Feedback: Heat management is still not fun.

[jady]

Dealing with heat in this game is not fun, in my opinion.

It's never been fun for me. In the base game, I avoided it entirely just by playing on the ice world. That was the best solution I could find, because every other map just made me frustrated and confused. The ice map was fun for me, because heat problems didn't exist. I do think it did make the game a bit too easy, but at least I could play the game to the end.

There have never been enough tools to deal with heat. The small-scale tools that exist are clunky, and the large-scale are complicated and confusing to my dumb brain. I'm a casual player, yes. I don't want to play the game by copying youtube video designs, or looking up how to 'delete heat' through hacky mechanics that make no logical sense.

The fact those hacky mechanics (like filtering water so it output at a set temperature) were so common just reinforces my opinion that the existing tools are inadequate. 

The DLC right now has no starting ice-biome. And even if it did, that's not going to be a 'solution' anymore to the lacking tools in the game, because the DLC is designed around multi-colonies in different biomes. I love the idea, and I want to love the DLC and play it fully, but heat needs more tools.

Playing in this beta is leaving me in the same position as the base game regular maps, because there are still no better options for heat management. 

I love the base game (on the ice-biome) but I don't think I will buy the DLC unless something about heat management is improved. 

I know this post will get a ton of "git gud" and other nonsense trying to teach me how wrong and dumb I am. I don't care.

The only thing that matters to me: IT'S NOT FUN.

[babba]

Hopefully world generation settings from the base game will make it in to the DLC in this year, as I like to start with a frozen core + the option to play on a big map ( like in the base game ).

Any players opinion and feedback is of value, including yours

[CheeseGromit]

I've never got my head around heat management long term. There's lot's of things in the game that I just don't build knowing that they're a source of heat that will cause me problems later in the game. It's not really negatively affecting my enjoyment of the game since I'm someone who will happily restart. I does mean I've still not touched space, even in the DLC.

I'll be interested to see what comes out of this thread, hopefully something positive.

I've never tried the ice planet, I'll have to give that a go.

[Meltdown]

So, what changes to the mechanic and/or additions to the list of existing tools could make heat management fun (or, at least, less frustrating) for you?

[Hayate108]

DLC had two start map

Terra and swamp

Terra always had two low steam vent

And swamp got a pollution water and salt water geysers

 

The heat problem is once again with Terra when it go over 30

No mealwood anymore 

But the teleporter had the ice and oil

Swamp start with ice and the delete heat building

So the heat economy is chooseable 

 

In original, planetoids without ice or any

Free way to consume heat is like living in hell

 

Hot hell if the volcano is opened

 

Although there has many way to deal heat

But ice fan is joke

The ice block leaking water everywhere

 

Cooling gas and liquid is fun but really chellage

Witch I failed so many times ...... sad

[sakura_sk]

1 hour ago, Hayate108 said:

The heat problem is once again with Terra when it go over 30

No mealwood anymore

For DLC Terra specifically I found out that digging dirt from the space biome to put in the farms helps a lot (maybe too much...)

Spoiler

My mealwood farm is that blue area in the middle. It got below 10 C and I had to heat it up a little...

 

[Hodhandr]

While temperature management is one of the many systems in the game with a bit of a learning curve, I do think we have quite a few tools to work with, ranging from wheezeworts (which can more or less passively cool vital areas from not too much heat), AETNs (simply consumes hydrogen to delete heat), or more complicated setups, usually involving steam generators and/or venting liquids/gas into space.

You might notice that all of these are for getting rid of heat, and that's because it is a LOT easier to make heat than delete it - a shallow pool of water with a tepidizer connected to a temperature sensor should be all you need to heat your living quarters. Generally excess heat will be the issue, though.

In addition to tools you may or may not have access to in any given game, you have a decent amount of control over how easy or hard it will be from your starting parameters, at least in vanilla. The DLC is early access and you don't have quite as much control. That said:

 

5 hours ago, Hayate108 said:

DLC had two start map
[...]
And swamp got a pollution water and salt water geysers

The swamp start actually gives you some very handy tools for keeping temperatures low
The cool slush and polluted water geysers are pretty cold, so you can use that to leech heat. You will need to delete the warmer water somehow, though - this can be done by venting to space, irrigating farms, or otherwise "consume" the water. The start also has a bunch of cold biomes, at least my save does.

