Mass deletion - steam

[aceluck]

In survival I had a big chamber of CO2 and steam, and thought I'd build a clever contraption to get energy, water and clear the CO2. Steam turbine to draw out the steam, and direct the water through a skimmer to delete CO2. The pwater I dropped back into the chamber, since, being geothermally heated, would boil the pwater into steam and dirt, and be recycled the steam turbine. Many a cycle later I return to find all the steam/water gone.

I've recreated it in the attached savefile - a chamber with 1000kg water at 250C, 1000kg CO2 at 250C. Let it run and watch the level of the liquid tank first fill up, then disappear until there's either 1000g left or nothing, depending on random factors.

I know @mathmanican posted a thread about mass deletion earlier: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/119498-mass-deletion-collecting-examples-to-identify-the-problem-in-steam-turbine-setups-and-more/, so I call upon the more experienced players here whether there are bugs reports for this, and whether there are workarounds. And no, keeping gases separate is not an answer, since this was a naturally occuring phenomenon. Anyway the point is that the game deletes matter in a way that feels like a bug. What I tried to do was entirely reasonable given the tools given by the game, and the outcome far from what I'd expect.

Mass deletion.sav

[mathmanican]

5 hours ago, aceluck said:

CO2 and steam

This is the problem. 

5 hours ago, aceluck said:

keeping gases separate is not an answer

This is the solution.

5 hours ago, aceluck said:

feels like a bug.

It absolutely is a bug. 

5 hours ago, aceluck said:

What I tried to do was entirely reasonable given the tools given by the game, and the outcome far from what I'd expect.

And you sharing your opinion about it will hopefully reach the devs ears.  It is a disappointing fact about the game. 

[Gurgel]

I am really undecided as to whether this is a bug. There are probably some real problems this solves and changing this behavior may cause a ton of other undesirable effects that are worse. Physical reality just mixes materials for this, but ONI has regularly quantized space and only one material per tile (disregarding debris).

[aceluck]

There was plenty of space here though, so not really one material per tile (although that might be the cause of the bug. I suspect it has to do with the order of updates, variables overwritten). It's more like the game can't handle more than one gas in a room. I did another test just now, of another thing I've been doing in survival, which is running hot petroleum generators. Because their output temperature = building temperature, running them hot produces hot steam (= more power) instead of pwater. But in my tests, a lot of that water/steam is indeed deleted, because the building also outputs CO2. And there's no way I know of to separate the two gases before the deletion occurs. So while playing I thought I had done a smart thing using steam turbines with the petroleum generators, but this bug has been deleting the water. The whole reason for running the generators flat out was to make the oil cycle water positive. Another use was recycling steam from rockets, and also here water was destroyed, because of CO2 from solid boosters and the occasional meteor. I've had fun doing calculations of heat and mass and SHC etc to build various contraptions, but all calculations go out the window if stuff just randomly disappears.

 

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, aceluck said:

all calculations go out the window if stuff just randomly disappears.

Well said.

@aceluck There are at least two bugs involved in your setup.  One is a bug that deletes steam at the location where the liquid turns to gas (this can delete steam VERY rapidly).  Another bug has to do with just gas-gas interactions, which can result in lost gas as well (not as rapidly, but it does happen and shows up in electrolyzer setups all the time). There might be others as well. Trying to fix one bug, in this crazy ONI universe, often results in other bugs appearing.  The latter gas-gas deletion appeared (or at least became much worse) after matter conversion was removed.  Some of the bugs we will probably just have to live with.  It does remove some of the calculation fun when you know you can't predict stuff because laws of conservation don't hold in ONI. I wish I had better news for you.  

[babba]

Playing survival and being about to build a rocket silo in to my steam chamber ( lets say it should be built by the dupes in 5 hours from now, solving 28 design problems on the way ), it would be very hard for me to identify a steam deletion bug.

Recently I suddenly had 20 tiles high of iron popping "out of nowhere" ( no mods ), but to track that origin down - Geeez, it would have taken an eternity for me to identify if that was a bug or not.Recently I had the strange problem that the Oxylite Refinery stopped working, the only thing getting that Oxylite production back to life was to build a new one in the same position. The environment conditions did not change.

With my way of playing...Do not know if I would be able to identify a bug deletion-of-steam or not. Starting to erect a rocket on the left in a big steam machinery room, so far 1 gantry and the steal bunker tile base is up. Just my 5 cent on practical experience playing the game.

Wishing everyone lots of fun in ONi

P.S. Thanks @mathmanican for making me aware of the visuals in the game - That some things are actually there, but invisible for some time to the player...only showing up as graphic if a certain mass level per cell is reached as example.

