Some Long Overdue Housekeeping

Considering that I've spent the last several dozen (maybe the low hundreds) of cycles paying most of my attention to the planetoids I was harvesting, I knew that some of my home base's systems and solutions needed some fixing and/or upgrading. So that is what we'll be doing today.

H₂ and O₂ Liquefaction

The first thing to do is build the hydrogen and oxygen liquefaction facility. I'm going to need both of those in liquid form for hydrogen rockets to work. The tricky thing is that they need to be chilled... really far down. Oxygen needs to get to about -183° Celsius. Hydrogen needs to get all the way down to -252° Celsius. That might sound crazy cold, and it is, but it's actually pretty straightforward to reach once you make Super Coolant. That's why I was so excited to find graphite on the water planet!

My setup is something I pretty much stole from Francis John (as are the overwhelming majority of ONI players' setups), but I know it well enough to build it without referring to his guide anymore. It's really not that complicated anyway, it just requires Super Coolant, a pretty late-game resource. I really wanted to make sure I built this facility first because of the ramp-up time associated with it.

It takes a while to chill that much gas into liquid. It's alright with oxygen, since generating a lot of oxygen is absurdly easy between electrolyzing water, letting polluted water off-gas, and consuming algae. You also just don't need to drive the temperature as far down as with hydrogen, so getting the tank full on liquid O₂ is fine. The hydrogen is the bigger problem. Getting a lot of hydrogen is difficult; the only renewable sources are from electrolyzing water (only 11% of the water electrolyzed turns into hydrogen though) and a hydrogen vent. I could take all the H₂ from water electrolysis and dump it in here, but I'd rather keep my O₂ production independent and self-sustained. So, I only liquefy the excess hydrogen from the SPOM, not all of the hydrogen produced. This means it only contributes a fraction of a fraction of the input water, which is pretty much nothing. I prefer the peace of mind in knowing I can't accidentally take down the SPOM I've had for hundreds of cycles now, so it is what it is.

Thankfully, I do also have a hydrogen vent, so it wasn't a miserably long wait time to get my hydrogen needs satisfied. I don't need to use any of the hydrogen from the vent to keep my base powered (I have a different solution... scroll down an inch or two) so all of the vent's output can go into here to get condensed into liquid form.

Geothermal Power Generation

My main base has been exclusively powered by some hot rocks for a while. Like most starting planetoids, I have a big swimming pool of hot magma, igneous rock, and obsidian at the bottom. It's kinda hard to justify doing anything down there, since there's plenty of space elsewhere that's not literally hot enough to melt stuff.

Although, that core of the planet does make for some interesting use cases when you actually do want the heat. In this case, I want to use the heat to boil water, then use the steam to generate power. The water it outputs from processing steam goes right back on to the hot rocks to boil again and produce more steam. Here's what it looks like right now:

Turns out, I used up more heat than I anticipated... so I needed to relocate and rebuild. I decided to push some of the nearby into a giant puddle and put the heat-exchange portion right at the bottom, so all the hot magma falls into it, in a sense. Here's a bad power-point time-lapse of the process:

I chose to rebuild here (if you noticed, this is really close to my old geothermal power plant) for one other reason too. My map has three minor magma volcanoes, which are all positioned close together above the magma pool. So, I took the time to construct some vacuumed-out tunnels for their magma to spill into the pool. They're double-insulated too because... well, I'm really not interested in any accidents involving glowing, red-hot, molten liquids.

In combination with the remnants of my old power plant, I can have around 7 kilowatts of power generation at a moments' notice. There's not much of a reason to break down the old plant, so I'm just going to let it run until it uses up all of its limited amount of heat. Both builds turn on/off based on how filled my battery reserves are, and the old one kicks on before the new one.

