melter The Meteor Magmaficator Mk 2 - Regolith to igneous rock and steam power!

[Sevio]

Hey everyone, I'm back with a followup to the Meteor Magmaficator, my first Regolith melter. The first one had some unsolved problems such as how to deal with the hot rock that comes out and a small chance of melting the input before it got to the magma chamber. I think I've solved those problems with this new version now. Yes it works in the Expressive upgrade!

The Meteor Magmaficator Mk 2's goal is to melt regolith efficiently with whatever heat source you wish to use and output the igneous rock as cool as possible. It can melt up to 2 kg/s of regolith on default settings but could handle up to 4 kg/s with some valve changes. Because melting regolith creates a lot of additional heat energy, it also drives up to two steam turbines.

Your heat source can be the metal refinery, the glass forge or even the kiln, which is fully automated by conveyors. You can also pipe through natural magma. (used for preheating but can also serve as your main heat source)

Here's what it looks like, you can also download the save if you'd like to have a poke around and see how it works in detail.

As usual, overlays in the spoiler:

Spoiler

So how does it work?

Regolith enters the heat exchanger from the bottom left and snakes its way up through the iron plates where it gets preheated. Then it enters a receptacle, waiting to be put into the storage compactors to be melted. The storage compactors are limited to 20 kg each so that the melting happens quickly when there is enough heat.

In the melting chamber, below the magma is a diamond hot plate. Hot liquids go through here and heat up the hot plate enough to melt the regolith into magma. There are two pipes going through the hot plate, one for molten glass from the glass forge (and for natural magma) which goes on to the heat exchanger to eventually be dumped. The other pipe is for molten copper "coolant" from the metal refinery which gives off heat here and then goes back to the refinery.

When the regolith melts into magma, it is pumped by a liquid pump into the heat exchanger where it preheats the regolith. The valves limit the flow of magma to 500 g/s, which prevents the magma from solidifying inside the pipes even below its normal freezing point. (they could handle up to 1000 g/s without breaking the pipes)

After the heat exchanger, the magma pipes turn right and go through a heat buffer that drives the turbines. The left turbine will always run if it can, the right turbine will run if the buffer heats up to to 250 C and if the buffer is in danger of overheating, an emergency heat dump activates. The emergency heat dump forces the heat buffer doors closed, dumping all heat into the steam chambers. At the same time, the doors under the steam turbines will open, making the turbines consume steam at 5 times the normal rate. This is enough to keep the temperature under 300 C even during heavy use. The magma that comes out of the vents will always be under 300 C thanks to the turbines and instantly solidify.

Survival build notes:

Spoiler

You will need to have researched almost all of the late game technologies and you will also need a plentiful supply of abyssalite, metal, refined iron, gold, some tungsten, 800 kg of molten copper and 30 kg of naphtha.

• This build requires a large vacuum area to work! It's advisable to prepare with a liquid lock and exosuits and clear the area from the inside out to avoid having to pump the room vacuum later.
• Insulated Tiles are abyssalite, but normal abyssalite tiles will work just as well in most cases. I would keep the tiles in and around the melting chamber, the top of the heat exchanger and below the metal refinery and the glass forge as insulated though.
• The orange Insulated Liquid Pipes are abyssalite, this is required to avoid pipe breakage.
• Window tiles are diamond.
• Metal Tiles in the heat exchanger are iron, in the steam turbines they are gold.
• Yellow Radiant Liquid Pipes in the melting chamber are tungsten, in the heat exchanger they are iron and in the steam turbine they are gold.
• Airlock doors in the steam turbine area are wolframite.
• Tempshift plates are mostly granite, but there is one tungsten tempshift plate behind the normal compactor in the melting chamber. The bottom 2 rows of tempshift plates in the steam turbine heat buffer are diamond to help spread heat faster but that should not be required.
• Take note of the 30 kg naphtha tile in the plumbing screen! You could do this by having 3 pipes full of naphtha on and above that tile, then deconstructing them.
• Take note of the 50 kg of molten copper tile in the plumbing screen! You don't need to pump molten copper to get it there, just build 2 refined copper power wires above that tile, deconstruct them and leave the copper there, it will melt once the machine has heated up.
• Steam turbines can be built while pressurized with 2 kg of oxygen, then closed up and they will self pressurize when the right amount of steam is let in after the heat buffer has heated up. Use the atmo switches to keep the liquid shutoffs disabled until the heat buffer has heated up to about 300 C since it will be hard to get excess steam out if you let too much water in.
• The 800 kg molten copper for the metal refinery can be created by building a copper tempshift plate next to natural magma like this:
• Once the machine is built, it has to be heated up by pumping natural magma through it for several cycles. You can bridge it onto the glass forge's output pipe. You have to get the diamond melting plate to at least copper's melting point (1083.9 C) this way before you can start using the metal refinery to heat it up further. You can also start using the glass forge during the preheating phase but I wouldn't recommend trying to heat it up with only the glass forge.

