Coolthulhu

Solid-solid temperature interactions are orders of magnitude faster than solid-liquid ones. Water is cooled by polluted water, turns to ice, ice heats quickly from tiles, turns back to water. You need to cool the tiles below. The tiles won't cool themselves down, at least not quickly, because solid-gas interactions are much faster than solid-liquid ones. Build some tempshift plates touching the insulated tiles from inside the tank.

Overcrowding prevents egg counter from increasing. If you have a lot of similarly-aged critters, they may not die out quickly enough for the youngest ones to lay eggs. It takes up to 63 cycles of uncrowded adulthood for a wild hatch to lie an egg.

It must have changed then. I'm sure at one point it did cost power to teleport the packets through sieve. The sieve did a janky animation when pumped an uninterrupted flow of clean water and wires showed full consumption.

Was it just one packet per rail after split or more than one? Disinfection rates might differ somewhat between 1 100kg packet and 5 20kg packets due to rounding errors.

Can still help conserve energy. I'm pretty sure that sieve consumes full power when teleporting clean water packets.

What's the mass of the block? Is it 20kg or vole-vomit-sized?

If the sweater tile is surrounded by solid tiles or gas or liquid tiles that can't be compressed or pushed out of the way, there is no space for new material. Pretty sure it only checks orthogonally adjacent tiles for spots. Compression will also check only adjacent tiles and is not recursive - either a tile can be compressed into its neighbor or it can't. There is one exception: an exactly 5kg tile can sweat without any extra space, even surrounded by solid tiles. Last time it happened to me, it created a bugged "liquid vacuum" that cleared on save, though it was because the 5kg tile was salt water and thus had two products, one of which is a solid.

The term "flaking" is a bit misleading. "Sweating" is a better name also used for the same thing. It's better because it implies phase change, which is an essential part of this behavior. The requirements are roughly like this: Two tiles of some different elements are adjacent The tile that is supposed to "sweat" (let's call it "sweater") is at least 5kg At least one of the two tiles is non-solid and there is enough space for a new material The tile providing the energy (let's call it "heater") is above sweater's phase change temperature Heater has enough energy to actually heat 5kg of sweater to phase change temperature, without causing the heater to drop below this temperature When all of those are met, every "physics tick", the sweating mechanic will trigger and do this: Subtract 5kg from sweater tile, possibly destroying it if it's exactly 5kg Create 5kg of the material sweater would phase change to due to being heated Subtract required heat energy from heater tl;dr Conductivity doesn't matter at all, specific heat matters, temp difference "kinda matters" Examples of this are pretty common in normal games: Warm gas reaching cold biome will cause ice to drip 5kg drops Oil that drops on very hot abyssalite will turn to petroleum and maybe to sour gas Liquid oxygen/hydrogen chamber "not working" until bottom layer of tiles cools down enough Tiles under launching rockets spewing tiny bits of magma that immediately solidifies

Not cooling water you don't need to be cold is the best option. 50C is fine for dupe-populated areas and most ranches. Only plants need <30. As long as the air is <70C, dupes will not be harmed by it.

It can be seen using electromagnetic vision, it must be using cloaking technology.

It shouldn't be more dangerous. It should be harder to avoid.

Oil well + petroleum gen produce more water than they use if you boil the oil rather than using the refinery. At perfect efficiency, you gain almost 25% more water than you put in, so 150kg/cycle per well. You need 6 capped wells to match a single average cool steam vent, but also gain tons of power as a side effect. And a lot of CO2 to vent to space. Compare to 3.75kg/cycle from a groomed molten slickster.

Nope. There are infinite gas storage builds and do not need multi-tile walls.

I use tiny puffs of oxygen for this. 100g/s of oxygen is enough to cool down an array of steel miners spanning ~35% of the width of the map. Oxygen is the only element that doesn't block any light.

You can see the damage by mousing over the lowest pixel of the block. It's just the "properties" tab which doesn't show it.