ways to make up the water shortfall

[avc15]

I'm sure you've all been experiencing it too, the new steam geysers are awfully lean. Even though my base only has 10 dupes, I use more water than my 2 geysers can give me on their own. I have electrolyzer-produced oxygen and right now my dupes eat mostly berry slush (but I only collect wheat from the wild - I went to great lengths to keep as much wild wheat alive as possible from the start of the game). That's a very water efficient food.

Since I keep running out of water, I had to come up with a way to make more. Share your solutions below! Here's mine so far. I'm sure it can be simplified - but, this is a fairly energy efficient way. (could also use less water - alternative methods for O2 production, or, ways to use less water making food)

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I have four tanks: a cool water tank inside the base, a polluted water tank (can be anywhere, shouldn't really be inside my base at this stage of the game, just haven't moved it yet) and two sterilizing tanks for cleaning sieve water.

First, fill both sterilizing tanks with germy water from sieve output. Then it operates on a cycle run by that SR latch at the bottom:

- The last tank to pump down is the "dirty tank" and the full one is the "clean tank"

- Makeup water to the hot water header and the cool tank comes from the clean tank, controlled by a level sensor in the cool tank.

- Regulate cool tank temp with the aquatuner in the dirty tank, heating the dirty water so germs will die before the clean tank empties.

At this moment, the clean tank is on the left, and is pumping down into the cool tank above it. Cool tank is circulating water through the aquatuner in the dirty tank on the right. Dirty tank fills from sieve output until the liquid sensor in the dirty tank gets covered, and then just continues heating as makeup water pumps into the cool tank from the clean tank. Germs die off gradually.

Here's the automation:

If you're not familiar with that device at the bottom (square of or gates and not gates), that's the brains of the whole operation. It's called an SR latch. If you want to know more about how it works, here's a really great video. The latch selects one tank or the other based on which tank's low level detector became uncovered most recently (you might use a different condition if the times don't line up correctly in your base)

Here's the automation again after pumping down the tank on the left (I changed the tank configuration a little bit, without mixing the contents at all). What triggered the switch is the low liquid level sensor in the left-hand tank went active, flipping the state of the latch. Since the left tank has been filling for a few seconds, you can't see that sensor activated, but that's the sequence of events.

And the germ overlay again at that moment:

Right now, the sieves are filling my dirty water tank on the left. Clean tank on the right is pumping makeup water into the cool tank above. Cool tank is circulating water through the aquatuner on the left to heat dirty tank and keep cool tank temp at or below 22C.

Here's my piping. Don't judge me too harshly, this is survival mode and it evolved over time into the train wreck you see below.

You should make your tempshift plates out of gold if possible (instead of diamond), OR don't fill every square with shift plates. You don't want your radiator to have too much total heat capacity.

Now, there are a couple edge cases I didn't account for:

 If you're consuming a lot of hot water and very little cool water, your sterilizing tanks won't get sterile quickly enough (because you won't be heating them much). You'll end up pumping germy water into your base. You could: set the thermostat lower on your cool tank, make both your sterilizing tanks much larger, put a germ sensor at each of the pumps in the sterilizing tanks (more makeup water would come from geysers), or add tepidizers.

If you're consuming a lot of cold water and very little hot water, your sterilizing tanks will get too hot and you'll have a problem with overheating and/or steam. You could: set the thermostat higher on your cool tank, or add temp shutoffs on both aquatuners and a 3rd aquatuner someplace else. or dump some hot water back into your geysers (it'll help cool the steam).

 

[TheScaryOne]

Since you're already aquatuning skip the sieve and save the sand and just heat the PW to Steam and regular Dirt. The conversion deletes a TON of heat, since the heat capacity of the dirt and steam is much lower than the PW, but they come out the same temp. Bonus: renewable dirt.

[chemie]

I see a PW / clean water and a hot/cold water manangement system but missed tbe part where you make new water

[avc15]

51 minutes ago, chemie said:

I see a PW / clean water and a hot/cold water manangement system but missed tbe part where you make new water

Right now just pumping PW through sieves. I'm getting new water from latrines, NG generators, and scrubbers.

It's not quite enough to sustain on just the new PW created in that process, but when you mix the two sources together (PW production and steam geysers) it's more than I need. I think you can get a good deal more PW per produced joule on petroleum generation, but I havent taken a hard look at the units yet.

For now I still find myself digging to find more PW because it's still getting gradually used up.

