Heating the CO2 for a molten slickster farm?

[riwenna]

I've been running a mostly ranching based colony (because grooming is so cool :P), plus keeping a tight eye on my gasses (saving the exces nat gas to use during dormancy, using excess hydrogen from oxygen generation for extra power, coal from hatches for some coal gens, automation to stop it working for most of the time, dreckos for plastic, and eating mainly omelettes)... and saving my CO2 since quite early on it the game, for around 1000 cycles now. Let's just say I have a lot of it.

So... I think it's time for me to move on to slicksters. Seems like the molten ones are just so much better, what with outputting petroleum and whatnot. I have all the CO2 in the world, and a CO2 geyser if I eventually need more. It's just much too cold for the molten slicksters (my stored CO2 is around 20-35 degrees and is actually settling in pretty layers), I just need to figure out a way to heat it up consistently to 100+ degrees that the molten slicksters require to be cosy. I'm not pressed to use the petroleum they output right now but I am keen on avoiding the cost of eventually processing oil into petroleum. Any suggestions? Even better, pictures?

I've been digging the forums and wracking my brain over it, but even tho I've seen the superiority of molten slickster praised often, never found any concrete suggestions.

Some ideas I've mulled over:
- Using the output of the Glass plant. However, from what I've read the heat output is not very high taking into account the abundance of power required, plus it requires duplicant operation.
- Building a hot room at the top made of bunker tiles, have the meteor showers heat up the room to super hot. Would require a lot of steel, and piping the CO2 far, but doable.
- Using volcanoes? Not much experience with them so ideas and suggestions would be nice. Not sure how to get over the volcano dormancy periods (maybe that's where the Glass plant comes in?)

[mcat_corr]

Radiant gas pipes past a steam geyser, or through oil? Basically anywhere that's hot.

[0xFADE]

Molten slicksters are born at like 100c. You don’t really have to worry about the co2 temp unless it was near freezing or something. 

[Yoma_Nosme]

Not totally sure if the spaceheater can go up to 100°C+ or if he's capped at some weird temp but I would go for that solution. Cheapest solution... Or the volcano...

[riwenna]

At @0xFADE when you say they are born at 100c, are you suggesting to build a farm down near the magma where I originally find them, or that their core temp won't drop enough if I feed them with 30c CO2? I suspect the former, since I suspect their temperature would drop quite quickly.

@Yoma_NosmeSpace heater is so simple to try out and sounds consistent enough, and can be always turned off if I suplement it by a volcano or geyser heating. I'll give that a go and hook other systems to it eventually

[Coolthulhu]

4 minutes ago, riwenna said:

At @0xFADE when you say they are born at 100c, are you suggesting to build a farm down near the magma where I originally find them, or that their core temp won't drop enough if I feed them with 30c CO2? I suspect the former, since I suspect their temperature would drop quite quickly.

Creatures that hatch from eggs do not "inherit" any temperature data. Molten slicksters hatch really hot.

As long as your slicksters can't "bathe" in any liquid and your farm contains only CO2, chlorine and natgas, even 40C gas should be safe. They will quickly die if your farm gets flooded or if you let them walk on non-mesh tiles with cold liquids on them, though.

[riwenna]

Hm, interesting. I guess that's because of low thermal conductivity of those gasses. I have an eye on a molten slickster / egg, so if I grab it and hatch it... I can get started right away if I don't need to heat up my CO2 since their temperature won't drop enough in their lifetime... that's really really neat.

Since you mention bathing in liquids... does that mean I shouldn't make the two slickester farms one above the other since they will... excrete the petroleum over one another? Or rather, is the petroleum they excrete at the temperature of the CO2 they breathe, or is it at their body temp?

[Neotuck]

You only need to heat up normal slicksters to get them to lay moltan eggs.  Once you have moltan slicksters you don't need to heat up the CO2 any more as they generate their own heat.

Make a temporary ranch connected to the lava biome till you get an egg then breed them in a normal ranch

[riwenna]

No need for a temp farm, I have an eye a molten slickster already in the lava biome, I just need to wait for it to lay and egg, get the egg and hatch it in my incubator. And I'll breed them from there.

