Best way to save a bit of water

[Mullematsch]

Alright, so I am running a 16 duplicant colony, currently 1200 cycles in and I am consistently using a bit more water than I am getting. 

If you want to take a look at my colony and my water situation, I did a world tour at 1000 cycles and nothing has really changed. 

 

I am feeding my duplicants a mix of berry sludge (if sleet wheat is available), BBQ (if meat/Pincha Peppernut is available) and gristle berries to cover the rest. My oxygen is getting supplied exclusively from electrolyzers. 

I can probably survive until the next update by just pumping melted down ice into my water tank but I was curious what the best way to tackle the issue would be:

 

I have two polluted oxygen vents but I am using them for ranching Pufts and would like to keep it that way.

The obvious solution is obviously getting the majority of oxygen of Morbs and only running one electrolyzer to power my three Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifiers.

That is probably what I will end up doing, but let's say I would completely switch over to BBQ and Pepper Bread. I should have enough meat (if not, I add more ranches) to do that and I am also getting a decent amount of sleet wheat but I do not really have a lof of Pincha Peppernut. 

If I stop growing bristle berries and switch over to meat/sleet wheat +Pincha Peppernut will that save me some water?

Sorry for making you guys do the math but after a quick look at the wiki values, I think it would overall save a bit of water... 

Also I have ~16 Slicksters at all times, if I build an oil boiler for the oil of them, I guess that would also get me a bit of water. 

Off topic here, but all my Slicksters are sitting on top of mesh tails and producing like no oil at all. I heard it is a bug and I should have the slicksters sit in a bit of oil to fix that, can anyone confirm that? 

 

Appreciate it! 

 

 

[Djoums]

If you're getting a surplus of slime from your pufts, you could also consider running algae distillers. They give a fair amount of pwater.

[Mullematsch]

3 minutes ago, Djoums said:

If you're getting a surplus of slime from your pufts, you could also consider running algae distillers. They give a fair amount of pwater.

I have six to eight Pufts at all times. Currently, I am just letting the slime build up because if everything goes downhill, I could have my dups eat mushrooms for a while.

Will probably use it in the algae distiller eventually, cannot imagine that giving me a lot of water though .

 

 

[Yoma_Nosme]

You could/should feed them mushrooms. They are the same quality as gristle berries if I'm not wrong and don't consume water. 

 

[Sevio]

@Mullematsch Use slime to Grow Dusk Caps now, cook them into fried mushroom and feed those to your dupes instead of gristle berries, they are both +1. You can last a very long time on slime since it has the highest amount of calories per kg of input resource. That will save you far more water than turning the slime into water to feed gristle berries.

If you're not getting enough pincha pepper from wild sources and you can't afford to grow enough with polluted water, you could start cracking eggs and making omelettes to supplement or even replace fried mushrooms.

[Mullematsch]

19 minutes ago, Sevio said:

@Mullematsch Use slime to Grow Dusk Caps now, cook them into fried mushroom and feed those to your dupes instead of gristle berries, they are both +1. You can last a very long time on slime since it has the highest amount of calories per kg of input resource. That will save you far more water than turning the slime into water to feed gristle berries.

If you're not getting enough pincha pepper from wild sources and you can't afford to grow enough with polluted water, you could start cracking eggs and making omelettes to supplement or even replace fried mushrooms.

I will start doing that. Totally forgot about omelettes as well. I have a lot of critters everywhere so that might really help as well. 

What would be amazing to have is a smart fridge so we could disable farms and so on depending on how much food we got stored up. 

[Saturnus]

You have oil wells? Cook the oil to petrol instead of using refineries, use petrol gens and get a nice surplus of water.

[Gurgel]

I am a bit surprised you have this problem. Are you using both cold steam vents efficiently? If you do not cool the steam immediately, they will go into overpressure frequently and give you a lot less water. Also, maybe you are using way more water for farming than you should....

[fishpear]

Try the resource-free drecko arm. It does not cost resource but labor.

You can delete your bristle berry farm and use this. It saves a lot water.

The picture below illustrates the structure. The capacity of this size (you plant every box flower) is about 150 dreckos.

