Whats up with the heating tower?

[Lordly Cinder]

Seems like once it reaches 500C it kinda stays there. So its viable maybe with just burning carbon? Any Gleba tips?

[POWER WITHIN USER]

1 tower to 4 heat exchangers to <7 steam turbines.
Works with all fuel types, even spoilage though it'll need several dozens per second.

Heating tower burns things to create heat energy.
Heat exchangers use heat energy to create steam.
Steam turbines use steam to make power.

If these are working at full capacity then they'll hit a heat energy equilibrium and stay at the same temperature.

[Revolver Rez]

It's viable burning anything. When I eventually worked out what Gleba wants you to do I made it so everything spoilable I don't use funnels directly into a series of heating towers and it keeps the base powered indefinitely thanks to the infinite fruit harvest powering it all.
Since you have infinite resources and you need to keep everything going or it'll rot on the belts, the towers are an amazing waste disposal system. You COULD also use recyclers, but those don't give any benefit other than deleting waste.

I'm trying to figure out alternate ways of having nutrients around without making multiple small closed loops for each manufacturing area. It works well, but looks so messy.

As for tips, have inserters filtering spoilage into provider chests everywhere, at least one every looped area you're using to keep the system moving and put a requester chest feeding into a heating tower. Or carbon production. Not that you probably need that advice if you're at the point where you're making carbon there.

[BaronTox]

On Gleba,
Use Heating Towers with two boxes as inputs... Each Inserter should have a wire to the Heating Tower and 'Read Temp'.
For Box 1, spoilage in my case, set the temp, if T below 550
For Box 2, limit inserter stack size to 1, use Solid Fuel (then rocket fuel), if T below 520
This keeps spoilage burning at an even rate, then if it falls below 520 the better fuel kicks in to sustain it.

@POWER WITHIN USER got the ratios right, 4 heat exchangers -> 7 steam turbine, happy planet power grid :)

[Lordly Cinder]

Thanks for responses. I left the heater tower wihtout carbon because I need the nutrients to make 100 science packs for the wuick health upgrade. Odd thing is that its still at 501c
Thats strange isnt it? Why would that be, its still using a little bit of turbine power. I have some solar and batteries as wull as a bunk of steam tanks because I thought the tower would turn off. I wonder if its a bug?

Yeah its just staying at that temp with zero fuel. Maybe because all the steam is hot and the boilers are still hot from the network of steam tanks.. So it wont power the boilers I guess even though it stays at 501c. Maybe thats so it will keep things warm on Aquila.

Anyone know what the two slots to the right of the fuel is? Looks like somthing can go there?

[Lordly Cinder]

Looking at the tech tree and I see the ultimate Gleba science is fish enrichment. Idk what its for but it has to be something good ;P

[Lordly Cinder]

Originally posted by Revolver Rez:

It's viable burning anything. When I eventually worked out what Gleba wants you to do I made it so everything spoilable I don't use funnels directly into a series of heating towers and it keeps the base powered indefinitely thanks to the infinite fruit harvest powering it all.
Since you have infinite resources and you need to keep everything going or it'll rot on the belts, the towers are an amazing waste disposal system. You COULD also use recyclers, but those don't give any benefit other than deleting waste.

I'm trying to figure out alternate ways of having nutrients around without making multiple small closed loops for each manufacturing area. It works well, but looks so messy.

As for tips, have inserters filtering spoilage into provider chests everywhere, at least one every looped area you're using to keep the system moving and put a requester chest feeding into a heating tower. Or carbon production. Not that you probably need that advice if you're at the point where you're making carbon there.

To be honest the setup is fairly quick but it involves me eating fungi and jetpacking around hand harvesting cropps to make seeds and see how it gets started. Im still at starting point but Ive unlocked most of the basic things. As far as setting up systems and how to work the pentapod eggs Im clueless still. I visited the other 2 first and now its just science pickup there as I heard gleba is frustrating.

