Best way to automate Oil Wells?

[Pyrex042]

To be clear, the automation itself isn't the difficult part.

The problem I'm having is that my dupes won't leave the Oil Wells alone when they aren't producing.

I've tried cutting off incoming Water, cutting off Power, and Disabling the building itself, but my dupes keep wanting to go Operate the Oil Well constantly.

I've enough surplus Crude that for now I've just deconstructed them, but building and un-building them isn't really automatable.

Are the Well's bugged?  Or is there something I'm misunderstanding?

I suppose I could try replacing the flooring underneath them with horizontal Airlocks, then the dupes wouldn't have anywhere to stand, but that would interfere with their self-cooling when they're running.

[ghkbrew]

Dupes should only try to operate wells with natural gas in them. If they aren't running they shouldn't be accumulating natural gas. Are they trying to operate wells without gas? If so sounds like a bug. A work around would be to disable dupe access to the buildings with doors.

[Pyrex042]

5 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

 A work around would be to disable dupe access to the buildings with doors.

Is there a way to automate that?  Only deny access to the Well when automation says there's no demand for Crude?

Edit, I suppose I could have automation lock an Airlock, which should be fine as Crude shouldn't need to flow out.  That should be less ridiculous than replacing the floors.

[beowulf2010]

Just now, Pyrex042 said:

Is there a way to automate that?  Only deny access to the Well when automation says there's no demand for Crude?

Yep. Use an Airlock door and hook it up to the oil level sensor. Green signal opens the door, red closes it. 

Then have a second door (any type) set to out only so that dupes can get out if trapped inside by the automated door. 

[Pulstar]

5 minutes ago, Pyrex042 said:

Is there a way to automate that?  Only deny access to the Well when automation says there's no demand for Crude?

I would just use two doors to restrict access to the oil well. One would be hooked up to an automation sensor (ex.liquid pressure to see if you have too much crude oil in the pool) that locks the door if there is enough crude oil in the pool.

The second door would be an emergency exit that allows dupes only to exit the oil well room (go left or right), in case they get trapped inside while operating the well. I guess it is also possible to use an AND gate and a duplicant motion sensor connected to a filter gate, to eliminate the risk of dupes getting trapped and the need for a second door. I did something similar to prevent dupes from getting trapped in my critter drowing chamber (it only floods it if there are critters and no dupes for more than 20 seconds).

[ghkbrew]

1 minute ago, beowulf2010 said:

3 minutes ago, Pyrex042 said:

Is there a way to automate that?  Only deny access to the Well when automation says there's no demand for Crude?

Yep. Use an Airlock door and hook it up to the oil level sensor. Green signal opens the door, red closes it. 

Then have a second door (any type) set to out only so that dupes can get out if trapped inside by the automated door. 

Yup.  Though I'd suggest controlling access with a pneumatic door connected to automation rather than an airlock.  It won't be a gas barrier anyway since it'll be opening periodically.

[Pyrex042]

Huh, I didn't think Pneumatic Doors were automatable.  That's certainly better as it doesn't restrict gas/liquid flow.

I'll give that a shot.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, ghkbrew said:

Yup.  Though I'd suggest controlling access with a pneumatic door connected to automation rather than an airlock.  It won't be a gas barrier anyway since it'll be opening periodically.

True. I just default to Airlocks and use pneumatics for specific purposes. 

[The Plum Gate]

There is actually a bug here - disabling via automation does not cancel the request of the oil well to release the natural gas pressure - this chore is not revoked in other words. So they just stand in front of it instead. 

Meanwhile, I just set that slider to 100% and deconstruct the well to release the natural gas ( no suits and its the last thing they do in the room ). They usually don't get scalded if I wait until the natural gas in storage cools down some.

[Pyrex042]

5 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

There is actually a bug here - disabling via automation does not cancel the request of the oil well to release the natural gas pressure - this chore is not revoked in other words. So they just stand in front of it instead. 

Yeah, that pretty much matches what I'm seeing, the dupes just stand there idle, and their status shows that they're "Operating" until I gave up and deconstructed the well.

Assuming that's what I'm hitting, then the best solution should be to cut off the water supply while leaving the building powered & enabled.  That way they should be able to release the pressure once and resolve the task, but the task shouldn't recur while the well has no water.

I'll give that a shot before I go to the automated doors solution.

[The Plum Gate]

9 minutes ago, Pyrex042 said:

Yeah, that pretty much matches what I'm seeing, the dupes just stand there idle, and their status shows that they're "Operating" until I gave up and deconstructed the well.

