Sublimation station being able to sublimate things other than polluted dirt

[TuxSam123]

I loved the addition of the sublimation station to the game, it's an absolute must in the swamp cluster. However, I think that it should be able to sublimate other materials, like slime, bleach stone and oxylite.

[The Plum Gate]

Adding something similar to the recipe list for refineries or the sludge press would work for this. The current internal capacity is 600kg, so the recipe list would probably tone this down.

Right now it behaves exactly like the algae deoxidizer. 

I like the idea - it also lets you turn off the station through recipe list manipulation in the early game without the use of automation.

It would also be interesting to have there be byproducts from these sublimation materials. ( the spent medium which they come from ) Consider the algae distillery - this produces polluted water still yes? Where would this go?

Maybe adding polluted water to the list would be nice as well, perhaps it could spit out clean water bottle and polluted dirt at the end of the process - this would supplement the sparse water supply at the start of the game on swampy worlds.

Imparting it with a recipe list also allows for the variation of byproducts. so a polluted water chain: polluted water to polluted oxygen + water. Or polluted water to polluted oxygen + polluted dirt ( as a water mass loss ), would further allow sublimation of polluted dirt.

[JaxckLl]

Meh. The Sublimation Station is fairly poorly implemented tool already. I'd rather they rebalance Oxygen generation first before trying to add additional functionality for an unnecessary building.

• We have several ways of generation Oxygen reliably. Algae (via Terrariums & Diffusers), Hydrolysis, Rust Deoxidization, Oxylite off-gasing, Polluted off-gasing, and Sublimation. Each of these systems has a specific niche which makes them viable, except for Sublimation. Algae & Oxylite serve as efficient early-game sources of Oxygen (with Terrariums also serving as effective long term method of converting Water to PWater, such as for Thimble Reeds or Puft ranching). Rust & Polluted off-gasing are decent mid tier options, both constrained by their limited renewability & unwanted gas side effects but buoyed by their efficiency (Rust additionally serves as a good source of Iron Ore for Steel production). Hydrolysis is the ultimate long term source of Oxygen, and eventually all bases will have their primary Oxygen production come via this method.
• The problem with Sublimation is that it is presented as an early game source, but doesn't compete well with large scale off-gasing. POxygen is already widely available & easy to produce, especially on the Swampy start. It's even harder now to convert to regular Oxygen which really doesn't help (that 5W cost is crippling for the utility of Deodorizers, primarily of the metal & dupe time cost for all the additional wiring). There's not a good reason to build the Sublimation Station when just digging out another dozen tiles of off-gasing floor will accomplish the same effect.
• The way I see it, Sublimation wants to be an alternative to Hydrolysis not an early game build. I feel the Sublimation Station would work better if it cost plastic and provided a 99% return on PO2 for mass. This would make it a viable long term alternative to Hydrolysis and finally make SPOMs unnecessary. Additionally, I feel the Sublimation Station would work better as a Station rather than a machine, creating a room which enhances the off-gasing of contained materials. This gives it a completely unique niche among Oxygen generation systems, and also makes it a natural enhancement to existing "dig out the map" strategies rather than an unnecessary side step.

I have yet to build a Sublimation Station and I doubt I would consider it even if other off-gasing materials could be placed inside. Now if you could place Coal inside and generate CO2 efficiently, that might give it an early game niche as an enabler of early game rocketry.

[The Plum Gate]

hmm, and I thought 120w powered doors were a bit too steep - but this fixes a number of play related issues.

[Sasza22]

16 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

Meh. The Sublimation Station is fairly poorly implemented tool already. I'd rather they rebalance Oxygen generation first before trying to add additional functionality for an unnecessary building.

The one important thing the sublimation station gives you is freedom. You can put it where it`s needed. Outside the starting biome oxygen doesn`t generate itself. Not everybody plays the same way. Some people might strip mine the entire biome and keep offgassing stuff underwater. Some might seal off parts of the biome to prevent wild offgassing, some may even make sure oxygen from the sublimators gets cleaned right away.

It`s early game tech. Doesn`t need to be efficient but it gives you options. You have the option to ignore it as well. Anyway it`s a good thing for puft farms if we get an arboria type start with arbor trees, dusk caps and pufts. Making ethanol outputs tons of pdirt and pufts can change it into slime for your caps. Someone needs to do the math on how reliable that wuld be though.

[JaxckLl]

5 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

The one important thing the sublimation station gives you is freedom. You can put it where it`s needed. Outside the starting biome oxygen doesn`t generate itself. Not everybody plays the same way. Some people might strip mine the entire biome and keep offgassing stuff underwater. Some might seal off parts of the biome to prevent wild offgassing, some may even make sure oxygen from the sublimators gets cleaned right away.

It`s early game tech. Doesn`t need to be efficient but it gives you options. You have the option to ignore it as well. Anyway it`s a good thing for puft farms if we get an arboria type start with arbor trees, dusk caps and pufts. Making ethanol outputs tons of pdirt and pufts can change it into slime for your caps. Someone needs to do the math on how reliable that wuld be though.