Temperature management by heat sink/heat exchanger
For keeping stable temperatures in my bases, I build a heat sink/exchanger, which is essentially just a large water tank with some metal(aluminium) tiles in it (for easy heat transfer).
You need to cool the heat sink, since so many things produce heat, and this would usually be done by one or more thermo aquatuners/regulators (one tuner using water should be enough if you're not cooling hot equipment like refineries), but in this case I use the cold liquids from the geyser. At least in my save the liquids would otherwise be so cold that they burst pipes, so it's two birds with one stone.
Do note that if you're using regulators/aquatuners you'll need to cool the regulator/tuner too, though, usually with steam generators or by dumping the heat into something you just vent into space - this is easier on the smaller DLC maps.

Image in spoiler: Heat sink/exchanger temps

Spoiler

That gives a nice, stable, dupe-friendly temperature I can easily equalise temperatures with, and I use this to cool oxygen coming from my electrolyzers, as well as a cooling loop that circles the dupe-portion of my base.

Image in spoiler: Gas pipes from electrolyzers

Spoiler

Image in spoiler: Liquid piping in base

Spoiler

Notice the radiant pipes between the geyser pumps and the purification area (marked with red circles, bottom left) - these cool the heat sink down in case it goes over the target temperature

-----

Takeaways
The general concept is also easy to set up even with very little tech (as soon as you have insulated tiles and access to enough water to fill a decent portion of the tank) and gradually improve it(metal tile heat sink, tepidizer, cooling with aquatuners+steam generators, etc)
In addition, you can easily scale it up (or down!), which would let you cool more pipes and generally make temperatures more stable, but I've found that something like this is good enough for the dupe portions of a base(little to no industrial equipment), while not taking too much space or time to build.
As you can see in the image below, it works like a charm.

Image in spoiler: Base temperatures

Spoiler

Personally I enjoy heat management in this game, and think that you can generally get away with fairly simple solutions if you want to - assuming you're not doing megaprojects, but those usually involve heat management anyway, and aren't something you'd do if you don't have a good grasp on the heat system. In addition, the base game has a breadth of options for making your life easier/harder. As for the DLC, it's in early access, and clearly states so in the text you probably skip every time you load the game, so it doesn't have as many options. Even so, with the two starts you till have some choice.

Finally, if you still hate that part of the game, I'm sure you can find a mod that creates/deletes heat to reach a target temperature. I will concede that mods aren't always optimal, but heat is such a core part of the game, and if you think all our current tools are too clunky, well, the only thing simpler than an AETN would be a freely placeable building which just deletes heat, and I don't see that being in the game outside mods.

[narg]

Just go for the swamp start. 

You get 2 geysers spewing brine/polluted water at negative temperatures. Plus at least 1 Thermo-Nullifier and the ice biome.

But you should learn how to setup a thermo aquaturner + steam turbine because you will need later for volcanos.

[Sasza22]

We actually lack some mid tier effective cooling. Most solutions are pretty complicated and involve aquatuners.

I`ve used ice fans. They work. But they have drawbacks. The most infuriating one is dupes droping ice all over the base, which turns into water. After having to order mop twice a cycle you just give up. Another thing is that you need 2 or 3 of those to get the job done and there isn`t any automation cutting it off when the temperature is fine. But it works if you are willing to sacrifice some dupe time.

We could use an easier way to set up thermoregulator loops. It`s really annoying to get the hydrogen inside and even then the thermoregulator seems to be more effective at overheating itself than cooling the tuff it`s intended to. But i think with a better way to put hydrogen inside (a bottle-to-pipe machine) it would be less of a hassle setting those up, especially at the bottom of the base.

