Steam turbine should self-prime

[AutoMcD]

New player here, spent the last few weeks chipping away at this game and am loving it. Some things are not intuitive but the community has been great about this.

I’m finding that the steam turbine often gets all of its inputs blocked by other gas such as oxygen, even if it only a tiny amount and there is 10kg of steam the next layer down just ready to blast through. And any time my dupes go through the airlock to tweak something it only gets worse. The only solution seems to be to dig out in a complete vacuum and seal it off permanently, or shut down the entire system and wait for gas pump to create a vacuum, then restart steam creation. In case of a vent that cannot be built over this is the only solution, assuming it is dormant.. but the gas pump often takes several cycles to create a vacuum.

I think this really creates a large hassle which is probably not intended. In reality, the engine would gulp that hot pressurized oxygen just as readily as steam. For sake of the game, I would be willing to accept that gas other than steam does not create power and just gets spit out into the area nearby.. or even causes the improper input damage. This would make steam chamber “self priming” and prevent stalling out because oxygen layer.. and also be more consistent with other devices which can tolerate an imperfect system with damage penalty.

[Steve8]

2 hours ago, AutoMcD said:

The only solution seems to be to dig out in a complete vacuum and seal it off permanently

That's probably intended. Airlock doors just don't work in the game. So people build liquid locks for anything that really needs to be sealed off. Even if the steam turbine is changed, you still need that for all kinds of other builds

You don't need a gas pump to create a vacuum for a steam turbine by the way. The easiest is to layer two or three different liquids on top of each other. For example water, polluted water and salt water. That pushes out the gas on top.

[degr]

Depends from what are you doing. If I have 10 steam turbines, as usual I remove 1 tile, and if you have 10-200 kg of steam per tile, it will push away any gas. After it, I build tile again. It damage dupes a bit and bring hot steam to base, but it work. If I have 1 steam turbine, I make vacuum.

Also you may build gas pump on the top of your steam chamber, and pump gas manually. But you are right, if steam turbine will pull hot gas and become damaged, it will be much more easy.