Strength Training Gym for Large Groups

[mathmanican]

Have we been thinking about strength training gyms all wrong?

While playing Oceania, I ran across some groups of mop commands that persisted, and kept my dupes quite busy indefinitely. Seemed like a perfect time to build a new strength training gym that won't hog your liquid resources, and can be scaled easily to accommodate any number of weak dupes.First a picture (oh, and note that the liquid is filtered at a minuscule 300g/s, could be lower).

Ignore the fact that these dupes don't know how to social distance (they are in atmosuits, so maybe they are following local guidelines). Check your dupes local guidelines to verify if they need atmosuits or not to do this.

Also ignore all the ladders, I've been trying a new way to mass clear regions of the asteroid by building rows of ladders every other row (it's pretty quick), and doesn't affect lag on my slow 8GB RAM machine. Runs counter to the monopathing arguments others make, but it makes clearing regions quick and efficient without adding lag.  

Here are a few key mopping facts (maybe new idea for the gym builders out there). 

1. Dropping liquid directly on your dupes from a vent means that liquid only arrives once every 5 ticks. This means that directly venting liquids onto your dupes will result in the mop command disappearing unless you make elaborate designs. 
2. Dropping liquid on a tile, and then letting it flow sideways to drip down to your dupes, means that liquid arrives every tick. The mop command never completes. 
3. When liquid drops onto a tile every tick, I've found I can preserve the mop command on the tile itself, and the adjacent tiles (left and right).  So each drip down allows me to keep 3 mop commands active. Sometimes even tiles that are 2 left and right of the drip (for a total of 5 tiles) keep their mop commands, but these edge cases eventually disappeared (a few cycles in). The middle three never vanished.

Note again that at 300g/s, the power cost to pump is less than 8W. I'm sure the total flow could be reduced even more, but I was fine with 8W. It takes a little over 5.5 cycles to drain one entire 1000kg block of water. You could set a cycle timer on a under the bottle emptier and allow people to drain the bottles every few cycles (saving gobs of dupe time).

The above is not at all optimized. I look forward to seeing improvements.  Basically, this allows us to build a strength training gym, that won't hog your liquid resources, requires almost no tech, and zero refined metal.

Have fun.

[Gurgel]

Excellent! I had mostly given up on strength training in the regular form. This approach, I will definitely use.

 

[mathmanican]

49 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

This approach, I will definitely use.

It can be as simple as dropping water off a ledge at the edge of a wall.  No need to complicate it much more than that. At the cost of 1 tile of water every 5+ cycles, you could probably just leave the water there indefinitely, or have it ready to be consumed for research. 

Now I just need a nice way to interrupt the mopping job with automation, so that a dupe doesn't get stuck there for the rest of their shift. I have a 59/1 sec timer on my manual generators, so that my dupes always go there rather than idling.  Something like that would be nice with mopping. 

[Gurgel]

 

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

At the cost of 1 tile of water every 5+ cycles, you could probably just leave the water there indefinitely, or have it ready to be consumed for research. 

I would just feed it back in a tank, I think. So the only cost is really the electricity. Hmmm. Do this with pWater for nice pOxygen?

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

Now I just need a nice way to interrupt the mopping job with automation, so that a dupe doesn't get stuck there for the rest of their shift. 

The following works for 2 tiles of mopping next to each other, i.e. one door. With with 2 doors directly next to each other, one dupe gets stuck (bug-report just filed for that):

Not perfectly elegant, but put several mesh doors with space between them and this scales up.

[Sigma Cypher]

As far as interrupting the mopping: Why not use a liquid shutoff to interrupt the flow? (shutoff upstream of feed valve)

[werecat]

33 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

As far as interrupting the mopping: Why not use a liquid shutoff to interrupt the flow? (shutoff upstream of feed valve)

Then you would have to manually re-add the mop command after the dupe finished, which is what these strength training setups try to avoid

 

I have found a way to interrupt dupes mid-mop, but unfortunately it's very annoying to play the game with.

Yellow alerts interrupt a dupes current task if they get chosen to do it, so with a bit of automation you can briefly open a door to give dupes in the gym access to a manual generator set to yellow alert, thereby interrupting their mopping. Then when the door closes again the dupe can recalculate their priorities and potentially go and do something else.

In a real example you would want to lock the door going into the gym at the same time so only dupes inside the gym can get interrupted by the yellow alert, and you would also want a 1 manual generator per mopping command.

[Zarquan]

22 hours ago, mathmanican said:

It can be as simple as dropping water off a ledge at the edge of a wall.  No need to complicate it much more than that. At the cost of 1 tile of water every 5+ cycles, you could probably just leave the water there indefinitely, or have it ready to be consumed for research. 

