Help! Purifying Germs from Polluted Water

[Keramane]

So! I did some looking around for a good process, and all seem to suggest using Tepidizer(sp?) to about 75 degrees to kill everything. Pump in chlorine for the added bonus, if possible.

However, the issue I have is that anything above 70 causes my pumps to take damage, so I can't have a tepidizer and pump in the same pool. My prior attempt was lost due to Slimelung getting into the algae and then becoming airborne due to screwing up on my ore filters and/or not storing said algae in a chlorine environment to kill everything. However, before I try again, I was looking for a solution to my water/germ issue.

My own solution was to run a depidizer in a seperate liquid, like say, water or crude oil (if I get lucky enough to find the latter this time) that's completely isolated, use insulated tiles and heat that stuff up, then run radiant liquid pipes through it to heat the heck out of the water inside before dumping it into a new resevoire to sit until the germs are dead. To ensure that no new germs come through the line, I'd turn off the polluted water feed manually, and let the germ count drop to 0.

This is where my plan stumbles though, since now I have pump issues (can't have a pump submerged in that high a temperature otherwise damage). I consider using an Mechanized Airlock as a 'trap door flood gate' to open to the pump room, though that would mean that I'd need some cooling rig that I can set up to chill the superheated liquid before dumping it on the pump. That aside, I ask a simpler question: Can I remotely open a Mechanized Airlock or have an automation switch do it, to prevent my Dubes from hacing to step in and get boiled alive?

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With all the above, I should mention that this is a mid-game build. The best ore I have in any quantity is Iron, I'm struggling with adequate cooling but am working on a solution, and by now I'm needing Slime-biome Algae and Slime Refining. This design is to help me combat potentially airborn Slimelung before it becomes a problem.

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TL;DR: Help me design good mid-game germ filtration, sempai!

[fluxtorrent]

water doesnt carry slimelung so you can stop worrying about it if the airborn slimelung is what worries you.

For airborn slimelung you need to destroy and prevent polluted oxygen. De-odorizers are your main (and nearly only) weapon, although pufts can be used if you are into that sort of thing, downside to puffs is that they generate slime which can produce polluted oxygen, and it carries slimelung heh. Airlock your base with a deodorizer on either side of the door will prevent most of it from ever entering (and give you some convenient breathable air on the other side so your dupes dont have to keep opening the door to catch their breath.

To get rid of germs in water, the tepidizer works, though I personally recommend using the more power hungry aqua tuner. Run the pipe from your water sieve into your aqua tuner while it is submerged in your polluted water pool and it will heat the water up slowly to the point it kills germs, and let you output a much more reasonably temped clean water.

Downside is that the water you use at first "will" have some food posioning germs in it so its best to use it for things where that doesnt matter. toilets and showers don't affect your dupes if it has germs in it, as well as hydroponics. You can also pump that water straight into water resevoirs for holding until it is germ free, which is easily done by filling the room they are in with chlorine. Using this method isn't a 100% garuantee because any water left in the pipes does not get purified.


Lastly, using the tepidizer you only need about 50C for it to start killing germs. If you do want to go up to 75 to kill them faster, use gold amalgam for the machinery, it doesn't overheat until 125, and is just as readily available as iron if you dig into slime biomes.

[Hedning]

For the slimelung algae sounds like what you need is the ore scrubber. I've never used it myself because I move on to water based oxygen generation at that point.

If you need your pumps to handle higher temperatures you need to use different materials. Gold amalgam is an early game heat resistant material. However heating things up with power is the most wasteful thing you can do with power, so first consider if there isn't another way. Like with o2 a better way is using water, or convert the algae to o2 in a place where it can die off before reaching the duplicants.

[Keramane]

Yeah, I built 2 ore scrubbers and set permissions on my airlock design for the slime biome. I'd take a screenie, but it's on my home PC and I'm on my laptop (gawd do I wish they shared saves via steamcloud). Basically, an auto-door to the base, 2 sinks pointed inside so dubes clean up when coming back, a Deodorizer, then an Autodoor, my ore scrubbers and slime refiners, then deodorizers (one on the ground, one on an air tile above the door) next to the outside autodoor. The last door has permissions for only my miner, builder and courier, so that my standard dupes aren't getting sick and they don't overwhelm the ore scrubber or sinks.

I've come to notice that I don't rush Chlorine or Hydrogen storage rooms/tanks fast enough, so my scrubbers aren't ready by the time I run out of safe algae, but I'm working on that.

As far as Gold Amalgum, I'll need to push to get some of that fast; having a heat-resistant pump in place for a late-game filtration configuration sounds wise... Iron just won't do it.

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]

I used to have trouble with this, but I don't even try to mess with slime anymore. No matter what I do, I always end up with major slimelung infestations. My current strategy is to get a fully functioning set of electrolyzers + hydrogen generators before I run out of algae.

