Fart power

[accent]

I'm quite new to the game, only ever managed to survive up to 200 cycles. But I decided to try if I could power the base with farts, so take only flatulent dupes in and collect all the natural gas they emit. It took about 60 cycles to build everything needed for it (by that time I had 7 flatulent dupes) and the farts collected during that time were enough to fill 2 gas reservoir tanks. For 12 cycles after that, I could run everything in my base with 1 natural gas and 1 coal generator, but then the gas tanks were empty and the fart collecting system didn't supply enough gas to keep it going so I had to add more coal generators.

Would there be any way to collect enough fart-produced natural gas for it to be practical? I had several pumps at the level that the natural gas accumulated at, all piping to a filter sending it to a big emptied room at first before I had reservoir tanks researched and then to the tanks. All the pumps had sensors around them so that they only pump when there is natural gas around them, to conserve power. The problem with that is that when most of the gas is gone, they only very briefly activate every once in a while and never pump long enough.

I'd need to figure out a way to collect all the stray puffs of gas to one place instead of having them randomly float around here and there. Though that might still not be enough gas to be useful. Otherwise there were no problems. I planned not to have more than 8 dupes anyway (and my screening process of "are you flatulent? no? then get out!" keeps population increase slow) so I only needed two 16 wide barracks to give each dupe space around their beds to not wake others up with farts. And when they work next to each other and someone farts, it's only a really short interruption to their work so it doesn't seem to matter.

[SKull]

I've managed it once. It's just a little finicky because the gas flows around everywhere so it gets fiddly to collect. I used three pumps/gas filters set up at the bottom of the base with gas element sensors and auto wires. But you really need to shape the base as an intact bowl so that the gas can't get out. And obviously you need a skimmer pronto, because you'll have a CO2 layer and a natural gas layer above that in the base, which tends to push the oxygen high up in the base and make parts of it unihabitable until you get your system set up. But once the CO2 in the bae has been removed it becomes simpler to place the natural gas pumps.

16 dupes could keep 1.5 generators running more or less full steam in that base. Drawback is that you can't really use liquid locks because the dupes will fart in them, and that you get disruptive natural gas on farms and other inconvenient places. For some reason they also drop stuff when they fart, which means you need to be careful how you arrange the eating/kitchen.

[Strygald]

Sadly, not very practical.

According to the wiki a flatulent dupe produces natural gas at a rate of 5g every 10 seconds or 0.5g/s

Considering a natural gas generator needs 90g/s to run .. you'd need 180 flatulent duplicants to run just one.

Better ways to obtain natural gas:

- natural gas geyser, can usually run 1 natural gas generator continuously(if you can store the excess vent output effectively).

- oil wells, 3 produce enough to run 1 natural gas generator continuously.

- oil refinery, 1 produces enough to run 1 natural gas generator continously(tricky part is making your dupes work on it enough, could just build 2)

[Strygald]

Didn't quite trust the wiki so I just ran a little test:

I placed 1 flatulent duplicant in a small room and left it there for 1 whole cycle, then let it out.

Following that, I pumped the natural gas into a gas reservoir.

Result...

approximately 1250g natural gas ended up in the gas reservoir

1250g/600s = 2.1g/s of natural gas

so assuming that result is consistent, you'd need about 45 flatulent duplicants to power 1 natural gas generator.

[NoBrainRequired]

Playing with Flatulant dupes only is the most fun way to play.