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Cannot get Liquid valve to work, has been toggled!


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Hello, this is my first post so hopefully i'm putting this in the right area, apologies if not. But after playing this game for over +250 hours and yet I've never even properly explored a slime biome, ice biome or oil biome, anything but the starting area and easy to reach hot "caustic" places (for algae, iron) as I always rip through water and algae since I cannot for the life of me get a water valve to work. 

It always acts like it works but 10Kg/s goes through it no matter what is set. I long ago gave up on valves as nothing I did would ever in any update work for me no matter what I try. So after finally caving and looking online for the last few times i've played I've finally decided to ask how to get a water valve to work? I've tried everything I can think of and looked around the forums but everyone seems to get their valve resolved after either.

1) making sure there is no pipe in between the valve

2) make sure the priority is set right for toggle so that a Dupe actually adjusts it. (It still takes them unusually long to the point I have to degrade all other tasks almost to nill, (and still I need to wait half a cycle to toggle it at least))

That seems to resolve most peoples issue that i've come across on here as I know this issue has already been touched on a bit. But no matter what I do it says "not pumping" (even if the graphic is showing it lit up and shaking with water as if active, water flows through to the other side at 10Kg/s of pressure and ultimately reaches my electrolyzers as i'm trying to get more into those since solely relying on Algae is clearly not working. I've been avoiding toilets, Hydroponic farming, showers, -ALL-because the water and gas mechanics are soo confusing. I have been studying Chemistry and Physics since I was 12 and now 32 now with at least an associates degree and have taken upper division chemistry and some Physics and yet I can't get blocks of gas to disperse to the nearest vent in favor of a high pressure area? I've probably put more time into this game than any other in my history and I simply grind to a halt before I've ever even tapped my first geyser even if it's as close as it realistically gets (no joke)...I'm starting to realize maybe the key is throwing out the preconceived notions of how gases work but unless I keep my systems painfully simple it stops working in any predictable way. Clearly i'm having the same issue with water. I've tried building it sidewards, then upwards, pipes in-between and without, tried flipping it around "just incase". I really cannot think of anything else but other people get it to work so I have no clue what i'm doing wrong with it. I've always just assumed it was buggy but after enough updates I just figured I was just doing it wrong. But looking things up I can't find anything that fixes it that I haven't thus far tried.

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However in the past some of these water and gas mechanics make it near impossible to move forward. gases will pass vents that have no gas in it's room only to jam up at some vent with 2Kg of pressure, stuff like that. It kinda makes me just want to throw my hands up and quit this game when I have to restart a base for the same thing that I expect from learning about gas laws in Chemistry class (and IRL experience) and then nothing works as it seems it should. gases like to diffuse, not concentrate together where it's most concentrated already, that's not how entropy works (assuming a starting biome room temp, lets not get into refrigeration stuff atm, i'm already kinda on a tangent lol) .

But going back to the Water valve. As far as the valve goes, I just have no clue but I've been playing since Outbreak and I STILL can't get it working.

 

Sorry if this comes off as quite ranty, maybe i'm just in a mood because it's just consistently not working for me and getting frustrating, it's just ya... +250hrs and not getting past the easy stuff and still using outhouses when the whole reason i'm drawn to the game to begin with is to play with the mechanics (sure I love the Dupes and the fun of managing the base, but for a segment of us it's all about making complex setups and trying to play with the "Chemistry/Physics/Control systems engineering simulator" aspect of it, so getting that down and streamlined seems like it should be a development priority since it's kinda the core of the game in how it will all play). Meanwhile life is ticking by and it makes me wonder what I can learn if I just spent all that time (+250hrs) shoring up my Calculus and then fully learn to put it to my Physics and Chem know how IRL. At least It stays with me afterwards. Don't get me wrong I love this game and enjoy it when things are working in a way, just not when things like this crop up where you build and rebuild, load and reload and do it all over again to no avail.

Since people can get it to work I assume it's just -really- nitpicky and maybe needs to be refined in a more common sense way, if it was just a bug because we're still in Beta and of course there is still plenty of room for improvement that would be different. I didn't even realize until looking things up more a few days ago that a Dupe needed to toggle it, sure it says something about a dupe being needed under "requested flow  volume" but doors and "toggle" stuff usually has a red symbol with a joystick like thing on it, seems like that should be there or something like that to more clearly indicate

 

Once again sorry if that was long and ranty, I  just needed to get my thoughts out and wanted to be clear about what I've tried thus far, happy playing and hope someone has something I haven't tried!