40 mins later...

"Work harder, work harder !"...I say from my armchair, licking ice cream...

BTW for rocket silo`s I can recommend Mafic Rock, so much on hand and its reactive...

Like humans in real life...Naphtha from melted ladders and a fuel pipe cutup without thinking, its all poison now in the water supply ! Would be great if welding sparks, ignition, combustion, explosions and spreading fires

( DLC2 ? ) would be possible in the game @JoeW

Cycle 2966 - The erection in the steam room is growing. Playing 3000 cycles in a week is a bit nuts, the game is awesome ! The colony was nearly extinct a dozen times.

After 3000 cycles in a week I consider the post man ringing at the door to be out of genetic ooze.

 

[aceluck]

I think, @babba, that you may have some deletion going on since there's some CO2 in there, and if you use solid booster or petroleum rockets there will be more. But I don't think it happens just with the gases being in there, it happens if you release water into the room and CO2 happens to cover the vent with nowhere to go (because of steam or other tiles).

So I modified the experiment in my save a bit, by making a bead pump. I let the pwater out over a mesh tile, and built some walls. The idea was to see if it would pump the gases out of the way, so that when the evaporation happened, there'd be vacuum to fill and no conflict. That worked pretty well, and I could recover roughly 600kg out of the 1000kg, which is a lot better than the previous 99% loss. In the attached screenshot you see a situation where mass deletion does occur - CO2 covers the vent, with steam above and below. In that case I saw no bead forming, and the water just disappeared. I'm not too experienced with this though, so there might be ways to make it work better by changing the build. For instance, I think both walls of the bead pump dropped temperature when the water evaporated, so it runs into the heat deletion bug as well.
I then got another idea, which was to put the vent inside a small chamber surrounded by metal tiles, with a droplet of naptha blocking the only exit, and diverting 0.1g/s of the water to drip on it, making a liquid bypass pump. (Thanks, @mathmanican!) That way the water would turn to steam in an isolated part of the room with no CO2 in it, and the bypass pump would pull the resulting steam into the main steam room. That also worked pretty well, and I only lost half the water. The loss, I think, was due to this being pwater, so sometimes offgassing would create PO2 over the vent, causing the same issue again.
I don't know if there's a good setup that can alleviate this - the bypass pump makes the chamber a vacuum, so there's no pressure preventing offgassing. I could sieve the water before dumping it in of course, although it seems a waste since there's plenty heat to boil the pwater.
I tried a third solution as well, which is to move the vent to right under the steam turbine, and use gas element sensors a couple of tiles below, to check (with only some certainty) whether there was only steam at that level, and only then release the water into the room. This had the weakness of having water pile up and cause damaged pipes, unless I ran it through an aquatuner first, and that CO2 would form layers with steam below and above, stopping or pausing the process intermittently.
But I'm hopeful there's some setup where the liquid vent can be kept in steam only. Or maybe better yet, that there's a setup where one could cause the CO2 to be the thing deleted, instead of the steam? I think @mathmanican has mentioned gas deletion when a bypass pump is used with several gases. Maybe it could be coerced into deleting the unwanted gas?

 

[babba]

@aceluck Hi ace

Thank you for your input and thinking`s - There is a variety of CO2 sources in my screenshots:

### 2x CO2 Geysir`s ( they dont emit due to gas over pressure ) ### Map wandering exchaust fumes from lots of Natural Gas Generators ### Rocket exhaust stuff ### "Local or map wide wandering CO2 accidents" & ### Gas/Fluids moving around due to construction room redesigns ### Used to have 100x wood burners in the steam room, for electricity

"it happens if you release water into the room and CO2 happens to cover the vent with nowhere to go (because of steam or other tiles). " > I have not experienced such a steam inlet CO2 issue in my map, I spent a lot of time monitoring and working on my steam engines. I did have PO, OXY or NG gas sometimes below the steam inlets, that was before...as my steam was below 10 kg/cell. For those issues I had placed large gas pumps near the inlets, so if I ever have steam engine gas inlet issues, the non steam stuff gets pumped to the above room. I could perhaps imagine that inlet issues could arise on more confined builds like in your screenshot, but I play "Open Plan" with lots of space for stuff to move.

I managed to launch my first silo rocket , the CO2 on the top left is exhaust fumes from NG generators. Everytime I currently launch a rocket the NG based CO2 will drop in to my steam(engine)/rocket room. Building a deep silo rocket base was 8 hours work, puh. Time to heat up the 50kg/cell steam now to get my steam engines back working

Changing stuff by dupes on a large scale can easily take hours, so changing anything is always a major undertaking. I probably had dupes build 1000x silo tempshift plates a 800kg, so 800 tons of heat collecting material at the silo entrance. They are at the top silo entrance because I had to block the space tiles anyway. My silo could easily take the heat of 10 petro rockets launched in parallel at the same time, currently being at 50kg/cell steam in the silo. Wish I could detonate a nuke in my steam room to get it hot

Had to move the steam-room-door entrance to the bottom of the base, anything metal going in to the steam room leaks heat like hell.

