Help mastering heat? (Keep finding cool vent geysers, and overheating my colony. :(

[Porknz]

Looking for some general help with temps.  I keep finding cool vents, but when I try to build too close, or use water from them, I overheat my colony.  Thanks for any general tips or ideas. 

[QuQuasar]

Cool Steam Vents are monsters. They don't seem too bad at first since they're relatively low temp compared to hydrogen or nat gas vents, but the high mass and specific heat output means you need active cooling to tame them, and a lot of it. The steam turbine seems like the perfect solution, until you learn that it requires 125 C steam and the vents aren't even hot enough to run it. 

Early game: If you're not ready to deal with the heat, don't. Put an insulated wall between you and it. As a temporary measure, put some dirt or ice tempshift plates behind it steam vent. This won't tame it, far from it, but it will absorb the heat and condense the steam for a while.

Mid game: Steam water is best electrolyzed: it's a lot easier to cool down the outgoing oxygen than the incoming water. Insulate your hot water piping and don't run it behind tiles. Never give steam vent water to your farms.

Late game: if you don't have a handy slush or salt slush geyser to absorb some of the heat, a steam turbine built on top of a steel aquatuner is the way to go. There are multiple ways to approach this: you can cool the steam coming out of the geyser to get it to condense, which tends to be simpler and more compact, or you can heat it up and run it through the turbine, which is complicated and requires a bigger steam chamber and more turbines (usually three), but is more energy efficient.

[ZombieDupe]

I suggest playing with the DLC enabled so you get guaranteed Cool Slush geysers. At least until Klei decides to make them guaranteed for the base game too, which they don't appear to be in any hurry of doing unfortunately.

[village_idiot]

“Cool” is highly misleading when it comes to steam vents. They’re only cool in comparison to their 500C brethren. As @QuQuasar points out, 110C water is a real nightmare and will boil your base quickly. 
 

Early game temp management is generally about reducing heat leakage before you get access to enough steel and plastic to build a cooling setup that can delete large amounts of heat on demand, and maintain stable temperatures. Generally the advice is to avoid digging up the really big heat producers like steam vents and all types of volcanoes until you’re ready for them, and to utilize entropy nullifiers and weezeworts to crudely manage the heat you cannot avoid making. 
 

Cool steam vents prove a challenge here, because in my experience they are usually exposed at game start (as compared to being buried in igneous rock) and they usually don’t have a sufficient abyssalite layer protecting them. So the moment they’re exposed they’re generating heat and that heat is leaking into your base. 

This yields two obvious solutions to this problem pre-steel. 
 

1. Find and seal in the steam vents immediately with insulated tiles. You can either build a box around the vent for later use, or at a minimum put a line of insulated blocks filling in any gaps in the abyssalite layers. This’ll staunch the heat leak, and buy you a lot more time. 
 

2. As soon as possible, begin migrating to heat insensitive sources of food, because most of the time the issue with heat is that it stifles early game farming, especially mealwood. On most clusters this is going to mean hatch farming, which will begin to die at 70C. Hatch ranching uses low value materials, makes better food, but has a pretty long lag before you start producing a lot of meat, so it’s good to start early. 
 

Once you’ve got that nailed down, you can ignore the steam vent until you’re ready to tame them via a cooling loop, and focus on renewable oxygen and research. 

[Sasza22]

If you really need the water from the geyser and don`t have the infrastructure to cool it down to a reasonable temperature then look for a cold biome to run the water through. Basically sacrifice an ice biome if present to cool down the water. Best use radiant pipes but a longer line of granite regular pipes will do as well. Not only will you get piped water at a usable temperature but also melt some ice for future use or for cooling an aquatuner you might add later when the biome heats up too much to be an effective cooler. Just make sure the meltwater doesn`t flood your base.

[Dragony]

I really don't know why people always have trouble with the heat problem in ONI. You should probably stop trying to transfer real world physics to ONI. Because, I quote "it's just a game!". So just use the simple heat-deletion mechanics (creepy...) and you are fine. Just transfer your heat to a isolated cave with an aqua tuner and delete the heat with steam engines. Super weird, but super easy. Or did they fix that in the meantime?

there are also other heat deletion mechanics, but the one mentioned above is the least creepy one.
"Heat deletion" .... creepy... never came across that term before I have met ONI xD

[village_idiot]

Not sure why you keep calling heat deletion creepy, but the issue is that doing it reliably requires steel and plastic. New players struggle to make both, especially steel since making it involves creating a lot of heat and will boil most coolants. Having to rush steel and plastic in order to create a cooling loop after your farm starts to stifle is not easy. 

[Dragony]

I call it creepy because it is. Or maybe better "spooky". creepily spooky ^^ I love RL physics, even when they are simplified. But DELETING energy??? Oh come on! Thermodynamics anyone? It's perfectly fine to simplify nature laws but not to f*cking break them!

Steel can be created easily with polluted water. You don't need much steel after all. Plastic is a different thing, especially with the DLC. If you got lucky and found some Dreckos, you don't need to leave your planetoid for this as well.

