Volcanoes should not produce refined metals

[Technoincubus]

Refinement is quite dead now even in latest patch and steel requirement for some buildings

[FenrirZeroZero]

The simpler solutuin would be that vulcanos spout out "metal slush" that turns into ore on a far lower temp (to prevent remelting to refined ore). One way conversion like Plastic -> Napta. 

Basically the metal is mixed with enough igneus stone that its simply not refined....

[Technoincubus]

They could produce some kind of polluted liquid metal that will soldify into unrefined metal. Any soldution will help as a long as it will remove the current state of things where all refinement building are no longer needed when you dig a volcanoe and establish a cooling facility.

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, Technoincubus said:

the current state of things where all refinement building are no longer needed when you dig a volcanoe and establish a cooling facility.

Why is that in any way a bad thing?

[Technoincubus]

15 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Why is that in any way a bad thing?

Because, once again, entire branch of industrial buildings becomes obsolete and no longer needed

[BlueLance]

40 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Why is that in any way a bad thing?

 

24 minutes ago, Technoincubus said:

Because, once again, entire branch of industrial buildings becomes obsolete and no longer needed

The sad part is I entirely agree with this, if we go with metal refining I go Hatch > Stone Hatch > Smooth Hatch > Volcano if any. I completely leave the granulator and refinery (Which I have never used) 

Saying that, I now need to use it because steel is needed for rockets...

[scaldinghotcarl]

On 7/10/2018 at 6:17 AM, JonnyMonroe said:

I can imagine a base not needing steel but to do so means you're ignoring solar power, and possibly all surface access, as well as limiting what you can do with sweepers and other machinery in hot environments.

You mean ignoring the surface where there isn't anything of benefit for all the work that it takes to get up there and maintain?
I haven't needed steel since I build a row of bunker tiles across the sky.

[Sasza22]

7 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

They could produce some kind of polluted liquid metal that will soldify into unrefined metal.

I think this is possible in the game but would require the polluted metal to be a special kind of element with the unstable tag that solidifies instantly after leaving the volcano and leaves it at a much lower temperature than the current molten metals. This would result in metal volcanoes producing less heat and some designs basing on them being no longer usable.

[fredhp]

Actually i just cheat for raw metal.

 

[Rainbowdesign]

There should be both types of vulcanos.

[Yunru]

12 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

Because, once again, entire branch of industrial buildings becomes obsolete and no longer needed

Right, which requires mega builds and engaging with the map. Again, not seeing the downside here.

[TLW]

My particular frustration is that late game you can outright run out of ore. Plenty of refined, just no ore.

This happens through a number of mechanisms:

• Exosuits being lost / destroyed.
• Buildings getting autorepaired.
• Ore being eaten by e.g. hatches
• Ore being inadvertantly refined.
• Ore being inadvertantly heated to melting.

You can say "but you shouldn't do that"... but again, all of this is outright irreversible. And ultimately I am only human. I mean... my day job wouldn't exist if people didn't make mistakes.

Some possible solutions:

• Split refined metal and unrefined metal's molten states. If you wanted to be fancy about it you could even make it so if you heated unrefined molten metal enough it turns into refined metal.
• Give a recipe that takes refined metal and turns it back into ore.
• Have something else that produces ore.
  • Have a hatch that eats refined metal and poops ore?
• Have refined metal substitute for unrefined metal.
• Ignore it and focus on the many other similar frustrations (e.g. autorepair outright deleting mass.)

[Technoincubus]

When you discover a metal volcanoe

Rock Granulator:

Simplest refining, could be kept for lime production, metals not needed as there are billions of tonnes of regolith and you need no sand.

Metal Refinery:

No longer needed. You get refined metal from volcanoe and all you need is some minimum infrastructure to keep cooling and transporting going. No need to deal with cooling liquids and tremendous power management.

Shooth Hatches.

No need to breed them as you will need steady supply of unrefined metal, which is a limited resource. And you still have more refined metal from volcanoe than from a full ranch of smooth hatches.

Three aspects are no longer needed.

[Yunru]

3 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

When you discover a metal volcanoe

Rock Granulator:

Simplest refining, could be kept for lime production, metals not needed as there are billions of tonnes of regolith and you need no sand.

Metal Refinery:

No longer needed. You get refined metal from volcanoe and all you need is some minimum infrastructure to keep cooling and transporting going. No need to deal with cooling liquids and tremendous power management.

Shooth Hatches.

No need to breed them as you will need steady supply of unrefined metal, which is a limited resource. And you still have more refined metal from volcanoe than from a full ranch of smooth hatches.

Three aspects are no longer needed.

Rock Granulator: Not needed since ever, you can already skip straight to Refinery.

Metal Refinery: "Minimum infrastructure". Okay then, show yours. Show us your "minimum infrastructure" heat sink that handles 2000+ temperatures.

