Science! The Blossom-Wood Experiment

[Czeraphine]

IMPORTANT NOTE:

This just in, previously, it seemed that the Mealwood plant consumed oxygen, carbon dioxide, and any other such gases (or at least they were somehow magically removed while in the presence of the mealwood plants). Quite a few people have conducted tests recently which showed this not to be the case. In a twist of fate, Mealwood plants now do not seem to consume gasses anymore. Ninja update and patch? Not sure, either way; Yay! 

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Previously, I've conducted a small experiment where I placed quite a few mealwood plants in a confined air-sealed location with a decent atmospheric pressure. Unfortunately, the mealwood plant simply sucked up all of the oxygen which pretty much proved that they consumed oxygen. However! Now that we've gotten that done, I've tried the set-up again. But, this time, filling the room completely with carbon dioxide. Previously, we assumed that mealwood only consumed O2. NOPE, it consumes CO2 as well. Take a look at the picture below. Though, I don't have a previous picture showing the full atmosphere in effect, I hope the meal lice on the floor is convincing enough.

So, what gas does mealwood NOT consume? Or, does mealwood actually consume all gases? More science needs to be conducted on that. Additionally.. is the secret perk of the blossom seed the lack of consumption of gases?

tl;dr: Mealwood consumes both Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide.

Here it is! The start of the Blossom plant's development. Hoping for positive results! Note that the oxygen levels have stabilized to 2033.1g/tile throughout the entire chamber (aside from the single tile of CO2 which is marked at 476.2g). Additionally, the system is closed from all outside inputs; that door is set to closed so there is no way a dupe can get either in or out of the space.

The blossom plant has been breached! Oh no! But wait.. why? Apparantly, Blossom plant requires fertilizer, whereas, the mealwood plant does not. Is this only relevant during the growth phase? I'm not entirely certain -yet. Below are the new equilibrium variables in the experiment. 2423.7g/tile of oxygen, and still the same 476.2g of CO2.

The bristle has blossomed! The oxygen concentration changed again due to another breach caused by a lack of fertilizer. The fully grown Blossom's current atmosphere is 2041.6g/tile of oxygen and 624.6g of CO2.

So far, it DOES NOT seem to be consuming any CO2 or O2 at all! This is massive! But, I will post my findings after a full cycle has completed.

Cycle 30 begins.

And, here we can absolutely say for certain that the Bristle Blossom plant DOES NOT in any way, shape, or form, consume oxygen or carbon dioxide. That implies that, although the bristle blossom yields less kcal per harvest, the lack of oxygen consumption allows for, say, a single electrolyzer to run your entire base given you have a dupe population of less than 8 dupes.

 

TL;DR:

The Bristle Blossom plant does NOT consume oxygen or carbon dioxide, while the Mealwood plant does in large quantities.

[jigggy2000]

I am eagerly awaiting the results for the bristle blossom.

Thanks guy!

[kambing]

if it also consumes CO2, can't we just replace the air scrubber with it? doesn't require power or water. 

[Czeraphine]

1 minute ago, kambing said:

if it also consumes CO2, can't we just replace the air scrubber with it? doesn't require power or water. 

yes, yes you can! And, the work-around there would be to have a vat of carbon dioxide at the bottom of your base, which then has an air pump pumping the CO2 right into a room with only a few mealwood plants. Doing so would pretty much act like an air scrubber with the possible upside of food production, less power consumption, and no water requirement.

[Radje]

I started a test earlier myself (in debug mode tho) but cannot finish it until tomorrow.

For now I can tell you that both mealwood as well as the blossom plants will grow in any of the 5 gasses (hydrogen, contaminated O2, O2, Chlorine and CarbonDioxide) as long as the atmospheric pressure is high enough. The lower limit for pressure seems to be 140g for both of the  plants, but there is something going on with the way it's measured, as it does not instantly start growing again at any value above 140g. Sometimes in between 140-150 and sometimes as late as 160g. For now I take a very wild guess and  blame the dispersion speed of gasses.

I also try to find out how much gas they consume. But I'm not sure how exactly I would measure time in the game. I don't know how many seconds a cycle has (maybe I can just take kcal consumption/1000, but gotta see tomorrow) and how to precisely measure a cycle. Maybe eye ball it at the point the game auto saves? I didn't do anything concerning their consumption yet so cannot see if blossom also consumes gasses at the same rate as mealwood or not at all.

