Why does the ore scrubber delete chlorine?

[LaShomb]

I've been thinking of some of the buildings that I don't use as much anymore. The ore scrubber seems like something I should use more, but without a chlorine vent to keep it fed it can be a bigger pain than it's worth. It's usually better to just use storage containers in a pool of chlorine for most things.

Where does the chlorine go? Shouldn't it just spray onto the item then fall onto the ground to be recollected? That could make me reconsider using it, as it would just involve building a chamber for it to fall into with a pump and filter to resupply it.

[Zarquan]

It should be collected or released in to the atmosphere so it can be collected again.  The mass loss makes me not want to use it without a vent too.

[RonEmpire]

I haven't looked at the ore scrubber in a while since it is pretty useless to me.   

[PhailRaptor]

Personally the bigger issue is that it only eliminates 480,000 Germs per use.  That's barely half of what is usually alive on a blob of Slime after you dig it out, and in the time it takes your Dupe to carry that same blob the 3 steps to the left or right to reach a second Scrubber on their path of travel, the number of Germs will have resurged again, to be greater than 480,000 again.  So you need a minimum of 3 Ore Scrubbers between your Swamp mining location and your Slime storage dump, per Dupe able to travel that pathway.

If a Dupe stopped at an Ore Scrubber would stay there until the object they were carrying was free of Germs, the same way Dupes stop at a Sink or Wash Basin, they would already be dramatically better.  As they stand, they are logistically cumbersome and systems built around their use are prone to failure simply by virtue of their disharmony with Dupe traffic.

Alternatively, rework it into a building for Conveyors.  Same deal, objects on the Conveyor line enter it, are processed for a period of time based on how many Germs are on them, then exist the other side.  Costs Power while running, requires supply of Chlorine.

[Sasza22]

The scrubber is a good idea but bad implementation. It needs to get rid of all the germs or it`s really clunky to use. I like someones idea that the amount of germs removed should be based on spinning time.

The chlorine pipes are also problematic as it uses really low amounts of chlorine but usually needs a long pipe. I really hoped it would use bottled chlorine after they implemented the gas bottler but that thing is way to high tech atm.

As for it wasting chlorine i could live with that (not like other buildings aren`t wasting stuff) i`d just like to be guaranteed a renewable source of it. A geyser is only 50% + a smaller random chance to be buried somewhere and we need it for our gass grass if we get to the lategame.

[Coolthulhu]

Ore scrubber was never a good idea. Stopping a dupe to clean anything (other than hands or food) is way too high of a cost, especially considering how trivial it is to avoid infecting things other than gas. The name is misleading: there is no good reason to ever disinfect ore. Only slime and food are worth disinfecting. And slime gets re-infected very easily, so if you really want clean slime, you need to chlorinate or freeze it.

How to fix ore scrubber: turn it into "sealed atmosphere storage container". A storage container that prevents all offgassing and treats stored items as if they were in chlorine environment as long as it is supplied with chlorine on the input pipe. There, now it has actual uses.

[Kazumiya]

They need to fix the use of it. It's not a bad idea, but as other says : fix it so it completly cleans materials so you don't need to build more (just like a washing machine, you don't need more than 1 in your house right ?).

Now maybe if they change this way => you can't use materials if they are not clean then it could be useful. It's a good thing to have buildings who make use of chlorine because it has so few utility right now... I hope they will add more thing who can use those chlorine vents. 

[Zarquan]

3 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Ore scrubber was never a good idea. Stopping a dupe to clean anything (other than hands or food) is way too high of a cost, especially considering how trivial it is to avoid infecting things other than gas. The name is misleading: there is no good reason to ever disinfect ore. Only slime and food are worth disinfecting. And slime gets re-infected very easily, so if you really want clean slime, you need to chlorinate or freeze it.

How to fix ore scrubber: turn it into "sealed atmosphere storage container". A storage container that prevents all offgassing and treats stored items as if they were in chlorine environment as long as it is supplied with chlorine on the input pipe. There, now it has actual uses.

I disagree.  If you play on miserable and you need to go through a slime biome, you really want to scrub the algae if you still have any deoxidizers.  That's my main use for ore scrubbers.  I usually store food in a chlorine room, but I probably should put an ore scrubber outside the kitchen in case germy food is brought in.  Only if I have a chlorine vent though.

1 hour ago, Kazumiya said:

They need to fix the use of it. It's not a bad idea, but as other says : fix it so it completly cleans materials so you don't need to build more (just like a washing machine, you don't need more than 1 in your house right ?).

Now maybe if they change this way => you can't use materials if they are not clean then it could be useful. It's a good thing to have buildings who make use of chlorine because it has so few utility right now... I hope they will add more thing who can use those chlorine vents. 

If you have 20 people living in one house, you might well need more than one washing machine.