Sure thing, I'll do the math and edit this post with my complete workings.

[ONI-FAN]

You could sublimate ice and polluted ice too.. It could come out in cool puffs of steam that likely will ultimately make puddles on the floor.  This would be helpful for liquefying ice for use as water.

[TuxSam123]

On 1/6/2021 at 9:42 PM, The Plum Gate said:

Maybe adding polluted water to the list would be nice as well, perhaps it could spit out clean water bottle and polluted dirt at the end of the process - this would supplement the sparse water supply at the start of the game on swampy worlds.

But isn't that what the water sieve does?

[The Plum Gate]

2 minutes ago, TuxSam123 said:

But isn't that what the water sieve does?

Yes of course, giving you polluted dirt and water while taking sand.

[TuxSam123]

1 minute ago, The Plum Gate said:

Yes of course, giving you polluted dirt and water while taking sand.

So why make the sublimation station do the same, when there is a structure which does the exact same thing?

[The Plum Gate]

5 minutes ago, TuxSam123 said:

So why make the sublimation station do the same, when there is a structure which does the exact same thing?

Because polluted water sublimation could occur faster in the sublimation station. Not via the water sieve.

It's about effects, not byproducts.

[TuxSam123]

3 minutes ago, The Plum Gate said:

Because polluted water sublimation could occur faster in the sublimation station. Not via the water sieve.

It's about effects, not byproducts.

But that's not sublimation, that would be vaporization.

[The Plum Gate]

Just now, TuxSam123 said:

But that's not sublimation, that would be vaporization.

That's a technicality that implies the polluted oxygen can condense back into polluted water.

[TuxSam123]

8 minutes ago, The Plum Gate said:

That's a technicality that implies the polluted oxygen can condense back into polluted water.

True

[Yunru]

On 1/7/2021 at 3:18 AM, JaxckLl said:

Hydrolysis is the ultimate long term source of Oxygen, and eventually all bases will have their primary Oxygen production come via this method.

You make funny joke, it made me laugh.

[JaxckLl]

2 hours ago, Yunru said:

You make funny joke, it made me laugh.

If you have nothing to contribute, feel free to post nothing.

[Yunru]

18 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

If you have nothing to contribute, feel free to post nothing.

Thank you for the permission. 

To quantify, the electrolyser is one of the worst sources of oxygen, long term or otherwise, in terms of conversion efficiency and should only be used for producing hydrogen from water.

So to hear someone confidently state that they're the ultimate source and that all bases will be using them was legitimately a funny joke. 

 

I'm sorry if you weren't joking, but between that and the statement that polluted water was a limitedly-renewable resource (despite both it being the sole major cause of confusion regarding newbies and bathroom loops, and essentially the same resource hydrolysers use), well... It's an easy misassumption. 

[JaxckLl]

1. You did not "quantify" anything. "To quantify" means "to assign numbers to in a meaningful way".

2. We currently have four sources of Oxygen. Algae, Rust, PDirt/PWater, and finally Hydrolysis. Algae is efficient, but extremely limited and difficult to produce in the mid game. Algae can be a long term source of Oxygen, but such a system is very convoluted and consumes power. Rust is efficient, but there is no renewable route whatsoever. Rust also serves as a good source of Iron Ore & Chlorine, so it's an attractive mid game option. PDirt/PWater is a mixed bag. It's now a long term viable system thanks to the Sublimation Station, but it's usually better to convert PDirt to Dirt. PWater to PO2 is a bad trade by any measure (unless it's being used with Pufts to produce Algae), but the fact that it can be done passively makes it an attractive early/mid game option. Hydrolysis is an efficient source of Oxygen which has the advantage of being power-positive if all the Hydrogen is properly captured. Additionally, Water is readily renewable making Hydrolysis the go-to long term source of O2.

3. You should probably think before posting again, both about how rude you are being and how inexplicably bad your English is.

[The Plum Gate]

I, for one, have taken to using large PW reservoirs and deodorizers for primary base Pacu farm and oxygen generation. 

This seems to be the most power efficient design, a dexoidizer or a sublimation station is a good source of emergency O2/PO2,

... deodorizers seem to be more granulated in their design, such that one continuously running deodorizer and one running part of the time is enough to keep up with one dupe. So. In my playthrough being limited to usually 8 dupes I only need 10 deodorizers running over a liquid locked (mesh+airflow capped ) polluted water reservoir - I use the atmo sensors to trigger the deodorizers similarly to deodorizer and sublimation station. 

I wouldn't need all that metal intense pwater infrastucture if I could deliver p-water to the sublimation station. So this was my original thought earlier in the thread.

Problem here being a manual delivery from a hand pump and the inevitable PO2 issue.

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, JaxckLl said:

PWater to PO2 is a bad trade by any measure

Are we playing the same game?

PWater to PO2 is 100% conversion efficiency.
When talking about oxygen production, that outweighs the 88.8% conversion rate of the electrolyser you tout as supreme, even factoring in a Deodorizer's 90% conversion rate for PO2 to O2.

Furthermore, regarding:

1 hour ago, JaxckLl said:

Additionally, Water is readily renewable making Hydrolysis the go-to long term source of O2.

