Should we talk again about min temperature clamping?

[imazined]

Temperature clamping of newly build things was removed after the first beta release. The arguments were twofold.

First the inability to build anything out of mercury because the building would spawn at the minimum temperature of 15C and instantly melt.

The second argument was more confused in it's form. Some found min temperature clamping would make Ceres too easy while other found it would make Ceres too hard.

Personally I found the idea of people discouraging from replacing natural tiles with build ones a nice change of pace. The two most important plants wouldn't grow above -14C so there was something to be gained by preserving the natural environment.

Two major issues I encountered on playing the Ceres DLC were spontaneous critter scalding due to new buildings or tiles that were below their livable range and second liquids in motion inside of insulated pipes freezing and breaking.

Since the removal was kind of haphazard because people wanted to build stuff out of mercury and now mercury is this not easily renewable resource we need for mercury lamps the focus might have shifted. And the second argument was confused.
  

Here is a video how fast the temperature transfer happens. This is the best available pipe material on this coal starved world. 

[ivan....]

The issue of mercury lamps freezing and breaking in pipes can be resolved by using pipe reflux. Open a liquid vent a short period to let the mercury, which is about to freeze, flow back into the reservoir.

[gsc2]

Start on Rime - get your base to a balmy 18-20c after about like 30 cycles then decide its time for some Thimble reeds or something and put in another row of farm tiles or whatever, maybe some backwall for the barracks et al and so forth...

Report back

 

On the bright side - yeah, mercury and snow tiles, the sole benefactors/reasons of said temp clamp change, exclusively, dont melt anymore upon being built so.."yay!" (?)

 

I'll see myself out

[imazined]

The issue seems to be the temperature of the building should be meaningful while the player has no realistic options to control the temperature of the building material the dupes choose based on their current position.

[imazined]

8 hours ago, ivan.... said:

The issue of mercury lamps freezing and breaking in pipes can be resolved by using pipe reflux. Open a liquid vent a short period to let the mercury, which is about to freeze, flow back into the reservoir.

My issue is less how to deal with it but the unpredictability if it's needed or nor. Pre U52 I knew pipes, tiles will between 15C and 45C. After the changes I need to build a pipe run inspect it and decide based on the temperatures of every pipe segment how to deal with it.

Plus rotating liquid back into the tank costs power which is kind scarce on many Ceres starts until you get to the big guns

[ivan....]

13 hours ago, imazined said:

My issue is less how to deal with it but the unpredictability if it's needed or nor. Pre U52 I knew pipes, tiles will between 15C and 45C. After the changes I need to build a pipe run inspect it and decide based on the temperatures of every pipe segment how to deal with it.

Plus rotating liquid back into the tank costs power which is kind scarce on many Ceres starts until you get to the big guns

The first issue makes sense: the temperature of solid materials shouldn't vary much after constructing the pipes. Now, whether it's high or low temperature, manufacturing the pipes will result in them being within a set temperature range. This seems a bit unreasonable.

 

Ceres is a frozen world, which is a key point. We need to challenge ourselves to survive in such a cold place. Living in a cold environment requires a lot of heating equipment, which in turn requires a lot of electricity. We need to find ways to address the various problems encountered in cold conditions.

 

As for the solution I mentioned earlier, there are actually a few more options. You can build the pipes in areas with moderate temperatures, allowing the pipes to self-circulate, which will keep the fluid at a certain temperature and avoid wasting electricity.

[asurendra]

Important reason for that change was new Ceres plants. When you build farm tiles and they spawn with +15 and heat up everything... That was devastating. And nothing you can do on first cycles. You cant even cool them with pipes because ceres starting biome has no liquid, and only actual liquid available is ethanol which is not a coolant at all. That can easily kill your colony as Alveo vera just not grow! That was unintuitive and I really appreciated that KLEI heard us in that

[gigamoi]

If the alternative is unusable farm plots on Ceres, I prefer finicky pipes. Any player who dealt with liquid hydrogen before should already be familiar with those issues.

I find hatches dying on Rime far more concerning as far as gameplay goes (even though I have never particularly liked Rime myself).

[imazined]

4 hours ago, asurendra said:

Important reason for that change was new Ceres plants. When you build farm tiles and they spawn with +15 and heat up everything... That was devastating. And nothing you can do on first cycles. You cant even cool them with pipes because ceres starting biome has no liquid, and only actual liquid available is ethanol which is not a coolant at all. That can easily kill your colony as Alveo vera just not grow! That was unintuitive and I really appreciated that KLEI heard us in that

A planter pot was usually enough. A farm tile took a cycle or two to cool enough down. It was possible to plant before the removal of the min temp clamping.

[asurendra]

2 hours ago, imazined said:

was possible to plant before the removal of the min temp clamping

It really depends on size and shape of your farm. There was a lot of reports about plant problems in beta threads,..