Known flaws:

• For some reason the pump deletes heat from the magma tile below it when it is pumping. If the magma pump backs up during heavy use and the magma tile below it gets too much magma in it, this can cause the magma to solidify. If that happens, add igneous rock to the normal compactor's filter and disable regolith storage until it has re-melted all of the igneous rock. You can set the 4 valves above the heat exchanger to 1000 g/s to make this much less likely to happen.
• If you order too many recipes in the kiln or set it to continuous, the kiln will end up with too many resources stored that will never get used. I've also seen those resources turn into tiles and displace the molten copper but I'm not sure what causes that, it may be related to completing recipes instantly with instant build mode. Ordering just one recipe at a time should be safe.

Meteor Magmaficator Mk2.sav

[_Q_]

So you change a lot of useless sand into a lot of useless rocks, and some power.

OK.

[leoroy]

35 minutes ago, _Q_ said:

So you change a lot of useless sand into a lot of useless rocks, and some power.

OK.

*He's turning a lot of useless "sand" into a lot of usefull rock to feed your hatches

[_Q_]

Just now, leoroy said:

*He's turning a lot of useless "sand" into a lot of usefull rock to feed your hatches

I guess he is keeping around 5000 hatches then.

Really nothing that simple volcano can't do.

I guess he is creating that to make impression that this constant regolith shower from the sky is not an issue, but it is.

I got more than angry at this game today. Whole space biome is in dire need of total rework, its not acceptable in its current state.

Game slows with time cause of to many objects - lets add endless streams of sand from heaven.

There is no logic in that, not to mention that machines will overheat around 75 + 50 from gold, or even more if you can make it from refined metals, but mushrooms will only melt at over 9000 degrees. Most of the stuff is one time use - like you make those exsosuits and maybe some clothes and then good luck in storing all this endless stream of reed fiber somewhere, and its eternal as it melts in the same temperature as mushrooms and many other things, but then there is that fun sand coming in so you have something more interesting to deal with. Hauling sand simulator - cool space edition.

 

[Sevio]

I mainly created this because:

• I have no volcano on my map!
• I want to be able to feed hatches with rock, sustainably.
• I want to be able to refine metal and have the heat produced do something useful.

[_Q_]

I don't have metal volcano on the current map, but using space to get more metal is not viable solution either.

There is more than enough rock to feed your hatches for ages on the map anyway, you wont be playing on the map for long, unless you are into slide shows, then by all means have fun.

[blash365]

@Sevio:

I have no volcano either, but i fail to see this concept working (it obviously does, but i need some more explaining).

You say we can use any heat source. I can see it working with the glass forge, because it obviously generates a temperature of sufficiently high degrees, but how do you achieve to get 1.410°C with a kiln or a refinery without them overheating?

And how much "on-time" do you need on your heat-sources to achieve the cooking temperature?

I also dont see a closed system on your screenshot. What happens with all the excess heat from your heat exchange pipes? Does it still work when building another abysalite wall around the heat exchanger?

How do you further cool down the 300°C output?

How do you pump magma with your pump? Is it some exploit with that naphta tile?

How did you get the copper into the refinery loop? Is it that wire-thing you are writing about (nvm found that 50kg copper tile)? How does the copper get into the pipe?

Do the steam generators produce the same energy when running with only 1 base tile? How do you keep the turbine correctly pressurized? Is it solely the geometry of the room?

How do you keep the auto-sweepers from melting?

Does the plant manage to be energy-neutral or energy-positive (disregarding the missing cooling for the moment)?

And why are you using ordinary temp sensors instead of pipe temp sensors?

[Nativel]

Yes it's working, not sure what for, I place stone hatches farm near by - well they eating this exploitus rocks normally.

 

[Sevio]

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

You say we can use any heat source. I can see it working with the glass forge, because it obviously generates a temperature of sufficiently high degrees, but how do you achieve to get 1.410°C with a kiln or a refinery without them overheating?

The kiln has no overheat temperature, so it will just dump its running heat straight into the melting chamber (via the tile of molten copper in front of it). The refinery and glass forge don't overheat because they are in vacuum and don't exchange temperature with their contents. The metal refinery has molten copper inside that can reach 2000 degrees C when you refine steel.

