Aquiring poluted water / farming pincha peppers

[nadir-seen-fire]

I started farming pincha peppers to improve my duplicants morale when I was using slime to produce oxygen and realized there was a massive polluted water output I needed to take care of.

Now thanks to depleting my slime reserves, the effort needed for slime mining, slime being needed for my mushroom farm, power outages causing long lasting oxygen level emergencies, and great* bathroom management strategy. I now have a functioning SPOM and my polluted water output has become nearly nonexistent.

Pincha peppers are needed for all the high-tier morale food and the espresso machine. Even if I manage to get eggs sustainably or start farming sleet wheat morale will drop from +3 to +2. So I need a good source of lots of polluted water.

I can't seem to think of a good source, a lot of potential sources don't seem to work out. Who knew it would be so hard to just make water dirty!

• I have a working self recycling bathroom system. It doesn't produce enough surplus (polluted) water, I think I'm 200 cycles in and it still hasn't filled up enough to even add an automated shutoff. And I don't want to try switching to pumping in an external water source and pumping away polluted water.
  
• I have a natural gas generator, but it hasn't output enough liquid to start dealing with yet so I don't think it would be a good source.
  
• I'm currently using petroleum to generate a small amount of plastic. I don't think I'm up to sustaining a petro generator yet to get polluted water out of it.
  
• I did find a cool slush geyser. But it doesn't seem to erupt much, so I'm not sure it's a great source. Plus it's cold, while pincha peppers want a hot location and I actually had to add a space heater near my first farm. And the geyser is far away, making it a long trip for my farmers.
  
• My carbon skimmer's output appears to be really low and I kind of don't want to try risking diverting my co2 dumping and SPOM's water source to try using a skimer to just generate an unknown quantity of polluted water.
  
• There are a pile of polluted water pockets I can use for now. But they take a fair bit of effort to get to and pump out. And that effort is multiplied by the number of pockets and how little each has.

[SKull]

The slush geyser is great if you can find one. But other than that your sources are producing more yourself though the use of lavatories and natural gas generators. They output quite a bit of it. Failing that you should reverse the problem and try to use less polluted water so that you don't run out.

[nadir-seen-fire]

I'm playing the "casual?" mode in the new update because I've had so many colonies fail and want to see the late game / figure out techniques to surive without needing to effectively start over just to try and fix a mistake. Maybe the output is different in this mode, because my generators aren't outputting much polluted water. I have 3 natural gas generators and they're my primary power source while the geyser is running. But after a long period of time (I think I'm past cycle 200, not sure how much of that they were running) they still haven't produced a half tile high pool of liquid in my 9 tile wide power room. I don't think I could even run a pump smoothly yet.

Or maybe they just don't run much because they're automated and because of power shortages I haven't setup anything with a really high power demand. Though they still run a fair bit.

Edit: And I don't want to multiply my power consumption by 10x just to produce more poluted water through the natural gas generators. I'm trying to concerve power at the moment because I've been dealing with blackouts during the long periods when the natural gas geyser isn't running. I finally built a series of gas reservoirs to cover this, but I am not sure how much capacity what I have built is capable of handling for the period of time the geyser is dormant.

It's easy to produce polluted oxygen. I wish I could just pump water and polluted oxygen into a small 3x1 or 4x4 machine to output polluted water.

[SKull]

Well, it depends how much they are running, right. But if you run three NG gens and have 4-8 lavatories running on sieve water you will have a surplus of PH2O that you can then use to farm nuts. Whatever the quantity of that surplus is is exactly how much you should use on nut farms in my opinion. Even if it's just five nuts it's better than nothing. Doesn't have to be super fancy either. Just keep an eye on the water level in your tank. If it is going up then you can grow more nuts. Going down, grow fewer. This neanderthal approach is basically what I do. But it works. And it can keep a nice balance to the nut farming to make it mostly effortless.
The only variable are the NG generators. If they stop running because of a dormant geyser or because the batteries are full you get less PH2O in, so you might need to use less PH2O for a while or pump in some more/melt polluted ice. Or you can use more power so that the generators are running more constantly. That is always an option depending on the circumstances.

If you are using a tray under the gens for the water you shouldn't run a pump full time. Unless you have a lot of them I guess, which you really wouldn't after the changes to the geysers. I use a clock sensor and an auto wire on it so it switches on for a short period every day if I do this. Usually I try to place the generators over an existing pool of water though. Saves me a pump.

I'd try to get to the oil and set up a couple of petro generators on the circuit to deal with the incosistencies of natural gas. They are more reliable than the NG because of the dormant periods of the geysers, and the supply is close to limitless with small-scale play. There is a lot of oil down at the bottom. That should solve the power issues for a while at least. Petroleum generators are very nice indeed. All you need is an oil refinery somewhere not too remote and some plastic for the generators. And obviously pipes. Lots and lots of pipes.

Oh, and a second, rather more exciting, option is to only allow flatulent dupes in your colony and then use that natural gas in the generators as well. I've tried this a few times, and 16 dupes can easily keep one to one and a half natural gas generators running full time. If you can get all the gas from whereever it is to the generators obviously, which is the tricky bit. Fun to fiddle with though.

[Strygald]

if you need large amounts of polluted water then petroleum generators are the way to go, even just 1 produces 750g/s polluted water.

Like Skull said there's lots of oil at the bottom of the map, once that runs out you can get more petroleum from either slicksters(free) or pumping clean water into oil wells(infinite).

Using the refinery is inefficient in that 50% of the mass is lost when converting it into petroleum but since there's so much free oil initially it's not that big a deal.

A more efficient way of converting crude oil into petroleum, 1:1 ratio, is to heat the crude oil up to 400c which will make it turn into petroleum. You can actually generate a nice amount of free water with this method.

[Elevrai]

The slush geyser will be the simplest way to feed your plants: Chain the geyser with 2 metal refineries and each time you refine metal, you'll feed the plants. It will be worth less when you'll run out of metal but when you'll be there, you'll have tons of peppers stored in space.

[Doombunny]

I've got an automation setup where i have a tank of polluted water for my metal refinery to get the water to pinchapepper tolerances; once it goes over a certain temp (55-70 degrees), i have it pump that water to a water seive to delete some of that heat. If the water level gets too low, I pump pwater in from my lavatory/shower runoff to cool tthe metal refinery resevoir to about 35-40 degrees.

Its not perfect and needs fiddling from time to time, but it keeps the metalrefinery going, cleans the food poisoning germs out, and grows my peppers/resupplies my clean water tank.

I keep the clean water cool with periodic ice infusions or pumping in melt water from an ice biome. Its not infinitely sustainable, but its sustainable for now (450 cycles in).

[zoarionprime]

Dont waste the water farming, preserve wild plants in sterile gases, unless you have over 20 dupes already by then youll be producing a good amount of poluted water...

[cainboy]

My Polluted water lvls exploded when I finally took care of my CO2 issues with the petroleum generator... they also gave polluted water, so win win.
:)
I dont know how many dupes you have, but i'm currently subsisting on wild grown plants.