no gold on Arboria

[Majestix]

I would like to hear peoples' experience with supplying oxygen in the early-mid game on Arboria. I have access to several sources of hot water that I find mouth-watering (forgive the pun), such as a water geyser and a cool steam vent, both nearby, but since there is no gold, I do not see any obvious ways of using it for example in electrolyzers. I can probably survive for quite a while longer just digging up pockets of algae here and there, or I could go down the rust deoxydizer route, which I don't particularly like, since they are power hungry, and one has to deal with the chlorine. Oxyferns will probably work fine in my base, but I would like to start making atmo suits, and also at some point to even start making steel, I would want to get that blasted water into the oil wells somehow.

A concrete question: if I just quickly dig up to the surface to start the meteor showers and occasionally collect the gold amalgam from the surface, will this come back to bite me? I am used to having a full container of steel ready before starting that whole thing, and immediately making bunker doors to cover a decent area. How bad will it be if I just let the meteors rain on the surface completely unprotected for quite a number of cycles? Or maybe there are just simple tricks that I am missing? Maybe the "pump above the water" exploit, and cool the electrolyzers with a bunch of wheezeworts? Would that stop them from breaking if they are fed 80C water?

[Steve8]

Getting steel for the increased overheat temperature a bit early is not too difficult. You can temporarily use a pool of water as coolant.

or I could go down the rust deoxydizer route, which I don't particularly like, since they are power hungry, and one has to deal with the chlorine

They are very cheap. 60W for 5 dupes. The chlorine produced is minuscule and can be eaten by some saltvines. The main issue is that they are pretty labor intensive, but they aren't bad under the circumstances.

[Majestix]

50 minutes ago, Steve8 said:

Getting steel for the increased overheat temperature a bit early is not too difficult. You can temporarily use a pool of water as coolant.

 

 

They are very cheap. 60W for 5 dupes. The chlorine produced is minuscule and can be eaten by some saltvines. The main issue is that they are pretty labor intensive, but they aren't bad under the circumstances.

Thanks! I do not currently have any sufficiently cold water whatsoever, I only started with a tiny puddle, which was used up very quickly for research. I only just managed to set up a closed toilet loop before all the starting water was gone. However I now have also found a natural gas geyser. So maybe running that to produce some polluted water, and just running that through a refinery before sieving is the way to go?

I have the feeling that this is a tiny hump: once I manage to access that hot water, the rest should be really smooth sailing.

[Steve8]

There are cool salt water pools in the tide biomes, though they tend to be pretty small compared to polluted water in slime biomes. And you have ice biomes that can be melted

In addition to the natural gas you can burn all the ethanol pools in the rust biomes. And you can make more ethanol from trees.

[Majestix]

2 minutes ago, Steve8 said:

There are cool salt water pools in the tide biomes, though they tend to be pretty small compared to polluted water in slime biomes. And you have ice biomes that can be melted

In addition to the natural gas you can burn all the ethanol pools in the rust biomes. And you can make more ethanol from trees.

Yep, all good ideas. Thanks! The more I think about it, the more I realise that the barrier was more psychological than real. I always treated steel as later game stuff, you know, complete with steam turbines for heat management and all that jazz; I just need to overcome my aversion to temporary solutions that will not last more than 50 cycles. In this case I think it will be worth it.

[Tsabo]

11 hours ago, Majestix said:

Yep, all good ideas. Thanks! The more I think about it, the more I realise that the barrier was more psychological than real. I always treated steel as later game stuff, you know, complete with steam turbines for heat management and all that jazz; I just need to overcome my aversion to temporary solutions that will not last more than 50 cycles. In this case I think it will be worth it.

I had to do early steel recently - I was going for Super Sustainable and I desperately needed to be able to tame a hydrogen vent with a steel gas pump. Wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected; I just used polluted water in the metal refinery, and then piped the 90C output faaaaar away to some distant dumping pool to forget about it. No ill effects long-term.

Still don't quite know how I go the power to run the refinery, but it worked somehow.

[Mutineer]

I had same problem. But first geyser I discover was 95C water geyser. Can not pump it.

I solve the problem of cooling water until temperature low enough to feed ferns (45C) By botlin some of it to Rust biome. 95C water went to continue research. Heat does not leak much.

I actually got problem now when geyser enter 75 cycle break, but I think I have enough stored water to feed ferns. By now I almost ready to operate outside core base with suits.

[TheMule]

You should have quite a bit of ethanol. You can turn it into pwater for coolant in a metal refinery and use the largest pool of ethanol you find to dump heat into. Usually it's located in rust biome that are naturally cold, so both the pool and the environment should be able to adsorb some heat.

If you start using existing ethanol as fuel ASAP, it provides a bit of extra water for research and oxyferns if you sieve the pwater.

I usually rush a metal refinery, and thus, the first 1.2t of steel. In maps with swamp biomes it's trivial (demolish one, place the refinery on top of the pool of pwater that collected at the bottom, one pump, one reservoir, and you're done. You do need the tech for the temp sensor unfortunately, but you can do w/o if you choose to spend extra power and just dump the p water back into the pool w/o making a loop. As soon as I have the thermo sensor, I switch to a loop with gold radiant pipe (gold being the metal that produces less heat when refined).

W/o swamp biomes it's a bit more complicated, but not much. Find a suitable pool of ethanol, build a generator (that you need to power the refinery anyway), collect the first 400 kg of coolant, create a loop. Aluminum produces much more heat than gold, when refined, but OTOH you need way fewer pipe segments for the same effect, so adjust accordingly.

You may need to switch to different pool if you're going to refine more metal. Or pump away the too warm ethanol (store it to feed the generator) and replace with fresh cold one.

To build your first proper refinery setup you need plastic tho. I can't remember how easy it is to get mealwood on Arboria. If you have it, ranching dreckos early on can provide early plastic, and you should already be doing that for fibers. You should be able to get some oil as coolant, but if that's not an option, build a AT/ST setup, don't let the turbine run until it's 200C, build a plastic shiftplate inside the steam chamber, collect 800kg of naphtha, use that as coolant for the refinery, it ok for 2 full jobs. Naphtha doesn't have a great TC, but aluminum radiant pipes help a lot, also you can run it with a max temp of 430C (intake), which is short of 540C out, and the delta-T helps a lot with thermal conduction too. Dumping heat into the steam chamber isn't a problem with 540C naphtha inside aluminum radiant pipes.

Once you have a steady steel production, the lack of gold is a minor inconvenience.

 

To answer your original question, collecting gold amalgam from meteors is messy if done by dups. You need to create access paths to large chunks of the surface and keep them clear of regolith, a lot of micromanagement with constant attention to avoid trapped dups.

[Majestix]

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

...

Thank you for the very detailed response! I will have no problems powering the refinery, since I have tapped into a natural gas geyser, but its pwater production is too slow. I am now planning to just desalinate some salt water and use that as coolant. I might then either feed that to oxyferns or just temporarily run it through a rust biome to keep cooling it, but from that point my aim will be to transition to oil/petroleum cooling and a steam turbine as quickly as possible.

[Occam Blazer]

I've been moving away from electrolyzers for oxygen production. Check out using polluted water in an A.E.O.N. or MOGOM (credit to @Yunru)