Regolith really needs to have more use.

[Holocus]

I have an old colony that I like to tinker in and learn how to play and manage stuff.

However regolith is a real problem, ( I also think a bug occured, suddenly there was hundreds if not thousands of stacks with 25t regolith all across my 'space layer')

Now I have almost 18.000 tons of regolith

It would help a tiny bit if we could manually choose/force to use it instead of sand.

 

Welp. 2 hours of playing and an extra 400 tons of scorching hot regolith has fallen/appeared.

Seems like this is the deathblow of my colony with 4500 days under its belt
It literally falls quicker then the dupes can clean it away, with stacks of 25 tons suddenly appears

 

 

[Joe Dee]

Why do you need to move it away? If the heat is a problem, just insulate it. Removing regolith is a waste of time as you've noticed.

As for using it in great quantities, you can build a regolith melter to get igneous rock and feed it to a vast number of stone hatches, along with producing equally vast amounts of power.

[Holocus]

4 hours ago, Joe Dee said:

Why do you need to move it away? If the heat is a problem, just insulate it. Removing regolith is a waste of time as you've noticed.

As for using it in great quantities, you can build a regolith melter to get igneous rock and feed it to a vast number of stone hatches, along with producing equally vast amounts of power.

Firstly I'd like to keep it somewhat tidy, secondly I figure that thousands upon thousands of stacks of regolith scattered about will start cause performance issues,
I'll have to take a look at a regolith melter, mayhaps you know of a good solution to lookinto?

 

 

[JRup]

A regolith melter will make the best use of it as a resource. You can find lots of that in the forums.

If you want to get rid of it fast then that may not be the most efficient way of going about it. Ranching shove voles should be first in your list instead. Also found in the forums.

Moving regolith efficiently becomes a priority in any event. A single conveyor line can only move 20 kg/s - loaders count as industrial machinery and will interfere with scanners. Instead, using automatic dispensers with autosweepers can help move up to 1000 kg/s but restricting duplicant access will have to become part of your design. All of that bounty is here in the forums.

[Joe Dee]

15 minutes ago, Holocus said:

Firstly I'd like to keep it somewhat tidy, secondly I figure that thousands upon thousands of stacks of regolith scattered about will start cause performance issues,

The stack are going to have the same performance impact whether they're in one place or another. It will just concentrate the performance impact a little. So it would help if you move them to a place of the map that you're never going to visit again.

However, moving them all will surely cost vastly more performance, no matter how you do it.

And no, I tried making a melter myself once and didn't get very far...

[MinhPham]

They are filtration medium, a replacement once you run out of sand.

The regolith melter idea seems nice but not very good in practical use, a lot of things inside conveyor belt would cause a lot of frames drop, i don't know how much they improve things but it's better to have less pipe related things.

If possible you can gather them all in one tile, then bury it inside a artificial "nature" tile, or, ....

In order to prevent future regolith pile up, you can delete them with mech doors instead of using robo miner.

[Gurgel]

I "force" regolith use simply by supplying it via auto-sweeper and no dupe access. Works well. 

[Holocus]

On 2/2/2023 at 10:15 PM, JRup said:

A regolith melter will make the best use of it as a resource. You can find lots of that in the forums.

If you want to get rid of it fast then that may not be the most efficient way of going about it. Ranching shove voles should be first in your list instead. Also found in the forums.

Moving regolith efficiently becomes a priority in any event. A single conveyor line can only move 20 kg/s - loaders count as industrial machinery and will interfere with scanners. Instead, using automatic dispensers with autosweepers can help move up to 1000 kg/s but restricting duplicant access will have to become part of your design. All of that bounty is here in the forums.

