ideal terrain cannot put you above oil/volcanic biomes.

I.e. I have insulated the oil biome, with air between the insulation and the oil biome to minimize heat dispersion, and my base still heats up, because the temperature difference between me and a biome adjacent to the starting biome has a >50'C difference, and every other direction has temperatures ~32'C or higher, so some cooling is needed