[brown29knight]

Originally posted by Lordly Cinder:

Looking at the tech tree and I see the ultimate Gleba science is fish enrichment. Idk what its for but it has to be something good ;P

It is to help make large numbers of quality spidertrons, but it is very hard to use at qualities beyond rare. (see the multiple threads about fish breeding)

[Defektiv]

The role the heat tower provides is that it will continue to burn material inputs even if it is at max temp, which is a function that is necessary for a full function Gleba base that never stops operating even when idle. My base has 50 heat towers to handle all the spoilage and overproduction and they hold temps between 800 and 1000 degrees depending on whether I'm pushing it for production or if its idle. It has dipped below 500 degrees once when I stopped using the science and let it sit for a long time so I set up a reactor to monitor temps and only insert a cell if it drops that low. But as long as something is being built the heat towers alone do just fine.
I found its much more difficult to keep a Gleba factory running at a smaller scale than a larger scale unless you import a nuclear reactor and keep importing fuel cells, which turns out to be a lot or work and materials. The larger scale you run the factory the more spoilage and overproduction occurs, which continues to feed the heat towers more and keeps temps hotter. The downside is that the more you run it the more you farm and the more spores you produce, which increases the area in which you aggro enemies. But once you finally get a large factory producing hard, and have a good amount of research into explosives for rocket turrets, a Gleba factory is one of the best in the game. You end up being able to print anything except uranium and other planet specific products and never have to expand for new resources. I felt hopeless at the start of Gleba that I would ever be able to leave the planet for long but after many many hours building and advancing that factory, it has become one of the most stable and productive factories in the game. At high evolution levels it can get a bit strained as you get large groups of big stompers erasing your front line defenses, but since the factory can print replacements very quickly it can hold out on its own for quite a while. The key is to embrace waste and use it to keep the factory running all the time.

[Hurkyl]

Ooh, when you say "stays there" it's not about not seeing the temperature go up when you burn stuff... it's about not seeing the temperature go down when you aren't!

Factorio doesn't model heat insulation. E.g. on its own, steam doesn't condense back into water, water doesn't freeze into ice or evaporate into steam, and ice doesn't melt into water. Heat pipes and heat-producers do not lose heat naturally... except on Aquilo. Aquilo will sap the energy out of your heat network.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Revolver Rez:

It's viable burning anything. When I eventually worked out what Gleba wants you to do I made it so everything spoilable I don't use funnels directly into a series of heating towers and it keeps the base powered indefinitely thanks to the infinite fruit harvest powering it all.
Since you have infinite resources and you need to keep everything going or it'll rot on the belts, the towers are an amazing waste disposal system. You COULD also use recyclers, but those don't give any benefit other than deleting waste.

The benefit of recyclers is that they immediately convert biological intermediates that spoil as spoilage, to spoilage, and they only return 25%. This simplifies the waste disposal pipeline to just needing to handle spoilage, and it prevents you from being overwhelmed by tons of the stuff; faster than you can get rid of it or can get it shipped to where to get rid of it -- which is a situation that could easily lead to jams that snowball into seizing up everything.

In short; the use of heating towers and recyclers is complementary.

[NeoSniper]

Originally posted by Lordly Cinder:

Odd thing is that its still at 501c
Thats strange isnt it? Why would that be,

Could be related to Heat exchangers needing temp of 500C to generate steam. Below 500C heat exchangers won't work.

[BlueRock]

Spoiler: if you want to crank up your power production quite a bit on Gleba without the cost of importing nuclear materials. I started with putting spoilage into heaters, then shifted to making and burning carbon, but then finally moved to Rocket fuel. Rocket fuel very little to generate a lot of heat due to its high fuel value and can be made for free essentially on Gleba.

[Avloren]

Originally posted by NeoSniper:

Originally posted by Lordly Cinder:

Odd thing is that its still at 501c
Thats strange isnt it? Why would that be,

Could be related to Heat exchangers needing temp of 500C to generate steam. Below 500C heat exchangers won't work.

Yeah, it sounds like OP has too many exchangers and not enough heating towers to keep them going. Or there's enough heating towers, but not enough fuel being fed into them fast enough. Either way, not enough heat. Whenever the towers get over 500C, the exchangers turn on and immediately suck up the extra heat and drop it back down to 500C, then they stop because they can't run below 500C. So you'd see it constantly hover around 500-501C.

Check the towers: are they constantly burning something? Then you need more towers. Are they sometimes idling? You need to feed them more fuel. Note that with some types of fuel-poor items (i.e. spoilage), the rate your inserters can shove it into the tower can be the bottleneck. Either way, scale it up until the towers can get comfortably over 500C and the exchangers can run as much as they want without running out of heat.