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Ok, first off, I think your main problem is trying to make sense of ONI physics with real life physics, and that's just not a good idea (on some/most aspects). Some concessions have to be made to ensure complexity doesn't affect gameplay. Coding and processor power limitations etc..

Second, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here. But if the issue is that there are 10kg packets of water after the valve, it would seem that that depends on where the water goes to off the right side of the screen, if that doesn't output enough, the line will back up, causing it to fill up.

Also, T junctions like the one prior to the valve act unlike real life too, 1 packet will go up and the next will go towards the valve, essentially creating 5kg/s of throughput on both lines assuming neither is backed up.

Bridges are your friend, you can do a lot of things with these. Primarily getting packets to do what you want them to do. Bridge input is prioritized on the line it draws from, bridge output yields to the line it feeds.

T-junctions are bad.

Finally, the picture shows it's only pushing through 1666.7 g/s even though the max is 6000 g/s, simply because there is no room. Point being, the liquid valve is working fine, doing exactly what it is supposed to.

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Thanks for your input everyone. I'll keep that in mind about the T-junctions and trying more water bridges Ichikai, thanks for the advice. 

So ya I admit, I can see some points to having to have concessions to IRL stuff to making game mechanics work, I actually joked to myself a while back that there is almost an ONI version of the wave particle duality experiment (I forget the name of it off hand) in that if you move your cursor around a tile you can find different gases hanging out at different pressures and temps but once the tile is clicked it snaps into "one gas, one pressure, one temp" hehe (not that I have a problem with that, I see how that simplifies things a lot and hasn't affected my game play) just a fun observation I thought. ^_^

But I guess I just expected things to be a little more loose in treating the gas like blocks that seek diffuseness to the area that has the least pressure (as the gases/liquids do outside of the vents). Like being able to have pumps push blocks of gas towards each other in opposite directions and only block if they meet in the middle and didn't have plenty of vents in between to let it out, so they push each other from a distance right when they suck into the pipe and seems to make things messy as nothing flows (wish I had a picture. It was a while back on my computer that sorta died so ya, maybe i'll do a test lab sometime. It was also a few updates ago as I sorta just let that one go (as mentioned apparently there are nice things you can do with bridges to organize things that I admit I should play around with more.

But then I also had weird instances where vents were clogging up while passing right over ones where there was a near vacuum (I.e. my crop room, and pushing ALL the way past every other vent to go all the way to the end, to the one vent up in my slime biome airlock that is totally at 1.9-2Kg per tile and keeps blocking while passing over the room I really need it to go to. That was a few updates ago and I simply did away with that style of doing things as it admittedly got over complicated  (I imagined having multiple pumps around my base sucking gas from algae deoxydizers and then after filtering out whatever (H2, CO2, etc) have it go to a sort of "centralized ventilation system" assuming the blocks of gas would try and find the vent leading to the room with the lesser oxygen/gas. But then everything just jammed up if any pipes had bridges (way apart) facing towards each other (flow wise). With the passing right by rooms with an almost vacuum It may have been a path calculation thing from what I've read (the gas had to pass by the low pressure room vent on it's way to the room it went to with higher pressure, so it wasn't a junction thing). But that's kinda something I just "did away with" as I admit it looks easier to just make a pump connect to it's own pipe system and just keep it simple and keep track of the bridge paths (still need to play it with more at junctions).

But as far as the liquid valve issue and the average flow rate I was wondering if that may be the problem so I made sure to look at some examples online carefully first. But the reason the flow is short like that I think is because the Electrolyzers are mostly at max gas pressure and so they turn off often and then the water stops flowing, I made sure to follow it on video. So since things turn off and aren't flowing often I think the average flow rate is less than my requested volume.

