Make Hatches eat regolith

[Technoincubus]

Regolith is a problem. People are making whole installations to destroy it. To compact it. There's just not enough sinks for this trash. At least allow us to make hatches or stone hatches eat it. Or make Space hatches who will eat regolith only - it will still be worth breeding.

[BlueLance]

13 minutes ago, Technoincubus said:

Regolith is a problem. People are making whole installations to destroy it. To compact it. There's just not enough sinks for this trash. At least allow us to make hatches or stone hatches eat it. Or make Space hatches who will eat regolith only - it will still be worth breeding.

I was actually thinking of just melting it all and using the magma generated for fun and then feeding the igneous rock to hatches

[_midnightrain_]

I would love to have a space subtype of hatches which eat regolith, it would be more than ok if they only put out 25% as coal or even 10%... But I guess finding a good balance to make this little trash-destroyer not utterly overpowered could be difficult.

[BlueLance]

22 minutes ago, _midnightrain_ said:

I would love to have a space subtype of hatches which eat regolith, it would be more than ok if they only put out 25% as coal or even 10%... But I guess finding a good balance to make this little trash-destroyer not utterly overpowered could be difficult.

I am going to make a lava tube of regolith which reached the surface and melts all other regolith! it is my dream!

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

I have not been able to breach the surface until last weekend. You know, what all the hype going on about the rocketry upgrade, I thought it was finally time. The first thing I did was reaching the Gravitas structure and turn it into a space centre. Meteors had already struck inside apparently with regolith all around. A minor inconvience I thought, just get the breaches patched, pump in oxygen and set up a couple compactors to get rid of the regolith on the ground.

Yeah... That became a huge inconvience. I'll post a picture later, but basically the regolith made the structure sit around 180 degrees. I put in 18(!) wheeze worts, wondered why it still did not cool down significantly until I checked the regolith quantities. Hundreds of thousands of kgs of regolith. I am putting my exosuit engineers on getting it cleared, but even with their 1600kg carry capacity and 4 of them it is a monumental task.

We really need something to clear the regolith better. It's simply a disaster. A critter would do.

[Saturnus]

As I see it, it's the rate and mass of meteors that is completely disproportional to anything else in the game. I roughly calculated at one point that if you converted all the regolith into magma and have the resulting igneous rock eaten by hatches you'd need somewhere around 400 hatches. And in that case nevermind your asteroid heating up, the more pressing concern would be keeping your CPU from melting.

Currently there is only one good solution to the meteor and regolith problem. Ignore it. Build a row of solar panels across the top of the map and you can completely ignore the meteors and regolith. Rockets fly right through without a problem and nothing gets through the solar panel shield.

[SamLogan]

1 hour ago, Technoincubus said:

Regolith is a problem.

Nope, it isn't. You can transform it in Clay with Deoxydizers as well we have :

Regolith -> Deoxydizer -> Clay -> Hatch.

To be sure Regolith is deliver to yor deoxydizer use the auto sweaper.

For one Coal Generator :

18 Deoxydizers + 18 morbs + 9 Hatchs + 1,4 tonnes Regolith / cycle.

An example :

[AndreyKl]

55 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Yeah... That became a huge inconvience. I'll post a picture later, but basically the regolith made the structure sit around 180 degrees. I put in 18(!) wheeze worts, wondered why it still did not cool down significantly until I checked the regolith quantities. Hundreds of thousands of kgs of regolith. I am putting my exosuit engineers on getting it cleared, but even with their 1600kg carry capacity and 4 of them it is a monumental task.

There are ways around this issue.

Regolith comes around 300C, so I cool it with steam turbine as start) 226C is still hot but far easier to manage (for example it won't overheat autosweeper now) And I get a fair bit of power as result so further processing is possible. Besides you always can add a 'vacuum layer' between your roof and regolith to keep everything cool (it is far easier to lift regolith by couple tiles then move it).

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

8 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

There are ways around this issue.

Regolith comes around 300C, so I cool it with steam turbine as start) 226C is still hot but far easier to manage (for example it won't overheat autosweeper now) And I get a fair bit of power as result so further processing is possible. Besides you always can add a 'vacuum layer' between your roof and regolith to keep everything cool.

