Learning Temperature Management

[timmy-t]

I've been playing ONI for about two weeks, and the biggest limiting factor for me has been temperature management. Realizing the game was in development for a while and many YouTube videos were made during that time, is there a recommended guide--either YT vid or webpage--for temperature management?

[avc15]

There are just so many ways to manage temperatures and so many different priorities you might have. How advanced or basic are you right now? Is this about preventing heat death on an easy gamestart with lots of wiggle room (terra - arboria) or just figuring out how to get by on a difficult gamestart (volcanea - oasis)?

There are just so many different aspects.

For a more advanced scenario where the player has to use thermal properties of different materials to get by, along with a healthy dose of heat deletion, one series to watch is brothgar's surviving oasis series. He is a bit of a perpetual noob (doesn't come close to optimizing anything) but he also is an engineer by trade (so gets into some pretty advanced stuff)

[timmy-t]

1 hour ago, avc15 said:

There are just so many ways to manage temperatures and so many different priorities you might have. How advanced or basic are you right now? Is this about preventing heat death on an easy gamestart with lots of wiggle room (terra - arboria) or just figuring out how to get by on a difficult gamestart (volcanea - oasis)?

For right now, it's about preventing heat death. I've only played so far on Terra as "No Sweat."

[JRup]

To get started with heat management in any base you'll want to use liquid piping and insulated tile... lots of it.

After surrounding the initial base with insulated tile, one usually builds a liquid piping loop in the areas where you want to control the temperature.... Granite is the go to material for this on the cheap. To fill any loop for living areas polluted water will work best until you get into the later stages of the game. (Polluted water has a wider temperature range that helps a lot for this kind of purpose)

Any loop to control temperature will definitely have somewhere to dump the heat into. A common idea is to route the loop around your base and then through an ice biome, for example. This will buy you time to find better solutions. Note the ice biome will eventually melt. (I did a pacu-powered cooling pool to start with so I preserved most of the ice biomes.)

This should give some ideas on getting started with heat management. There are buildings that also help, but managing those are also a subject of their own.

 

[darknotezero]

5 hours ago, avc15 said:

He is a bit of a perpetual noob (doesn't come close to optimizing anything) but he also is an engineer by trade (so gets into some pretty advanced stuff)

i'm not an engineer, but this describes the way i play this game to a T, especially when it comes to temperature management. I'm definitely still hacking my way through that fairly clumsily.

Anyway, as someone who defines myself as a bumbling intermediate player, I have to say that the fandom ONI wiki guide on Base Cooling was definitely an important resource for me to start when I didn't really understand any of the numbers or the fine mechanics of the game. I definitely did a lot of clumsy pipe running into cold areas with radiant pipe to chill my hot liquids/gases (and warmup those cold biomes as a result) that would loop back into my base that started to get too hot. My base still got hot over time, so it was more like turning a gushing open wound into a slow death instead, but it still helped me start to grasp how to do it better when I started my second colony.

Once you start to understand how that works, the numbers and the detail/nitty gritty starts to make more sense, especially once you understand how to use Thermal Capacity, Specific Heat Capacity, and "state change" points in elements (melting point, evaporation point, etc) to deal with temp management.

It might help to know when in-game you're starting to get heat death. Like, if you're dupes are dying by cycle 100 due to heat death, i'd venture to say that you're running too much hot machinery? if you're talking cycle 500, that's something else entirely.

 

[TheMule]

I upgrade food production from mealwood to stone hatches ASAP. Then I can forget about heat management inside the base for like 500 cycles. And that's if I made sweeper out of lead, they melt at around 56C. My colony is perfectly fine at that temp, btw. I replace them with copper/aluminum ones and begin thinking of a cooling solution...

[SamLogan]

You have three entities :

Entity which produce heat : DTU / sec (DTU = amount of heat)

Entity which move heat to their body : thermo regulator & Aquatuner

Entity which destroy heat : Wheezewort, AETN, Steam Turbine

 

So if you want manage heat, you have to see how much DTU you produce, it marks in each windows of machines, then use a heat remover.

 

Example, you produce 12 000 DTU / sec with generator so you need 1 wheezewort in hydrogen. Use those links :

- https://oni-db.com/details/coldbreather

- https://oni-db.com/details/massiveheatsink

- https://oni-db.com/details/steamturbine2

And for material :

https://oni-assistant.com/tools/coolingcalculator

 

Also, you can use the mass effect. If you open a room which produce too much heat, it will dilute in the environnement. Same with water pool can handle a lot of heat.

