Why does water distiller let germs through?

[frogglebunwich]

Firstly its a water filter if it uses sand, but secondly if it is supposed to make potable water why does it let hundreds of germs through with every few kilos, the result for a water tank where a block can hold  1000kg is tens of thousands, about 50k, germs per block, its a disaster. 

It means the distiller is useless which is why people appear to be recommending thermal purification all the time because the distiller is a liability.

 

[GrindThisGame]

Germs do die off slowly in clean water. But that doesn't really answer your question. Some filters in real life can remove a lot of stuff but don't have a pore size small enough to remove viruses. I would rather it kill off most of the germs (or all) if I'm going to invest the energy and sand though.

[Coolthulhu]

Germy water is perfectly usable for everything except cooking. Unless it's bugged hard to contain gorillions of germs per tile, then it also becomes somewhat dangerous to produce air with.

Either way, purifying water - in any way - is greatly overrated. Just avoid using up all the water until you cap a geyser. You don't need tons of water if you don't waste it on musher.

[Alpe12]

I think sand filters in real life don't prevent germs.
You can raise the water temperature to kill germs.
Maybe they could add a new sand filter that also boils the water to kill the germs, but uses more power.

[frogglebunwich]

OK I am a noob to ONI but lets please not confound real mechanics with game code, it is an epistemological mistake.

This is about use of language, descriptions and the expectations they create and the intentions of the developer. 

In game research it is called a distiller. Description of a distiller is "distil difficult mixtures down to their most useful parts".

Yet the building is described as "Uses sand to filter polluted water" which is not distillation and does not have the same effect as distillation as it lets germs through.

If this is working as intended then the name and research group are misleading and it should not be called a distiller because this implies purification, it is evidently a (slightly dodgy) filter, leaving the most part of germs in the water.

Distillation depends on creating a steam phase and condensing the distillate which can be done in the game, only not using this machine, so it is doubly confusing and a definite a misnomer, which creates expectations of purity which are not fulfilled.

This is my first play through and I am disappointed to have so many germs since I started filtering polluted water I am having to disinfect half the ladders every day.

[clickrush]

41 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Germy water is perfectly usable for everything except cooking. Unless it's bugged hard to contain gorillions of germs per tile, then it also becomes somewhat dangerous to produce air with.

Either way, purifying water - in any way - is greatly overrated. Just avoid using up all the water until you cap a geyser. You don't need tons of water if you don't waste it on musher.

This answers your question perfectly in a practical sense.

In terms of the distiller being misleading I can somewhat agree. It clearly uses sand to clean water though. A better name would be filter. In terms of game design the item is perfectly fine, as it is very cheap and there are a ton of germ free polluted water puddles on top of all the devices that generate polluted water.

In terms of the distiller being useless, I agree to some extend because there are more efficient and definitely faster solutions of getting clean water. Same goes for the air filter.

But this is largely because people tend to have a plan of teching up fast by siphoning a steam geyser and a gas geyser ASAP to get oxygen (electrolyzer), clean water and power quickly while destroying CO2 with skimmers. The reason for this is that you can setup a sustainable base like this relatively quickly and scale from there.

However thinking about this, there might be another way to progress into the late game, while delaying being sustainable for a longer time. By digging quickly into slime biomes you can rely longer on deoxydizers and especially terraria, since you'll find a lot of slime (which turns into water and algae), algae and polluted water. Here is where the distillers would come in. You will eventually run out of sand but I assume you can hold on really long with this, since this plan requires less power and cooling if you heavily rely on terraria. Also since you will find a lot of reeds you can quickly tech up to exosuits. This sounds like a very fun, low tech/power kind of mid game plan, assuming you can feed the terraria germ water.

[Saturnus]

The whole problem boils down to semantics. The distiller should be called a filter but we already have a building with that name so they tried to name it something different instead of renaming filters to what they actually are, namely separators. Air and liquid filters suffer the same confusion that they don't actually filter anything but separates into different gas/liquid types.

[clickrush]

Ok I made some calculations to figure out what a slime biome base needs to survive.

