polluted dirt handling

[kelmenwong]

compost seems to be the direct approach, but i read that the dirt will get hot, and dupl using the hot dirt to plant food, can cause the plant wither.

other suggesting just to keep them in storage under cool water., but it will stay forever there.

if using compost, is there a practical way to cool down the hot dirt b4 they being used in the farming?

if just to keep in cool storage, no way to really recycle/remove them?

[Prometheus]

Its only a problem if you don't use any kind of cooling technique at all. A simple cold room that you pump your air through then to the rest of your base will take care of it.

[Gamefever]

I've also run into that at some point I have to manage the temperature of the living area's and then of course in future manage just how hot the machinery Im using will get.

So that means I'll have to set up a cooling room with perhaps the ability to move liquids and gases through it to then cool those down then export them to the rest of the base. I've seen examples of this with looped systems however the actual room that does the cooling gets hot enough to threaten the machines that do the work.

The weezewurt seems like a good option but in the patch those now have to be "farmed" or maintained rather than a passive free source of cooling. So those wont be a long term solution so to speak.

Actual cooling rooms are quite large and involve a lot of cross over mid tech so its not something that gets built in the early game unfortunately.

The real issue with heating comes from plumbing system that gets put into place early with the sieve and bathrooms....This ends up bringing up living quarter temps to about ~39 C. Which is quite warm, insulated pipes can mitigate a lot of that but that means more teching and more work replacing those lines.

Of course there is the list of things to do,
Oxygen Production, Farming, and then Bathrooms...
In this coming patch the nice thing is the new Oxyferns, these can take almost 40C temps...So at least that puts off the need to reduce water temps.

What Im getting at in a long way is that polluted dirt temps are not the main problem. Its a small issue compared to other heat sources.

[Strygald]

The only areas you need to cool below 30c are the crop farms, even if barracks, bathroom and mess hall are 50c the dupes don't care much.

Believe it or not 1 gold amalgam thermo regulator is enough to cool down your farms, but you need to set it up a certain way.

Build the thermo regulator in a small insulated room next to your electrolyzer room, cover the back of this room with tempshift plates made of obsidian or better. Next build 1 gas reservoir nearby and fill it with hydrogen, then next comes the loop.. radiant gas pipes around crop farms and insulated gas pipes for the rest... now hydrogen is cooled by the thermo regulator and consequently cools down the crop area.. and no gas pump is even needed.

Now you probably are thinking "but the thermo regulator is going to overheat and break!", remember the cooling room is built next to the electrolyzer room? this is where we have radiant liquid pipes snaking around the thermo regulator, bringing water from the water supply to the electrolyzer.. water passing through the radiant pipes will keep the thermo regulator cool, the heated up water will be fed into the electrolyzer and its heat deleted.

Remember to have a thermo sensor controlling the thermo regulator.

[madcow]

Compost heat production is so low and so trivial to deal with (and by deal with it I mean do nothing other than produce cool O2 for your base which will overcome all trivial heat producers). If you are avoiding handleing Polluted Dirt because of heat, you will struggle with the real heat producers of early game and have non-trivial problems.

[Hedning]

Once you have auto sweepers and rails the whole process is so much easier because you can just take the dirt on a little detour. In the meantime try to use whatever means you have access to to move the heat away from the plants. I recommend radiant gas pipes in a loop since they don't require refined metal. If you have started electrolyzing then fill them with h2, otherwise o2 will do well enough. If you have unlocked tempshift plates those can help too. You could try putting the dirt in cold water but if your usage is on-demand that won't help much.

Originally posted by madcow:

Compost heat production is so low and so trivial to deal with (and by deal with it I mean do nothing other than produce cool O2 for your base which will overcome all trivial heat producers). If you are avoiding handleing Polluted Dirt because of heat, you will struggle with the real heat producers of early game and have non-trivial problems.

His problem is not the compost itself, but that the dirt isn't cooled enough before getting put into the farm tile. If placed into the tile he may have a 0 degree o2 vent just by the farm, some plants may still experience overheating because conduction and convection may not be fast enough to carry it away. You may think it's trivial because when you were in early game your compost dirt got diluted by a lot of dug dirt, and then things average out so a cool o2 vent can easily take care of it, but if you are using mostly composted dirt then that's a rather large heat source.

[madcow]

Originally posted by Hedning:

His problem is not the compost itself, but that the dirt isn't cooled enough before getting put into the farm tile. If placed into the tile he may have a 0 degree o2 vent just by the farm, some plants may still experience overheating because conduction and convection may not be fast enough to carry it away. You may think it's trivial because when you were in early game your compost dirt got diluted by a lot of dug dirt, and then things average out so a cool o2 vent can easily take care of it, but if you are using mostly composted dirt then that's a rather large heat source.

