Quick guide: How to deal with heat for long-term success

[MARTFONGER]

I started this as a reply to another thing, but it was off-topic and got huge.

The heat problem. So many people suffer for not knowing how to deal with this, and it took me forever to really finally figure out design principles which easily deal with the heat problem, so I want to share a strategy that works really really well, and is easily executed by anyone, in the current build of the game.

Anything that makes a lot of heat like a power plant or a refinery or whatever, needs to be in a room that is both sealed and insulated with igneous tiles. Any gas that is produced need to be reclaimed or eliminated.

Now what you will have created by doing this is a a box of heat destined for failure, but now you HAVE TO go get wheezeworts and put enough of them into that room that all of the heat produced is nullified.

Here's an example, which has been running almost full-tilt for 600 cyces;
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1576607324

You should also use the abyssalite edges to your advantage to create these areas whenever possible.


Now anywhere else in your base that you have unwanted heat, you need to do the same thing. SPOMs usually get away with 1 or 2. Metal refinery needs more than you think.

You will have to also deal with hot water at some point for some reason, but you just delete that heat through a refinement sieve and then cool it any number of ways, like an AETN or what-have-you-at-hand, like a slush geiser (ideal!) or even just a cold biome with a liquid cooler in it until you can get something nicer.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1576616571


Some will say that they use a wort cooling hydrogen tower and then run gas pipes everywhere, but I did that for a half dozen or more playthroughs over 700 cycles EACH and that crap is just plain fail. And I did it on a crap computer so I had plenty of time to consider it.

Speaking of gas pipes: All pipes moving anything hotter than you want your base, through your base, need to be insulated pipes made of igneous rock or ceramic.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1576615907

The gameplay implications;

There is a time in the mid-game where how fast you can expand is limited by your ability to gather wheez's. It's just that simple! Anti-turtling design.

Mid-to-late game, you must by then have created a design cool enough and which produces enough steel to have covered the surface, or you're going to lose to surface degredation and/or heat-death eventually, too-late is around cycle 1000. This design, capable of launching rockets, must be kept cool by only the AETN's and wheez's that exist on the starting map, without space resources. This is EASY, but it is another hard-limit the game imposes.

Late-game, ice planets give you more wheez's than you could ever possibly need even if you filled the map with generators and wheez's.


So what? All solutions are valid? Well in my current playthrough at cycle 907 I'm about to have infinite solar power and start launching rockets and I have never built a single water or gas cooler, or had to power one, or run strange, obtuse collections of piping for one and THAT is truly, truly efficient.

That gas power plant above? That's enough for my entire core base. Running water cooling 24/7 is just awful! Wheez's are the way to go.

[Strygald]

Heat management in this game, atm, is actually pretty trivial... yes, probably all players in the beginning freak out when their crops start wilting from heat build-up and didn't know how to handle the heat, we've all been there. Once you understand the game better you'll realize all you need is Wheezeworts...yep, you don't even need AETN.. just Wheezeworts lol

They used to be underwhelming, but now they are overpowered! you don't need to even put them in a Hydrogen chamber, just space them around your colony as nice super cooling decorations. This probably wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for heat deleting machines but using heat deletion machines is pretty standard at this point.

The only thing you really have to worry about is cooling water down for growing crops... so convert the hot geyser water into polluted water(or transfer the heat into existing polluted water), then clean it... is it then really that hard to cool the resultant 40c water down below 30c? lol

I find it amusing that all the heat management buildings are not used for base cooling at all, but rather to prepare resources like rocket fuel or as 'science experiments'

[Clonefarmer]

Very good advice! Not sealing your base from off from industrial machines and heat is one of the most common mistakes I see new players make.

I'd just like to add, now that we can vent heat out to space it's even easier to deal with. You can go nuts with aquatuners and just vent all the steam out into the vacuum of space.

[Ddoge]

very good tips. I've never made it to cycle 600, but I can see how heat would be a real issue eventually if you don't take step s to control it early on!

I just wish there was a better option to eliminating heat than the 2 we have currently: weezewarts and the hydrogen cooler thing in ice areas. I think I need to learn to exploit the ice biomes more.