[Carnis]

Boil oil, eat slickster omeletts.

[Mullematsch]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

You have oil wells? Cook the oil to petrol instead of using refineries, use petrol gens and get a nice surplus of water.

Yeah, I have three actually. I wanted to play around with them soon (first space base) but I do not want to rely on them since I have never used them before.

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

I am a bit surprised you have this problem. Are you using both cold steam vents efficiently? If you do not cool the steam immediately, they will go into overpressure frequently and give you a lot less water. Also, maybe you are using way more water for farming than you should....

I have two kinda crappy cool steam vents and one cool slush geyser which is also not that great.

Yes, I think I am using them efficiently:

 

 

45 minutes ago, fishpear said:

Try the resource-free drecko arm. It does not cost resource but labor.

You can delete your bristle berry farm and use this. It saves a lot water.

The picture below illustrates the structure. The capacity of this size (you plant every box flower) is about 150 dreckos.

Dreckos are the only critter I have not played around with jet.

So in your design here, you let them eat your plants and kill them for meat or what purpose do the Dreckos have in there? 

[fishpear]

55 minutes ago, Mullematsch said:

So in your design here, you let them eat your plants and kill them for meat or what purpose do the Dreckos have in there? 

 

For meat, which saves the water for bristle berry. In fact, bristle berry is the largest water consumer.

It can produce huge amount of egg shell as well. 

I actually has a hatch farm under the drecko farm. They together produce a lot of egg shell. I managed to protect the entire sky with steel in 700 cycle

[KittenIsAGeek]

I use a variety of methods to conserve water. 

1. Plumbed bathrooms.  This is a water-positive system.  Every time your dupes use a toilet (vs an outhouse), you get extra polluted water.
2. Do NOT make mushbars or mealwood bars (I can't remember their specific name right off).  They use WAY too much water.
3. Don't farm sleetwheat or bristleblooms.  Farm mushrooms until you can get some sort of ranching set up -- or even to augment the ranches.
4. Reduce your dependency on electrolyzers.  You can use deoderizers to convert PO2 to O2 for the cost of sand.  As a temporary fix (limited resources) you can use a distiller to turn slime into algae (for oxygen) and polluted water.  
5. If you can boil oil into petroleum or NG, then you can produce extra polluted water.  Using the petroleum refinery isn't water positive, but straight boiling is.

 

[Mullematsch]

4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I am a bit surprised you have this problem. Are you using both cold steam vents efficiently? If you do not cool the steam immediately, they will go into overpressure frequently and give you a lot less water. Also, maybe you are using way more water for farming than you should....

ACTUALLY, I AM FEELING VERY STUPID NOW.

So I guess you could say I was using the cool vents the proper way. Cooling them down and pumping out the hot polluted water and so on.

I just made one tiny mistake...

I had my pump pumping out the polluted water at above 115C, obviously thinking I pump it just before it would boil. That is ignoring the fact that it is too hot for steam to condense.

So yeah, I totally have been wasting a **** ton of water (probably) since hundreds of cycles!

 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

23 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I use a variety of methods to conserve water. 

1. Plumbed bathrooms.  This is a water-positive system.  Every time your dupes use a toilet (vs an outhouse), you get extra polluted water.
2. Do NOT make mushbars or mealwood bars (I can't remember their specific name right off).  They use WAY too much water.
3. Don't farm sleetwheat or bristleblooms.  Farm mushrooms until you can get some sort of ranching set up -- or even to augment the ranches.
4. Reduce your dependency on electrolyzers.  You can use deoderizers to convert PO2 to O2 for the cost of sand.  As a temporary fix (limited resources) you can use a distiller to turn slime into algae (for oxygen) and polluted water.  
5. If you can boil oil into petroleum or NG, then you can produce extra polluted water.  Using the petroleum refinery isn't water positive, but straight boiling is.

 

Good tips, a lot of stuff I am already doing or working on.

Just wanted to point out. Next to my water tank, there is this cool aquatuner setup I am using.

That is totally your design which has been working amazing for me in several designs. Good stuff fellow duplicant! 