[Czeraphine]

1 minute ago, Radje said:

I started a test earlier myself (in debug mode tho) but cannot finish it until tomorrow.

For now I can tell you that both mealwood as well as the blossom plants will grow in any of the 5 gasses (hydrogen, contaminated O2, O2, Chlorine and CarbonDioxide) as long as the atmospheric pressure is high enough. The lower limit for pressure seems to be 140g for both of the  plants, but there is something going on with the way it's measured, as it does not instantly start growing again at any value above 140g. Sometimes in between 140-150 and sometimes as late as 160g. For now I take a very wild guess and  blame the dispersion speed of gasses.

I also try to find out how much gas they consume. But I'm not sure how exactly I would measure time in the game. I don't know how many seconds a cycle has (maybe I can just take kcal consumption/1000, but gotta see tomorrow) and how to precisely measure a cycle. Maybe eye ball it at the point the game auto saves? I didn't do anything concerning their consumption yet so cannot see if blossom also consumes gasses at the same rate as mealwood or not at all.

 

The more science, the better as always  I've also been wondering about the precise amount of time each cycle has; I've also been devising a way to measure that via kcal consumption -but it hasn't been at the top of my priority list.

[Radje]

1 minute ago, Czeraphine said:

The more science, the better as always  I've also been wondering about the precise amount of time each cycle has; I've also been devising a way to measure that via kcal consumption -but it hasn't been at the top of my priority list.

Just fyi. I cannot check myself currently, but if you go to the stat page of a duplicate. At the bottom should be a trait called Duplicate, if you hover over that you get to see the base consumption rate of duplicates, I thought it also listed kcal at sometime like -1.7kcal/s but I'm not sure.

[Czeraphine]

1 minute ago, Radje said:

Just fyi. I cannot check myself currently, but if you go to the stat page of a duplicate. At the bottom should be a trait called Duplicate, if you hover over that you get to see the base consumption rate of duplicates, I thought it also listed kcal at sometime like -1.7kcal/s but I'm not sure.

 

 

You are correct, it is 1.7kcal/s. Since that happens to be the case, it feels like the only "per second" variable in the game with which we are allowed to calculate the cycle time.

edit: In hindsight.. we can easily do it by starting a new world and letting it run from the beggining to the end of the cycle. Hovering over the Cycle displays "time played". But, the default speed should be played. A rough estimate should be found doing it that way.

[darwithe]

I was testing this in debug mode before I broke my test setup playing with temperature and then crashed trying to fix it, but before that I found a few things.

First: With single width walls both a completely empty sealed off room and a room with a single meallice plant behaved the same way: Erratically. 

Second: Completely sealing with double width walls then replacing all the oxygen using the cellpainter also resulted in the same behavior; nothing changing except the plant growing % ticking up. No loss of pressure, no CO2 made. The only things I didn't get a chance to test before breaking it was if anything happened when the plant grew visually, or if there was only an effect during the point the lice are crawling around. 

[kambing]

I did some quick calculations with oxygen rate and production and came up with about 400s per cycle.

[Czeraphine]

11 minutes ago, kambing said:

I did some quick calculations with oxygen rate and production and came up with about 400s per cycle.

To support those calculations, the practical test must add up. Unfortunately it doesn't. In the picture below, we see that the total time played (without pauses or any other influences on the time since world start), is .11. We find 400/3600 to be approximately .1111. The day hasn't ended yet. Therefore, it is not 400s. 

Instead, we find that approximately .16 hours is the time from world start to the next day as shown below. .16hours * 3600s/hour = approximately 576s or 9.6 minutes. .166 repeating, or 10*60/3600 leads to the conclusion that each cycle is 10minutes long, without any pausing or deviations in time.

[kambing]

I was referring to in-game time, for instance, when they say oxygen generation is 800g/s, its not referring to realtime, and that quantity speeds up as you fast forward. We can't use realtime to calculate in-game values.

[Risu]

I can't find any evidence in the code that suggests either crop "breathes".
Only that it can be entombed, drowns, expects a certain pressure range and temperature range, and that the blossom wants fertilizer.
 

[Octyabr]

This is just a wild guess: "seconds" is in fact real seconds in the lowest game speed.

How to check that: run a algae deoxydiser for a set amount of time (lets say 10 seconds) at the lowest speed in an empty room (vacuum) divide the amount of gas generated by the total time and that should be the amount specified in the deoxydiser description.