Anybody know at which temperature the petroleum they excrete is? CO2 input temp or their body temp or something else? (Aka, it fits me having farms stacked vertically, will them dripping their petroleum over each other lower their body temp or will it be fine?)

This is amazing, thnak you

[Carnis]

IMO they excrete about 160.

Best to farm them under your base, on the oilworld.

[psusi]

I thought I read somewhere that they excrete at their body temperature.

 

[riwenna]

Well, as long as their body temperature doesn't drop significantly while feeding them CO2 at 24*C, as everybody claims it wouldn't, that's good enough for me. Building it now, let's see how it goes.

[riwenna]

Hm. I've built my farm, nicely thermally isolated from everything else, however feeding them CO2 at 20*C apparently drops their body temperature below a 100*C in just a few cycles. They were around 105*C when I got them in, or maybe a bit more.

They do indeed produce their own heat, so I think I'll just install space heaters temporarily and see how it goes. I think the first bit of petroleum they dropped was at 80*C currently sitting at 57*C and heating up the CO2 (which is currently 47 just above the petroleum, between 39-41 in lower slickster area, and 31 at what will later be a second area above, 28 at the vent all the way up). So, I think once the equilibrium with some hot oil at 80* establishes, if they do get born at 100*C, they indeed won't have time to cool down too much. However, for now... I'll give them some heating.

 

*Oh, never mind, silly me... their livable range is 75*C-270*C. No Space heaters, they won't cool down that much I assume. And I guess I'll get a mixture of regular and molten slickster eggs, but still with enough molten to keep me going.

[VoidPhanto]

Make sure they dont pass through liquids, they die like that.

 

[riwenna]

They're not, what you can see in the picture is a stable and the collection area under it. When I get enough sustainable CO2 to maintain the second stable, I was going to put it on top of this one to collect in the same tank, so they will technically drop their pretroleum all the way through the first stable... but I hope that will be okay since the petroleum is of high temperature anyway.

[riwenna]

It's been 62 cycles and I've noticed my stable only has 2 molten slicksters in it. Now, I know it was time for the one I first brought in at a tender age of 40-odd to die out, but I don't think any other ones should've dies from old age.

The room is getting substantially warmer so I do think it will get at least warm enough for them to not cool down too much in a 100 cycles eventually, but right now I noticed one of the older ones (aged 44) at body temperature of 77.4*, so I suspect one of them died of "freezing" at 75. Conclusion thus far: starting to farm molten slicksters probably requires a bit of pre-heating but will hopefully not in the long run.

The petroleum is currently at 79*C.

Edit: I just observed the temperature of that cutsie drop for another 2 degrees in another 3 cycles, before the space heater had much effect, and he just popped and died. So, it definetely requires some pre-heating. I hope not infinetely.

Now I just have to figure out if I want my permanent source of CO2 to be the CO2 vent near my base erupting at 500*C which I have no idea how to cool down, or a CO2 geyser that's stuck above my bunker tile layer getting meteor showered because I didn't get to it in time, and I've no idea how to heat up from -55. Fun  

[riwenna]

And apparently the Space Heater is capped at 70*C and can't reach the required 75*C all on it's own. Really really hoping this stabilizes with their petroleum output. However, the petroleum pool is cooling down as well, currently at 76*C so it's all a bit... unsure right now.

And since the CO2 is dispersing heat really badly, I need to at least add some granite tempshifts or see it turn off for a few seconds every few seconds when it gets the immediate surrounding tiles hot.

[jfc]

8 minutes ago, riwenna said:

And apparently the Space Heater is capped at 70*C and can't reach the required 75*C all on it's own. Really really hoping this stabilizes with their petroleum output. However, the petroleum pool is cooling down as well, currently at 76*C so it's all a bit... unsure right now.

And since the CO2 is dispersing heat really badly, I need to at least add some granite tempshifts or see it turn off for a few seconds every few seconds when it gets the immediate surrounding tiles hot.