[Coolthulhu]

4 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I disagree.  If you play on miserable and you need to go through a slime biome, you really want to scrub the algae if you still have any deoxidizers.

Nah, it's nowhere near as important as you make it to be. Put the deoxydizers further away, don't reload them with fresh algae (storing it will lower germ count significantly), have dupes wash hands when coming to colony, don't rush into slime when you still have a lot to do in other biomes (ie. haven't switched to electrolysis+suits). This is more efficient than scrubbing.

The only time it didn't work for me - and I played on miserable since it was added - was when early occupation update made all dupes incredibly slow and I had to make the colony stupidly compact.

[Zarquan]

2 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Nah, it's nowhere near as important as you make it to be. Put the deoxydizers further away, don't reload them with fresh algae (storing it will lower germ count significantly), have dupes wash hands when coming to colony, don't rush into slime when you still have a lot to do in other biomes (ie. haven't switched to electrolysis+suits). This is more efficient than scrubbing. 

In my current base, I had lousy caustic biomes around my base and the only thing of note was a chlorine vent.  So I had to dig through a slime biome early.  I almost certainly would have gotten slime lung if I hadn't put an ore scrubber in.  Now the base is fine and I managed to avoid any significant exposure to slime lung. 

[Coolthulhu]

4 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I almost certainly would have gotten slime lung if I hadn't put an ore scrubber in.

Only if your deoxidizer placement is bad.

[Zarquan]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Only if your deoxidizer placement is bad.

I didn't have to worry about my deoxidizer placement because I built an ore scrubber.  When I play, I don't want any germs in the clean areas of the base.  I want my dupes to never be a germ host (except occasionally the germ resistant dupes.)  And where ever you put your oxidizers, at least one of your dupes will be exposed to slimelung.

I do believe that the ore scrubber needs a redesign.  The problem I was facing was rare and I had never seen before.  Normally, I don't have to enter a slime biome until I set up electrolyzer.

[Coolthulhu]

3 hours ago, Zarquan said:

When I play, I don't want any germs in the clean areas of the base.  I want my dupes to never be a germ host (except occasionally the germ resistant dupes.)

Then you have to stay out of slime biome. Slime tile dug by un-suited dupe is automatic exposure to slimelung counts greatly exceeding those from refuelling germy deoxydizer. And algae not encased by slime are too sparse to get serious amount of oxygen from.

So you still have those problems, just with more dupe time spent on cleaning,

[Zarquan]

10 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Then you have to stay out of slime biome. Slime tile dug by un-suited dupe is automatic exposure to slimelung counts greatly exceeding those from refuelling germy deoxydizer. And algae not encased by slime are too sparse to get serious amount of oxygen from.

So you still have those problems, just with more dupe time spent on cleaning,

I dug through the slime biome without any slime offgassing and I dug through an area without any slimelung in the air.  I had all the slime fall in to a layer of water then moved it using tiles to the side.  The only hazard I experienced was germy algae entering the base and that was taken care of by a single ore scrubber.    So I didn't have those problems.  I wasn't digging it out, I just had to get through it.

If it were up to me, I wouldn't have used that algae at all.  I actually made a post about having material checkpoints that can say "No materials of these types past this point" for exactly this problem.  But I didn't want to deal with finnecky door controls on that massive of a scale.  I installed one ore scrubber and a few sinks and everything worked fine.

Basically, I had a map with very little water and algae in the core biome (but tons of copper) and the caustic biomes around me had very little algae.  So I had to go through the slime biome to get more water to use in electrolyzers and get to a good caustic biome that I could see on the edge of my vision.  I had never encountered such a bad early game map before.  During the project, I had to use deoxidizers.  After the project, I had gotten to a large cold biome that I largely dug out (I know melting would have gotten more water, but I wanted to preserve the sleetwheat) and used the ice to replenish my reservoir and I also got many large pockets of polluted water that I could tap in to.  I got to turn off the deoxidizers and run solely on electrolyzers, which let me store the algae in a chlorine atmosphere to degerm it and store in case of emergency.  Besides, I run larger colonies.  This one had 18 dupes by accepting every dupe up to this point.

The main point I am trying to make is that I successfully survived the early game on a lousy staring map with lots of dupes with no deaths or slimelung infections by using the ore scrubber to clean algae heading in to my base.  There may have been ways to survive without using the scrubber, but I didn't need them.  This may have been the first time I have used the ore scrubber since it came out.  And I haven't used it since in this colony.  The series of events that led to the ore scrubber being useful were so bizarre that I believe it needs a rework of some kind.  There are only a few use cases I can think of for using it because of how clunky it is.  And they only really apply on miserable immunity.  I feel part of such a rework should include not deleting the chlorine (instead releasing it in to the atmosphere) and having it destroy all the germs (if it works with its current mechanism).