[Gurgel]

22 hours ago, Mullematsch said:

ACTUALLY, I AM FEELING VERY STUPID NOW.

So I guess you could say I was using the cool vents the proper way. Cooling them down and pumping out the hot polluted water and so on.

I just made one tiny mistake...

I had my pump pumping out the polluted water at above 115C, obviously thinking I pump it just before it would boil. That is ignoring the fact that it is too hot for steam to condense.

So yeah, I totally have been wasting a **** ton of water (probably) since hundreds of cycles!

Don't worry. The reason I suggested this was I made some similar mistake myself and spent quite some time fixing it.

The way I noticed is that I was getting wayyyy to little water from the vents.

I now have several tiles of water cooled by an ATEN under each hot steam vent and diamond heat-shift plates directly into that cooled water from tile-level 3 on the vent. No overpressure anymore. Probably a bit wasteful, but so far I always had plenty of cooling power. Here is an example. The radiant pipe is a hydrogen loop from the ATEN. The tank fills up pretty much to the level shown (2 tiles from vent bottom) when at least a bit under-used. The cooling pipes above the water may be redundant, but I am too lazy to find out.

 

 

[Whispershade]

On 8/21/2018 at 9:17 AM, Mullematsch said:

What would be amazing to have is a smart fridge so we could disable farms and so on depending on how much food we got stored up.

Refrigerators are already smart. I had built a system that would only pull food when there was space in external storage and avoid leaving food on the conveyor line. It did require two refrigerators. One to signal it wasn't at capacity and the other to handle the rest of the conveyor line backlog.

[Mullematsch]

20 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Don't worry. The reason I suggested this was I made some similar mistake myself and spent quite some time fixing it.

The way I noticed is that I was getting wayyyy to little water from the vents.

I now have several tiles of water cooled by an ATEN under each hot steam vent and diamond heat-shift plates directly into that cooled water from tile-level 3 on the vent. No overpressure anymore. Probably a bit wasteful, but so far I always had plenty of cooling power. Here is an example. The radiant pipe is a hydrogen loop from the ATEN. The tank fills up pretty much to the level shown (2 tiles from vent bottom) when at least a bit under-used. The cooling pipes above the water may be redundant, but I am too lazy to find out.

 

 

Maybe a bit overkill but if it works, nothing wrong with it.

I am still using this design (just had to change my temperature automation): 

On 8/21/2018 at 6:06 PM, Mullematsch said:

 

18 hours ago, Whispershade said:

Refrigerators are already smart. I had built a system that would only pull food when there was space in external storage and avoid leaving food on the conveyor line. It did require two refrigerators. One to signal it wasn't at capacity and the other to handle the rest of the conveyor line backlog.

I was under the impression that the automation signal for refrigerators only enables/disables them not outputs the amount stored. Never tested it though... 

[Saturnus]

6 minutes ago, Mullematsch said:

I was under the impression that the automation signal for refrigerators only enables/disables them not outputs the amount stored. Never tested it though... 

No. Refrigerators have an automation output.It simply tells if it's full or not (depending on the max amount you have set it store). Haven't tested it lately if Klei have fixed the bug that made it impossible to fill once you have one item with a fractional amount of calories. If not, then they're still pretty useless for automation. 

[Mullematsch]

2 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

No. Refrigerators have an automation output.It simply tells if it's full or not (depending on the max amount you have set it store). Haven't tested it lately if Klei have fixed the bug that made it impossible to fill once you have one item with a fractional amount of calories. If not, then they're still pretty useless for automation. 

Oh, so it does work like a smart storage compactor. That is really nice actually.

Should be mean if you only have auto-sweepers taking & delivering food thus always inserting/removing the same amount that you can easily disable a farm if you have <x food. 

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, Mullematsch said:

Oh, so it does work like a smart storage compactor. That is really nice actually.

Should be mean if you only have auto-sweepers taking & delivering food thus always inserting/removing the same amount that you can easily disable a farm if you have <x food. 

I've said it before but if smart storages and fridges were just "smart" in the exact same way smart batteries were there'd be no problem using them at all. That means having a minimum and maximum slider based on the maximum storage capacity for hysteresis control.