That requires a whole lot of planning and getting water up there, inside the gravitas center. I did create a vacuum layer first and afterwards added abyssalite insulated tiles. The biggest issue are the chunks of regolith that made their way inside the center, that's what is heating up everything. Even if I cool them down, I'd still need to get rid of them of because of the decor penalty.

I just have to swallow the pill. I should be able to get rid of 40-50k of regolith each cycle.

[BlueLance]

Instead of having dupes carry it wouldn't it be simpler to to have a sweeper arm do it? That way it wil constantly pick up and deposit tonnes and tonnes until there is none, then rinse and repeat... That was my plan at least I was going to ship all of it into a makeshift "Lava Tube" and let it bubble to the surface XD It would look and be super awesome if it actually works!

[AndreyKl]

1 minute ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

That requires a whole lot of planning and getting water up there, inside the gravitas center. I did create a vacuum layer first and afterwards added abyssalite insulated tiles. The biggest issue are the chunks of regolith that made their way inside the center. Even if I cool them down, I'd still need to get rid lf them of because of the decor penalty.

Not inside, a pipe with oil as coolant and small turbine-cooling facility nearby does fine (but since you already cooled regolith below 226 it is no longer relevant), later it can be used as power plant by running same pipe through bunker-layer. And from my point of view this game is about planning)

4 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Instead of having dupes carry it wouldn't it be simpler to to have a sweeper arm do it?

+1 to sweeper idea. The biggest issue with sweepers is that they don't work long in vacuum (steel ones might work long enough to clear the gravitas structure) and that you can't simply drop regolith automatically, so unless you have a receptacle in 'infinite' lava you will have to have a sweeper, receptacle and compactors outside of facility, reset compactor's filters from time to time (and probably have a door under compactor to drop the regolith from sweeper's reach).

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

27 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Instead of having dupes carry it wouldn't it be simpler to to have a sweeper arm do it? That way it wil constantly pick up and deposit tonnes and tonnes until there is none, then rinse and repeat... That was my plan at least I was going to ship all of it into a makeshift "Lava Tube" and let it bubble to the surface XD It would look and be super awesome if it actually works!

I did think about it (and still am for that matter). The issue is that it is too slow, being limited at 20kg per rail tile. An exosuit engineer can carry 1600kg. Since I parked the compactors very near the gravitas centre, they don't waste enough time to make sweepers more effective, even if considering downtime on sleeping and waiting at the duplicants checkpoints, as well as travel time.

I could definitely set it up in tangent though. I will need to set up more power in the area first.

[BlueLance]

13 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

+1 to sweeper idea. The biggest issue with sweepers is that they don't work long in vacuum (steel ones might work long enough to clear the gravitas structure) and that you can't simply drop regolith automatically, so unless you have a receptacle in 'infinite' lava you will have to have a sweeper, receptacle and compactors outside of facility, reset compactor's filters from time to time (and probably have a door under compactor to drop the regolith from sweeper's reach).

For my plan I was going to have a railing and containers all the way down it, the shipping will fill them up and melt appropriately.

14 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

I did think about it (and still am for that matter). The issue is that it is too slow, being limited at 20kg per rail tile. An exosuit engineer can carry 1600kg. Since I parked the compactors very near the gravitas centre, they don't waste enough time to make sweepers more effective, even if considering downtime on sleeping and waiting at the duplicants checkpoints, as well as travel time.

I could definitely set it up in tangent though. I will need to set up more power in the area first.

That's true, but it also depends on dupe numbers, etc. If you need other stuff done then you might end up just being better off with a sweeper arm

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

So I promised pictures of the misery regolith is causing me. Here we go.

The last image basically shows you what a mess this. The list of regolith goes on and on, far exceeding my screen range! Luckily I only have of such cells to deal with, but it's such huge pile up. I honestly don't know why this happened. A lot of the debris already has been cleared, but the remaining debris is still able to completely nullify and actually heat up 19 wheeze worts. 19 wheeze worts, let that sink in.