But even this is not needed. You can survive hundreds of cycles by just transferring your heat energy to a isolated basin with polluted water (+ your pee water and your gem problem is solved as well)

The only problem is when you don't have much water, but then you have other more serious problems anyway.

[village_idiot]

Not sure why it would be spooky for an unrealistic cartoon game to not follow physics either. It’s not supposed to be a physics simulator. 
 

The issue with using bathroom PWater for cooling is that the toilet outputs 37C water, while the early game plants typically stifle at 30C. And needing to keep a mealwood, bristle blossom, or bog bucket farm alive requires that they be cooled down below 30C, using bathroom water makes the issue slightly worse. Not every map has a cold pwater geyser to provide convenient access to 0C pwater. 
 

Of course this isn’t an issue if you move over to hatch ranching, as I said. Hatches start dying at 70C, a much more forgiving range. It’s not hard to keep a base well below 70C even without active cooling. 

[QuQuasar]

3 hours ago, village_idiot said:

The issue with using bathroom PWater for cooling is that the toilet outputs 37C water, while the early game plants typically stifle at 30C. And needing to keep a mealwood, bristle blossom, or bog bucket farm alive requires that they be cooled down below 30C, using bathroom water makes the issue slightly worse. Not every map has a cold pwater geyser to provide convenient access to 0C pwater. 

Dragony is not suggesting cooling with it. They're suggesting moving the heat to it with an aquatuner. This allows you to get in many, many cycles of cooling before it boils, especially if your farms are insulated.

The *actual* difficulty related to aquaturbines and steamtuners, in my opinion, is more about design. Most here know you can add a reservoir to the loop to stabilize the temperature and do a little kink and a bridge underneath the aquatuner to keep the coolant flowing, but a new player experimenting with cooling loops for the first time is going to break their pipes with cold damage.

[village_idiot]

Ah, so a more fancy version of putting the aqua tuner in a cold biome to prevent overheat damage. Sounds much more fiddly than rushing hatches at steel, imho, but it could work. 

[GuyPerfect]

This is somewhat of a cheesy exploit:

1. Box in the Cool Steam Vent with tiles
2. Set up a P-trap style airlock nearby, perhaps using the water that already came from the vent
3. Excavate all around your vent-tile box, leaving a gap of Vacuum

The vacuum-sealed vent box won't be able to distribute heat through the vaccum, so you can contain its thermals until you're ready for them.

[blakemw]

Cool Steam Vents are a mixed blessing, because clean water is useful and many buildings don't care or barely care how hot the water is, like you can feed 95 C water to the Super Computer and it's perfectly happy and there are no consequence from the water temperature, the water is just deleted from existence regardless of the temperature. The Electrolyzer produces oxygen at a minimum of 70 C or hotter if the water is hotter, but going from 70 C to 95 C isn't that big a deal if you have Gold Amalgam or Steel to prevent overheating.

With both Cool Steam Vents and metal volcanoes and other vents, I very often do something lazy like this:

Just make an insulated tile wall in the direction towards the base, and leave the other side open to keep bleeding heat into terrain I don't care about. The wall can be extended as heat bleeds further, if required.

Then once the thing goes dormant I tend to dig it out and build a more permanent solution.

I love doing this with Metal Volcanoes, because I get about 20 tons of refined metal at the cost of heating up some terrain I don't care about anyway. And the hot refined metal can be cooled for free by using it to build a bunch of Tempshift Plates (ideally two tiles above the floor to minimize problems from the temporary heat from the refined metal debris), as buildings always have their temperature set to 45 C if the materials were hotter, so construct deconstruct makes the heat go away at the cost of a small amount of scalding if I can't be bothered with atmo suits.

[Maxposting]

On 12/6/2022 at 3:49 PM, Dragony said:

Thermodynamics anyone?

Not a fan of those.

[Prince Mandor]

On 12/6/2022 at 8:33 AM, Dragony said:

delete the heat with steam engines

Why you are calling converting thermal energy to electricity 'deletion'?

Deletion is using 600C igneous rock to 25C hatch . Steam turbines is more physical than most devices in game

[babba]

"Cool Steam Vent" is a marketing trick, to fool new players Its just like Nvidia marketing.

[Joe Dee]

On 12/28/2022 at 11:49 AM, Prince Mandor said:

Why you are calling converting thermal energy to electricity 'deletion'?

Deletion is using 600C igneous rock to 25C hatch . Steam turbines is more physical than most devices in game

The heat is still deleted. A real physical steam engine would dump the heat to a cool reservoir, this does not happen in ONI. Only a tiny fraction of the heat is applied to the steam engine and the rest is deleted from the game as if each steam engine had an infinite cooling water reservoir attached to it.

19 hours ago, babba said:

"Cool Steam Vent" is a marketing trick, to fool new players Its just like Nvidia marketing.

I guess "'Not quite as hot as a hot steam vent' steam vent" wasn't catchy enough.

On the other hand, 115°C steam is about the coldest steam you can possibly get in the game without it condensing, so it's not all that wrong, really. I mean, technically IRL you can get steam as low as  -50°C with the right (minuscule) pressure, but most people wouldn't call that steam anymore.