Pressure suit seems to multiply CO2

[Gozzon]

I got some CO2 into my ship since I used pressure suit while salvaging ship. CO2 levels after refreshing my suit gas levels by taking helmet off were around 0.1KPa. Afterwards putting helmet back on I almost instantly started to get hypercapnia alarms. After taking helmet off again ships CO2 levels rose to 0.2KPa. Tried this again few times and was able ro rise CO2 levels up to 0.5KPa in a few seconds just by putting helmet on and off

[Blue Bottle Games, LLC]

This sounds like it might be normal.

Whenever you refresh the air in a pressure suit, you're basically just emptying that built-up CO2 into the room. So the room's CO2 increases each time unless you do something to purge that CO2 from the room.

Since all starting ships lack a CO2 scrubber, you'll need to purge CO2 via another means. (Usually by venting the atmosphere and refilling with O2.)

Let me know if that makes sense with what you're seeing! I could be missing some vital info about the situation. And of course, there could indeed be a bug if I am!

[Gozzon]

The issue is that when you go for a walk in the suit. If there's no CO2 in the ship you can walk in the suit for around 5 minutes. This will then dump CO2 in the ship when you take the helmet off.
If you now put helmet on again you will immediately get hypercapnia warning. Taking off helmet once again will dumb same amount of CO2 into ship even though you wore helmet for few seconds versus 5 minutes.

So if you keep putting on helmet and taking it off in environment that already has CO2 you produce same CO2 when taking helmet off but the amount of time it takes for you to need to take it off is a lot shorter.

At least that is what I saw. I was able to do a single space walk around a wreck and after that I just kept multiplying the CO2 in the ship while standing in my ship and putting my helmet on and off for few seconds since I was instantly getting hypercapnia when putting helmet on. No issues walking around the ship

[Blue Bottle Games, LLC]

The way the gas system works, it doesn't generate any new gases when you take the helmet off or put it on. All it does is mix the gas inside the helmet with the gas inside the room.

The same is true when you put the helmet on. It just encloses some of the room's gas inside the helmet. And if that gas has CO2 in it, your helmet will capture that as you don it.

It's normal if you see the CO2 going up while donning and removing the helmet, since you are breathing in O2 and CO2 the whole time. I think you'd see a similar thing happen if you were standing inside that ship without a helmet the whole time.

This is especially true of the "Custom Retrofit" ship you start with (a.k.a. "the coffin" or "no mortgage ship"), as it has no O2 supply of its own, and the cabin is so small it fills with CO2 quickly. The other two ships have O2 pumps, and tend to refresh their cabin atmo more often as you use the airlock. So you won't see it as much there.

I guess the one thing you could do to maybe test if this is a bug is to put the game on pause (so your character isn't breathing), and try taking off and putting on the helmet multiple times. If the gas mixture changes appreciably when doing that, it could be a bug.

You can use the "G" hotkey (default binding) to toggle extra gas info near the cursor, if that helps.

[Gozzon]

I'll check more closely and check out the pause.

The thing is though you get WAY more CO2 when using the suit than when just standing in the ship. As said I was able to over quadruple the CO2 in the ship with suit in less than a minute. Not something I'm able to do by just standing around

But I'll take closer look at gas values.

The ship is the one with O2 bottle and small air lock. Moderate life expectancy

[Gozzon]

So I was able to take a lot closer look at this and it seems like it is as you said that there isn't really any issues with the pressure suit.

What I did find was that amount of CO2 generated seems to relate to O2 levels.
At the very beginning of the game I was generating like 0.01KPa CO2 every 5 minutes.
In my ongoing save where I seem to have over 1 000KPa O2 in the ship I was generating 0.30KPa CO2 every minute. That's increase of about 150x of CO2 generation between these two games.

So I guess at some point I managed to completely over pressure my O2 and now I'm generating CO2 like crazy. I tested this more by pumping out most of O2 and being below 200KPa O2 has vastly reduced CO2 increase

[Blue Bottle Games, LLC]

Thanks for following-up on that! And that's good news. It sounds like it's working as designed, albeit with a weird edge case.

Basically, the way breathing works in-game is that it scoops a set volume of air out the room, and converts a percentage of that air's O2 into CO2 (about 4%, iirc). So if you have a higher density of O2 (more mass per cubic meter), it'll produce more CO2 per breath.

Where it starts to fail is at extreme pressures, like you say. I'm not sure what happens irl at 1000kPa O2, but I sort of expect the CO2 uptake/conversion would diminish returns as pressure goes up (or cap off at a certain level).

Our system isn't really *that* sophisticated, though, so we might have to live with this. (Though it might get a revisit in 0.15, as we deal with fire, etc.)

[Gozzon]

I think O2 has a lot of all kind of weird interactions depending on pressure and composition.

I think the thing that eluded me was the fact that I was shown N ja CO2 levels but Not O2 without extended gas display so I never assumed that the O2 level was so high. Maybe it might have been due to fact that O2 level was over thousand and the number was too long?

I guess other kind of hints of high pressure could be all kinds of creaks and pops

[zantanzuken]

honestly even 200 kpa is kinda high, my ship on average has 50 kpa o2, and i balance it out with 60-ish nitrogen. a good way to balance out your ship pressure levels is to dock with KLEG and force open your airlock... this'll also get rid of any of your excess co2 as the station has scrubbers.