The waste heat from the refinery and glass forge is cooled by a bit of petroleum sitting at the edges of the building that connects to the igneous rock tiles below.

The contents of the refinery and glass forge do exchange temperature with the tile below the middle of the building, so that's why those tiles are insulated abyssalite and have no petroleum on them.

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

And how much "on-time" do you need on your heat-sources to achieve the cooking temperature?

You can't get the system to melting temperature with the metal refinery because the molten copper would break the pipes. You need to heat it up first with an external heat source. Pumping a few tiles (3-4) of natural magma from the bottom of the world through the glass forge's pipe should get it at least hot enough so you can start using the metal refinery. Or you could keep pumping natural magma and use that as your heat source too.

Once it is heated up, it is extremely efficient and doesn't need much on-time from your heat sources. For example in a test of the Mk 1 version, using 4 tons of sand to make 1 ton of glass produces enough heat to melt 6.8 tons of regolith into magma/igneous rock, which you can crush into more sand etc. The glass forge produces a tiny amount of heat compared to the refinery so refining steel will produce even more.

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

I also dont see a closed system on your screenshot. What happens with all the excess heat from your heat exchange pipes? Does it still work when building another abysalite wall around the heat exchanger?

The magma coming out of the melting chamber into the pipes is right at (just slightly below) the freezing point of magma, so the heat exchanger will trend towards that temperature but not go over it. All of the excess heat that isn't dumped into the heat exchanger and the regolith goes to the steam turbines, they are very powerful at removing heat. When building stuff like this in debug, I work in large vacuum rooms to give me plenty of freedom to experiment, you could build a wall around the heat exchanger with insulated abyssalite or even normal igneous rock if you left a vacuum tile between the hot parts and the wall. That would also let you have ladders there for your dupes to get around while building.

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

How do you further cool down the 300°C output?

I didn't consider that to be within scope as cooling it further would involve aquatuners or wheezeworts, however 300 C rock in large stacks doesn't give off all that much heat. I've also seen people feed their hatches rocks straight from a volcano as a heat deletion system so there's that option as well.

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

How do you pump magma with your pump? Is it some exploit with that naphta tile?

The naphtha lets the pump know there is liquid for it to pump, but it will also pump the magma below it. So we loop the naphtha back with a liquid filter and send the magma on to the heat exchanger. As for why that works:

 

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

How did you get the copper into the refinery loop?

See the survival build notes in the OP on how to make molten copper. once you have that, you simply use the same technique as you would to pump magma to get the copper into pipes. They have to be insulated abyssalite or the copper will solidify, of course.

 

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Do the steam generators produce the same energy when running with only 1 base tile? How do you keep the turbine correctly pressurized? Is it solely the geometry of the room?

Yes they produce the same energy with only 1 tile but only use 1/5th the steam. The turbine runs because there is a layer of oxygen at the top fighting with the steam for the top row of tiles, which satisfies the steam turbine's requirement for lower pressure at the top than the bottom.

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

How do you keep the auto-sweepers from melting?

The auto sweeper and loader are dipped in petroleum which connects to the outside wall and so can be cooled by contact with your base. Note that their "base" tile (where the game considers their hot resources stored) must be in vacuum and the tile below that must be vacuum or abyssalite for this to work.

 

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Does the plant manage to be energy-neutral or energy-positive (disregarding the missing cooling for the moment)?

Massively power positive. I haven't timed it exactly but my impression is one refinement of steel can run the two turbines full blast for several cycles. If you did that long enough, the emergency heat dump will kick in and make the turbines waste some heat to avoid overheating though.

52 minutes ago, blash365 said:

And why are you using ordinary temp sensors instead of pipe temp sensors?

Pipe sensors are still a bit new to me so I rarely think of them, but in this case the turbine control system needs to know the temperature of the heat buffer, and there isn't always magma going through the pipes to measure so it makes sense to use normal temp sensors.

[blash365]

1 hour ago, Sevio said:

The waste heat from the refinery and glass forge is cooled by a bit of petroleum sitting at the edges of the building that connects to the igneous rock tiles below.

And where does the heat go to? To the turbine chamber via the wires?

Quote

The contents of the refinery and glass forge do exchange temperature with the tile below the middle of the building, so that's why those tiles are insulated abyssalite and have no petroleum on them.

So you are saying that a glass forge with input material 500°C sand and output of 1400°C glass does only heat up from its "production temperature" and indirectly through the centre tile? That's good to know.

1 hour ago, Sevio said:

The auto sweeper and loader are dipped in petroleum which connects to the outside wall and so can be cooled by contact with your base. Note that their "base" tile (where the game considers their hot resources stored) must be in vacuum and the tile below that must be vacuum or abyssalite for this to work.