Wish it was that easy just finished building a smelter,  Nakomaru's design since it was compact enough to fit near my volcano and realistically doable with my skills (it seemed), but after a couple of days playing and constructing it, it don't work. the thread is from 2021 so probably something changed and it's old enough to be a locked thread so can't ask even about it there either

(already ranching Vole's for my food, but would probably need a factor of 10's the size of the farm to handle all the tens of tons of regolith per day that falls )

[MinhPham]

43 minutes ago, Holocus said:

Wish it was that easy just finished building a smelter,  Nakomaru's design since it was compact enough to fit near my volcano and realistically doable with my skills (it seemed), but after a couple of days playing and constructing it, it don't work. the thread is from 2021 so probably something changed and it's old enough to be a locked thread so can't ask even about it there either

(already ranching Vole's for my food, but would probably need a factor of 10's the size of the farm to handle all the tens of tons of regolith per day that falls )

The most fun part of the game is make something yourself and feel like a genius , sure @nakomaru's design is awesome but i think it's fine to have a bigger / less effectiveness smelter.

For vole ranch, it's OK to have more than 1 groom station ....

[Holocus]

12 minutes ago, MinhPham said:

The most fun part of the game is make something yourself and feel like a genius , sure @nakomaru's design is awesome but i think it's fine to have a bigger / less effectiveness smelter.

For vole ranch, it's OK to have more than 1 groom station ....

I'm too dumb  First game I played I played with trying to be casual and just playing. It ended with heatdeath-starvation-no coal for power-no power-and ran out of water
Second try (this one) I took a slow and steady pace, But every time I try something it f's up and end up being hundreds of cycles of work to get it to work reliably
And with the sudden popin of several thousands tons of hot regolith made it ...bothersome.

I choose Nakomaru's smelter beacause it's the only one that fits without having to demolish too much, or have to try to pipe magma halfway across my base.
The Vole ranch I currently have is more then enough to feed my 20 dupes so food is spoiling all the time.

[JRup]

5 hours ago, Holocus said:

the thread is from 2021 so probably something changed and it's old enough to be a locked thread so can't ask even about it there either

I could chance it and say I'm fairly familiar with the design and can confirm it is still working to this date. Is there any specific question you have? Bear in mind that screenshots will help us help you.

[Holocus]

55 minutes ago, JRup said:

I could chance it and say I'm fairly familiar with the design and can confirm it is still working to this date. Is there any specific question you have? Bear in mind that screenshots will help us help you.

That would be extremely helpful! I just closed the game after trying all day and got it to 'work' albeit very hacky. I'll try to startup the game later and get some screenshots on how and what's not working and so!

Loading up the save of the smelter works fine, but trying to rebuild it in my world just will not work for me. I have the railway path figured out I think, but as soon as I add the railbridges on the leftside (heating block?) the regolith starts moving around all the place for a while before it locks in place and nothing happens, (building it with the bridges from the go made the regolith start oscilliating back and forth in the 'bottom heat block part') until saving and reloading (which seems to cause a few regolith to melt, 120Kg i think, before it locks up again and nothing happens.  Seems like heat will not transfer to the regolith on rails when they are not moving (in vacuum)

 

 

[Derringer]

On 2/2/2023 at 2:59 AM, Holocus said:

However regolith is a real problem, ( I also think a bug occured, suddenly there was hundreds if not thousands of stacks with 25t regolith all across my 'space layer')

Now I have almost 18.000 tons of regolith

That's a change of behavior then.  All 'normal' debris are intended to break into 25t stacks that way, but I saw an exception for regolith allowing it to merge stacks without limit then cap the resulting merged stack at 100t, deleting any over the limit. Maybe it was a brute fix for the exception also applying to items made of genetic ooze; it was entirely too easy to trigger deletion of lumber that way.

I don't really see why the 25t limit in the first place, to be honest. Collapsing stacks in a quantum stockpile down to one stack per item type would probably help with performance.

[degr]

I never think about it, but most probably all my colonies have not enough of regolith, because shove volley consume 5 tons in a cycle. Each time I end with 400-500 of those creatures, so I need 2.000.000 kg per cycle.

[ALCRD]

I kind of miss having free Regolith and Metals falling from space onto my starting asteroid.

[Ntr1cate]

1 hour ago, ALCRD said:

I kind of miss having free Regolith and Metals falling from space onto my starting asteroid.