Assuming that's what I'm hitting, then the best solution should be to cut off the water supply while leaving the building powered & enabled.  That way they should be able to release the pressure once and resolve the task, but the task shouldn't recur while the well has no water.

I'll give that a shot before I go to the automated doors solution.

That worked for me also, otherwise I disable the building before it reaches 100% pressure. 

Trying to automate a water tank for this purpose might be more mathematically appropriate since there's no feedback from the oil well regarding pressure. I'll usually just lock the thing behind a door to prevent stupidity to begin with. This usually gives me better flexibility in dealing with it.

I could probably figure out how much water it takes to equate to the 80kg of natural gas that builds up in it and go from there as well. 

[Lupbert]

I use a very simple solution.  Attach a dupe motion sensor, pointed at the well, to the well.  This even works if you already have automation since it works as a wired-OR.

 

This has the drawback that the well will produce oil when it shouldn’t while a dupe empties the gas, but that little extra oil shouldn’t cause any problems unless your system is incredibly over-tuned.

[AndreyKl]

On 2/17/2021 at 11:18 PM, beowulf2010 said:

Then have a second door (any type) set to out only so that dupes can get out if trapped inside by the automated door. 

Would be so much easier if we could automate doors to become one-way... or at least if we could adjust door logic to switch between 'auto' and 'open' instead of just 'locked' and 'open' (door permissions to be a one way door would have kicked in for 'auto' state)

[The Plum Gate]

7 hours ago, AndreyKl said:

Would be so much easier if we could automate doors to become one-way... or at least if we could adjust door logic to switch between 'auto' and 'open' instead of just 'locked' and 'open' (door permissions to be a one way door would have kicked in for 'auto' state)

Yes. I was a bit annoyed with it locking and with it opening and not reverting to auto.

Further fooling with it, I could unlock or auto an automation disabled door, but then the results were unpredictable. 

I thought dupes would respect directionalality regardless of the door being open or not.

[babba]

On 2/17/2021 at 10:08 PM, Pyrex042 said:

To be clear, the automation itself isn't the difficult part.

The problem I'm having is that my dupes won't leave the Oil Wells alone when they aren't producing.

I've tried cutting off incoming Water, cutting off Power, and Disabling the building itself, but my dupes keep wanting to go Operate the Oil Well constantly.

I've enough surplus Crude that for now I've just deconstructed them, but building and un-building them isn't really automatable.

Are the Well's bugged?  Or is there something I'm misunderstanding?

I suppose I could try replacing the flooring underneath them with horizontal Airlocks, then the dupes wouldn't have anywhere to stand, but that would interfere with their self-cooling when they're running.

Is this still an issue for you ?

I had oil wells running 3 days in the last stable game version release of the dlc and I did not experience this.

What I often experienced, something like 50 times, was that dupes get de-registered from the world ( from ladders and medical beds ) in relation to multiple asteroids filled tombstones, medical beds auto assignment screw ups and with too many dead dupes laying around.

Ladders...

[Pyrex042]

7 minutes ago, babba said:

Is this still an issue for you ?

I had oil wells running 3 days in the last stable game version release of the dlc and I did not experience this.

I haven't had a chance to re-test it yet.  My oil asteroid was cooked by a heat calculation bug that just got fixed.  Once I clean up the mess from that, I'll test the workaround for this. 

[JRup]

Dupes standing in front of a deactivated oil well used to happen to me all the time. I realized that they were waiting for a chance to vent the natural gas from it... So here comes the duplicant motion sensor to the rescue, it pretty much reactivates the building while it's being vented besides just turning on the light for a lit workspace.

This build is steam free only if we pump out the nat gas when above 20Kg (I'd love it if sensors had a bigger range even.) A high machinery attribute for the dupes also helps. I'm using 94ºC water in this building. It rises to around 96 by the time it's done venting.

If gas is being pumped then that also triggers the liquid pump to act as a liquid cooling safety feature.

I used a ribbon reader connecting the duplicant sensor and the oil well. A filter or a buffer can be used, but I saw these being used and liked it, that was the last addition to the build. The automation circuits for these two must be separated somehow so there you go.

The liquid reservoir is the main responsible for activating the oil well.

Believe it or not, the decor in this build is not half bad. Use gold, lots of it where it counts. (This oil well is made out of lead because it's got the lowest TC of all refined metals, I also have made one of gold without issue)

A happy liquid lock keeps all the nat-gas inside. It has been there for thousands of cycles.

Here are some screenshots.