1 hour ago, TheScaryOne said:

Since you're already aquatuning skip the sieve and save the sand and just heat the PW to Steam and regular Dirt. The conversion deletes a TON of heat, since the heat capacity of the dirt and steam is much lower than the PW, but they come out the same temp. Bonus: renewable dirt.

that's eventually a necessary step because my approach has a disadvantage: sand is plentiful but difficult to replenish, unless you happen to have a magma volcano on your map. This one has a few advantages though:

- it's lower labor/lower micro (and I think a simpler system overall?) than boiling PW. No digging out a chamber, no condensing steam.

- Also I believe that in the boiling process you lose mass? The PW leaves behind dirt and steam, the sum is equal to the mass of PW you started with. Right? The sieve would give you more total water per PW consumed if I'm right. But, I have to test that theory.

Anyway, show us your system too

 

[Neotuck]

Have you thought of switching to mushrooms to save on water for your berries and wheat?

Also if you make a puft stable you can produce enough slime to run an algae distiller and that provides germ free PW you can send to a sieve for clean water.  And also provide algae for deoxydizers and save water on your electrodizers

[avc15]

yeah puft farm for slime is high on the list, i'd be able to shut down some of my electrolyzers.

I'm skipping the mushroom farm, though, I want to see how decadent I can make a large base (gonna eventually expand to 20 dupes) on the new geyser mechanics

[trukogre]

9 minutes ago, avc15 said:

 

- Also I believe that in the boiling process you lose mass? The PW leaves behind dirt and steam, the sum is equal to the mass of PW you started with. Right? The sieve would give you more total water per PW consumed if I'm right. But, I have to test that theory.

 

Boiling PW goes to 99% steam and 1% dirt IIRC; dirt's useful too so it wouldn't be bad it the percentage were a bit higher, but 1% is quite small.

" I want to see how decadent I can make a large base (gonna eventually expand to 20 dupes) on the new geyser mechanics"

You could have a very ample water geyser as one of your randoms...or you could not.  So I'm not quite sure what it means to 'make a large base on the new geyser mechanics".  If you have some of the more ample water geysers it will be easy, if you only have the default two small ones it will be hard, how does making any single base test that entire spectrum of mechanics?

 

Your SR latch system is pretty cool.  I'm much lazier, I simply make a germy PW tank that goes to fert. makers, and a non-germy PW tank that goes to water sieves.  (I'm talking early game before I've set up a PW boiler)

 

[TrustyFish]

It seems like it's more efficient to deodorize the polluted oxygen instead of feeding it to pufts. It depends how long you want to run your colony, but for most purposes I don't think geysers are necessary at all with careful water recycling. There's so much water in the swamp and ice biomes. You use a little bit of water on bristle blossoms, and get a bit of it back from the lavatories. The main water sink is electrolyzers. There's also a lot of water in the oil biome, the natural gas and petroleum generators produce water.

[Neotuck]

12 minutes ago, TrustyFish said:

It seems like it's more efficient to deodorize the polluted oxygen instead of feeding it to pufts.

If the pufts are wild I would agree however tamed pufts provide enough slime per PO ratio you get more oxygen from distilled algae then if u use deodorizers

[Luminite2]

14 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

If the pufts are wild I would agree however tamed pufts provide enough slime per PO ratio you get more oxygen from distilled algae then if u use deodorizers

I don't think that's true anymore. I tested and they seem to only produce 50% of the mass they consume, making them only useful for dusk cap farming.

[Neotuck]

8 minutes ago, Luminite2 said:

I don't think that's true anymore. I tested and they seem to only produce 50% of the mass they consume, making them only useful for dusk cap farming.

I'll test it tonight and see if it's still true

[TheRealKillface]

Build thermal shift plates near your geyser. I've notice that they're not working 100 % most of the time due to the steam overpressure. 

After I've set up the tiles + wheezewort on top, the steam condensates almost immediately providing much more water that before.

[avc15]

Oh, if the conversion is 99%, that's very efficient.

 

But yeah, I only got 2 steam geysers. They both have very long dormancy cycles and very short activity cycles. Guess I just want to see how big a base I can keep going under those conditions.

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, Luminite2 said:

I don't think that's true anymore. I tested and they seem to only produce 50% of the mass they consume, making them only useful for dusk cap farming.

I looked at the old patch notes and haven't found any mention of nerfing the pufts so this might be a bug, from what I can tell from testing, the slime produced hasn't changed after wild pufts become tamed 

[Luminite2]

Just now, Neotuck said:

I looked at the old patch notes and haven't found any mention of nerfing the pufts so this might be a bug, from what I can tell from testing, the slime produced hasn't changed after wild pufts become tamed 

I'd appreciate it if someone could replicate my results. I'm not terribly concerned with the rate of conversion, but I do care about the ratio of how much slime/oil gets produced from X amount of P02/C02. My experiments indicated that the ratio was 2:1 for input:output for tamed/happy critters.