As my overall power needs slowly inch up and up, the old one runs close to 24/7 now. Its enough wattage to cover times of low activity, but cannot sustain me through peaks. I'd have to greatly increase my battery buffer for that. I'll probably still do that, but I want to guarantee that brownouts are not a thing first. The old one will probably be retired in a couple hundred cycles. That's just my guess, no real mathematical calculations... but I think it'll be fine.

Famous last words maybe?

Rootial Metal Haul

I went back to Rootial for a few reasons:

1. The metal transport system had some issues in keeping the metals flowing in some places and preventing flow in other places.
2. Wanted to go pick up 100+ tons of refined metal, so I didn't need to keep using the metal refinery so much at home for non-steel materials.
3. Needed to get a bunch of oxylite.

Let's talk about them in order.

Since I built the entire conveyor system for shipping metals around when some of the volcanoes weren't active yet, I didn't actually verify that the metals were moving from source to destination. I tried to make a few edits while all my dupes were off-world, and promptly discovered that ONI will let me disconnect things without a dupe present, but I cannot reconnect them. So, I needed to send a party over there to make some repairs.

Overall, I reworked the conveyor system to make sure all the resources (1 copper, 2 gold, and 2 aluminum volcanoes) all feed into the same cooling system. I made the cooling system allow metal to pass through once the two latest metals were cool enough, not just the latest one. This solved some issues where quickly-cooling gold/copper would inadvertently allow slow-cooling aluminum through before it was done chilling down to room temperature. If I feel like it, I'll probably make another trip over here to make a dedicated cooling unit using Super Coolant... It'll process aluminum faster that way.

Why do I say "If I feel like it"? Well, I've gotten quite the haul of materials already...

That much gold and aluminum will probably last me for the rest of the play through. That is so much refined metal. And so much of it is gold, which generally has a high enough overheat temperature for generic use, and aluminum, which has fantastic thermal conductivity for things that need to exchange temperatures quickly but won't ever get very hot.

This planetoid also has something that I did not think would be so useful - oxylite meteor showers! I didn't set up a way to capture the oxylite when I'm off-world. As I've learned from my Dampista trip, oxylite is actually a really convenient way to bring tons of oxygen on a rocket ship with me without over-pressurizing the cabin and rupturing ear drums. I can make oxylite myself, but it requires oxygen gas (which is fine), gold (rather annoying to keep using), and power (kind of a lot actually). So I made a capture system for it!

It's quite simple. A bunch of robo-miners, auto-sweepers, and conveyor loaders. They are spaced apart precisely enough that all the miners can dig each other out if need be, and all the sweepers can load the resulting oxylite debris into the conveyor loaders. The loader rails are covered in solid tile, so they don't off-gas into the void of space while on the rails. Eventually they get dropped off in one convenient pile for me to come pick up periodically.

I went one more time to get some gold and copper. That last haul was a fat one indeed:

I do still need to come back to Rootial for Uranium stuff. This planetoid has Beetas! These are honeybees, except for uranium. Very normal stuff. They're gonna be essential in the future when I want to run a research reactor for power generation, radbolt generation, or both. Never messed with these critters before, so it'll be a new experience. Stay tuned!

Space Exploration

I found another planet... it has a tungsten volcano!!! Definitely curious about the prospect of having infinite tungsten to use for building.

Space Exploration v2.0

I found another-another planet... it's cold!!! The iron volcano is tempting, but not really necessary at this point. Nothing else exciting here, which means it's probably hiding something inside...

Sleet Wheat and Berry Sludge Production

One goal I had for this world since pretty much the start is for my dupes to eat some sort of really good food... forever. In most of my worlds, I use some hatches to make barbecue (so long as I have rocks to feed them). Eventually I transition over to shove voles for truly infinite barbecue. I've already done that much in this world. It's easy and effective... but I want to do something better and still have it be sustainable.