 

[babba]

5 hours ago, timmy-t said:

I've been playing ONI for about two weeks, and the biggest limiting factor for me has been temperature management. Realizing the game was in development for a while and many YouTube videos were made during that time, is there a recommended guide--either YT vid or webpage--for temperature management?

As a tip - You can start an ice world, with a frozen core ( no magma ). This can give you easily a thousand cycles peace from heat problems. As an ONi large scale industrialist player it is my favourite starting choice. As it has been mentioned, the "No sweat setting" is also great. If you run a "No sweat" colony with hundreds of dupes it will be sweat

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Game_Settings

[avc15]

Since you've told us your situation now, I'd caution you against getting too advanced.

Try things like, making your build more efficient. Use smaller machines, don't be wasteful overall, produce what you will actually use not large amounts of anything. Especially water - as a beginner you should steer clear of any crop that consumes water constantly (sleet wheat, bristle berries) as collecting that water pumps tremendous amounts of heat into your base. Also especially power - get by with a smaller power plant.

When you really do need to move heat from one place to another, as a beginner, start simple and small. Put an ice machine outside your base, haul the ice to a container where you're trying to lower temperatures. I'd steer clear of wheezeworts as a beginner because they require you to play with pips or bleachstone, both are pretty mechanics heavy. If playing with ice isn't good enough, build a thermo-regulator. Aquatuners are strictly more efficient (by a lot) but they also require you to have a big power plant or automation. Definitely easier to take it in small chunks, so a thermoregulator will get you there. Pump the heat to a biome away from your base until you get higher tech.

My advice boils down to, keep things small, keep things simple, be efficient, use the most basic tools first.

[babba]

Oh Kerbin, I miss Kerbin so much

[Steve8]

2 hours ago, avc15 said:

I'd steer clear of wheezeworts as a beginner because they require you to play with pips or bleachstone, both are pretty mechanics heavy.

They need phosphorite, which need dreckos to be renewable. But there is plenty of the stuff around to mine. And you are only going to use a few for a while, so you only need very small amounts. People say they are useless after being nerfed (from being OP), but they are still quite nice to deal with hotspots as long as you aren't dealing with industrial heat producers. For example they easily counteract the heat put out by dreckos or a rock crusher. They can keep farms cool. I've also used them with rust deoxidizers - which aren't countered completely, but they delay the need for more powerful solutions.

 

 

This covers some basic stuff that doesn't need tech, but also advanced concepts. Mostly the aquatuner and steam turbine:

 

On Terra you really don't have to worry about temperature too much for a while. It may look bad, but the dupes themselves are very tolerant. A bigger issue is cooling farms for example. And there are some ways to temporarily cool those without having to build anything complicated.

[timmy-t]

19 hours ago, darknotezero said:

it might help to know when in-game you're starting to get heat death. Like, if you're dupes are dying by cycle 100 due to heat death, i'd venture to say that you're running too much hot machinery? if you're talking cycle 500, that's something else entirely.

I haven't even made it in the triple digits yet! I usually quit when I see that heat has gotten out of my control, before there are any real effects (other than crop death) from it. But so far, I have done nothing to insulate my base. That changed with my latest game, when I have insulated the main base, and I've put my generators outside the base. 

[Urist McPilot]

5 hours ago, timmy-t said:

I usually quit when I see that heat has gotten out of my control, before there are any real effects (other than crop death)

At that point you still have plenty of time to start dealing with the situation (at least on Terra). Don't quit, try to invent some cooling. You still have enough time to get it wrong and fix it a few times

5 hours ago, timmy-t said:

I have insulated the main base

I have never insulated my whole base, not even on Volcanea with magma channels. Just cut off the source of heat.

[Steve8]

5 hours ago, timmy-t said:

before there are any real effects (other than crop death)

Easy to solve. In the video above ice machines are mentioned. But on asteroids with ice biomes you don't even need that. You can just grab some ice you mined. That buys you a lot of time

Or move away from crops and ranch hatches instead. BBQ is better food anyways

[chemie]

with Terra, just insulate your base and put all heat producing machine outside the base (like power and refining)