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, Luminite2 said:

I'd appreciate it if someone could replicate my results. I'm not terribly concerned with the rate of conversion, but I do care about the ratio of how much slime/oil gets produced from X amount of P02/C02. My experiments indicated that the ratio was 2:1 for input:output for tamed/happy critters.

from what I can see wild pufts create the same ratio of slime as wild ones so what's the point of taming them? must be a bug

[Luminite2]

18 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

from what I can see wild pufts create the same ratio of slime as wild ones so what's the point of taming them? must be a bug

That's fine, but what IS that ratio? Is it 2:1, 1:1, 1:2, or something else?

If it helps, my procedure was this: make a box, put a known amount of PO2 in it, teleport a puft in (I used a tamed one), wait for the puft to inhale and poop once, then pause and compare the mass of the slime to the total mass of PO2 in the box. The amount of missing PO2 was twice the mass of the slime.

As an additional test, I used the same setup and let it run for a cycle or so, then removed the puft, and let all of the slime offgas back into PO2. The end result was that there was considerably less PO2 than when I started the experiment, indicating that the output ratio was indeed less than 1:1.

I observed the same thing with slicksters. 

[TrustyFish]

43 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

from what I can see wild pufts create the same ratio of slime as wild ones so what's the point of taming them? must be a bug

I don't know if that kind of benefit is documented anywhere, it kind of needs to be for us to make informed decisions. But the point of taming them is still there in being able to breed them and control their location more easily I would think. They could be nice as little mobile deodorizers floating around the base.

[Neotuck]

Just now, TrustyFish said:

I don't know if that kind of benefit is documented anywhere, it kind of needs to be for us to make informed decisions. But the point of taming them is still there in being able to breed them and control their location more easily I would think. They could be nice as little mobile deodorizers floating around the base.

Not very good deodorizers considering the Slime is so little and evaporates into polluted oxygen so fast dupes wouldn't be able to sweep them up into compactors before they disappear

[TrustyFish]

1 minute ago, Neotuck said:

Not very good deodorizers considering the Slime is so little and evaporates into polluted oxygen so fast dupes wouldn't be able to sweep them up into compactors before they disappear

One thing you can trust ONI for, always presenting new problems for us to solve.

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, Luminite2 said:

That's fine, but what IS that ratio? Is it 2:1, 1:1, 1:2, or something else?

I did a test, one tamed and one wild, and the ratio was 2:1 for both.  Only difference is the tamed one seem to inhale/poop more often then the wild one.  But not enough to be worth the effort 

[Luminite2]

3 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

I did a test, one tamed and one wild, and the ratio was 2:1 for both.  Only difference is the tamed one seem to inhale/poop more often then the wild one.  But not enough to be worth the effort 

To clarify, when you say that it was 2:1, do you mean:

A) They inhaled 2 parts PO2 and exhaled 1 part slime, or
B) They inhaled 1 part PO2 and exhaled 2 parts slime?

My test (which I just ran again) indicated A, which means that the oxygen you get from running PO2 through the puft->distiller->deoxidizer loop (assuming that you let all the polluted water from the distiller offgas and go back through the loop) is 50% * (500/550) = 45.45%, while deoderizers give 90% back as clean oxygen (and condensing it gives 100%). In this scenario, pufts are pretty bad, and only useful for dusk cap farms.

If, however, you got result B, then that directly contradicts what I got, and would indicate either a mistake in methodology or a bug.

[Neotuck]

Just now, Luminite2 said:

To clarify, when you say that it was 2:1, do you mean:

A) They inhaled 2 parts PO2 and exhaled 1 part slime, or
B) They inhaled 1 part PO2 and exhaled 2 parts slime?

My test (which I just ran again) indicated A, which means that the oxygen you get from running PO2 through the puft->distiller->deoxidizer loop (assuming that you let all the polluted water from the distiller offgas and go back through the loop) is 50% * (500/550) = 45.45%, while deoderizers give 90% back as clean oxygen (and condensing it gives 100%). In this scenario, pufts are pretty bad, and only useful for dusk cap farms.

If, however, you got result B, then that directly contradicts what I got, and would indicate either a mistake in methodology or a bug.

It was A 

[Luminite2]

Good to know it's confirmed then. Disappointing though.

Also, for the record, wild pufts lose 50 kcal/cycle, while tame ones lose 200 kcal/cycle, so in theory one tame puft will have the throughput of 4 wild ones.

[Neotuck]

Just now, Luminite2 said:

Good to know it's confirmed then. Disappointing though.

Also, for the record, wild pufts lose 50 kcal/cycle, while tame ones lose 200 kcal/cycle, so in theory one tame puft will have the throughput of 4 wild ones.

still inefficient, I posted in bug tracker hoping the nerf was unintentional