[GluttonyMain]

Building farms on ceres was annoying before the change, Id rather not go back to that.

[imazined]

Since we don't have the control about the temperature of the material going I published a mod that restores the old min temperature clamping behavior.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3337006250

[Sanchozz]

1 hour ago, imazined said:

Since we don't have the control about the temperature of the material going

Actually, we have control

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2963257205

Also, I believe max temperature clamping should also be deleted.

[imazined]

First that's not vanilla. I would like to see vanilla controls when Klei makes such a big change.

Second this screams micro managing which is not everybody's style.

Edit: I should have read the whole mod description. Sorry.

[Charletrom]

3 hours ago, Sanchozz said:

Actually, we have control

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2963257205

Also, I believe max temperature clamping should also be deleted.

Agree but we will need better vanilla tools to manage which materials dupes will use. While hilarious, I would prefer not to have 1000+ degree stuff built in my base.

[imazined]

I had a look at the mod and the first issue I saw was the availability view of a material didn't update with changing the temperature.

[6Havok9]

On 9/24/2024 at 4:39 PM, Sanchozz said:

Also, I believe max temperature clamping should also be deleted.

While I might like that to some extent, I think that it would make the hot asteroid starts and the flipped asteroid (SO!) a possibly worse experience and gate the superconductive asteroid (SO!) behind hundreds of cycles of cooling down obsidian, or force you to bring or send additional tons of building material.

That would be the case even if the vanilla game had delivery controls like those the mod provides.

[Gurgel]

On 9/24/2024 at 7:53 PM, Charletrom said:

Agree but we will need better vanilla tools to manage which materials dupes will use. While hilarious, I would prefer not to have 1000+ degree stuff built in my base.

As far as I remember, there was a dev comment that this was the reason for temperature clamping in the first place. I would expect that adding temperature as a selection criterium for building-supply would a) seriously slow it down and b) make the interface cumbersome.

[blakemw]

16 hours ago, 6Havok9 said:

While I might like that to some extent, I think that it would make the hot asteroid starts and the flipped asteroid (SO!) a possibly worse experience and gate the superconductive asteroid (SO!) behind hundreds of cycles of cooling down obsidian, or force you to bring or send additional tons of building material.

My approach to superconductive wouldn't be changed that much if there was no max temperature clamping.

I generally plunge parallel columns of Obsidian Insulated TIles down into the magma, eliminating the magma from in between them by deletion or freezing.

I admit I do normally freeze some magma into igneous rock by building Igneous Rock Tiles. Obviously this relies completely on max temperature clamping. However, deletion using diagonal building works fine too and doesn't really take any longer.

Whether or not an Obsidian Insulated Tile is extremely hot is only marginally impactful in most cases particularly if it's an Atmosuits zone anyway (I'm not going to claim the heat leakage from magma hot Insulated Tiles into gas is trivial, it's not, it's multiple kDTU/s, though if you have an ST/AT you can totally brute force the cooling of an habitable area), probably the most annoying case, is the floor of a Steam Turbine, a Steam Turbine exchanges heat pretty fast with Insulated Tiles, but a player in the know could just bring some Ceramic or Mafic Rock and make the floor out of cold insulated tiles, like it's not too much to ask, you're already bringing plastic and other stuff. Also we're used to max temperature clamping, but it doesn't make sense in the same way as the material just staying hot does, we're just used to it by now.

I exploit max temperature clamping a lot, like the big one for me, is I crack open Metal Volcanoes ASAP and just let them accumulate hot refined metal. When I want to use some, I batch up a bunch of Tempshift Plates to reset the temperature to 45 C then deconstruct them. Now, if max temperature clamping was removed, I wouldn't stop doing this. Instead I'd have to build the TSPs overlapping cool thermally massive tiles (Igneous Rock, Granite, Ice or Water) which I don't care about getting a bit hotter, buildings have their thermal mass divided by 5, so this is still an 80% discount on cooling the refined metal and I can ensure the cooling happens in a place I don't care about instead of the middle of my base.

[6Havok9]

8 hours ago, blakemw said:

Snip

I've extensively abused clamping in the past, like when filling a quarter of the flipped asteroid with obsidian tempshift plates, but I try to avoid now. I still use it if I stumble in an early metal volcano.

I'm now trying my best to avoid mass and heat deletion as much as possibile. But sometimes it's unfeasible, sometimes it's unavoidable as it's an intended mechanic, and sometimes it's just not fun going against it, might just accept deletion. Like when using freshly excavated superhot obsidian. Maybe you're right and I'm just too used to it.

But really... I can't delete magma anymore. Makes me suffer  that's why I use rovers now, and neutron star density infinite magma storage!