Jump to content

Is there any way to decontaminate water?


Recommended Posts

Okay, so one of my dupes threw up in my water reservoir. Despite my building blocks to keep any spills from leaking into my water, she decided to stand right over the pump and throw up directly into the water supply, and there was nothing I could do about it. That's fine, bad stuff happens... but now all my dupes are just getting sick because my main source of water is contaminated and as far as I know, there's no way to decontaminate it now. I've been dealt a bad hand, and have no means to mitigate the damage (as far as I know). There should be a water sterilizer building that decontaminates water (kills germs) or something. Clearwater tablets you can craft in the apothecary to drop in water to kill germs would be cool too, just something that I can do to not have half my dupes perpetually sick and unable to get better...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, iCaughtFireOnce said:

my main source of water is contaminated and as far as I know, there's no way to decontaminate it now.

heating the water enough destroys food poisoning.  Select a contaminated water tile, go to the germs tab, and there is a 'full details' button or something like that.  Click that and it'll tell you the relevant temperatures.  Even though it's given as a range, I don't think it's actually a 'hard' range.  I think the closer you get to the points they give, the faster the germs die. 

So ya, you can heat up your water and kill the germs, and then deal with the water.  Another option you could try is filtering some non-contaminated polluted water, of which there is usually tons in slime biomes. 

Or, stop using the microbe musher, and upgrade your basins to sanitizers.  You can use contaminated water for toilets, with no issues, and I think even for the electrolyzer, though you'll probably want to use geyser water for that anyway.  Just make sure the dupes are not eating food made with germy water, and are not washing their hands in germy water.  If necessary put some sanitizers in the access path to your food storage, to make sure the dupes have clean hands when they go to get/store food.    This should make the food poisoning a non-issue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Only sources of water with germs are bottle emptiers(water from wash basins) and algae distillers. And lavatories if you use them(I don't because they do not produce fertilizer). Just make 2 separate pools for contaminated polluted and purified water and do not ever mix that water with non-contaminated one.
Since sources of contaminated water do not produce any significant amount, you may just accumulate that water for 100 or more cycles, then disable your purifier for several cycles until purified water decontaminates naturally. Then empty pool and reenable purifier for another 100 cycles.
Also saving clean water by not using musher and terrariums helps. Just build more farms of meal lice and live on deoxydizers until you find steam geyser and switch to electrolyzers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

in my recent play through I was surrounded by Slime biomes and not much clean water in the dirt biome. I was also concerned with keeping my water supply as germ free as possible, since the only additional water was going to be from cleaning stuff from slime biomes.

there is a few things which I noticed about which made keeping germ levels low alot easier.

 

1 if a dupe does puke into the clean water reservoir, the polluted water will collect towards the bottom corners and then you can build tiles around the polluted water squares to contain it and separate it from the rest of the water, then deconstruct the tiles under the separated polluted water to let it leak out of your reservoir area and then mop up and rebuild your reservoir.

2 build multiple clean water storage areas, build 2 or 3 extra tanks for the germy blue water coming out of your Water Distillers.

3 the passage of time will kill the germs if they are in fresh water, so run that polluted water through the Water Distiller right away and let time kill some of those germs off. 

4 there are buildings which don't care about the germ levels in clean water,  Carbon Skimmer doesn't emit any gas so its not like the Algae Distiller which will make germ filled air if feed by Germ filled materials. thus you can safely run germy water through the carbon skimmer.

5 There are buildings which I think care about germs but I've never been affected by, lavatory, shower, and sink. I supplied germy water to these buildings and it seemed to have zero affect on health. I wonder if they will change this in the future.

6 cycling water has a interesting effect, if you have the water dripping in from the top left of the tank, the highest concentration of germs will tend to be towards the bottom right corner, thus that where i put the liquid pump which supplies my Bathroom buildings & Carbon skimmer. you would think this would not cause germs to die off any faster, ohh but it does,

I have not identified where the germs are getting removed but if you run a closed cycle between

a tank filled with high germ but blue water,  -->> bathroom & carbon skimmer to the -->> water distiller -->> back to water tank  and repeat, the germs will die off at a much higher rate than the normal drop off rates, I've completely cleaned tanks of water this way, thou it does take some time. by the time completely drained and mined out 1 slime biome I had my starting water tank, 1 extra tank which became germ free water and 1 newer tank of germy fresh water.  after this point I finally found my first steam geyser and then I had to build yet another water tank, at this point my colony had 9 dupes running around. and 4 Electrolyzers making oxygen

in the end I realized that there were more uses for germy blue water which didn't affect colony health and also which decreased my use of the germ free supply and also that cycling water through the use & recycle process helps speed up the the elimination of germs. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...