Smooth Hatches: Were never needed.

 

What's next, remove heat because it makes the Water Purifier irrelevant?

[tzionut]

Quote

Rock Granulator: Not needed since ever, you can already skip straight to Refinery.

Needed for crushing egg shell to lime...

Excess igneous rock from the melted regolith to sand, sand to glass, glass to sand... a way to reduce the excess regolith

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, tzionut said:

Needed for crushing egg shell to lime...

Excess igneous rock from the melted regolith to sand, sand to glass, glass to sand... a way to reduce the excess regolith

Yes but both of those aren't related to the processing of metals (with the exception of steel requiring lime). Which is what the entire thread is about.

[he77789]

Just reverse what the smooth hatch eats and poops.

[Sasza22]

3 minutes ago, he77789 said:

Just reverse what the smooth hatch eats and poops.

But this makes no sense. The hatch is supposed to be a living refinery so that you don`t hve to build infrastructure for the smelter or deal with the power requirement or excess heat. Reversing the hatch works for lategame but makes it useless early when you got limited amounts of refined metal.

So lets look at the game this way. You gather raw resources from the map. You refine them for use in your base and fially build your infrastructure out of them. Resources otherwise unrenewable like water, crude oil or chlorine are available through geysers, vents and oil wells. But sitll it sometimes needs processing. Now metal volcanoes give us processed metals so we can use it for high tech straight away (only processing needed is cooling). This removes the reason to refine it and raises the need for unrefined metal that suddenly becomes unrenewable.

So what we actually need is a source of unrefined metal. to keep our bases running forever. We could keep the metal volcanoes but also get an ore volcano type that produces unrefined metal for late game use.

[Nitroturtle]

One solution would be to add alternatives for items that require ore to build.  For example, currently, if you need an airflow or mesh tile it can ONLY be made from ore.  I'm at 1400 cycles and struggling to find enough ore to continue building, however, I have 50-60 tons of both refined gold and iron.  I've been going through and upgrading all my wiring to conductive, but things like mesh and airflow tiles don't have an alternative refined metal option.  Also, I'm not sure who thought copper ore should be the only option for exosuits.  What are you supposed to do if you refine all the copper in the starting area?

[KittenIsAGeek]

One of the really fun aspects of this game, IMHO, is that you can use a variety of methods to achieve the same thing.  All of the methods have pros/cons.  The pro for volcanoes is that your refined metals is no longer a limited resource.  The pro for the granulator is that you can start making refined metals fairly early in your base development.  The pro for hatches is that you don't need to waste power (or gain heat) to produce refined metals.

Its like with the ventilation system.  You can use the gas filter to separate gasses. Or you can build a system using element sensors and gas shutoff valves for a bit of complexity and a large reduction in power.. or you can set up an entirely manual gas separation system that doesn't use any power at all.  You don't HAVE to use one method over another -- all the options are available for you to use in whatever way you feel is right.  There is no "wrong" way to do something -- regardless of how many people claim you're "exploiting the system."

[Technoincubus]

On 05.09.2018 at 4:54 PM, he77789 said:

Just reverse what the smooth hatch eats and poops.

That would still be worthless. Refined metals come at rather small quantities and even with several volcanoes you won't get to feed one full ranch of 8 hatches that way

[SakuraKoi]

Well, perhaps I am a bit late to the party but it is not like I like parties to begin with~

Seriously, just to get some facts straight:

• Metal Volcanoes did always produce on average 140-200kg of Refined Metal per Cycle i.e two "free" Metal Refinery uses.
• To normally cool volcanic 200kg down to a reasonable temperature, let's say 100°C (without exploits, i.e building with hot matter), Copper needs to cool by 163.702.000 DTU (164mDTU), Iron by 217.854.800 DTU (218mDTU) and gold (which is finite still) 65.170.800 (65mDTU)
• To produce copper, iron and gold one respectively heats water by 19.2°C, 32.1°C and 6.3°C, which translates into (and when doubled i.e 800kg coolant) into Copper: 64.189.440 DTU (64mDTU), Iron: 107.316.720 DTU (107mW) and Gold: 21.062.160 DTU (21mDTU)

So, what advantage does a Refinery have? One can produce much more in a cycle and it requires much less cooling (half if not a third), the price for that is manual operation, material and energy which is rarely a problem anyway

and let's add new facts:

• ore (apart from Gold and Wolframite, so actually only Iron and Copper) is also infinite now since a rocky asteroid is bound to spawn at 30k km.
• many more applications for refined metals now

plus, as extra, my personal opinion:

• One should want a lot of metal tiles, especially gold ones in one's basis, no 2 tiles per cycle ain't gonna cut it.

[Technoincubus]

Ore is infinite super-late game. And using refinery to make steel ONLY is extremely bad design situation