So if i were to build a closed system, i'd have to connect that "cooling" outside wall with my turbine chamber as well?

Quote

and there isn't always magma going through the pipes to measure so it makes sense to use normal temp sensors.

If i saw it correctly the pipe sensor will retain the last scanned temperature, so that might be glitchy in your scenario, indeed.

 

Thanks for all the answers. I like the build. It uses a few exploits, which i would be happy to avoid, but i guess in the current state of the game, they are necessary.

• pumping magma/copper with naphta trick
• using gas layer to trick steam turbine pressure
• turbine input reduction
• auto-sweeper liquid trick

Still neat though.

[AzeTheGreat]

30 minutes ago, blash365 said:

• using gas layer to trick steam turbine pressure
• turbine input reduction
• auto-sweeper liquid trick

• You can use a door pump for the steam turbine.
• You can run it without, but then you'd get 1/5th the power.
• You can use an automation setup like I did here to reduce the exploitiness of this.

They're basically all just power saving tricks.

[Sevio]

8 hours ago, blash365 said:

And where does the heat go to? To the turbine chamber via the wires?

The power wires don't conduct heat, in fact despite the heavi-watt bridges the turbine chambers are thermally insulated from the glass forge/refinery room by vacuum and abyssalite tiles. The waste heat from the metal refinery and glass forge in survival would be conducted to the left where you would put a liquid lock and an igneous rock wall to your base. That lone tempshift plate in the glass forge room is there to conduct the waste heat to the right without touching the heavy-watt plate. In fact you should build a normal igneous rock wall around pretty much the entire dupe-accessible area and above the melting chamber to conduct the waste heat to your base.

9 hours ago, blash365 said:

So if i were to build a closed system, i'd have to connect that "cooling" outside wall with my turbine chamber as well?

No, your turbine chamber should be completely insulated from the outside by vacuum or abyssalite. Magma heat comes in via the pipes and is converted to power by the turbines. They delete the heat when they do that.

9 hours ago, blash365 said:

Thanks for all the answers. I like the build. It uses a few exploits, which i would be happy to avoid, but i guess in the current state of the game, they are necessary.

The turbine pressure trick and input reduction trick are not necessary for the build to work - the turbines are mostly there to delete heat but since this build is so full of tricks I thought I'd go all the way here and keep the size down. It's certainly doable to run steam turbines with door compressors and no input reduction instead. You might need only one turbine to deal with all the heat in that case.

The naphtha magma pumping trick is essential for the build to work, no way around that. Although IMHO it is silly that pumps have such a low overheat temperature and I would prefer if they just allowed pumps to work in any temperature that doesn't melt them, or at least make their overheat temperature just below their melting point.

And dipping the auto sweepers in petroleum is essential for the build to work sustainably since that's the only way to cool an autosweeper/loader that is handling extremely hot items. If there is an exploit here, it's not the petroleum - it is in contact with the building and so will conduct its heat away like it should. What really makes it work is that the resources being handled or stored by a building don't exchange heat with the buildings that contain them. As far as the game is concerned, they are considered "debris" that occupies the building's "base" tile. For an auto sweeper that is the tile where the sweeper arm is attached, for the metal refinery and glass forge it is the central bottom tile. For a loader, the "base" tile is the tile with the conveyor port.

The "debris" will obey the same temperature exchange rules as real debris, it will interact only with the tile it's on (vacuum) and with the tile below it (insulated abyssalite or vacuum) and therefore not change temperature.

[blash365]

8 hours ago, Sevio said:

The power wires don't conduct heat, in fact despite the heavi-watt bridges the turbine chambers are thermally insulated from the glass forge/refinery room by vacuum and abyssalite tiles. The waste heat from the metal refinery and glass forge in survival would be conducted to the left where you would put a liquid lock and an igneous rock wall to your base. That lone tempshift plate in the glass forge room is there to conduct the waste heat to the right without touching the heavy-watt plate. In fact you should build a normal igneous rock wall around pretty much the entire dupe-accessible area and above the melting chamber to conduct the waste heat to your base.

Thanks for all the answers Sevio. Would you think that i can replace the petroleum on the floor near the forge/refinery with tempshift plates?

[Sevio]

2 hours ago, blash365 said:

Thanks for all the answers Sevio. Would you think that i can replace the petroleum on the floor near the forge/refinery with tempshift plates?

