Stop duplicants picking up gold from gold geysers

[TV4Fun]

So I have a gold geyser, which provides a nice source of refined gold, but my duplicants, seeming to lack any sense of self preservation, keep going to it to collect gold immediately after it erupts, at which point the gold is extremely hot, and they are badly scalded. Is they any way to prevent this?

[Yunru]

Yes, put a door down and lock it.

[yoakenashi]

6 hours ago, Yunru said:

Yes, put a door down and lock it.

Haha, hilarious.

But in all seriousness, I have been wondering this myself. How do you keep duplicants from picking up and transporting certain objects.

They carry them through transport tubes. The carried items don’t affect weight plates. And sometimes it’s impractical to lock the door and use autosweepers.

The only solution I can think is to limit duplicant access. For example, you have three zones. A hot zone (ie the geyser area, a common area (mess hall, toilets), and a cool area (where you are using cool gold in builds). Alpha duplicants have access to hot/common, beta duplicants have access to cold/common.

i use this access restrictions for hot regolith and mafic rock. Works well.

[Gwido]

There's multiple ways to prevent duplicants from picking up this hot gold.

 

As Yunru said, the simpliest is to put a door, and set the acces permissions so that the duplicants can't pass.

 

But the best one is ... to master this volcano.

Some water to cold the gold, and when the gold is cold enough, you can open the door, so that your duplicants go pick it.

[Yunru]

12 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

But in all seriousness, I have been wondering this myself.

In all seriousness, put a door down and keep it locked while the gold's hot.

[crypticorb]

The best way I've found so far is to make a cooling tower for the volcano.

Simply put, put a box around the volcano made of insulated tiles, preferably abyssalite. At the bottom of the box, have a 2-wide shaft that the liquid gold drops through. The tower doesn't have to be very tall, 10-15 down from the bottom of the box works, but more is better. Fill this cooling tower with liquid, polluted water is best. Keep this tower topped off with pH2O as some will boil off to steam, and if you want, put a radiator inside the tower pumped with cooling liquid.

At the bottom of the tower, have a trapped gas-water-gas lock that keeps the liquid inside the tower, so dupes can access the cooled gold. If you want, you can put an auto-sweeper.

The main idea is that the liquid gold will flow off the volcano base, into the bottom of the box and drip into the tall cooling tower and slowly fall through it. By the time it reaches the bottom, it'll be cooled enough to handle, either with dupes or sweeper.

[yoakenashi]

2 hours ago, crypticorb said:

trapped gas-water-gas lock

Sounds interesting. Would you post a picture (or link) please?

[DrWorm]

A solution could be sticking in a dupe checkpoint and hooking it up to a thermosensor that only allows access when it's cool inside the volcano room.

[ImpalerWrG]

A similar problem occurs in Dwarf Fortress, dwarfs run across the map to try to collect things like the socks off of a dead goblin and run into a live one.  The solution was to create a 'forbidden object' designation which prevented attempts to gather things until the designation is manually wiped by the player.  But this is a case of ongoing production of items that are unsafe so an area based zone of 'don't collect here' might be wiser.  I've always felt the game needed more of a proactive 'pick up anything that appears in this area' command to help keep the base tidy so this would be a natural counterpoint.

[crypticorb]

22 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

Sounds interesting. Would you post a picture (or link) please?

Sure, it'd be something like this:

It wouldn't be the easiest thing to set up, but once working it wouldn't need any maintenance. It uses the basic idea of water locks and one element per tile rules to function. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.