Meter Valve, the superior Valve.

[blakemw]

While the main purpose of the Liquid/Gas/Conveyor Meter Valve is to meter large quantities of materials, there's absolutely nothing stopping it from metering small quantities, and by small I mean "smaller than a full packet", and thus splitting packets.

When you set a Meter Valve to a small Amount (less than a normal packet size) and feed a permanent green signal into the Reset port, it acts almost identical to a Valve effectively emitting "Amount" per second, though with some perks:

1. It can be used for the Conveyor System, which doesn't have a conventional Valve. This opens up new possibilities and exploits (though many things like seeds and clothing can't be split and won't be emitted if the Meter Valve isn't set to at least 1).
2. It also functions as a Shutoff, because you can cease sending the green signal to cut off the emission of packets. This is much cleaner than a Shutoff + Valve combination, and still uses only 10 W.
3. You can set the Amount as a free action, unlike a Valve which requires a duplicant to pull the lever. This is great if you want to seal away the Valve.
4. It sends a green signal after it has emitted its packet, hence also acting somewhat like a "pipe element sensor" that tells you when stuff is passing through.
5. Unlike a Shutoff It doesn't have an overheat temperature (historical precedent is this could likely be fixed at some point). Though Valves don't stop working when they are broken so their overheat temperature is only a visual nuisance.

It has a few disadvantages:

1. It consumes 10 W, unlike a Valve which consumes nothing, but the same as a Shutoff. Not entirely a downside as it gives a build an extra fail safe if the power goes off (assuming the Valve is responsible for delivering heat, not cooling).
2. It can only go down to 1 g/s, unlike the Valves which go down to 0.1 g/s. This is mainly applicable to exploit builds, like a 10 kg packet fed into a Bypass Pump would last 166 cycles on a Valve but only 16.6 cycles on a Meter Valve and there are some exploit uses for going below the 1 g threshold where heat exchange ceases.
3. It requires plastic to build and appears higher in the tech tree. Not a huge deal but limits use very early game.

Applications:

In the past I've often used Shutoff+Valve combination for precisely delivering heat via a gas or liquid pipe loop, but the Meter Valve is much cleaner.

For example here is what I refer to as a "Gas Loop Volcano Tamer" that uses Meter Valves for extremely precise delivery of heat into a self-cooled Steam Chamber, normally a single self-cooled Steam Turbine isn't enough for an Iron Volcano, but with precision heat delivery it can clear the backlog over the dormant period.

A gas loop is controlled by a Gas Meter Valve to pull heat from the molten metal at a rate that won't overheat the steam and ultimately condenses the metal into debris to be moved by the Sweeper (refined metal which can't be immediately processed is stored in the Storage for the dormant period).

Meanwhile a Conveyor Meter Valve controls the flow of metal based on a Thermo Sensor and splits it into 2 kg pieces so it delivers heat much more smoothly than 20 kg chunks and those small chunks cool down much more easily.

Such a build is vastly superior to the common self-cooled Steam Turbine builds, offering rock stable temperatures without needing large amounts of thermal mass and not being particularly expensive to implement, in fact arguably being cheaper. I've been using such builds since long before the Meter Valves were introduced, but the Meter Valves make the build a lot cleaner than chaining Shutoffs and Valves and Sensors, and the Conveyor Meter is just *chefs kiss* perfection.

The Meter Valves are new enough that we're only scratching the surface of their potential and of course they may also be subject to some mild nerfing.

[JRup]

I've been using a somewhat similar setup  in a copper volcano for some time now (as in pre-Meter valves). I agree that it is a more reasonable approach. My design did take advantage of the 1kg/s feature for liquids, though. Getting back to Meter valves:

I'd like to point out some things I've observed with this new piece of hardware:

Power

Power is only consumed when receiving a new package. This may sound kind of natural but the important bit is for gas and liquid meter valves because these systems merge packages in line.

That means that if you keep the pipe before the meter filled then you're set power-wise after the initial payment. Not so for the Conveyor meter, because baskets packets don't merge. So 10w are consumed per basket loaded.

 

Pipeline mechanics

Meter valves respect the line priority like most buildings. This means that if any packet is already on the line, then there is no output merging into the line. Gas and liquid bridges will be needed to provide merging capacity as usual for those systems. Conveyors never provide packet merging as of writing this.

But here's the hidden surprise: gas and liquid valves actually merge into the line as a bridge would do, even if they have the pipe blocked prompt, so beware of this pitfall! This can be seen as either a bug or a feature of valves... Point in favor for valves, I guess.

 

Mathematical realities

If using a conveyor meter to cool down solids you find that your lines are gummed up then you're a victim of maths (We hates it!). Long story short: there are temperature exchange limitations built into the game mechanics and binary numbers in the mix. So if you happen to get packages that are less than 1 gram, then there is where you get a problem in the loop.

 

Aesthetics (a.k.a. "looking purdy")

I like the designs, they mesh well with the game and don't look like an oddball addition to it. Though if I had a bone to pick it would be with the overlay view. To this date, only the conveyor meter looks normal when switching overlays. I did comment way back in 489642, but I guess it may need a bug report...

 

[blakemw]

13 hours ago, JRup said:

 

If using a conveyor meter to cool down solids you find that your lines are gummed up then you're a victim of maths (We hates it!). Long story short: there are temperature exchange limitations built into the game mechanics and binary numbers in the mix. So if you happen to get packages that are less than 1 gram, then there is where you get a problem in the loop.

Yes, behavior can be deviant when dealing with sub-full packages. This would only seem to be a problem when actually using a loop, right? If putting out packets that are like 1-2 kg they reach ambient temperature nearly instantly so no loop is needed. If a 1 gram packet gets sent through it doesn't cool but it also just drops out the end as a still hot 1 g packet which doesn't matter because it's 1 gram. I almost never use conveyor loops except for cooling Igneous Rock debris, and even with Igneous Rock if it's split into 1 kg packets they cool to ambient when passing through 2-3 solid tiles. A Minor Volcano outputs about 1 kg/s and a major Volcano about 2 kg/s during their active periods so now that Conveyor Valves exist I probably won't ever use a conveyor loop again.

13 hours ago, JRup said:

But here's the hidden surprise: gas and liquid valves actually merge into the line as a bridge would do, even if they have the pipe blocked prompt, so beware of this pitfall! This can be seen as either a bug or a feature of valves... Point in favor for valves, I guess.

I didn't know that Meter Valves didn't merge, but that should be exceedingly useful when filling a liquid loop with 1 kg packets, which is not that hard with Valves but with Meter Valves requires basically zero thought.

I can't really think of a build where I rely on output merging from Valves, because normally I'm just using Valves as splitters or flow-chokers rather than mergers.

 

 

[JRup]

4 hours ago, blakemw said:

I didn't know that Meter Valves didn't merge, but that should be exceedingly useful when filling a liquid loop with 1 kg packets, which is not that hard with Valves but with Meter Valves requires basically zero thought.

One had to build a filler array for the loop... which is basically a valve with a shutoff. Because shutoffs don't merge then the loop would fill normally... But yeah, now just the meter does the trick.

The oldstyle filler is inside the spoiler:

Spoiler

Place the loop where the green arrow is to fill the loop...

 

4 hours ago, blakemw said:

now that Conveyor Valves exist I probably won't ever use a conveyor loop again.

Agreed, many builds are simplified by this new piece of hardware. Abyssalite debris still remains undefeated, if you ask me...