Infinite storage trick

[Czeraphine]

Have you ever wanted to have infinite storage? Tired of building many compactors that just fill up? Have no fear, this simple trick will save you time and space.

To keep it simple, just build a compactor on top of an airlock set on auto. If you want the airlock horizontal, press O to rotate it. That's all it is. When your compactor is full, click on it, de-select all, and all of the resources would fall down to the bottom.

And, just a quick tip, always have your compactors on sweep, or else your dupes will waste a lot of time.

[Targa_X]

What do you mean by dupes wasting a lot of time? "If checked, only objects marked for sweeping will be stored here" - What other objects are they storing, and how does that waste time?

[Vilda]

1 hour ago, Targa_X said:

What do you mean by dupes wasting a lot of time? "If checked, only objects marked for sweeping will be stored here" - What other objects are they storing, and how does that waste time?

If they don't have other jobs, storage (not sweep only) is available and things are laying around, they will collect it on their own. Even things you don't want or want to lay there to feed your Hatch.

[Travin]

1 hour ago, Vilda said:

If they don't have other jobs, storage (not sweep only) is available and things are laying around, they will collect it on their own. Even things you don't want or want to lay there to feed your Hatch.

Odd.  I haven't noticed this. My experience has been that they happily sweep things up without being prioritized as long as there is a path, storage and higher priorities aren't needed.

"[x] Sweep only" says to me: put only things here when I tell you to sweep. But really thinking about it it makes no sense because only things they sweep are stored in a compactor. Looks like another verbiage disconnect to be resolved. 

[DNsingbanana]

What exactly is the point of the airlock? Just to make it look like a storage down there? ^^ why not letting everything on the tile the compactor is on? 

[Travin]

2 hours ago, Vilda said:

If they don't have other jobs, storage (not sweep only) is available and things are laying around, they will collect it on their own. Even things you don't want or want to lay there to feed your Hatch.

OK, testing it I get what you're saying. However, I thought there was a pretty good hit for decor if things aren't kept tidy. I suppose it's a game play style, I prefer not to have to order each and every pickup, especially when far afield digging resources. I end up wasting my own time just micromanaging everything. 

[Vilda]

10 minutes ago, Travin said:

OK, testing it I get what you're saying. However, I thought there was a pretty good hit for decor if things aren't kept tidy. I suppose it's a game play style, I prefer not to have to order each and every pickup, especially when far afield digging resources. I end up wasting my own time just micromanaging everything. 

I sweep everything in base, but it starts to be a problem when they start throwing in unnecessary and hot resources from far away.

[jigggy2000]

Does unticking the sweep option in the jobs window stop them from sweeping altogether?

If it does you could just have it unticked and when you want to sweep something tick it back on and order them to sweep that spot. Then tick it back off. I know it's a pain but in your case maybe its not so bad since it sounds like you don't sweep a whole lot after your base is done.

edit:

or you could do what Targa_X said

Quote

What do you mean by dupes wasting a lot of time? "If checked, only objects marked for sweeping will be stored here" - What other objects are they storing, and how does that waste time?

 

[Travin]

@czeraphine, using this trick how do you keep track of your resources?

 

As they no longer show in your stats and dupes can't pick them up until instructed in this large pile, how do dupes know where to find things?

[Vilda]

1 hour ago, Travin said:

As they no longer show in your stats and dupes can't pick them up until instructed in this large pile, how do dupes know where to find things?

All dug out resources are shown in your stats, not just the ones in storage.

[Oatmeal]

2 hours ago, DNsingbanana said:

What exactly is the point of the airlock? Just to make it look like a storage down there? ^^ why not letting everything on the tile the compactor is on? 

I was thinking the same thing. And you could have one compactor set to one resource (So quite a few compactors) and just constantly empty it to separate the resources. Would be pretty pointless, but in the case that you wanted the visual separation of materials.

[Travin]

5 hours ago, Vilda said:

{Fyi, this isn't a quote from Vilda. Rather the forum software cannot properly function in numerous browsers and numerous versions of Android} 

@Vilda,  that's what I thought too, but the moment I dropped all the assets from a compactor my stats changed and the build menus grayed out. Perhaps this instigated bug (like this forum software)  so I just saved and shut down.  I'll check back on it later, hopefully it rights itself. 

[Vilda]

That is weird if it dropped right in front of a compactor. If it dropped down through airlock like OT, it might have dropped 3 tiles down and become unreachable, thus not counting to your stats.

[Czeraphine]

4 hours ago, DNsingbanana said:

What exactly is the point of the airlock? Just to make it look like a storage down there? ^^ why not letting everything on the tile the compactor is on? 

The point is to prevent the massive take-away from decor value. Lets say you have about 20 stacks of random resources on that tile.. you're going to get something like -150 decor value. The air lock just makes sure that your dupes wont get stressed around those tiles.

