self-sustaining mid-game energy source

[voron43]

Hello, I'm pretty new to ONI. I've already got infinite oxygen and water on my colony, but for power I'm using coal... And I would be out of any coal soon

Now I'm looking for mid-game self-sustaining energy setup to produce 5-10 kW.

By mid-game source I mean no use of space and no use of magma (or volcanoes), but liquid/gas geysers or ore volcanoes are ok. I'm just afraid of these two things until my colony isn't stable and dupes are starving/suffocating/peeing sometimes. No one died, but I don't want to play with fire...

By self-sustaining I mean that it doesn't need any resource (like coal/algae/sand/etc) and doesn't need dupes to be there. That's needed to prevent situation with my coal shortage. But use of water is ok.

I've been googling hard and that's what I found:

• This space greed, but it requires space.
• Brothgar's setup, and it's quite brilliant, but there is (are?) few update(s?) after that video and some of the machines are looking and working not the same way. If I wouldn't find better solution, I would try to reproduce he's masterpiece. But it looks like it would take hours for me...
• This one is new, but needs ore to operate
• Shine bugs+panels are extremely cool, but it's about ~1kW for ~100 bugs, so I guess my computer is not ready for ~1k shine bugs. (also my eyes are not ready for that light and ears for all of thease WOO WOOO by bugs :D)
• Also I have natural gas geyser and I'm thinking of natural gas generators, but I guess it would be 500-1000 W, not so much

I'm not lazy, I'm not looking for the magic stick to do all for me, I'm ready for building a massive setup, but I don't know what to build :C

[Neotuck]

Another option is to stick with coal and start ranching a lot of hatches.

If not then go with an oil boiler.  There are many other designs than Brothgar's 

[voron43]

1 hour ago, Neotuck said:

Another option is to stick with coal and start ranching a lot of hatches.

If not then go with an oil boiler.  There are many other designs than Brothgar's 

but this is for boiling oil to pathrolium... It could produce so much energy? I thought they require energy, not produce.

I'll search for it, thanks.

[Neotuck]

You can also farm arbor trees for ethanol, much more energy efficient than boiling oil into petroleum 

[lee1026]

If you are okay with using water, print a few extra dupes and stick them on hamster wheel duty. They only need to be fed berries, which only take water. 
 

Should be about 200 grams of water per second for 400 watts, which isn’t actually a bad ratio. The extra hydrogen should be worth another 80 watts or so. 
 

Exploring to find an extra cool steam vent will get you a few kilowatts. 
 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

7 hours ago, voron43 said:

Now I'm looking for mid-game self-sustaining energy setup to produce 5-10 kW.

5-10 kW is quite a bit for self-sustaining.  The ONLY way you're going to get that power as a renewable source is to dig down to the oil biome and build a nat-gas boiler.  Boiling oil into sour gas, then condensing it into nat gas and burning the gas will give back more water than you need in order to pump more oil out of a well.  You can easily produce 10+ kW of surplus power once you get the whole thing running.  Depending on how you build your boiler, you can do it without any space materials.  The only necessary dupe labor once you have it running is occasionally letting the pressure out of the well.

If you don't build a boiler, but instead build an oil refinery, you will lose water in the process and it won't be completely sustainable -- however, it WILL take up a LOT less space.  So if you have surplus water from a geyser, then pumping oil out of a well will definitely get you the power you need mid-game.  A refinery will use dupe labor to run the building, but at full output you can run multiple petrol generators off the labor of a single dupe.

[lee1026]

 There are quite a few other ways to get to 10KW without a natural gas boiler

10 kg per second of oil is possible with the 3 standard wells, and as petrol, they will get to 10KW with a bit of extra power to run pumps and such. If you want the thing to net 10KW in power, adding some slicksters to harvest the CO2 will get you to about 10KW net or so. This chain is by far the easiest way, but other ways exist.

 

Solar will get you to an average 5KW or so if you cover the whole map, but it will be spikey with long downtimes during meteor storms, so you will have to combine this with other solutions, but it will get you most of the way there. If you harvest the heat from regolith (this is much easier than you might imagine; just run a pipe of petrol through those bunker doors and cool the oil in a steam chamber), you will yield more power than solar from my limited testing. Tapping into hydrogen rocket exhaust will produce even more hilarious amounts of power via turbines, but I never cared about power at that point anyway. 