His problem does not exist; reread the OP. He hasn't tried handling dirt yet. If he did, he wouldn't have bothered with this post. This is not an issue. It exists only in the OP's mind. I have never seen a colony have an issue with the composted dirt's heat. Its not helpful to new players for others to cater to erroneous perceptions.

[kelmenwong]

i read that with compost, dupl will move the "hot dirt" to farm planting food, but the high heat of the dirt will render the plant withered

[madcow]

Originally posted by kelmenwong:

i read that with compost, dupl will move the "hot dirt" to farm planting food, but the high heat of the dirt will render the plant withered

It doesn't. Try it. There is alot of "expert" opinions out there. Everything you read isn't necessarily written by knowledgeable writers. The air and surrounding tiles will affect the plant more than dirt will. Those are the things that cause mealwood to wilt. This is meal wood 101.

Reading is good. Playing and observing is better. In the time spent worrying about dirt, you would have allready moved on to some better food. Meal wood is early game for a reason. Once you can do better to feed the Dupes, you should.

Spend less time worrying about what you read and more time getting farther in this game.

Worry about keeping the Colony cool. Not the dirt.

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by madcow:

Originally posted by kelmenwong:

i read that with compost, dupl will move the "hot dirt" to farm planting food, but the high heat of the dirt will render the plant withered

It doesn't. Try it. The air and surrounding tiles will affect the plant more than dirt will. This is mealwood 101.

Hot dirt will heat up surroundings of farm tile. Maybe you should try it.
If you don't provide any cooling and continue supplying dirt at 70C then your farm will wither.

[madcow]

Originally posted by Angpaur:

Originally posted by madcow:

It doesn't. Try it. The air and surrounding tiles will affect the plant more than dirt will. This is mealwood 101.

Hot dirt will heat up surroundings of farm tile. Maybe you should try it.
If you don't provide any cooling and continue supplying dirt at 70C then your farm will wither.

ofc hot things heat things. But it is trivial if he is keeping the area cool to begin with which is what I have been stressing. Plus the dirt cools very quick. How much composted dirt does the OP need and how fast must he provide it?

Do you want the OP to really spend lord knows how much time cooling his dirt when it can be spent doing something actually useful for his colony's development?

This is not a reason to not plant meal wood, not a reason to slow progression in game. There are many more important things the OP needs to worry about.

The temp of a little bit of dirt that is consumed by an early game crop has got to be the most useless thing to worry about.

Even when his crops get hot from basically everything else that matters that puts out heat, its easy to deal with unless its too late like having a coal gen or electrolyser near the crops.

Again, I don't think its kind to the new players to not advise them to try it to see how much of an "issue" it is and see that it is trivial compared to everything else.

In other words, if your Dupes are starving on a meal wood plan, lots of other things were done wrong. You would be focusing on the wrong issue if you fixated on the dirt.

[Angpaur]

This is what happens when you supply farm tile with a 70C dirt:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1790244076
Very quickly 22C oxygen heated up to 33C.

Players tend do insulate farms, which is good to prevent heat from outside, but if you want to use composted dirt then you need a quite good cooling system to counter inside heat. Enclosed, insulated space will heat up quite fast.

Good solution would be to just store hot dirt in pool of water or run a cold enough water in pipes inside the farm.

But best option is just to move on to better food type. Initially you can grow mealwood using cold dirt, which is plenty in starting biome.

[madcow]

Originally posted by Angpaur:

But best option is just to move on to better food type. Initially you can grow mealwood using cold dirt, which is plenty in starting biome.

I agree.

As far as insulating farm tiles, I'm usually done with meal wood by the time i have an insulated farm. Early farm is just open air away from anything warm.

[Hedning]

Open air isn't enough if you rely heavily on composted dirt. Especially if you build rows one above the next it will hinder convection. If your dupes rarely visit then cool air from the surrounding area has no reason to flow in. Tile-to-tile conduction is not enough. I've had problems with fertilizer/water heating the immediate area even though I'm pumping very cold air close by. It's a simple problem to solve but still a problem that exists.

That said I thought he actually experienced it, not only read about it. You are absolutely correct that he should build it first and see if it's actually a problem. The first mealwood farm is unlikely to experience this problem because it consumes way more dirt than you could possibly have from composts at that stage. Any compost dirt would not exist long enough to heat it up.