I'm now going to set up more power and an autosweeper.rail

[Rainbowdesign]

To what would you want to transform regolith? The hatches in my mod can eat regolith and transform it to coal. Just use the improvedanimalsmod.dll from the hotterthanlava mod

[Tobruk]

11 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

Regolith is a problem. People are making whole installations to destroy it. To compact it. There's just not enough sinks for this trash. At least allow us to make hatches or stone hatches eat it. Or make Space hatches who will eat regolith only - it will still be worth breeding.

What about a super giant hatch (4x4)? As you said, it would eat regolith and have VERY poor convert ratio, but each bite of that monster would get rid of at least a tonne of regolith. What do you think?

[QuQuasar]

The reason regolith arrives in such quantities in comparison to other resources is because it's purpose isn't to be a resource at all: it's there to serve as a natural shield against other meteor types, and to make traversing the surface harder (due to the changing contours and heat).

Allowing it to be consumed by normal hatches won't help. There's too much of it to even make a dent. A special breed of hatch with a massive appetite ("Black Hole Hatch", anyone?), would be required.

The solution I think Klei should implement would be to change the drop quantities when you dig regolith. Delete 95% or more of it's mass when you dig it up, instead of the usual 50%. You'd get to keep it's natural shield properties while bringing it in line with other resource quantities and allowing Klei to find a use for it without it being insanely unbalanced.

At least until people work out how to melt the entire surface instead of digging it up.

[Nitroturtle]

After taming space and building a solar plant, I was curious how much my FPS was being impacted by all of the tons of regolith.  I enabled debug mode and cleared a bunch of the excess and was amazed that my 1000+ cycle base went back to 200ish cycle FPS.  While I'm not usually a fan of "cheats" I'm also not going to play the game in slideshow mode, so I saved it, turned off debug and have just continued to play.  I'm assuming they don't realize the impact it has on game performance.  I can't believe have haven't reduced the amount of regolith for this reason alone.

[_midnightrain_]

@Nitroturtle Not to mention the time on loading or saving a colony... usually I barely notice the autosave until my map gets clocked by regolith... ATM my colony has around 25000 tons of regolith and thats only the stuff my dupes can reach... if im calculating all that unreachable regoltih and all that stuff I never cared to mine... I guess I have more than 100000 tons of regolith...

Edit:

@Tobruk This "Super-Hatch" schould also be heat-proof and able to dig blocks of regolith... Maybe a special breed our dupes "create" with genes from space or so...

[Djoums]

1 hour ago, QuQuasar said:

The solution I think Klei should implement would be to change the drop quantities when you dig regolith. Delete 95% or more of it's mass when you dig it up, instead of the usual 50%

That would not be enough, unless you count regolith destroyed by meteors as being dug too. You get thousands of tons of it without digging any yourself.

[Nitroturtle]

58 minutes ago, _midnightrain_ said:

@Nitroturtle Not to mention the time on loading or saving a colony... usually I barely notice the autosave until my map gets clocked by regolith... ATM my colony has around 25000 tons of regolith and thats only the stuff my dupes can reach... if im calculating all that unreachable regoltih and all that stuff I never cared to mine... I guess I have more than 100000 tons of regolith...

I have to imagine that everything, even unreachable, is being calculated.  I mean, that stuff still transfers heat and all.  The only thing that might possibly not be calculated is stuff still hidden.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

7 hours ago, Tobruk said:

What about a super giant hatch (4x4)? As you said, it would eat regolith and have VERY poor convert ratio, but each bite of that monster would get rid of at least a tonne of regolith. What do you think?

Oh please let that be a thing! Please Klei! All heil Emperor Hatch!

[Tobruk]

@ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy

 

YOUR SURFACE HAS NEVER BEEN THAT SPOTLESS CLEAN! THE SAVIOUR OF CPU IS UPON US

[Saturnus]

9 hours ago, Tobruk said:

What about a super giant hatch (4x4)? As you said, it would eat regolith and have VERY poor convert ratio, but each bite of that monster would get rid of at least a tonne of regolith. What do you think?

If it was 10 tons in a bite we'd only need 12-16 of them to keep up. 

[BlueLance]

3 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

If it was 10 tons in a bite we'd only need 12-16 of them to keep up. 

12-16, imagine the meat and omelettes you would get from those bad boys!