If you don't want to tap oil or build it into space, it will be harder. A good old fashioned volcano will get you a kilowatt or maybe two, and a metal volcano will be worth 300 watts or so. You won't have enough to get to 10KW with most seeds when you tap all of the volcanos, but it will help when combined with other sources. Depending on the map, you might make it work. Quite a few seeds have a lot of high heat sources to tap.

 

Through looking at tools not included, most maps offer enough water to get you to 10KW from printing extra dupes to run on hamster wheels.

[KittenIsAGeek]

15 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

 There are quite a few other ways to get to 10KW without a natural gas boiler

Yes, but 10kW with a natural gas boiler is completely sustainable and renewable.  You'll get more resources out of it than you're putting in.  You'll generate enough water to replace any oil you use in the process, and you'll produce way more power than it takes to sustain the boiler and sour gas condenser.  It also won't use any dupe power (except to occasionally let off pressure) once you get it running, and was also a condition of the OP's "Self-sustaining" requirement.

[lee1026]

These ways are all sustainable; just boiling to petroleum is still water positive!

[Lacost]

9 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

5-10 kW is quite a bit for self-sustaining.  The ONLY way you're going to get that power as a renewable source is to dig down to the oil biome and build a nat-gas boiler.  Boiling oil into sour gas, then condensing it into nat gas and burning the gas will give back more water than you need in order to pump more oil out of a well.

Would you really consider building a nat gas boiler to be a midgame build? The designs floating around are huge and really complex to build. You even need super coolant to get the sour gas cold enough. I would rather say that a good old fashioned petroleum boiler with a volcano as the heat source is a much more viable mid game build than going straight for sour gas.

And sustainability is pretty much always given, since a water geyser is usually enough to fuel the oil wells if you retrieve the polluted water from the generators.

 

17 hours ago, voron43 said:

Now I'm looking for mid-game self-sustaining energy setup to produce 5-10 kW.

By mid-game source I mean no use of space and no use of magma (or volcanoes), but liquid/gas geysers or ore volcanoes are ok. I'm just afraid of these two things until my colony isn't stable and dupes are starving/suffocating/peeing sometimes. No one died, but I don't want to play with fire...

First, tap into your natural gas geysers and harvest them. Just build a steel gas pump and insulated tiles around it and you are good to go. Nothing more required for basically free energy. Next, expand your coal prodution. Hatches are consuming non renewable resources in the midgame, but what are you going to do with the millions of tons of igneous and sedimentary rock lying around anyways? By the time you have used them up, you are in the super late game.

The next step would be building a petroleum boiler with a magma volcano as the heat source. There is nothing to be afraid of as long as you build it in vacuum, use obsidian + wolframite/tungsten and put them in atmo suits. If you follow established designs (Francis John has a good one) you can easily run 5 petroleum generators constantly which will provide you with all the power you need, even for the late game.

And killing Dupes with super hot materials is suprisingly hard, even if you don't put them in atmo suits. I ... erhm ... played around with that in the sandbox mode. Wanted to see how Dupes melt into genetic ooze.

[suxkar]

45 minutes ago, Lacost said:

Would you really consider building a nat gas boiler to be a midgame build? The designs floating around are huge and really complex to build. You even need super coolant to get the sour gas cold enough. I would rather say that a good old fashioned petroleum boiler with a volcano as the heat source is a much more viable mid game build than going straight for sour gas.

And sustainability is pretty much always given, since a water geyser is usually enough to fuel the oil wells if you retrieve the polluted water from the generators.

 

First, tap into your natural gas geysers and harvest them. Just build a steel gas pump and insulated tiles around it and you are good to go. Nothing more required for basically free energy. Next, expand your coal prodution. Hatches are consuming non renewable resources in the midgame, but what are you going to do with the millions of tons of igneous and sedimentary rock lying around anyways? By the time you have used them up, you are in the super late game.

The next step would be building a petroleum boiler with a magma volcano as the heat source. There is nothing to be afraid of as long as you build it in vacuum, use obsidian + wolframite/tungsten and put them in atmo suits. If you follow established designs (Francis John has a good one) you can easily run 5 petroleum generators constantly which will provide you with all the power you need, even for the late game.

