The Repair gym

[Fradow]

Credits to Hotep Thunderbolt for designing a first repair gym based on Ceiling Lights, @Amphorasfor helping out figure all the little details, and @Saturnus for the final design based on Refrigerators.

How best to train the Construction attributes? By making Dupes repairs Refrigerators over and over again, of course!

You might be familiar with the technique of making Dupes construct and deconstruct buildings (like Tempshift Plates) over and over again. Turns out, this has two majors flaws:

• It needs constant attention to renew the errands. Boring.
• It's actually quite slow

There is a better way: a fully automated Repair gym. As it turns out, repairing buildings levels up the Construction attribute twice as fast as actually constructing/deconstructing buildings, provided you can keep a Dupe occupied 100% of the time!

 

Major detail: this build only works with 0 Machinery Dupes. Dupes trained with Machinery repair too fast for the build to be of use.

 

Without further ado, the build:

The main idea is to overheat Refrigerators so that they automatically break. To save up a bit on materials and have full repairs (which translate to a better uptime), Dupes are only allowed to repair when the building is fully broken.

This is detected with the Refrigerator automation signal, which is only green when it's full and not broken. Fill it with 1kg of any Medicine (which doesn't rot) to keep it "full" all the time.

To save on power, Refrigerators are only powered for a small time (0.5s every 10s here) and the result is kept with a Buffer gate (11s here).

A Tepidizer is here to prime the build to heat up to 85°C (no automation needed), and isn't useful afterwards, since repairing doesn't modify a building temperature.

Raw Minerals are shipped to cover the loss of materials (1 every 3 repair loose materials according to Hotep Thunderbolt tests).

 

How many Refrigerators are needed? 6, like shown in the example, works up to 2 Construction, then more Refrigerators are needed to keep up with the improved Repair speed. There will be a point where there will be too much travel time and the build will loose efficiency, unfortunately. Since it's twice as fast as constructing/deconstructing, it will take a fair amount of time before this happens.

 

You can expect to gain the first 3 Construction levels within 5 cycles then gain 1 additional point every 5 cycles, to reach 10 Construction around 35/40 cycles after starting training, provided you can keep a high repair uptime.

 

To recap, the pros:

• fully automated, no player interaction required
• twice as fast as construction/deconstruction (provided a 100% repair uptime)

The cons:

• use some raw minerals (but who cares about those resources anyway?)
• require 0 Machinery Dupes
• require a lot of space to reach a high construction level
• a bit more infrastructure to setup than just ordering simple buildings construction/deconstruction

Despite the drawbacks, it's a very interesting option, as the drawbacks are quite minor compared to the advantages.

Shameless plug: want to know more about all attributes training? I recently published a detailed guide here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507923687 (still a work in progress)

[Tranoze]

Good to know repair give good construction. I think i ll build bunch of ladder in meteor silo, one meteor can hit countless amount of ladder for them to repair.
Have you test mechanic without over heat (like give wrong liquid to building)? You can control "when" if you know exact amount of liquid needed to break the building. That way you can stack building even more effectively.

[Fradow]

4 hours ago, Tranoze said:

Good to know repair give good construction. I think i ll build bunch of ladder in meteor silo, one meteor can hit countless amount of ladder for them to repair.
Have you test mechanic without over heat (like give wrong liquid to building)? You can control "when" if you know exact amount of liquid needed to break the building. That way you can stack building even more effectively.

Repairing ladders hit by meteors was an idea I had too. Not very scalable or practical, but it can definitely be used for some quick, low-effort construction training. Just remember about having 0 Machinery Dupes doing the repair, otherwise they will repair way too fast for it to be of any use.

I've not tested other mechanics at the moment. @Hjoyn is testing intentionally breaking 1001g/s Phosphorus pipes. So far, a full build has not be published, but the method seems very promising and might even make the overheating Refrigerators method obsolete or at least provide a serious alternative.