Wishing you a healthy time and fun in ONi, Babba

NG generators in steam room - A great way to add water in to a steam room

1st Rocket coming back in to the steam room - Erection !

BTW Cant stop looking at my dupes turning the wheels, I love this game

[Gurgel]

The way I deal with such problems is a) clean environments with just one gas or liquid and b) fault-tolerance mechanisms and fault-tolerant constructions.

This should actually make all the "realism" fans happy, because every real-world tank and processing system is leaky to some degree and you get things like substances being converted and evaporating in addition and you also get substances in there that you do not want as well. For example, oil-tanks tend to collect water at the bottom. Central heating systems collect air in the pipes. The water supply tends to collect limescale deposits. And so on. There are few really closed real-world systems, most have some replenishment of the substances they need to work and some removal mechanisms for substances that should not be in there. 

[aceluck]

Clean environments aren't always possible. Boiling polluted water f.ex. will produce steam + polluted oxygen, and this will then cause mass deletion (Unless we can find the perfect setup). In my original case here it was a large oil biome with accumulated CO2 and water hitting hot rock causing steam making the mess I wanted to clear up. Clearing up CO2 and steam is skimmer and steam turbine if one is to grab the nearest building options. Now I don't think the mixed gases themselves caused the deletion, it happened when boiling off the pwater from the skimmer into the same chamber. I thought that would simply create more steam for the turbines (the pressure being too high for offgassing). When I returned to it all the steam was destroyed, several tons - not the expected outcome at all. Now that I know this, I'll avoid doing this in the future. But even if I remove CO2 from the equation, just boiling polluted water and recovering all the water is tricky. Although it seems to work if you leave enough steam behind to prevent offgassing.

[babba]

Yeah, I follow the accident strategy b) which Gurgel mentioned.

I normally let accidents go through multiple rooms, areas, zones and systems until I build a major:

- Prevention system

- System or room redesign

- Cleanup/resolve system

Ive got time for ONi now and was thinking...Ive got all the Oxylite production and Petro fuel pipes in my left map steam room, the infrastructure is up. So I want to try to stack multiple rockets in that steam room. I just need to launch them in the right order. This would bring in the precious steel I need to build my first advanced rocket in my 2nd steam room, located on the right side of the map. That`s the plan

It would be so great if rockets could be delivered on built train tracks, sideways.

New system of adding bottom-room-mixed-fluids @ rocket launch from the top, for exhaust cooling, in to the steam room:

I love the spectacular looks of all the regolith and fluids coming down at launch, it looks amazing ! It feels so real

[cpy]

Just deal with it. This is the price you pay for game running at reasonable framerate. You have to cut corners somewhere.

Nobody has time to rent supercomputer to run scientifically accurate ONI where 1 frame calculation thakes over an hour.

[mathmanican]

@aceluck I made a water lock last year that blocks vertical flow of gas but allows dripping liquid to fall through. I bet we could use something like this to keep CO2 above the lock and have the polluted water drip through and then turn to steam in a pure steam environment.  Unfortunately I can't yet think of a way to guarantee the pw won't be deleted when it drips into petro. This returns me to the steam deletion bug from dripping liquid into petro but avoids the multi gas deletion bug....

[Gurgel]

On 10/29/2020 at 10:36 AM, cpy said:

Just deal with it. This is the price you pay for game running at reasonable framerate. You have to cut corners somewhere.

Nobody has time to rent supercomputer to run scientifically accurate ONI where 1 frame calculation thakes over an hour.

And that is exactly it. Overall the game sim works very well, there are just some quirks you have to be aware of. I never really had any problems resulting from mass deletion once I knew it could happen.

[babba]

In survival mode I`m running more and more steam generators. I now place pumps with gas sensors below steam generators as a regular build method. In my open plan steam room I sometimes have oxygen coming up below the steam generators and the pumps automatically pump it away.

[babba]

Updated layout for all my steam engines to remove unwanted ( one time, or seldom, occuring ) gasses.

Currently I have natural gas wandering through my base, a one time event. So I switch all sensor to the gas type and the inlet problem is solved.

The one time waste gas will then be collected from my colony wide installed emergency gasses collector system, for burning in generators. That system filters all colony gasses and redirects them for removal.