Now I just need a nice way to interrupt the mopping job with automation, so that a dupe doesn't get stuck there for the rest of their shift. I have a 59/1 sec timer on my manual generators, so that my dupes always go there rather than idling.  Something like that would be nice with mopping. 

I have an idea.  What if you used melting phosphorus floor tiles to automate the mopping?  They can't mop when there is no floor, so if you heat the floor to ~45 C and this will stop the dupes from mopping because they have no floor.  The heating and cooling of the floor can be automated, but that could be a bit power intensive and requires some mid-game tech to build and execute.

The mop orders shouldn't go away because the liquid is still there and the liquids shouldn't act weird because liquid phosphorus sits under water.

You can also use a hydrosensor to tell when the phosphorus melts and turn off the incoming liquid flow to stop the water from being unmoppable.

[nakomaru]

On 5/17/2020 at 8:00 AM, Gurgel said:

The following works for 2 tiles of mopping next to each other

Works great, thank you. (Pneumatic door by the way. Airlock doesn't work.)

[Gurgel]

19 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

(Pneumatic door by the way. Airlock doesn't work.)

Good to know, I only tried the pneumatic ones.

[psusi]

Now you just need an auto sweeper to pick up the bottles and deliver them to an emptier that gets pumped back to the vent.

[TheMule]

Out of curiosity what's the strength training good for? I mean, it's not for carrying capacity because once you have all dups in suits, they carry a lot already. I understand they mop faster, but is there anything else I'm missing?

I train recruits in athletics + operating, I find it more useful. Althetics impacts all activities (expecially tyding/storing since they have to move around to gather stuff) and operating is good for a lot of things (oil wells not releasing steam, metal refineries consuming less power, etc.).

I find this very useful to produce bottled pwater for O2/clay farms, tho.

[psusi]

16 minutes ago, TheMule said:

I find this very useful to produce bottled pwater for O2/clay farms, tho.

Easier to just fill up a reservoir and deconstruct it, or better yet, make an infinite water storage made of airflow tiles so the po2 can come out, like the claymater.

 

[TheMule]

6 minutes ago, psusi said:

Easier to just fill up a reservoir and deconstruct it, or better yet, make an infinite water storage made of airflow tiles so the po2 can come out, like the claymater.

 

Absolutely true, but the first isn't full automated, and the second implies you have a lot of pwater... not true if your map doesn't have swamp biomes and you don't find any geyers. Of course there are ways to produce it but expecially early on it's kind of a limited resource. BTW I usually use terrariums very early on but on maps w/o swamps algae is also kinda a rare resource.

[psusi]

50 minutes ago, TheMule said:

Absolutely true, but the first isn't full automated, and the second implies you have a lot of pwater... not true if your map doesn't have swamp biomes and you don't find any geyers. Of course there are ways to produce it but expecially early on it's kind of a limited resource. BTW I usually use terrariums very early on but on maps w/o swamps algae is also kinda a rare resource.

Well if you are short on pwater then you aren't going to be using this method to bottle it so it can off-gas.

Terrariums do produce a TON of pwater for very, very little algae.  At cycle 200 with 9 dupes I now have my SPOM set up and have stopped using them, and while I have dug out one very tiny pocket of swamp biome, I have I think, 17 tons of algae in storage, and most of what spawned in the starting biome still untouched.

[TheMule]

9 minutes ago, psusi said:

spawned in the starting biome still untouched.

Well that's it. I'm on Arboria. Forest start (no algae) and no swamp biomes, and little water, one hatch. I had to relay on oxyferns for quite a while and that means limited population (you have limited seeds). No pools of pwater around (at all). My solution was to switch ASAP to ethanol as a power source (it does produce a bit of p water), and pips and sage hatches (there are tons of dirt in the starting biome). Oh and also dreckos ASAP because otherwise no fibers and no suits! I had to relay on mealwood for a bit, I admit.

[Gurgel]

4 minutes ago, psusi said:

Now you just need an auto sweeper to pick up the bottles and deliver them to an emptier that gets pumped back to the vent.

I don't think that works. But you could probably heat the bottles to steam or cool them down to ice and then work with that.

No, I am not OCD enough to try that

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

I don't think that works. But you could probably heat the bottles to steam or cool them down to ice and then work with that.

No, I am not OCD enough to try that

Someone posted a build to tame a metal volcano the other day that had a sweepy mopping up the metal into bottles, and then an auto sweeper delivering them to a bottle emptier to only deliver 200kg of molten metal to the cooling zone at a time so it wouldn't form a solid tile.

