cooling Watt and Temperature interaction.

[PhailRaptor]

38 minutes ago, erso said:

Does Wheezewort not overheat above 95°C? And is steam below 95°C not liquid? Was it a joke or did you really find a way that Wheezewort and Steam interact meaningfully?

When you first plant a Wheezewort, it's the same as a fixed temp output building.  It will always be 20 C when planted.  So you can have it living in Steam of whatever temperature you want.  When it becomes Stifled (and stops working) you simply uproot it, then replant it.  It will be 20 C again, deleting any heat that was stored within it previously to make it overheat and Stifle.  It will then go back to working on the Steam, until it eventually Stifles again.  Repeat the process.

There are 2 issues with this, however.  There have been a few comments indicating that if a Wheezewort is Stifled when the game loads, the plant will immediately die and not produce a seed when you load.  So you will lose Wheezeworts over time.  The second issue is that Sweeper Arms cannot perform the Uproot task on Flower Pots, meaning you will have to manually order Dupes to uproot every time.  Sweeper Arms will still plant them, however.  But it overall complicates the ability to Automate the process.

[martosss]

1 minute ago, erso said:

Does Wheezewort not overheat above 95°C? And is steam below 95°C not liquid? Was it a joke or did you really find a way that Wheezewort and Steam interact meaningfully?

It's not a joke, the Wheezewort has 400kg mass. That means it heats up slowly, so it will cool steam with its mass + its sucking effect.

When building it initially, it has 20° temperature, so it can heat up by 75° until it overheats. The problem is that you'll probably cool down the steam mainly with the mass => steam will turn to water => pressure will drop => wheezie's cooling effect won't work efficiently.

So to make this viable, you need to

• keep the steam pressure high by supplying more steam or heating up the water so it evaporates;
• cool down  the wheezewort or replant it if it dies(I'd consider replanting an exploit, though, but it's still a possible strategy, although it requires some micro management).

This might work for a volcano or a cool steam vent - 4kg of steam at 100° is really nice, since the plant will quickly condense the steam, not allowing the steam vent to overpressure. In the volcano case you can use water to cool gold and if the water evaporates - use a wheezewort to condense it back. That way you won't have a pressurized room of 5kg steam @150° waiting for those doors to open and flood everything around( I have this in my base and I didn't think of using a wheezewort until now ).

Again, I'm not sure how the cooling will work out and automating this completely isn't possible, as @PhailRaptor mentioned , but I'm just throwing it as an idea - steam is the most efficient thing to cool down, if you can do it long enough. OP was asking for wattage and wheezeworts, steam as an alternative might make sense.