[Czeraphine]

32 minutes ago, Risu said:

I can't find any evidence in the code that suggests either crop "breathes".
Only that it can be entombed, drowns, expects a certain pressure range and temperature range, and that the blossom wants fertilizer.
 

Run some tests yourself; isolate a mealwood plant in pure oxygen or CO2. You'll find that the gas pressure and overall amount of gas inside the chamber will decrease, whether or not the system is closed.

42 minutes ago, kambing said:

I was referring to in-game time, for instance, when they say oxygen generation is 800g/s, its not referring to realtime, and that quantity speeds up as you fast forward. We can't use realtime to calculate in-game values.

I was referring to in game time as well. As normal, a second is referring to a single real second in real time which is also the natural speed it runs at in normal game speed (most of us play on the fastest speed).

18 minutes ago, Octyabr said:

This is just a wild guess: "seconds" is in fact real seconds in the lowest game speed.

How to check that: run a algae deoxydiser for a set amount of time (lets say 10 seconds) at the lowest speed in an empty room (vacuum) divide the amount of gas generated by the total time and that should be the amount specified in the deoxydiser description.

Correct! Though, the lowest game speed is pretty much just the base speed (which is real-time).

[Vilda]

26 minutes ago, Czeraphine said:

Run some tests yourself; isolate a mealwood plant in pure oxygen or CO2. You'll find that the gas pressure and overall amount of gas inside the chamber will decrease, whether or not the system is closed.

I actually tried that when I came upon the information that plants use oxygen and in 3 plant cycles till "death" with three plants in a separated chamber, there was not a drop in gasses.

Yet it looks like they indeed are consuming contaminated oxygen at the bottom of my base, because where else it would go? There chlorine right under.

[DockLazy]

I just tried this and mealwoods don't consume any gas at all. The mass of oxygen was exactly the same at the end of a full growth cycle. Something else must be going on in your game for the gas to vanish like that.

[Czeraphine]

16 minutes ago, DockLazy said:

I just tried this and mealwoods don't consume any gas at all. The mass of oxygen was exactly the same at the end of a full growth cycle. Something else must be going on in your game for the gas to vanish like that.

Mind posting before and after pictures and publishing your findings? Quite a lot of people are having the same "mealwood is consuming oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gasses" problem. If you happened to find the one miracle that makes them not consume any gasses, that would be great to know.

[Risu]

It's more likely that people are discovering that gases can permeate through 1 tile thick rock walls.
 

[Czeraphine]

5 minutes ago, Risu said:

It's more likely that people are discovering that gases can permeate through 1 tile thick rock walls.
 

if you scroll up to the OP, several cycles pass without gasses permeating through the 1-tile thick rock wall that you just mentioned. The gas displayed kept constant (until the system was breached simply because fertilizer needed to be refilled). Just try it out yourself, it's really that simple.

[Vilda]

Would be nice to farm it just for the "variety" in sustanance, but I already have severe power issues to add another cooling.

On that topic, Hatch when fed Abysillite poops Muck Root. Though I find the coal generation much more worth it.

[DockLazy]

Same result as before gas mass is exactly the same. Before:

After:

[potatisknugen]

I have also tried this experiment in three rooms at the same time. Not a single one of them saw any change in oxygen pressure. All three however had a single tile of co2 floating around, not sure what's up with that, it didn't change in size however. Maybe it was there from the beginning.

Edit: I also just tried putting a few in a room with pure co2, they grew there just fine but they don't have any impact on mass of any co2 tile.

[Radje]

9 hours ago, Czeraphine said:

Instead, we find that approximately .16 hours is the time from world start to the next day as shown below. .16hours * 3600s/hour = approximately 576s or 9.6 minutes. .166 repeating, or 10*60/3600 leads to the conclusion that each cycle is 10minutes long, without any pausing or deviations in time.

I think you might be correct here. Because just taking that each duplicate requires 1.000 Kcal a day (cant find where that number came from) and dividing it by their 1.7 consumption/s turns out to be 588.2 seconds, pretty close to the 600s=10minute mark. I think I might use 600s per cycle for now.

[Saturnus]

15 minutes ago, Radje said:

I think you might be correct here. Because just taking that each duplicate requires 1.000 Kcal a day (cant find where that number came from) and dividing it by their 1.7 consumption/s turns out to be 588.2 seconds, pretty close to the 600s=10minute mark. I think I might use 600s per cycle for now.

The 1.7 might be the game round 1.666... up.