[nakomaru]

22 minutes ago, psusi said:

Someone posted a build to tame a metal volcano the other day that had a sweepy mopping up the metal into bottles, and then an auto sweeper delivering them to a bottle emptier to only deliver 200kg of molten metal to the cooling zone at a time so it wouldn't form a solid tile.

We've all been tricked by this one.

Magma (?) and liquid metal bottles can be manipulated by the sweeper, but not ordinary liquids.

[psusi]

15 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

We've all been tricked by this one.

Magma (?) and liquid metal bottles can be manipulated by the sweeper, but not ordinary liquids.

Aw damn!  That's weird!  I always thought the reason that you couldn't really use sweepers to move bottles was because you couldn't ask that they be delivered to a rail loader or storage compactor or anything, and at least before sweepy, there was no automatic way to get bottles.  When I saw that, I thought ahh!  The bottle emptier requests a bottle, and there is a bottle in range, so of course the auto sweeper will deliver it!

[mathmanican]

Here is a prototype of a gym. With a minipump, this could be one tile thinner. As seen right now, you can add two ladder tiles left of the bottle emptier, and a pneumatic door above, as an alternate access point, so you can build dungeons the dupes have to crawl down into to sweep for ages, and build them all side by side (role playing torture chambers). 

1. Enable a small room for one dupe, lock out others. This makes it so dupes don't come in to constantly move the mopped water to the emptier. We only want that done once a day (at the start of the start of the shift, by putting high priority on the emptier). 
2. Use regular water (no offgassing to deal with),
3. Set the flow pretty low (300g/s = 180kg/cycle). This saves power. The flow can probably be much less (same minimum needed for a waterfall to function, so 116 will work) .
4. Have the dupe pick up their mess when they are done (if you want to stop the mopping with a timer or something), or before they start (letting the shift end break the mop command). Since they can't generate more than 180kg/cycle, they can empty an entire cycle's worth of mopping at the start of the next time they mop. 
5. Limit the total amount of water in the room, so that you can never flood the mopping tile. Or alternately, use a liquid shutoff to make sure that water won't keep on coming if no one is there mopping (a hydrosensor set to something small). You can also use the amount of total water in the room to limit the length of time they mop.
6. Place a liquid element sensor right before the flow valve, that shuts the pnemuatic door above the mop command when there is no liquid in the pipe. This preserves the mop command.

I figured since @nakomaru has already designated bubbles as having the mopping job, we might as well continue in that fashion.  

Here is a two dupe version (same 116g/s valve setting). (Edit: This doesn't work, as the senor detects water bottles.... You can still enable two dupes to enter and mop though.)

This one unfortunately can result in more dupes inside. Once two dupes are mopping, the right door locks.  Dupes can leave the room going upwards. However, there is a brief moment where one dupe may enter to use the bottle emptier, and then they get stuck there in short loop (what does using the bottle emptier train? - bonus extra gym.) 

[mathmanican]

I made it way to complicated with all the automation. The only automation you see here is a timer.   This can be set up as soon as you have valves (minus the timer). Just put 1 load of 200kg of water in the room.  The pipes cannot hold it all, you'll never flood the room, no automation needed.  You could even use this as a hypothermia chamber that dupes must visit before bed (after sending your dupes into slimelung infested areas - to prevent them from getting slimelung when they wake, provide you're willing to manually toggle the door privileges).

 

As I have it set up above, the timer goes off every 60 seconds, to free the poor dupe for other errands as needed. If nothing is available, they empty the bottle, and then get back to work mopping. So it's a passive strength trainer that can be set and forgot (I have priorities set at 3 and 2 for the emptier and mop command  - I reserve 1 for truly despicable tasks). 

[mathmanican]

A fully automated prison cell personal gym, giving you strength, athletics, and machinery, all set with a 59/1 sec timer to make sure you dupe can do stuff when they need to (or not, if you want the prison cell route). 

Spoiler

Liquid valve at 116

Note the automation wire placed behind the light. This forces the dupe to run, but doesn't allow the light to generate heat. 

The pump should run independent of the wheel, since if you want to train mopping, then you may not run on the wheel for a long time. 

I guess you could lock them inside this, drop them food once a cycle, and let the liquid be their pee (the PO2 off gassing would keep them alive without sending them any air, but you would have to vent the CO2). They don't get to participate in the colony till they hit 20 on athletics, strength, and machinery. I should name a dupe Jean Valjean. 

 

[Edoc_]

With 7 dupes breathing all over the place and the PW offgasing i put the valve at 400g/s and the airflow on the right to allow the CO2 to exit and not accumulate and mess with the mopping.

 

 

 

[cpy]

They all look so happy.