[DarkMaster13]

One of the simplest and easiest ways to manage heat is to isolate your farms from all heat sources.  That's generally power plants, oxygen generators, and industry buildings.  Most of my bases don't actually bother with cooling systems.  Switching off of mealwood to food sources that are either easier to temperature control or are fine with hot temperatures also works.  Mealwood tends to cook if you're using composts.  Bristle blossoms and bog buckets will be totally fine if you only irrigate them with correct temperature water.  While waterweed and grubfruit tolerate much hotter temperatures than your normal starting crops.

[Sasza22]

3 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

One of the simplest and easiest ways to manage heat is to isolate your farms from all heat sources.  That's generally power plants, oxygen generators, and industry buildings. 

Worst heat source in your base is pipes with hot water. I`ve done this mistake before. Piping geyser water to lavatories can heat your base in one cycle.

[Meltdown]

8 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

there isn`t any automation cutting it off when the temperature is fine

Actually, you can "automate" fans by building them on mechanised airlocks and connecting these airlocks to temperature sensors.

8 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

We actually lack some mid tier effective cooling

I agree. It could be nice to have intermidiate concept of heat pump. Perhaps it could work simmilarly to metal refinery - it could take a portion of coolant, move certain amount of heat over time to coolant and move it to output pipe. A reverse version of aquatuner.

[RageLeague]

You don't even need to worry about something being too cold. In this game, hypothermia doesn't kill you for some reason. You just need to worry about things being too hot, because heat can hurt dupes and destroy buildings.

[he77789]

On 2/1/2021 at 11:49 AM, jady said:

like filtering water so it output at a set temperature)

That's removed in 2018, bro. It used to only have these hacky things, now there are more logical things, e.g. steam turbine.

I do agree that the game might need a bit of intro/tutorial to "invisible" threats like heat, but IMO it's reasonably balanced if you know what you have and what are you dealing with. I never copied youtube and I'm going fine.

[V Ean]

Before i learned about AT ST and other water cooling systems, there was 3 ways i deal with heat. all 3 are done crappily. first, there the AETN. next, its the cold slush gyser, as said by someone above. Lastly, there using Co2 gyser and oxferns and making somewhat cold o2. if none of this spawns, i just do this thing called alright dupes we are gonna move to that colder place there.

[Sasza22]

7 hours ago, V Ean said:

Before i learned about AT ST and other water cooling systems, there was 3 ways i deal with heat. all 3 are done crappily. first, there the AETN. next, its the cold slush gyser, as said by someone above. Lastly, there using Co2 gyser and oxferns and making somewhat cold o2. if none of this spawns, i just do this thing called alright dupes we are gonna move to that colder place there.

My go to strat for cooling in the base gmae was pumping hot water through an ice biome. It took a while until it melted. Phase 2 was instaling an aquatuner in the molten glacial water. It took a really long time until that got too hot but once it did it was time for phase 3 - installing a steam turbine above.

I never felt the need to jump straight into AT-ST setups. On maps with no ice biome i`d just jumped to phase 2 dumping heat into random water pools around the map or even my polluted water tank that i always make in my base at one point.

Still i feel like we lack something for cooling that doesn`t take 1200 W, is somewhat effective and doesn`t require a really cold biome nearby.

15 hours ago, Meltdown said:

Actually, you can "automate" fans by building them on mechanised airlocks and connecting these airlocks to temperature sensors.

Yea i always forget about that since it looks so silly.

[DarkMaster13]

4 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Still i feel like we lack something for cooling that doesn`t take 1200 W, is somewhat effective and doesn`t require a really cold biome nearby.

There's the thermo regulator, a gas version of the aqua tuner.  Most people don't use it because it's not as efficient as the aqua tuner, but since it draws 240 w you can use it for earlier cooling.

[Sasza22]

19 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

There's the thermo regulator, a gas version of the aqua tuner.  Most people don't use it because it's not as efficient as the aqua tuner, but since it draws 240 w you can use it for earlier cooling.

Yeah i adressed that one a few posts above. If there was an easier way to get hydrogen inside it for a loop, like without building pipes through the entire base it would be much better and less annoying to set up. I just wish you could load bottled gas straight into pipes. Would help setting those things up a lot.