And killing Dupes with super hot materials is suprisingly hard, even if you don't put them in atmo suits. I ... erhm ... played around with that in the sandbox mode. Wanted to see how Dupes melt into genetic ooze.

This.

Have a look at Francis John's tutorials, you will see that you can build a petroleum boiler VERY early in the game (cycle 100-200) provided you have access to ANY magma volcano. The process is, as was said, water positive, so you have 10kW of free power plus a bit of free water, all for just the dupe time to build everything, a manageable amount of materials and the periodic maintenance of oil wells by operators. The energy cost for running oil wells (and pumping oil and nat-gas) is covered by the nat-gas they produce (using nat-gas generators) so the only power consuption is cooling the petroleum generators.

An alternative is using ethanol, but the loop to produce it is more complicated, requires more labor and a forest biome (or pips and acorns from printing pod) and produces less net power, although you get a lot of free water if you wild plant arbor trees. On the other hand, it doesn't require oil wells, which in turn requires you to get in the oil biome, which requires atmosuit setups.

EDIT: there are designs for sour gas boilers that require no space materials, but are super complicated and delicate. Also, they convert 10kg/s oil into like 45kW of power and god knows how much PW. That is like twice as much an average base will EVER need. I guess they can be fun to build, but they are for sure not what the owner of this thread is looking for.

[suicide commando]

Without space materials or a volcano, I think the easiest ways to produce a ton of power are:

- Ranching hatches for coal. ( pro-tip: make sure you have a couple of natural tiles in the ranch so they can burrow, and have a night shift with ranchers. When burrowed, they don't take up space in the room, so you don't get any overcrowding problems during the day, thus allowing them to lay more eggs. Only when they come out at night to eat/get groomed do they then get overcrowded. This way you can easily fit 20-30 hatches into a single ranch. )
- Shine bug solar plant ( if your computer can handle this, mine was not happy when I had 4 reactors up and running )
- Petroleum reactors with an arboretum, either fueled by a (polluted) water geyser, or use pips to plant wild trees. If you don't have a polluted water geyser, you can use clean water that you feed to some CO2 scrubbers that are in the room with the petrol reactors, those should output plenty of CO2 to turn your clean water into polluted water you can feed to the arbor trees.
- Self powering metal refineries. When you use a metal refinery to make Iron or steel, the amount of heat produced by that when run through a steam turbine produces more energy than you need to do the refining. So you can have your dupes generate power by refining iron ore into iron and steel.
 

[lee1026]

Shine bug power plants don’t produce much the way of watts. I have never seen anyone that can yield 2 kilowatts with that tool. 

[suicide commando]

Yes they can. A single shine bug 'reactor' can yield a maximum of 1140W ( 3x380W ). I don't know how many bugs there are in there, probably something between 50-100 or so. The way you set it up, you build a little glass box 3x3 with one side replacing the middle glass tile with a drop of liquid, and the top with a horizontal pneumatic door. Around this you put 3 solar panels, and you put a chute above the middle. Eggs get shipped from your ranch and fall out of the chute, pneumatic doors don't stop them so they fall inside the single tile in the middle, there they hatch and while the water keeps them from leaving that 1x1 room, it IS considered an open area so they won't overcrowd. Every bug you drop in there will lay an egg before it dies, so population inside remains more or less constant and their light powers the 3 solar panels. ( Brothgar came up with this setup btw )

It works very well, if you don't mind the onslaught on your frame rate.
To 'populate' the reactor, you use a ranch that is as wide as a auto sweeper can reach, with a loader inside that loads up the eggs and a critter sensor set to only see critters, which activates if there's 'enough' shine bugs in the ranch. Any surplus eggs that are laid by your ranched bugs get shipped off to the reactor, and if population goes below the number you want in there, the shipping stops until there's enough of them again. I set it normally to 6, so there's room for eggs to be laid and shipped off, while still having a good number that can lay eggs at the same time.

[KittenIsAGeek]

10 hours ago, Lacost said:

Would you really consider building a nat gas boiler to be a midgame build? The designs floating around are huge and really complex to build. You even need super coolant to get the sour gas cold enough. I would rather say that a good old fashioned petroleum boiler with a volcano as the heat source is a much more viable mid game build than going straight for sour gas.

