Catch 22 on Volcanea

[Nedix]

Have you ever been in the situation of nano-managing your dupes? I started a Volcanea map and the damn thing bleeds heat all over the place. I'm not talking warmth but searing heat which quite violently burns my dupes (150 - 300 degrees). I have to pay attention to each dupe, how much does it dig or build or stay in the affected area. I've reloaded countless times because of course they were getting incapacitated and there was no one to carry them to a bed and they eventually died. While yes, in a sense this is a challenge, after several tenths of cycles it becomes boring pretty fast. It's a constant battle with heat, building insulated tiles, keeping an eye on the affected areas, making food, caring for the wounded, emptying the outhouses, running on the mills for power, feeding the oxygen maker. I cannot bring new dupes because they will surely die from hunger and I need more dupes for the chores. I have to fence the searing heat as close to the heat as possible because of course if I don't do that I will end up with >300 degrees of steam and all the algae will turn into dirt.

I'll give it a couple more cycles, if I don't manage to stabilize it then I'll throw in the towel and start a new map.

[suxkar]

I don't have much experience with early game heat apocalypse, but shouldn't you try to build a small core base insulating ONLY a small cool area and then rush atmo suits?

[Nedix]

That is an idea indeed but I have to secure food and water first and then ranch dreckos for plastic and harvest reeds for fiber. Getting to an oil biome in this state is something that will make me lose tenths of cycles. I'll probably give it a go as a challenge.

[suxkar]

1 hour ago, Nedix said:

That is an idea indeed but I have to secure food and water first and then ranch dreckos for plastic and harvest reeds for fiber. Getting to an oil biome in this state is something that will make me lose tenths of cycles. I'll probably give it a go as a challenge.

If I were you, should the situation be too crazy and unenjoyable, I'd just give up. Still, if you choose to salvage the situation, I'd focus on the emercency: find a vaguely stable simple food source (either plants or ranching hatches), get fibers asap (you don't need many, and pwater is "free" from bathrooms, doesn't matter if germy). Crush as much refined metal for atmo suits and their docks and then stabilize. At that point you can kinda decide the pace. You don't need the oil boime for this.

I have never played Volcanea, but the starting biome should give you enough coal to get by powerwise.

EDIT: of course avoid any unecessary digging and be conservative when you chose the core base perimeter.

[TheMule]

1 hour ago, Nedix said:

ranch dreckos for plastic and harvest reeds for fiber

Well if you're ranching dreckos even if it's for plastic you have fibers for suits. No need for reeds. It's impossible that all eggs are glossy. Just let a few regular one hatch and shear them for a while. You should collect 20-30 fibers quite fast. The you can retire them to create room for more glossy ones.

 

It's not easy... a lot depends on how much of the starting biome you're willing to let go. I definitely rush some very early insulation with diagonal digging as much vacuum tile as I can. It can't be perfect, sometimes it requires building/destroying. Even if not perfect, 2-3 tiles leaking heat is not the same as 20. As soon as I have insulated tiles, I use them to close the gaps.

Anyway that's the challenge of volcanea. It isn't always that bad.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, suxkar said:

I don't have much experience with early game heat apocalypse, but shouldn't you try to build a small core base insulating ONLY a small cool area and then rush atmo suits?

For Volcanea, that is the easiest approach. Although I recently succeeded in insulating everything without suits. For the thermal leak below the base (I think that one is assured), I had to flood with lots of cool water because otherwise my dupes would not have made it. 

[Nedix]

In the end I managed to isolate and stabilize the colony so now I'm working on cleaning it up, optimizing and moving forwards. I started several Volcanea maps in the past, I like this type of maps because they're not quite easy, and I even got to the Temporal Tear with some of them. I like to play and make them better and better with various bits and pieces I found on the forum.

The thing with this map was that I never had heat bleeding in main area so soon in the game.

Thanks for encouragements

PS: indeed, I forgot that the regular dreckos give fiber until I get glossy dreckos

[Kderosa]

Look at this nightmare I had to deal with on my last Volcanea map. The biomes directly below my base and to the left got decimated by a huge 1000 C lava biome which wrapped around those biomes. This screenshot is from the time lapse after I dug those biomes out to destroy some of the heat. As you can see the biomes were so hot that all the water in those biomes had turned into superheated steam. 
 

pre-exosuits I had to insulate the base before it got too hot. Since the left side was over 250C I had to painstakingly diagonally build to make vacuum insulation. The bottom was only 125C so I just double walled insulation tiled that area. And then I forgot about those areas for a 150 cycles or so as I got exosuits, built, a spom, and dug down to the closest oil biome at the extreme right edge of the map. At that point I went back and strip mined those biomes until all that remained was steam as seen in the screenshot. I double and triple wall insulated the broken abyssalite which had caused the mess. As you can see there was quite a lot of abyssalite either superheated or missing which had to be repaired. Then I made a ghetto turbine-AT cooling loop below the base to condense the steam and make the Industrial block. The left side f the base was still too hot to deal with at that point. Except that I slapped a gas pump n that side and made a sauna steam loop before I left. 
 

A few hundred cycles later I returned with space materials to cool down the left side. On the plus side, all that steam generated a fair bit of power to defray the power expense needed to condense all that steam. I believe there was close to 100 kg per tile of 250 C steam to deal with. 
 

Then I demolished the lava biomes which had caused the mess. That was easy. Just make a liquid lock out of petroleum and dig in a vacuum. Simple. And I was left with tons of 1250C debris that I used to geothermally power my base for a few hundred cycles. I believe I was getting about 3.5 MW of power and free cooling. So all I’m all a win. 