But when it does flow through it clearly shows 10Kg Before and -AFTER- passing the valve, with the same sized "liquid in a pipe" icon. When I've seen it work on other peoples bases the water/liquid icon is clearly smaller on the other side and has the right number that is set regardless of the average flow volume which can be dictated by the amount of time it's actually using water and water is flowing in the pipe (max gas pressure = no water flow = lowers avg flow rate through the valve), but is large iconed after the outtake and is still 10Kg after and 10Kg before the valve so thats what I was watching for and frustrated by. Since each of them run at 1Kg/s I assume realistically I should set it to 1Kg/s and see 1Kg blobs of water coming outright? (Look at my output waste pipe as reference, the carbon skimmer is outputing 1Kg/s of polluted water as it's waste and it's small iconed and says '1Kg of polluted water" as I expect if I hover over it. I set it to 6Kg/s since it was working on 10Kg/s (just to see it work, since it works at 10Kg/s) and I have 6 x 1Kg/s machines on that "circuit". All of the water after the valve leading to all the machines says 10Kg per tile as if I never had a valve on at all

 

This is an example pic of what I'm looking for that I found online. notice how the water icon is smaller on the end side than the intake side. When you look at mine they are the same sized. Anyhow thanks for your input and hopefully i'll get it working soon, I thought I tried it with tearing out the T-bridge out and with the valve right above the pump (to test vertically) and it still didn't work, but maybe tearing that out somehow will fix the path calcuation and somehow fix it. I forget exactly what I tried with that part. That branch is going to another valve going to a carbon skimmer but it's become useless anyhow as my current skimmer is doing fine (except that it's eating 10Kg/s when running hence why I want the valve to work so bad :?). I'll probably go back a few cycles in my save file and try a simpler set up from scratch and see if it works (first time using electrolyzers and getting them "online" so I kinda made a mess of things in a way I would undo if I could, H2 all over my base, etc lol.).

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Oh and to be clear off to the side of the screen on my first pic is just a few more electrolyzers and one carbon skimmer hanging out near the water on a platform to catch the CO2, maybe this picture shows things a bit more normal and clear. 

Screenshot (267).png

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TL;DR

Sorry, but there's a few hundred sentences here where about 4 would have done, so I can only guess at the problem.  Valves just limit the maximum flow at the point of the valve by constricting that one pipe segment.  It does not change the size of the following pipes magically. The water volume inside the rest of the pipe is what the blue dots represent.  So if something on the other end is consuming all the water, it can only consume it at a rate that the valve is set at.  Not pumping and full blue dots on the other end means you're full and things are already consuming less than what you set the valve at.


If you're having the problem that your water after the valve is become full, you need to set that rate lower.  A lot lower.  Move that slider so it is mostly on the left.  You won't notice anything at first, because there is still water clogged in the pipes that is yet to be consumed.  Eventually it will run out, though.  Move more and more left accordingly.  Or rather, start at 0 until all the water is gone and gradually move it up.

 

That being said, you usually don't want to use valves like this.  One of the few uses I've seen is limiting the output of a natural geyser to it's average ouput, there's a few more but they're usually late game and more easily done with sensors.  Chances are whatever you're trying to do is easier done in another way.

 

NOTE: If your valve says "request flow rate at X" like it does on your bottom screenshot, this means a dupe has not set it yet and the valve is going to use the last setting, so you'll need to wait until a dupe sets it.  Click on subpriority n the bottom right, and make sufre it shows a red 9.  If a dupe never toggles it, it's probably unreachable.

 

Edit: Regarding a comment on gases not behaving as IRL.  They generally work how you would expect regarding temperature and pressure (well not like PV=nRT realism, but transferring heat via mass and specific heat, and equalizing density somewhat as you would expect) but in super super super, just absolutely crazy soup like extreme slow-mo.  

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Just because the pipe leading towards the skimmer contains 10 kg water packets, does not mean the skimmer consumes 10 kg/s, buildings should never consume more than advertised.

Turn off the liquid pump. Let the system clear out for a bit, then turn it back on and monitor it. It'll behave much like you'd expect it to, but unless you got some kind of overflow, the pipe will inevitably back up, because it's sending more than gets used.

Electrolyzers are finicky and tend to overpressurize often (there are many threads concerning optimizing them), so they rarely consume 1kg/s of water. The skimmer requires CO2 to function, no CO2 around for a second and it doesn't consume water, eventually backing up the pipe as well.

In this case the valve sends 6 kg/s forward, the first packet will go up or down, the following in the other direction, so in essence you're pumping 3 kg/s towards the skimmer, and 3kg/s to the electrolyzers.
Of course the pipe towards the skimmer will fill rapidly and then more packets will end up going to the electrolyzers.