It can be big, or it can require space materials.  It doesn't need to be both unless you're processing a LOT of nat gas. You can condense sour gas without super coolant, but you'll need a lot of room so you can do it in stages.  Also, without space materials, you'll need a magma pool or a volcano as your heat source.

10 hours ago, Lacost said:

I would rather say that a good old fashioned petroleum boiler with a volcano as the heat source is a much more viable mid game build than going straight for sour gas.

A petrol boiler is indeed a lot easier.  While it doesn't produce as much surplus water as natural gas, it is still water positive.

 

9 hours ago, suxkar said:

there are designs for sour gas boilers that require no space materials, but are super complicated and delicate. Also, they convert 10kg/s oil into like 45kW of power and god knows how much PW.

I will admit, sour gas boilers without space materials are rather finicky.  The most difficult part was that you almost have to run it continually or things start to break.  The amount of water you get back, though, was definitely nice.  You can use the surplus water to generate oxygen and hydrogen for rockets to go get you the space materials.

3 minutes ago, suicide commando said:

Yes they can. A single shine bug 'reactor' can yield a maximum of 1140W ( 3x380W ). 

The problem I've had with shine bug reactors was that when they are overcrowded, they stop shining.  You have to contain them using liquid locks so that the "room" size isn't a factor.

[suicide commando]

Yes, which is included in my description.

[lee1026]

3 hours ago, suicide commando said:

Yes they can. A single shine bug 'reactor' can yield a maximum of 1140W ( 3x380W ). I don't know how many bugs there are in there, probably something between 50-100 or so. The way you set it up, you build a little glass box 3x3 with one side replacing the middle glass tile with a drop of liquid, and the top with a horizontal pneumatic door. Around this you put 3 solar panels, and you put a chute above the middle. Eggs get shipped from your ranch and fall out of the chute, pneumatic doors don't stop them so they fall inside the single tile in the middle, there they hatch and while the water keeps them from leaving that 1x1 room, it IS considered an open area so they won't overcrowd. Every bug you drop in there will lay an egg before it dies, so population inside remains more or less constant and their light powers the 3 solar panels. ( Brothgar came up with this setup btw )

It works very well, if you don't mind the onslaught on your frame rate.
To 'populate' the reactor, you use a ranch that is as wide as a auto sweeper can reach, with a loader inside that loads up the eggs and a critter sensor set to only see critters, which activates if there's 'enough' shine bugs in the ranch. Any surplus eggs that are laid by your ranched bugs get shipped off to the reactor, and if population goes below the number you want in there, the shipping stops until there's enough of them again. I set it normally to 6, so there's room for eggs to be laid and shipped off, while still having a good number that can lay eggs at the same time.

I am not saying that it can't be done, just that no one actually done it. In any event, there are way easier ways to get to 2K watts with way less effort and drain on CPU speed.

 

If we are sticking with ranching, for example, that many pacu will yield over 2K watts in profits from smelting steel. Steel obviously has some value on its own, of course. 

[SamLogan]

On 28/03/2020 at 5:23 PM, voron43 said:

Hello, I'm pretty new to ONI. I've already got infinite oxygen and water on my colony, but for power I'm using coal... And I would be out of any coal soon

Now I'm looking for mid-game self-sustaining energy setup to produce 5-10 kW.

By mid-game source I mean no use of space and no use of magma (or volcanoes), but liquid/gas geysers or ore volcanoes are ok. I'm just afraid of these two things until my colony isn't stable and dupes are starving/suffocating/peeing sometimes. No one died, but I don't want to play with fire...

By self-sustaining I mean that it doesn't need any resource (like coal/algae/sand/etc) and doesn't need dupes to be there. That's needed to prevent situation with my coal shortage. But use of water is ok.

I've been googling hard and that's what I found:

• This space greed, but it requires space.
• Brothgar's setup, and it's quite brilliant, but there is (are?) few update(s?) after that video and some of the machines are looking and working not the same way. If I wouldn't find better solution, I would try to reproduce he's masterpiece. But it looks like it would take hours for me...
• This one is new, but needs ore to operate
• Shine bugs+panels are extremely cool, but it's about ~1kW for ~100 bugs, so I guess my computer is not ready for ~1k shine bugs. (also my eyes are not ready for that light and ears for all of thease WOO WOOO by bugs :D)
• Also I have natural gas geyser and I'm thinking of natural gas generators, but I guess it would be 500-1000 W, not so much

I'm not lazy, I'm not looking for the magic stick to do all for me, I'm ready for building a massive setup, but I don't know what to build :C

You're looking to much complicated. You go to magma biome and setup the petrol generator, you will have huge amount of electricity. It's easy to generate 2000 to 6000 Watts.