A colony isn't a colony if flaming boogers aren't traping your duplicants while your away making coffee

[ALCRD]

23 minutes ago, Ntr1cate said:

A colony isn't a colony if flaming boogers aren't traping your duplicants while your away making coffee

Klei should re-add this as a option in SO! (Turn Off / On starting asteroid meteor showers)

[nakomaru]

I believe the 100T limit was chosen because that's when single precision floating point numbers start to accumulate gram-level errors. Going much beyond that, each time stacks are merged/split you'll get worse conservation of mass problems.

On 2/7/2023 at 1:34 AM, Holocus said:

the regolith starts moving around all the place for a while before it locks in place and nothing happens

Sounds like it might be a bridge logic issue. That design used needlessly complex bridges and there are surely more streamlined ways to achieve the same results. I like the idea of sharing your screenshots so people can help.

If you think the large number of stacks might be affecting your performance and want to keep going on the save, it might be worth trying to delete most of the regolith in debug/sandbox to see if that could even help.

[Ntr1cate]

9 hours ago, ALCRD said:

Klei should re-add this as a option in SO! (Turn Off / On starting asteroid meteor showers)

Agreed, I sent a application, but the duplicant got trapped again along the way so we will just have to hope they figure it out

[Holocus]

Sorry for the delay. had to do some Real-life stuff and took a time-out from ONI.
(Changed into sandbox mode before taking screenshoits to try to clean up a bit but can't seem to just delete a single thing only the whole tile klicked?)
Anyhows. Here's some screenies how it looks lite now, I hope I can make sense explaining it all:
I had to make some changes to the rails since they don't seem to heat up while not moving (unless I loaded up a game)

RED is the 'heating/melting area' which snakes down and recirculates the unmelted regolith, (Priority over YELLOW which is the raw ca 300 degres regolith input, and BLUE
which is logic:ed to return Regolith (might be an error on my path here, BLUE should take priority over RED to return to be heated))
PURPLE is from the feeder up to two chained bridges,
CYAN is the output path that eventually ends with some logic that sends nice and warm igneus rock down the GREEN into a steamturbine chamber for some power hopefully
(The chute on CYAN's path should probably be removed, I forgot to remove it before I sealed up the room.

20380.1 tons of Regolith now

I appreciate all the tips alot and if it's possible to get it up and running I'll load up an save from before I started with this project and try to rebuild it mirrored so I won't have to pipe magma around and fit it right next to my volcano!

 

[nakomaru]

For some reason I was thinking of a different design (the ceramifier). This one already has pretty nice bridge design.

5 hours ago, Holocus said:

RED is the 'heating/melting area' which snakes down and recirculates the unmelted regolith

Big problem here. The red line should be a locally self contained loop, only recirculating directly on the heating element. By recirculating throughout the entire loop, the heat exchanger loses all of its efficiency and becomes a simple heater.

It seems you are also recirculating some of the cyan's igneous rock into the regolith via the blue line? If that is true, this is bad because 1) the rock can only escape after melting (for no reason) and 2) same reason as before.

If your idea is to get the igneous rock to move more slowly through the exchanger, such as when you are first heating up the heat exchanger, or simply for better efficiency, you can use the new conveyor meter building or throttle the chute output.

Also, your input regolith (yellow) barely contacts the magma freezing element. Path it directly over the metal tiles.

Once you get it working as designed, you can probably make some improvements by using the conveyor meter and/or the conductive panel.

[Holocus]

5 hours ago, nakomaru said:

For some reason I was thinking of a different design (the ceramifier). This one already has pretty nice bridge design.

Big problem here. The red line should be a locally self contained loop, only recirculating directly on the heating element. By recirculating throughout the entire loop, the heat exchanger loses all of its efficiency and becomes a simple heater.

It seems you are also recirculating some of the cyan's igneous rock into the regolith via the blue line? If that is true, this is bad because 1) the rock can only escape after melting (for no reason) and 2) same reason as before.

If your idea is to get the igneous rock to move more slowly through the exchanger, such as when you are first heating up the heat exchanger, or simply for better efficiency, you can use the new conveyor meter building or throttle the chute output.

Also, your input regolith (yellow) barely contacts the magma freezing element. Path it directly over the metal tiles.