A full pipe is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a buffer that'll keep your stuff working even if for some reason the pump fails functioning. But it does not cause consumers to use more than they ought to.

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Awesome Ichikai thanks, i'll give that a try. That all "clicks"and sounds like what my problem is. It probably just needs to reset itself after clearing out and as you mentioned it probably wouldn't hurt to make a few more on the line so it won't back up since there is still a 4Kg/s excess. I was just using 6Kg/s to test it and was just expecting to see 6kg/s packets emerge almost immediately when maybe it needed more time to clear out first before resetting or something.

I was also wondering what would happen to the remainder if it weren't all being used and where it would add to if I kept it at 6 x 1Kg/s so thanks for clearing that up for me.

Thanks Greep for the comment on the valves with regard to the geysers as I can see that being handy at some point if I want to keep an area from taking on too much heated water, manage showers, toilets, etc.

But the other stuff I think you missed what I was saying, by "blocks" I was meaning in the ventilation tab, not "tiles" which are in rooms with gas diffusing around based on densites and such. Also about the valve I was talking about expecting the water/liquid icon being smaller at the other end of the valve (like a small gas pocket moving in a pipe per second is a small block while a large gas pocket moving per second is a large block, polluted water at 1kg/s is small in it's pipe, not the pipes themselves. But either way I can understand getting a bit lost in all that. I know I tend to write a lot sometimes.

But also wanted to elaborate it because it's the kinda thing I think should fit within ONI's already existing physics system. The idea as gist as I can think without missing key detail was this. 

(WARNING: IT GETS LONGER FROM HERE, JUST EXPLAINING THE SIDE NOTE MORE CLEARLY, NOT CURRENTLY REALLY WORRIED ABOUT IT THOUGH. Just my "2 Cents as a new poster" lol. )

I wanted to have two blocks of gas push towards each other in a pipe if two pumps had bridges pointing towards each other from far away. The idea being they would meet vents along the pipe and have a chance to escape, I didn't expect them to "repel from a distance" and instantly jam the pipe despite no gas blocks ("Empty"=Vacuum) between them for many segments. The blocks would just oscillate back and forth on direction of flow like it couldn't make up it's mind. I expected it to "flow until meeting" which would only then block the system (opposing flow, with no where to go), assuming I didn't put vents in between.). it just may be that they didn't try this one way and didn't realize something was happening, or had other reasons processing wise or something.

The second bigger issue I had which seemed more like maybe a pathway calculation thing was basically if I had -a really long stretch of pipe- leading to vents in series and also some branches along the way. The blocks of gas would pass right over vents with rooms that I really needed O2 to get to (bedrooms, bathrooms, farm rooms, etc) and instead of going into these rooms which had a near vacuum in them it would flow all the way to the "end" vent at the top. Ultimately they were filling up a tiny space that was seldom used (I think It was an H2 airlock up in a caustic biome, I said slime last time, whoops). But as I said that was only when it was on some very long stretch of piping with lots of vents and only had one pump on it (A bad idea in far hindsight)

My guess was I overestimated the pump's capacity at the time (didn't really math things out back then) and when you have one pump connected to a long system with many branches it just kinda "picks a lane" and would just flow in the direction that was longest and not considered a branch (occasionally acting as if It would go down a junction or vent only to bounce back up the way they all went. It was also i'm pretty sure on my ancient laptop that was never meant to handle a game this intense so I dunno if it was overloaded or something, that sucker would get hot playing this lol. Maybe i'll test it again now that I have a newer machine and if I still have an issue maybe do that as a side post later on.

But I guess since i'm new it's just my 2 cents I've been kinda wanting to say I guess as I remember back then reading some people asking about similar issues and people being frustrated trying to sort it out. Then from there I just kinda accepted to think "parallel universe with alternate physics and mechanics, just go with it" ;), then watched some tutorials to get the feel and went from there to get the basic idea. 

Anyhow, that went on longer than I probably should have, I hope that was somehow more clear / better formatted on the ventilation part. I'll test things out with my valve this weekend more but ya I'm pretty sure what Ichikai mentioned should fix the issue, sounds exactly like what i'm experiencing/ trying to get to. I just need to reset the pipes by letting it all flow out, make my electrolyzer room bigger, dial the flow back maybe under 1Kg/s (and maybe not place electrolyzers under my farm, stupid idea heat wise in hindsight since heated H2 comes out haha.)

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