Here's a schema :

[suicide commando]

18 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

I am not saying that it can't be done, just that no one actually done it. In any event, there are way easier ways to get to 2K watts with way less effort and drain on CPU speed.

 

If we are sticking with ranching, for example, that many pacu will yield over 2K watts in profits from smelting steel. Steel obviously has some value on its own, of course. 

I've done this, and not just a single reactor, at one point in that colony, I had 4 of them running producing 4480W. Yes, I did get rid of it eventually, once I had gotten my supersustainable achievement.
As for ranching pacu, that tends to eat a ton of algae. I still haven't designed a good setup for this that is both algae efficient and produces a lot of lime. ( it's on my 'todo' list along with reaching the temporal tear, Once I get past the midgame, I tend to lose interest so I've never gotten around to that part. )
 

[KittenIsAGeek]

7 hours ago, SamLogan said:

You're looking to much complicated. You go to magma biome and setup the petrol generator, you will have huge amount of electricity. It's easy to generate 2000 to 6000 Watts.

Here's a schema :

If you use an oil refinery, as shown in your screenshot, then it is not fully sustainable. You will require additional water to push the oil out of the well.  While this is good advice, and its what I usually do, it isn't self-sustaining unless you already have a large surplus of water being produced.

[Badpip]

You can farm lot of wild arbor tree and make ethanol powered petroleum generator too

[Neotuck]

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

If you use an oil refinery, as shown in your screenshot, then it is not fully sustainable. You will require additional water to push the oil out of the well.  While this is good advice, and its what I usually do, it isn't self-sustaining unless you already have a large surplus of water being produced.

In OP's post he said he has infinite water and oxygen 

[TheMule]

26 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

In OP's post he said he has infinite water and oxygen 

That and the fact that a single average CSV is able to provide the missing water. It's 1,458g/s if you're sieving pwater; 1,477g/s if boiling it. IIRC the avg. CSV is 1,500g/s.

But 5kg/s of petroleum is only 5kW. The refinery and the pump tho, they can be powered by the nat gas produced by the refinery itself, so you don't have to count that. Of course CO2 disposal can be power-demanding too, depending on what you choose to do with it.

Burning petroleum this way provides you with enough CO2 to ranch about 40 molten slickters, which can feed 23 dups, meat wise. The petroleum they produce isn't much, IIRC they offset the efficiency by 12% (so you produce slightly more power and need slightly less water than the above figures).

[Neotuck]

13 minutes ago, TheMule said:

That and the fact that a single average CSV is able to provide the missing water. It's 1,458g/s if you're sieving pwater; 1,477g/s if boiling it. IIRC the avg. CSV is 1,500g/s.

But 5kg/s of petroleum is only 5kW. The refinery and the pump tho, they can be powered by the nat gas produced by the refinery itself, so you don't have to count that. Of course CO2 disposal can be power-demanding too, depending on what you choose to do with it.

Burning petroleum this way provides you with enough CO2 to ranch about 40 molten slickters, which can feed 23 dups, meat wise. The petroleum they produce isn't much, IIRC they offset the efficiency by 12% (so you produce slightly more power and need slightly less water than the above figures).

Don't forget the Nat Gas you get from over-pressurized oil wells

[TheMule]

On 3/30/2020 at 1:55 PM, Neotuck said:

Don't forget the Nat Gas you get from over-pressurized oil wells

You're right. But that goes in powering the oil wells themselves. Depending on the design, it's barely power positive. 3 wells produce nat gas equivalent to about 900W. They consume 720W but, since you need at least one gas pump, it's 960W. The pump won't run continuosly tho, since they produce 100g/s. I consider the oil wells self-powered but I'm not sure if they are in practice. They don't produce anything when a dup is operating them but I think they still consume energy, so it depends also on how skilled (fast) the dup is. Anyway their power economy is close to 0, that's why I usually ignore them.