[Travin]

17 hours ago, Vilda said:

That is weird if it dropped right in front of a compactor. If it dropped down through airlock like OT, it might have dropped 3 tiles down and become unreachable, thus not counting to your stats.

That would seem to make sense, but they only dropped two tiles and I had three other bins with resources in them. And no matter what I did I could not retrieve the situation. Changing settings, building new bins, digging under to make them accessible, etc. After that no new resources gathered would register in my stats. I've reported it as a hug. 

 

[Saturnus]

I use a similar set up over my hutch pit. Every once in a while I set the container to be filled up with useless stuff... usually ign/sed rock and drop it into the pit. Keep the critter happily pooping coal enough that I actually slowly rise in stored coal with one coal generator running 24/7 without mining for it at all.

[jigggy2000]

10 minutes ago, Travin said:

 I've reported it as a hug. 

 

Hahaha. I love this typo so much. 

Yes! You Report that hug! That hug is unsanctioned!!

[Travin]

We like hugs. 

[jigggy2000]

You can fix it you know. With the edit button. ...You're not going to are you? 

Thats a good choice. 

[Oatmeal]

Found out some interesting things.

For starters, the method below is basically a compactor almost completely surrounded by tiles except for the corners. I was curious if having the compactor in tiles kept the 'clutter' debuff for decor inside, and it did. It only gave the storage compactor debuff, which was almost completely taken away by the tiles alone. If you slap a decor object near it, the debuff is practically gone.

Here's the thing though. I tried to bury it underground and then just put a tile atop it. They apparently do not want to take or put things into the compactor from the missing corners above. BUT! They DO take and put things into the compactor from below through the missing corners at the bottom, where the selected tile in the pic is.

So if you use this method, you not only get the infinite storage, but you can also keep the debuff away; as well as use this to put other things inside to trap the gases. Although, I had yet to test it with gases since I am pretty tired. But theoretically, if you put something in there, such as contaminated dirt or slime, it should keep the gases inside.

[Czeraphine]

@Oatmeal Thank you for your contribution to science! It may seem small, but the implications are huge (able to perform qctions through diagonal cracks in tiles). Time to make a perfectly sealed farm room with zero loss in atmosphere forever hehe. 

[Vilda]

10 minutes ago, Czeraphine said:

@Oatmeal Thank you for your contribution to science! It may seem small, but the implications are huge (able to perform qctions through diagonal cracks in tiles). Time to make a perfectly sealed farm room with zero loss in atmosphere forever hehe. 

Nice logical implication. Though rather space sensitive. It depends if they will be able to collect dropped fruit.

[Oatmeal]

 

I am sure they will fix this eventually, but yeah.

You can use it with:

• Creature cages. (Which I believe I have seen done before, now that I think about it)
• Room separations. (Like building into vacuum rooms, or transferring materials between them and other rooms)
• The infinite storage.
• Storage for bad materials.
• A farm. (Which is funny because then that means the farms are kind of broken again due to the 'no eat gas' patch for mealwood)

When you think about it, it's not really a new thing, but it is good to know. This may also explain why I was unable to build a tile into a space with a tile above and to the left of the space, though before, I was able to destroy a block in the same position, but from below. You can't go down diagonally, but you can go up.

 

EDIT: New info.

And of course. I am confused now.

In the pic below, that Dupe is clearly constructing that tile. I noticed this just now when testing, and then put tiles all around that one tile so that they could ONLY construct from the spot he is standing in. Likewise, they can deconstruct that same tile; so they have no problem reaching it. HOWEVER!...

 

The pic below, made me laugh because no matter what I tried, they could not, for the life of me, deconstruct that tile. They just couldn't do it, despite the one before, being further and lower.

 

And for this one, I tried to see if they would construct the tile I am hovering over. Turns out, they couldn't do this one either. Yet again, despite the first pic.

 

 

[Saturnus]

Oh, you experienced the mysterious slightly off coloured magical tiles that you can't do anything with, too. You can remove tiles under them and get them out of the way but other than that... can't build or do anything else in that exact spot (which of course moves as I just explained). They're really annoying, and even restarting the game won't help.

[Oatmeal]

15 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Oh, you experienced the mysterious slightly off coloured magical tiles that you can't do anything with, too. You can remove tiles under them and get them out of the way but other than that... can't build or do anything else in that exact spot (which of course moves as I just explained). They're really annoying, and even restarting the game won't help.

 

Nah. That tile I placed myself to see if they would build it through the top-right missing corner. It's a continuation of the experiment above with how they react to those 'diagonal openings' on the missing corners. Although I can't say I have ever ran into an off-colored tile that was non-interactable before. The only tile that is off-color there is the one set for deconstruction.