So, I set the goal to be frost burgers! Frost burgers are the best food in the game. They're so good that the dupes get a bit high and loopy (I think), and they actually get a temporary penalty to their athletics skill, which means they run a bit slower. No worries there, my people are fast enough now. There's a big problem with my frost burger plan though. Frost burgers require lettuce to make, which requires waterweed plants, which require salt water to grow.

I don't have a renewable salt water source. At least, not on my home planetoid and not on the planetoid with a teleporter either. There is one on Rootial, but I don't think there's really a good way to get the salt water back. You can't ship bottled liquids in the conveyor system, so unless I instruct dupes to mop up salt water, manually move bottles into a rocket, fly back home, and then manually unload it all the same way, I just don't think it's realistic or doable. It certainly cannot be automated.

Meanwhile, I've discovered that there is a food called Berry Sludge. This food is pretty interesting because it doesn't spoil. No, that's not a typo. It's as tasty as barbecue and doesn't spoil. That makes it the best meal in the game to stockpile in a rocket. My little colonizers can eat that for a long time. So, while I decide what end-game food to pivot to (Pepper Bread?), I got to work on making a Sleet Wheat farm. Berry Sludge requires Bristle Berry, which isn't too hard to farm, and Sleet Wheat, which is kinda hard to farm.

Sleet Wheat is a bit challenging because it needs water irrigation, but the plant needs to be below 5° C to grow. That's not a lot of wiggle room if I were to chill a bunch of water to feed the plants - it'd be pretty easy to accidentally freeze the water and cause a ton of other problems. So I devised a way to take the needs more literally. The plant needs to be below 5° C, not the irrigated water. I can chill the plants down extra-hard to counteract them drinking warm irrigated water.

I built a cooling system for the plants and the room they're in. It uses Super Coolant as the coolant liquid so it's pretty efficient when I chill polluted water down to -10° C and let the plants get cold. This chilled water isn't going to be consumed, it's just a cooling loop that goes around the room. The water that I pipe in for irrigation is warm, or maybe even hot. The plants drink it up. This might get them really warm, but the aforementioned cooling loop is powerful enough to get them back under control quickly. I added tempshift plates (aluminum!) to help temperature transfer.

I'm gonna make some changes once a new growth cycle completes to make it a bit more compact. Throughout it's normal operation, I noticed that I'm able to supply a lot more cooling than I need to. So, why not use the excess chill power on the irrigation water too? Might as well, and I get to recycle the heat from it into power generation (this is 1:1, I'm not sure if the plants increase in thermal energy by the same amount as the contents of the water that they consume). So typically, the sleet wheat stays subzero, while the water I irrigate is usually in the 10-15° C range before the plants get to drink it. Now when the Sleet Wheat warms up from drinking "warm" water, it doesn't warm up a lot. In this case, it actually stays within its livable temperature range, so there's no downtime or delay of its already long growth cycle.

So now, I have over a million kcals of Berry Sludge. Fully custom design, no Francis John needed! I've got a huge stockpile and can fully load every rocket with enough food to keep dupes going for dozens, maybe hundreds, of cycles in one rocket trip. That'll make exploring easier, particularly for going to the more distant planets / POIs.

Water Management

My water sources are very unorganized. They're all over the map, and I'm pumping them all over the map, and I really don't like how some of my critical services (toilets, O₂ production, etc.) are ultimately all reliant on some particular source of water. There are multiple single points of failure.

I have three sources of water. One germy polluted water geyser at 30° C, one cool slush polluted water geyser at -10° C, and one cool slush brine geyser at -10° C. Ultimately, I need clean, non-germy water. These three geysers have different eruption times, so unless I store a big buffer of them, I'm going to have times where one of the three geysers dominates the other, so I can't just assume that I'll get a perfect "average" of the water by mixing all three.

I can't convert the cool slush geysers directly into water. They're too cold; if I clean them, the resulting water will freeze and break all the piping. I also can't reliably mix them with the 30° C water because there's just too much cold volume. Some rough napkin math tells me that in the best case scenario, the average temperature will work out to be close to 5° C, if and only if all three are erupting all at the same time.