Happy to explain all you want me to. Tempshift plates interact with elements in the world (that is, solid material/tiles, liquids and gases) but not with any other building, not even each other. So you will need at least one drop of petroleum in contact with the glass forge, the metal refinery and any other machine that self-heats but is in vacuum to be able to cool it. After that the heat could be conducted via normal tiles and accelerated with tempshift plates in contact with the tiles. If you have questions about how waste heat travels out of a particular area, I could sketch something in Paint to help make it clearer.

So if you're building this in survival, don't be afraid to make a petroleum mess when you pump some in with a liquid shutoff, you can just mop up the parts that shouldn't have it such as the insulated abyssalite tiles below refinery/glass forge and the heavi-watt wire bridges.

[blash365]

I do plan to build it in survival eventually, but currently i might not have the materials to do so. (struggling to get my solar panel area cooled at the moment).

Do you by any chance have a layout for a door-pump steam turbine posted somewhere?

[Sevio]

@blash365 I'm afraid I've never built a door pump! I know I've seen them around while scouring the forums but I couldn't find any examples in the threads about steam turbines I've visited before. I believe there is quite some automation involved in closing the doors in the right order.

[AzeTheGreat]

24 minutes ago, blash365 said:

I do plan to build it in survival eventually, but currently i might not have the materials to do so. (struggling to get my solar panel area cooled at the moment).

Do you by any chance have a layout for a door-pump steam turbine posted somewhere?

You can look at my design that I used in this build.  The automation for the door pump is pretty simple.

[blash365]

1 hour ago, AzeTheGreat said:

You can look at my design that I used in this build.  The automation for the door pump is pretty simple.

Oh, i didnt even notice the doors up there. Thanks for pointing it out again.

[Sevio]

Took me some time to get my colony to a place where I thought I could do this but now I've started building the Magmaficator in my survival game! Set aside a huge area, vacuuming it out takes a while due to all the slime, polluted water and hydrogen pockets that were in the way. So far so good, I hope I don't miss anything important while building the pipework and power infrastructure.

[Scorpio King]

So small question, how come magma does not solidify at the end of the pipe inside of it, i mean stuff can break abyss pipes no problem.

Edit: so the 500g limist is the key?

[Sevio]

5 minutes ago, Scorpio King said:

So small question, how come magma does not solidify at the end of the pipe inside of it, i mean stuff can break abyss pipes no problem.

Pipes don't take damage from below-freezing liquids if the packets are 1000 g or below, so that's why this thing can cool the magma all the way down to steam turbine temperatures before ejecting it as rock.

That's also why I had to make sure liquids can't bunch up once they start going through the heat exchanger.

[Scorpio King]

A beast of a machine! Thanks for sharing Sevio.

[Sevio]

A progress update:

All of the area is now vacuumed out and most of the liquid pipework and machinery for the melting chamber is already in place.

I realized that even with 60 tons of abyssalite to start, I would not have anywhere near enough to build the heat exchanger as it is in debug mode. And that's not counting the huge amount of abyssalite I will still need for an insulated abyssalite pipeline to the magma biome for pumping magma and molten copper. So I went with the next best thing, for the pipe segments that don't need to conduct I used normal ceramic pipes that won't melt and have a lower heat capacity than igneous rock. They can be used instead of abyssalite from the outputs of the 4 valves all the way down to the liquid vents.

I also changed the heavi-watt wire connections a bit because my heavi-watt grid is going to connect from below, so I will run the wires down through the left turbine.

My glass refinery turbine that I built in this same savegame earlier has already seen plenty of use while making all the metal that went into the project so far, it's now over 400 degrees C and has refined the crude oil it started with into petroleum. I could spin up its turbine anytime but I'm in no need of power yet:

This is where I plan to pump the magma from to heat up the machine, most of it is already vacuum but there's around 520 kg of natural gas in that pocket that I still need to use up before I can clear it out entirely.

I'm also considering to use diamond window tiles in the heat exchanger instead of iron just to save on the amount of refined iron I have to make, it depends on how much I will have spare after putting in the diamond tempshift plates in the hot plate under the turbine.

[psusi]

Wait... so the steam exiting the turbine at the top fights with a little oxygen and finally just falls back down below the turbine, where it is reheated and fed back into the turbine again?

 

[Sevio]

Just now, psusi said:

Wait... so the steam exiting the turbine at the top fights with a little oxygen and finally just falls back down below the turbine, where it is reheated and fed back into the turbine again?

 

Yeah, the reason it works is that the fighting between the two gases causes the turbine to see low pressure in those tiles (they keep alternating between < 1 kg steam and oxygen), which means the 5 kg pressure below the turbine or so is enough for the turbine to run.