[Lifepath -CdE-]

Well I have been insulating my hot machinery apart from the rest for a while but i'm going to try the opposite in that playthrough : heat dispersion using metal tiles i will let the heat from the machins go to other areas. I will then have a cool liquid radiator in the places that need it. It is ok for your base to be warm and if the heat disperses well it will be warm everywhere but never too hot anywhere.

[zoarionprime]

I like to use small hydrogen filled rooms with one wheezewort in it. in about 50-100 cycles the small room will reach -60 and transfer cold for quite a ways in all directions, depending on how you insulate you can direct the cold if you want...

Its way better than just setting up a wheezewort next to something hot. It stays cold once you get it cold...

Im currently at cycle 3520 btw...

[Ddoge]

Originally posted by zoarionprime:

I like to use small hydrogen filled rooms with one wheezewort in it...

great idea!

[ShaTiK]

It’s actually even simpler than that. The only place you really need to cool down is the CORE of your base (where dupes are walking without suits) – that’s usually cooking, sleeping, relaxing, farming, bathroom and maybe some ranching. All of that takes not that much space as you would think. By insulating the CORE from unwanted heat in form of biomes/machinery/energy-related stuff you really could get away with only minimal cooling. Usually it’s in the form of cooled oxygen, since it’s only the matter of time when you will have to switch to electrolyzers - and these output at 70, so you would have to cool it down anyway. Currently SPOM with radiant pipes and 3 wheezworts cools oxygen down to 20, which is more than enough (weirdly enough, from what I saw myself, high-end non-space materials SPOM with 4 wheezes coold O2 down to -5). Farming a bit different if you are making bristle blossoms and sleet wheat is entirely different story and end-game crop in farming anyway, but both of these have ways to manage water temp.
In all other cases you can just ignore temperature almost entirely or employ simple enough methods to prevent overheating, and that’s the only goal, really. Transformers are heating up? Placing even 1 wheez to 4 transformers is enough. Plastic production is overheating? Make press out of steel and cool it down with produced petroleum. Refinery outputs heated coolant? Make a heat-destruction loop with petroleum, radiant pipes and hydrogen-trick-steam turbine (among many other ways)+build refinery itself out of ceramics.
The only ‘problem’ with all of these is that ‘base’ temp of many of these things would be way above comfortable for dupes, but it’s far better to use exo-suits then to cool, say, refinery down to 30, since suits slow dupes down and do not affect their performance when tinkering/ranching

[MARTFONGER]

Originally posted by ShaTiK:

a lot of stuff

These are all strategies that I myself have implemented at one time or another. I feel that in the current build of the game heat is so much more controllable than all of that. I haven't had to make a single complex or high-power heat solution simply by insulating everything from the rest of the base. I have a great big berry farm smack in the middle of everything that is passively cooled by my cold water and requires only 1 wheeze. It's all about keeping the heat out to begin with and dealing with the heat each system produces on-site.

[ShaTiK]

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

Originally posted by ShaTiK:

a lot of stuff

I feel that in the current build of the game heat is so much more controllable than all of that

Well, way before even wheezworts were not present, so heat death was kinda inevitable. Which was fun in a way, but prohibited long term based. Right now, even after geysers nerf, game is still pretty manageable if you know the basics. Which a lot of new players don't know, then being new players and all.
All of that is not good not bad - just the way devs decided to make game. I personally like the availability of long term sustain solutions, but some may dislike it since before game was very varied and a lot harder too

[MARTFONGER]

Originally posted by ShaTiK:

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

I feel that in the current build of the game heat is so much more controllable than all of that

Well, way before even wheezworts were not present, so heat death was kinda inevitable. Which was fun in a way, but prohibited long term based. Right now, even after geysers nerf, game is still pretty manageable if you know the basics. Which a lot of new players don't know, then being new players and all.
All of that is not good not bad - just the way devs decided to make game. I personally like the availability of long term sustain solutions, but some may dislike it since before game was very varied and a lot harder too

Definitely used to be harder in some ways but easier in others. For a long time you could just trap a single hatch below a storage container and it would make endless coal with no interaction and a ton of other things. Heat is definitely easier now.

[zoarionprime]

Heat was no big deal before either, as long as you built a hydrogen bubbler before cycle 400-500. Now its so easy, just fly out and get more wheezeworts...