Assuming that you can feed 1 water distiller with polluted water constantly you can supply 5 dupes with constant oxygen via algae terraria. With all of them having exosuits and with all of the required pumps, the research station youll have a max wattage of about 2.040k, which will average way below that at about 0.8k so with some smart wiring you can get away with 2 grids, a coal generator and some wheels.

You want to put your coal generator higher than your terraria and then a level below that you put down a skimmer, which will only have to work about 8% of the time as long as you use a liquid valve to control it so the terraria will be constantly submerged in CO2. You will need 3 terraria per dupe if you want an O2 surplus, which is good practice in the early to midgame as you want to extend the base and keep a high pressure. One redeeming factor of them is that they won't stop producing O2 as long as they are fed algae and water, so air pressure doesn't matter. Apparently you can submerge them in water so your dupes don't have to deliver it.

Now you want a constant income of polluted water and algae. One of the things that help you there is the algae distiller, but I wouldn't use more than 1 as for 5 dupes you will have enough algae for a lot of cycles especially if you expand into the slime biome, which is also full of algae. You want to keep the power consumption to a minimum I think. If you really want to go ham on the slime refinement put down up to 5 of them and back them up with another coal generator. If they (5) constantly run then they will provide your dupes with a slight surplus of algae of about 10g/s and about 22% of their polluted water needs (which goes through the water distiller). However I consider that to be overkill.

When digging the slime biome you want to opt for getting thimble reeds as fast as possible to provide your dupes with suits. Also you should have one pump constanly submerged in one of the polluted water puddles. You'll pump that alongside your sanitation waste and the algae distiller waste into your terrarium area after filtering it with the water distiller. You'll also want to dig into ice biomes

The sideeffect of all of this should be that you are getting high value materials while staying on this kind of low power tech as long as needed. Namely gold, abyssalite, wheezeworts, wolframite and kind of look for geysers.

After you hoarded a whole bunch of those things you can add a bunch more dupes, use the geysers and smack down an electrolyzer base.

Here, now the water distiller does actually sound like fun!

14 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

The whole problem boils down to semantics. The distiller should be called a filter but we already have a building with that name so they tried to name it something different instead of renaming filters to what they actually are, namely separators. Air and liquid filters suffer the same confusion that they don't actually filter anything but separates into different gas/liquid types.

Fully agreed. I bet if you google for ONI water distiller and liquid filter then you'll get a whole bunch of posts from confused players.

[Saturnus]

6 minutes ago, clickrush said:

Fully agreed. I bet if you google for ONI water distiller and liquid filter then you'll get a whole bunch of posts from confused players.

I've been more or less active on this forum since March or so, and I've seen many... many... threads and posts by people confused about why air filter don't filter air and water purifier/distiller doesn't remove germs. It just boils down to having named the damn things incorrectly.

[mdallicardillo]

While all the concerns raised above regarding semantics are completely valid, lets all remember too that we're playing a game that is in early access, actively being developed. I wouldn't be surprised at all if one of the LAST things that happens is a pass through to correct any misnamed assets or misleading descriptions.

That being said, I feel I would be remisce not to mention that even many water purifiers (which I think is what the building is called right? Not sitting at my PC at the moment) do not actually remove all the germs, just a lot of them. Well, ones that are available commercially anyway...

[Saturnus]

3 minutes ago, mdallicardillo said:

That being said, I feel I would be remisce not to mention that even many water purifiers (which I think is what the building is called right?

No. They actually changed the name from water purifier to water distiller. Pretty much invalidating your point about the last thing they'll do is rename stuff. They already renamed it to something that makes even less sense than what it was before as a distiller should obviously remove germs and not require sand for operation (unless there is pre-filtering going on).

[mdallicardillo]

27 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

No. They actually changed the name from water purifier to water distiller. Pretty much invalidating your point about the last thing they'll do is rename stuff. They already renamed it to something that makes even less sense than what it was before as a distiller should obviously remove germs and not require sand for operation (unless there is pre-filtering going on).

