Cooling Woes

[LordQulex]

I've been a professional software developer for 15 years so when I say I get it, I mean I get it. You've got tiles, and buildings, and pipes, and flow, and duplicants, and they're all emitting or absorbing heat. Literally millions of little objects to keep in memory and calculate how they interact with each other. To the casual observer this is a cutesy game, but under the hood it is a complex thermodynamics simulator. And I'm impressed, I truly am. But I should be able to fry an egg in a vacuum. 

I've just made it to the surface for the first time in a non-sandbox game. I've put down some robo-miners underneath bunker tiles to dig away the regolith when my bunker doors open. I ran cooling pipes through the tile it sits on as well as behind the robo-miner itself. It over-heated. I thought to myself, "What, why? The coolant is sub-zero and so is the tile, what's going on here?" After reading an extensive wiki, I discovered that pipes and devices are all considered 'buildings', and 'buildings' only exchange heat with 'cells', not with other 'buildings'. So the best way to cool my robo-miners is to put up some dry wall, lay down a liquid coolant, and run the cooling pipes above the tile to cool the liquid in the cell to cool the device that shares the space with the liquid.

So in essence, I can't fry an egg in a vacuum because the hot frypan can't transfer heat to the egg on top of it. That seems like a fair bit of oversight to me, that machines can't transfer heat with pipes behind it nor the tiles it is adjacent to. Is there any plan to implement this? Those puddles required for heat transfer chip away at my suspension of disbelief for an otherwise relatively realistic, and fantastic game.

[MinhPham]

Butttttt ..... implement  this will remove some difficulties from the game, plus game logic is doesn't need to be the same as real life logic.

Some implies that game logic doesn't even need to make any sense at all, like a dupe starts with tier3 digging skill can't dig granite tiles which is required tier1 digging, which he don't have. AND THEY ARE FINE WITH THAT TOO ...

[mathmanican]

Actually an egg is considered debris. So the tile underneath will transfer heat to the egg and fry it.  

Unfortunately the empty fridge on the same tile won't transfer heat. Yeah it's not realistic and takes some getting used to. Luckily for the most part things are consistent (until they aren't).

[Soulwind]

I find that particular mechanic a bit odd too.  However, if you really want another method, there's a mod called Thermal Interface Plate which works kind of like a Tempshift Plate, except it lets heat move between adjacent buildings and pipes instead of atmosphere.  It does require refined metal, but if you're in space then refined metals shouldn't be an issue.