I also thought about dumping them inside the geothermal power plant I described earlier. There's enough magma to convert it all to steam, which will kill all the germs in the process. The salt gets left behind without any duplicant labor, and then the steam turbines suck up heat and output hot, but completely clean, water. It could work.

But I don't like it. I already misjudged how long the hot magma would last once, and I don't really want to have to balance my volcanoes' magma generation against my input water rate, against my output water rate, against my raw power generation needs. It's just too many variables and too much interconnectedness for my liking.

So I took a step back and thought of some things. Cleaning the brine will absolutely suck. It's cold so I can't desalinate it without warming it a bit. Unless I actually boil it, I'd need to use the desalinator, which will requires duplicants to come and empty out all the salt content every so often. And at the end of the day, do I really need to bother with it? Do I need that much renewable water?

No, actually. No I don't. I need clean water for sleet wheat, toilets, and O₂. Napkin math says that should need way, way, way under 10kg/s of clean water. Which means... I can just worry about the polluted water. That simplifies things a lot. I can throw the waste water from toilets in there too, since that's also germy polluted water around 30° C. Now, I still don't think the "dump it next to reservoirs of magma" idea is the way I want to go about doing it, but this does make the "mix em together" option better.

I'll mix them together, but I need to account for differing eruption schedules. If both geysers are erupting together, then the solution should stabilize well above freezing. If the germy water is overpowering, then it'll lean even closer to 30° C. Now if the cool slush is overpowering, it could dip below freezing. The liquid tepidizer machine is really good at heating stuff up, and I don't have to heat it that much, just up to around 10° C for some good buffer room. So with some simple thermal regulations, I can keep the polluted water solution easily above freezing. With a bit of pressure regulation, I can make sure the little mixing chamber never empties out enough for the polluted water to off-gas.

On to the next problem, this solution is gonna be germy. Real germy. Those germs will multiply like crazy in 20ish° C polluted water. Well thankfully, I'll just apply the same basic technique I always do in order to recycle toilet water. I'm going to build a chlorine gas room with a few liquid reservoirs and force the water to sit in there for a bit. In ONI, germs die when they're submerged in chlorine at a rate proportional to the quantity of germs, which means the death rate drops off hard when they're almost all gone. You need to keep them inside the room longer to ensure they all die. So, I'm gonna add a second room. This room will also have chlorine gas (because I might as well), but it'll have shine bugs also! These little guys are a bit radioactive, and will maintain a stable population without any extra tending to. Their passive radiation will kill germs at a rate proportional to the radiation present, which makes it quite effective compared to chlorine when the germ count is low.

By this point, I'll have de-germified, non-freezing polluted water. I'll let some of it go into two water sieves (two because together they will fully saturate one liquid pipe) and the remaining can stay for polluted water use cases, like growing thimble reed or pincha peppernut. It's not particularly complicated, but this one is a fully custom design and it's been working really well so far.

What's next?

Well, I need to explore the remainder of the local space cluster. There's gonna be niobium somewhere, which I can then refine into thermium. Those are the end-game metals, which are the best at pretty much everything. I'd like to get some of that, although I'm not totally sure where I'll need to use it.

While the rocket is traveling around the proverbial solar system, back in home base I think I'll have two core initiatives. The first is to grow more seeds and get some radioactive mutants from them. I don't care much to make a whole farm out of them (it's not worth the effort in my opinion), but there is an achievement to get at least one mutant of all seeds. So that's on the bucket list.

I will also look into making pepper bread. I have a natural gas vent, which is totally unused so far, which can more than sustain the gas range in the kitchen indefinitely. I just need stuff to cook with it! I'll look into Pepper Bread, since I've already satisfied the sleet wheat requirement of it. I need to add Pincha Peppernut to my garden... good thing I kept some 20ish° C polluted water lying around!