Metal Refinery not Functioning

[Heckbringer]

I've been unable to get metal refineries to work correctly in my games, and I'm not sure if it's because of a bug or if I'm doing something wrong.

In two separate games, tested on both the Cosmic Upgrade and the Expressive Upgrade, the metal refinery produces a single piece of refined metal for me, and then never produces anything else without intervention. If I empty the storage of the refinery, it will eventually produce one more item and then get back into the stuck state.

I believe I have all of my bases covered wrt proper refinery setup:

1. The temperature of the coolant is low.
2. I have sufficient power, with two large batteries fully charged on the same electrical circuit as the refinery.
3. I have two electrical engineer dupes that should prioritize the work.
4. All of the needed raw materials are in the refinery.

Here are screenshots of the setup in case they reveal that I've done something tremendously, terribly wrong that I'm unaware of. I'm also attaching a copy of my save (using the Expressive Upgrade Beta) if you want to witness this material tragedy firsthand.

Anyone know what the issue is? Without refined metal, these colonies are doomed to be abandoned and forgotten, dupes left to their own devices.

Upgrade Test.sav

[blash365]

The problem seems to be that the pipe is blocked.

Your refinery cant release its coolant while the aquatuner cant release its active batch. It's a deadlock.

Try to keep one tile of your piping free, otherwise it will stop working once the flow halts.

 

This also correlates with your "working scenarios". For the first piece the coolant exit pipe is free, so the coolant can be exchanged, afterwards it is blocked (or most likely not fully exchanged yet).

If you empty the storage, the coolant inside the building will be removed, that allows the aquatuner/pump to send more liquid down the pipe to the refinery (which in turn will allow the aquatuner to process some of the coolant coming down from the refinery. 

If you want an easy setup: fill the refinery once, then remove the pump, then refine away. If it still stops, try to add more buffer-piping or even a buffer basin for your coolant.

And just as a heads-up. The 14° cooling from the aquatuner might not be enough to save you from overheating the refinery or even vaporizing your coolant.

You might want to send coolant to the refinery when it has been cooled down to a certain temperature.

If you are still early in the game, i'd just leave the aquatuner for the moment (it is very power-hungry). Just use polluted water coming from your toilets as coolant and send it to your water sieve afterwards. The sieve will reset the temperature to 40°C, which effectively cools down your water. The downside is that the refinery will emit polluted oxygen while it is filled.

Later you might want to use petroleum for that matter.

[Nativel]

 

Ok here is your fixed save file.

Fixed test.sav

[Sevio]

@Heckbringer For an early game build and to avoid creating a lot of polluted oxygen, you can build your refinery above a fresh water tank. Have a pump inside that supplies your metal refinery and dump the hot water back into the tank. Run all of your polluted water through a valve (set it just high enough that the pipe doesn't back up, for my early colony 500 g/s worked fine) and then a snaking pipe inside the tank to cool the water back down, then send that hot polluted water to your water sieve. You can use your first bits of refined metal to make some of the polluted water pipes into radiant pipes for even better cooling.

Caveat: Refining steel is likely to vaporize your water if it's above ~40 C and break your pipes so you'll need active cooling for that.

[Heckbringer]

Thanks for the assistance all! My refinery now works. My takeaways:

1. Pumping new coolant nonstop into the coolant loop was the biggest problem, causing the refinery to be unable to empty used coolant and thus stop.
2. I'm wasting a lot of power using a thermo aquatuner where I could instead be using some radiant pipes paired with tempshift plates for passive heat exchange.
3. My base, as a whole, is a target rich environment for improvements.

With regards to #3, what were your main thoughts about the base @Nativel? I let a lot of the base languish while I was working on the metal refinery, but here are the problems I'm aware of:

1. Hydrogen, hydrogen everywhere. You want to go dancing? Hope you can breath hydrogen. Want to observe the local flora/fauna? What better way than in their natural habitat of a hydrogen atmosphere? I need to do a better job capturing the hydrogen from my electrolyzers and pumping it to hydrogen generators.
2. Lots of unused space. I carved out rooms in sizes of 64 or 96 so that they could eventually be categorized as appropriate rooms, but didn't necessarily use them afterward. Sometimes I filled them up with compactors just to try to get rid of all the loose debris from mining.
3. My duplicants are about as well cared for as your average refugee - stressed out, injured, and overwhelming my medical facilities. This would probably be better if I were providing them with atmo suits before sending them into hazardous conditions, but I have the utmost confidence in their tenacity.

Thanks again for the help, everyone!