Well you could place one space heater on the stable, make an insulated separated room with another heater, pump the CO 2 first to that room, and after reaching a certain temperature send it to the stable with the other heater

[riwenna]

I have a feeling it woould take me longer to clear a space for such a room and build it than it would the currently hooked space heater to pump the upper layers of the room to 70 with added granite tempshift plates

I'll be working on a volcano soon (well... given that today is the last day of my vacation, I'll be playing at 1/10 the rate of the last 2 weeks, so that might take a while), so I'll try to snake the CO2 through the volcano coolant first.

[erikac14]

You don't need to heat up. They heat up the place by themselves. In my colony, most of slickers are normal slickers and one long hair in the beginning, but they are mostly molten now. 

[beowulf2010]

7 hours ago, riwenna said:

And apparently the Space Heater is capped at 70*C and can't reach the required 75*C all on it's own. Really really hoping this stabilizes with their petroleum output. However, the petroleum pool is cooling down as well, currently at 76*C so it's all a bit... unsure right now.

You could always throw an Aquatuner in a slightly deeper pocket of petroleum and cool off random pools of water when the Petro gets under 80 to 100 degrees. 

A Liquid Tepidizer would work well as well. 

Or just run all metal refinery coolant through the room before disposing of it however you usually do. Plenty of sources of heat to take care of what the space heaters can't. 

[riwenna]

If you do, however, capture a molten slickster in the wild, as I did, and start breeding molten slicksters straight away, all the while keeping them in the room which was previously vacuumed and then filled with CO2 sitting at between 25-32*C, the first generation of slicksters will die of freezing as I've just witnesed, around the age of 50-60.

They do generate their own heat indeed, as the petroleum temperature is now rising again and is currently sitting at 81*C. However, they need some time (maybe two generations or so), to be able to do that sustainably. For how, I'm popping two space heaters on whenever the temp drops below 70*C (that's when they automatically turn off) around where the colder CO2 is coming in, and the second generation seems to be holding up well enough.

@beowulf2010Yea those sound like an idea, but it did stabilize with space heaters heating up to 70*C. They themselves did the rest, petroleum temp rising. I think I might eventually use the petroleum pool to cool down glass or something, but for now there's only 340 kg/tile petroleum, and I need to figure out a way to harness either a +500*C or a -55*C CO2 geyser if I want to sustainably keep a slickster farm, or even expand

[Kabrute]

snake the incoming co2 line through the petro pool before venting into the room.....

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, Kabrute said:

snake the incoming co2 line through the petro pool before venting into the room.....

And add a gold liquid tepidizer in the petro to keep the temp at 85C. Yes it takes 4 times the stated power as a space heater, but the heat output (20.32kW) is 50+ times more than 4 space heaters (so much better efficiency).  It will rarely ever turn on, and keep everything at +85C, provided you snake your CO2 through the pool as it comes in. Add in some temp shift plates if needed, and your room can be nice and toasty. 

If you are OK with using automation to override the 85C limit, you could easily keep the room at any temp up to ~175C, making it easy to breed molten ones. 

[riwenna]

Ty guys for all the suggestions. Sadly my vacation is over so my playtime suddenly went from 12 hours a day to barely 10 hours a week.

Still, long enough to descover that I should implement some of your suggestions because they still keep freezing at around 80 years of age when keeping the room at 70*C.

I'm in the process of adding tempshift plates to the room (I figure granite is enough for this purpose), and I've hooked up the output of my glass forge to the petroleum pool (it was literally in my next foor down so it was only about 5 tiles of piping) providing all the extra heat, and I think snaking the CO2 piping through the petroleum should do the trick. Even without the snaking, and with only about 3/4 of the tempshifts built in the petroleum tank, the mesh tiles on the slickster floor are finally at 76*C. I guess it would be best to use radiant piping for the snaking? (I'm still a bit fuzzy about how exactly those exchange heat)

Switching to a liquid tepidizer when I've had enough glass sounds like a great permanent solution, but I'm not in an awful hurry due to the glass forge. I've never worked with them though - so if the automation is similar to that on a space heater, then it will turn off at it's max temperature reglardless of the automation signal it receives.

And I've had to unfortunately reduce the farm to 4 slicksters, since that's all the CO2 I can reliably provide, and didn't get down to figuring out how to get CO2 out of either the boiling or the freezing geyser