You realise Water converts to Pwater through a variety of ways, including several at a 1:1 or greater ratio, right?

Water being readily renewable, by definition counts as much towards Pwater off-gassing as it does your chosen champion.

[JoeW]

Please keep things constructive and polite. Nitpicking at each other isn't productive and just degrades the entire conversation. 

For being a group of people so focused on efficiency, you could benefit from being more polite to each other. 

[yoakenashi]

3 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

Algae can be a long term source of Oxygen, but such a system is very convoluted and consumes power.

Just so I understand, are you talking about the “algae from algae distiller, slime from puft farm” route? Or have I been overlooking another way to make algae?

[JaxckLl]

2 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

Just so I understand, are you talking about the “algae from algae distiller, slime from puft farm” route? Or have I been overlooking another way to make algae?

The longterm sustainable source is PWater/PDirt -> PO2 -> Slime (via Puft) -> Algae. It's a good system for generating calories (via Pacus & Pufts), and a good source of Oxygen. However it is not power positive (unless you are converting Calories to power via Mousewheels, or somehow integrating the system with Sage Hatches), and a SPOM (which uses Hydrolysis to produce Oxygen & Hydrogen, with the ratio of power consumed to Hydrogen produced meaning the system is overall power positive) being a superior system in basically every way.

Theoretically the progression would be

• Algae & Sublimation in the early game. This requires minimal amounts of metal & plenty of dupe time. These systems are efficient in terms of the amount of O2 produced, but inefficient in terms of dupe time and they are not power positive.
• Rust in the early mid game. Rust represents an upgrade over Algae & early game Sublimation because of its secondary outputs (especially Iron Ore) and because of it's low dupe time compared to O2 output.
• SPOM is the best first project once reaching the midgame (the mid game starting once you have your first 200kg of Refined Metal and the capacity to produce more). A SPOM is an excellent source of power which can easily be isolated from the rest of the grid requiring only a single highly-sustainable input, Water. Indeed, SPOMs are so good at producing Oxygen that it's often advisable to transition to additional Oxygen consumers to increase the ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen being produced (such as Longhair Slicksters or Dense Pufts). This makes a double-SPOM (one for Oxygen, one for Hydrogen) a great mid game source of sustainable power which can be left alone for the rest of the playthrough. The minimum amount of Refined Metal is extremely low (the Gas Pumps need atmo sensors to provide power efficiency), and no special dupe skills are needed to set up the system.
• An upgraded Sublimation plant is an option at this point in the game. Sublimation represents an improvement over a SPOM in terms of raw O2 output compared to Water input, but it is dramatically more expensive to build as it requires substantial Refined Metals and a Mechatronics Engineers to be comparable in terms of automation. Additionally, while a SPOM is a net power provider, a Sublimation plant is a net power draw. This in turn makes it effectively more expensive to operate per kg of O2. An argument can be made for Sublimation plants on the Swampy start built using the Solar power available from the POI Glass, but in such a situation you are unable to use that power for other things and you are still spending dramatically more resources overall to build the fully automated system. PDirt can become a limiting factor without a good source, again requiring more Mechatronics & Refined Metal compared to a SPOM. Sublimation can serve as an upgrade route to a SPOM, as a SPOM which relies on a baseline of PWater will produce PDirt when using Sieves. It is usually more efficient however to boil the PWater and send 95C Water into your SPOM to delete some heat and further improve the power characteristics of the SPOM.
• The final option for Oxygen is to go back to using Algae, this time via the PWater -> Puft route. This system is something of a hybrid of the SPOM & Sublimation plant in practice, since the O2 yield per unit Water is improved compared to a SPOM, but the power & dupe time costs are poor like Sublimation. The expense is offset by this system also serving as a great source of Calories, which can be in turn converted into power via Mousewheels. The main advantage of this system is how it can be scaled to dupe population with extreme precision, and that Puft ranching is a very good source of Oxylite for rocketry. The main disadvantage is the complexity and again, the build cost.

In summary, Electrolysis in the form of SPOMs serve as the premier long term source of Oxygen in the game. Water becomes a superb source of both Power & Oxygen once a SPOM is built, all using a minimal amount of Refined Metal. Sublimation is in a slightly awkward place at the moment because of the lack of power positivity. The best argument for making Sublimation Stations consume additional resources besides PDirt is to open up the machine for uses other than pure Oxygen production. CO2 from rock or coal for example, Chlorine from Bleachstone, ideally some way to generate NatGas. This would allow Sublimation-based builds to have more than one purpose and to represent a true competitor to the superior SPOM.

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, JaxckLl said:

and a SPOM (which uses Hydrolysis to produce Oxygen & Hydrogen, with the ratio of power consumed to Hydrogen produced meaning the system is overall power positive) being a superior system in basically every way.

Except for resource efficiency and heat management, since the oxygen will require cooling, which in turn requires, oh look, power.

[JaxckLl]

10 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Except for resource efficiency and heat management, since the oxygen will require cooling, which in turn requires, oh look, power.

Wheezeworts are a thing....