Once you get it working as designed, you can probably make some improvements by using the conveyor meter and/or the conductive panel.

The red path and it's continuation in the smelting area was something I had to add just to get it 'working', I'm not 100% sure how the railway is connected in the original working design since the bridges covers the view . But when replicating it as good as I could, the Regolith ended up stuck in the smelting area, and never heated up unless it moved (?) (or when loading the game 6 cargocarts of Regolith was smelted before new ones moved in and stayed there for ever at the same temp.
Thinking maybe I could add a counter and stop the inflow into the smelting area to allow the Regolith to circulate around a loop at the smelting place, would get rid of Blue line and part of red line recurculating it.

(The Igneus rock is filtered out from cyan into green so there's only Regolith on the blue line towards incoming rail)

 

Unless I'm doing something horribly wrong with how the rail lines should connect
(it's not Spaced Out if that makes any difference)

 

[nakomaru]

2 hours ago, Holocus said:

Unless I'm doing something horribly wrong with how the rail lines should connect

Yep. The way you have it recirculating to the heat exchanger destroys its function.

The bridges in the exchanger are non functional and only for heat exchange. You can replace them with the new Conduction Panel.

Here is how the rails are laid out. Yellow is igneous rock (missed one spot - the Conveyor Loader), green is regolith.

The cyan box is the recirculating zone for the boiler. The regolith will continuously cycle in this area until it melts. Once it melts, more is added from the heat exchanger line on the left. If it never melts, you need to increase the heat of the boiler. Do not send unmelted regolith from the boiler plate back through the heat exchanger.

The magenta box area is the magma freezing coupling. Make sure to put your input (coldest) regolith through this.

Do not send igneous rock that has gone through the heat exchanger back into the system at all. You can use the new Conveyor Meter to limit the rock and the regolith to e.g. 1kg/s if you want to increase efficiency, for example, when first warming up the heat exchanger.

[Holocus]

3 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Yep. The way you have it recirculating to the heat exchanger destroys its function.

The bridges in the exchanger are non functional and only for heat exchange. You can replace them with the new Conduction Panel.

Here is how the rails are laid out. Yellow is igneous rock (missed one spot - the Conveyor Loader), green is regolith.

The cyan box is the recirculating zone for the boiler. The regolith will continuously cycle in this area until it melts. Once it melts, more is added from the heat exchanger line on the left. If it never melts, you need to increase the heat of the boiler. Do not send unmelted regolith from the boiler plate back through the heat exchanger.

The magenta box area is the magma freezing coupling. Make sure to put your input (coldest) regolith through this.

Do not send igneous rock that has gone through the heat exchanger back into the system at all. You can use the new Conveyor Meter to limit the rock and the regolith to e.g. 1kg/s if you want to increase efficiency, for example, when first warming up the heat exchanger.

Aha! I see where I've made an error with the conveyor line from the original design, I was unable to see that it was two lines up in the smelting part. (really wish there was an option to hide bridges for situations like this)

But. Dumb question about all the rail bridges in the exchanger part, They must only be built after there is a steady stream of igneus rock being transported or else the regolith would jump across straight up to the yellow output line as soon as a free slot is available on the output rail?  Or do I misunderstand the bridge mechanic really badly?
 

Can hopefully try this tomorrow and then attempt to build it mirrored (my volcano is on the leftside) since pumping magma seems really dangerous
Gonna try to see if I can work in the bridge/railline of the smelting area into a steamgenerator room to use up my 20.000 tons of (hopefully) really warm Igneus rock to get me some sweet sweet power!

Can't thank you enough for the help and patience!

 

 

 

[JRup]

2 hours ago, Holocus said:

But. Dumb question about all the rail bridges in the exchanger part, They must only be built after there is a steady stream of igneus rock being transported or else the regolith would jump across straight up to the yellow output line as soon as a free slot is available on the output rail?  Or do I misunderstand the bridge mechanic really badly?

Hi! Glad to see you're getting there.

Pre filling the line with igneous before starting up the melter is the usual procedure, this way there will be no chance for regolith to go where it's not intended on the bridges. This also allows for the bridges to be built before tiling up the heating array.