[Nedix]

@Kderosa It looks indeed like a nightmare. I like both Volcanea and Rime but they are sometimes to annoying to deal with, either too much heat or too much chill. I'm a bit "meh" with my map, I don't like it when a challenge turns into something boring that you have to do over and over again.

[TheMule]

6 hours ago, Kderosa said:

about 3.5 MW

 I'd like to see the screenshot with 4,117 steam turbines  Sorry couldn't resist...

[Kderosa]

1 hour ago, TheMule said:

 I'd like to see the screenshot with 4,117 steam turbines  Sorry couldn't resist...

Right?  I‘ll never get used to the ONI units. Still waiting for an option to display temperature in Rankine. 

[Kderosa]

7 hours ago, Nedix said:

 I like both Volcanea and Rime but they are sometimes to annoying to deal with ...

Well then I have the map for you:  Behold: VOLCA-397195425-0T1

It does have a rather interesting placement of the Gravitas building which I've put in a insert at the upper left hand corner ...

But, imagine putting in 200 cycles worth of game time only to discover while drilling down to the oil biomes that there are no oil biomes anywhere on the map - just magma.  Zero.  And that means no oil reservoirs either.  Your sole source of oil is the leaky oil fissure I've pointed out which will generate a whopping 241 kg/cycle of scalding oil during its active period. Fortunately,  The map has geodes with fossil and three smallish ice biomes with wolfamite, so at least steel and tungsten/thermium are on the table.

Enjoy. 

 

[Nedix]

This was a superb map for me - VOLCA-1972853474-0 . It has a massive pool of petroleum in the oil biome due to the crude oil naturally turned to petroleum due to heat. I might actually try it again, I remember it took me a while to figure it out and I lost a couple of hundred cycles to manage it.

[TheMule]

50 minutes ago, Nedix said:

This was a superb map for me - VOLCA-1972853474-0 . It has a massive pool of petroleum in the oil biome due to the crude oil naturally turned to petroleum due to heat. I might actually try it again, I remember it took me a while to figure it out and I lost a couple of hundred cycles to manage it.

I had something similar but I was too late and I managed to save only 1/3 of it... the rest became sour gas. 850C sour gas. 3 thermium pumps are keeping 2 steam turbines happy now, while I'm slowing pumping it away. One day I'll make a condenser.

1 hour ago, Kderosa said:

Well then I have the map for you:  Behold: VOLCA-397195425-0T1

It does have a rather interesting placement of the Gravitas building which I've put in a insert at the upper left hand corner ...

But, imagine putting in 200 cycles worth of game time only to discover while drilling down to the oil biomes that there are no oil biomes anywhere on the map - just magma.  Zero.  And that means no oil reservoirs either.  Your sole source of oil is the leaky oil fissure I've pointed out which will generate a whopping 241 kg/cycle of scalding oil during its active period. Fortunately,  The map has geodes with fossil and three smallish ice biomes with wolfamite, so at least steel and tungsten/thermium are on the table.

Enjoy. 

 

I wonder. Aren't 3 oil reservoirs guaranteed?

[Kderosa]

31 minutes ago, TheMule said:

I had something similar but I was too late and I managed to save only 1/3 of it... the rest became sour gas. 850C sour gas. 3 thermium pumps are keeping 2 steam turbines happy now, while I'm slowing pumping it away. One day I'll make a condenser.

I wonder. Aren't 3 oil reservoirs guaranteed?

Those are fun.  Recently I had two oil biomes full of 500C sour gas and steam.  I condensed the sour gas with a standard AT/Turbine cooling loop then dumped the liquid methane into a nearby NG geyser room which was conveniently above the lava biome which I also tapped for some geothermal heat to turn the methane back into gas.  It provided hundreds of cycles of NG.  So much power I never got around to using any of the crude oil I was pumping out of the oil reservoir at the bottom of one of the biomes using the turbine water runoff.  So much that I filled up a third oil biome on the left with the crude oil. Sorry for the poor quality time lapse screenshot.

I thought you were guaranteed a few oil reservoirs as well.  But I guess that assumes there's an oil biome for them to generate in.  Also, I have had the unfortunate situation where the only oil reservoir on the map was destroyed by the heat from an adjacent magma biome whose abysallite was broken.  They are made from sedimentary rock which has a relatively low melting point.  I sealed up that portion of the biome for later in the game when I had the space material to deal with it, but when I returned the oil reservoir was gone.  So beware.

1 hour ago, Nedix said:

This was a superb map for me - VOLCA-1972853474-0 . It has a massive pool of petroleum in the oil biome due to the crude oil naturally turned to petroleum due to heat. I might actually try it again, I remember it took me a while to figure it out and I lost a couple of hundred cycles to manage it.

That happened on this map too.  The top half of an oil biome got boiled into petroleum which was nice but also very hot.  (I mixed the 385C petroleum with cooler petroleum and piped it in a zig zag pattern through 10 kg chunks of algae to make a huge industrial farm with the help of a few friendly pips pressed into slave labor.)  The bottom half turned into sour gas which was sad.

[RonEmpire]

You're over extending yourself on the insulation zones.  You are trying to do it too close to the temp creep.  Just box the insulation closer to your base.   Build up to a loop coolant to expand later 

[Nedix]

It may seem like overextending but it's not (for me). I build my bases with the ranches in so the base is quite large from the beginning. Plus, if I leave it unattended, the heat will turn the water in the open into steam (see right side) and that will turn my entire base into a sauna.

[Nedix]

Turns out this is beast of a map. I found a nest of volcanoes and I (finally) went big and I've built a 2 x 5 steam turbines / desalinators + an oil boiler out of the same pool of magma.