[he77789]

3 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

If there was an easier way to get hydrogen inside it for a loop,

Just build it beside your electrolyzer setup? You need cooling for the oxygen anyways.

[CheeseGromit]

13 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

My go to strat for cooling in the base gmae was pumping hot water through an ice biome. It took a while until it melted.

I've never really progressed past this strategy. Before that it was wheezeworts. The power cost of aqua tuners and the heat associated with them plus the power generation to run them put me off. It seemed like it would just compound a problem rather than solve it. Also add in overheat temperatures. I need to experiment more. I probably also need to progress faster. I like a slow pace but that causes problems when some things deplete and others build up over time.

Good discussion so far.

[he77789]

13 minutes ago, CheeseGromit said:

the heat associated with them plus the power generation to run them

Neither aquatuners nor steam turbines generate net heat. The aquatuner moves heat. The steam turbine seems to create heat, but it's actually less than the amount of heat deleted by a significant ratio. The steam turbine also generates power.

Tepidizers have a net power generation of 2978W, if you want to exploit it.

[CheeseGromit]

I know they don't generate net heat. At the simple level they output heat and that's something I'm conditioned to avoid. I don't think I've ever looked at net changes across multiple buildings. I'm also pretty sure I've never built a steam turbine. As mentioned, I've not advanced beyond dumping heat into a natural source of cold, which generally depletes and I restart.

[Sasza22]

20 hours ago, he77789 said:

Just build it beside your electrolyzer setup? You need cooling for the oxygen anyways.

Actually i needed it mostly for the farms. For oxygen generation an AETN was usually enough if available. Often times i wouldn`t switch to electrolizers until 200+ cycles in and i might need cooling earlier. If it`s in the bottom of the base it`s pretty annoying to set up.

14 hours ago, CheeseGromit said:

The power cost of aqua tuners and the heat associated with them plus the power generation to run them put me off. It seemed like it would just compound a problem rather than solve it.

Yes it`s hard to afford an aquatuner powerwise but often enough it won`t run 100% of the time, like if you just need to cool water for bristle. Anyway putting one in about 10 tiles of cool water will buy you a lot of time. Putting it in a melted ice biome could take 500 cycles before it starts boiling and aquatuners don`t overheat before 125 C even when build from regular metal.

Later in the game things like oil refineries and petroleum generators tend to overheat and both are hard to cool down as you can`t run a liquid pipe behind them for cooling(they got liquid inputs). Luckily the in the dlc the near space biome is super cold. That combined with hydrogen natuarally gathering there works great as passive cooling. I got a polymer press working with 100% uptime and keeping at -35 C up there for several cycles.

[Meltdown]

15 hours ago, CheeseGromit said:

It seemed like it would just compound a problem rather than solve it.

Because it is a separate piece of a greater puzzle.

You may start with simple solutions. Already mentioned drowning aquatunner in pool of water is a good starting point. Then search for ways which may help to dispose that hot water. For example, if you create a pool of polluted water, and when it heats up to 70-80C use it to farm Pincha Pepper. A bit of gold amalgam for liquid pump (so it won't overheat), some minimalitsic, straightforward automation (even manually controlling the process with signal switches would do for the first time), and you are set. Just don't forget to refill the pool

Powering AT could also use simple and dumb solutions, like running separate mini power grid with a row of jumbo batteries and a few hamster wheels. As long as AT isn't running the whole day, periodically using manual labour may do the trick.

There are other ways to dispose hot liquids/gases that doesn't require you to produce steel and build steam turbines, like automating mechanized airlocks, venting hot stuff to space (even easier to do with DLC with disabled meteor showers). Like you said yourself,

15 hours ago, CheeseGromit said:

I need to experiment more

Don't forget about using sandbox mode to try and refine your ideas.

[Tayphil]

I loved the challenge of heat management it is really one of my favorite mechanics. I really enjoyed designing and building a large scale cooling  system with steam turbines and working out its quirks. But I get that this is not for everyone.

Nerfing heat would destroy a significant part of the fun for some players, imo. But I agree that there should be an easy mode for the heat mechanic and some simpler, possibly less efficient midgame tools for heat removal on a smaller scale.