The fact that they renamed something now does not remove the possibility that they'll do it later, when who knows how many tens or hundreds of other buildings exist with who knows what functions. Renaming things as you go and doing a final pass to address issues either raised by the community or identified by the dev team are no mutually exclusive events.

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, mdallicardillo said:

The fact that they renamed something now does not remove the possibility that they'll do it later, when who knows how many tens or hundreds of other buildings exist with who knows what functions. Renaming things as you go and doing a final pass to address issues either raised by the community or identified by the dev team are no mutually exclusive events.

I'm not sure if there is a point to what you wrote, if so I'm not seeing it. The fact is that they renamed the building from something that was confusing to many to something that doesn't make any sense at all. This has been discussed at length when they did in the outbreak upgrade. 

[frogglebunwich]

I agree with the point about filters also being confusingly named, when they are separators.

If these machines had a nonsense name that might be better, but to use a proper kind of a name in a nonsensical way is IMHO not so much entertaining as discombobulating.

 

[manu_x32]

Simple solution to keep using the water distiller: putting a row of plastic tiles like below, seems to keep all the germs on the left side. By the time they reach the pitcher pump or the regular pump, they are usually all dead.

 

[frogglebunwich]

Thanks that is an interesting idea, though a high tech solution which I cannot implement yet in my first game at around 95 cycles, I dont have plastic tech or oil resource and am in the process of converting coal power to natural gas, because coal is running out and I found 2 natural gas geysers, while desperately seeking a water geyser which has not yet been discovered. So I am scrabbling around getting gravity fed polluted water to filter. I made the noob mistake of growing thistles and making lice loaf, wasting a lot of water early on. Currently trying to research high pressure gas vent to enable the generator outlets so I can use the power to melt ice and the ice to condense the generator output. Its one step ahead of doom at the moment, living hand to mouth, cycle to cycle, 5 dupes.

I eventually solved the germs by using a tepidizer to Pasteurise the tank to 60°C and then a thermo aquatuner to cool the output which heated half the base up and broke down a few times due to overheating but this seemed to remove the worst of the germ problem. Though two cases of slimelung resulted from the excavations in the cold region, so its a struggle. Poor little dupes!

For the record, another thing I find confusing are the icons for the piping, they are not intuitive and having read around I know I am not the only one who has connected stuff up the wrong way round. I think the square bracket with arrow is completely confusing as you dont know if the bracket refers to the machine or the base volume or the pipe/duct system. It needs to be something like a square icon with a couple of cogs in IMHO and then an arrow pointing into or out of that, to denote the building, instead of the bracket.

[clickrush]

6 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

(...)

I eventually solved the germs by using a tepidizer to Pasteurise the tank to 60°C and then a thermo aquatuner to cool the output which heated half the base up and broke down a few times due to overheating but this seemed to remove the worst of the germ problem. Though two cases of slimelung resulted from the excavations in the cold region, so its a struggle. Poor little dupes!

(...)

This is why I suggested to use a combination of the two. Only use the tepidizer to preheat the water up to 80C (if at all) and from then on use the aquatuner up to 120C. Using the aquatuner requires you to have large amounts of water you want to cool and boil. As long as you feed its surrounding with polluted water it should not overheat and you can turn the polluted water into germ free clean and cold water. Cycle the fresh clean water through the aquatuner until you reach the temp you want. Since you have found 2x gas geysers you can also add more aquatuners (in a chain) to speed up the process and to be more power efficient since you are decreasing the pump/aquatuner ratio. That is if you want to purify water at all.

But keep in mind that if you just use the water to burn it with an electrolyzer then it doesn't have to be germ free as far as I know. It definitely doesn't need to be cooled. The best short term solution would be to just filter polluted water and burn it directly with the electrolyzer, as one of those produce more than enough oxygen for 5 dupes.

If you have ways of generating enough polluted oxygen you can also generate oxygen from that by liquifying it. There are a lot of ways you can do that, but I think the simplest most intuitive way seems to be a hydrogen radiator system. A lot of people around these boards have built different types of these and explained them on youtube. This might be more efficient and less complex than purifying water and then burning it.