[XratedSippyCup]

dude... just make your pump out of gold. if the tep is yout only heating source.. your pump will never meltdown

[Keramane]

Originally posted by XratedSippyCup (Ehcks Dii):

dude... just make your pump out of gold. if the tep is yout only heating source.. your pump will never meltdown

Well, like I said, I only had access to Iron at the time. I'll keep gold in mind if I find some that isn't blockaded by slime >.>

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]

Be sure you switch on the germ overlay with "i" and note that as long as you don't mine an infected slime block, or breathing air that's infected you're fine. Once you mine a block, the mined slime will begin to emit slimelung into the air. Dupes can crawl on slime blocks, but as long as they aren't breathing infected air they are ok. You can also mine slime blocks above liquid - if the mined block falls into the liquid, it wont emit slimelung into the air.

[Keramane]

Originally posted by Cake for Mumm-Ra:

Be sure you switch on the germ overlay with "i" and note that as long as you don't mine an infected slime block, or breathing air that's infected you're fine. Once you mine a block, the mined slime will begin to emit slimelung into the air. Dupes can crawl on slime blocks, but as long as they aren't breathing infected air they are ok. You can also mine slime blocks above liquid - if the mined block falls into the liquid, it wont emit slimelung into the air.

Mm, I'm very careful around the slime biome. I have a 9-importance storage for Slime that sits in it's own 1x1x4 room with a deodorixer above it to keep the air from polluting. It works well for temporarily storing the slime, but even if I rigorously control the traffic and prevention of germ spread, the focus of my excursion into the slime biome is usually for algae. However, I guess that if I focus more on the Electrolyzer, I will have a more viable oxygen production.

I might be overthinking it as is; my base's air purity is very high, and I have a solid lock on polluted oxygen, so the Slimelung bacteria SHOULD die on its own, even from my 4 Algae Deoxidizers. However, I'm nothing if not a perfectionist, and I've discovered very early that ignoring a "small issue" very quickly dooms the player.

[fluxtorrent]

Honestly the algae deoxidizer is so inefficient you are far better off using terrariums despite the higher dupe effort cost. As long as you manage the polluted water they output effectively it doesnt matter how germ infected the algae is either. For all intents and purposes the terrariums are more efficient on water that the electrolyzer and more effective on algae than the deoxidizer but it fails in the category of "easy to manage" because of the amount of work they force your dupes to do.

edit: To be clear I still switch to an electrolyzer setup as early as possible, water is just way easier to manage than algae heh

[Keramane]

From what I was reading, terrariums are worse than the AD's, needing 2.5 terrariums per dupe to provide equivalent oxygen. Also, if they are unable to output oxygen, they continue to consume clean water regardless, where as the AD's don't consume resources if they're not pumping air.

Then I roll a Carbon Skimmer to deal with CO^2 buildups at my base's low-point, pre-dug for CO^2 trapping.

However this might have changed since the post and video I read/watched. Can anyone confirm?

[fluxtorrent]

You do need more of them because they are slower. But they consume algae at a lower rate. But they are use algae far more efficiently 30 g/s for 40 g/s of oxygen VS 550 g/s of algae for the deoxidizer to the 500 g/s of oxygen. You can even improve the ratio of the terrarium with light upping its output to 44g/s without a correpsonging increase in its consumption.

They are NEVER unable to output oxygen, they don't have a cap to the pressure they can create which can be a problem if you don't space them out because it can lead to overpressurized rooms.

While they do consume water its a very tiny amount. They use 300g/s of water and output 290g/s of polluted water, so it is almost entirely recyclable.

In addition they don't take power and they don't produce heat.


Lastly you should do everything you can to preserve that co2! It is one of the most valuable resources in late game. Slickster food! Used to produce additional oil (or petroleum for molten slicksters).

[Keramane]

Oh yeah? I always thought it as a horrible by-product that needed to die. Hm. Spose I'll need to get rid of those Skimmers at some point.

Then again, Coal Generators make a bunch of it and I presently have a crapload of coal thanks to having a few well-fed hatches and a decent push into a caustic (or maybe the verge of an Oil) biome.

I debate keeping the seed ID and retrying the map, since I'm in danger presently, but we'll see if I can't salvage these poor souls.

[fluxtorrent]

Heh my current long game is on day 516 and i cant produce ENOUGH co2 to feed my hungry little moltens. I kept digging bigger and bigger rooms to hold it and pumped a lot of it into resevoirs as well before hand, they consumed all of it in about 40 cycles. That being said I wasnt using ANY power generation that produced it until around cycle 400. I was running my oxygen units on the hydrogen produced by the electrolyzer and everything else on cycles still. The benefits of having an oxygen generation system that easily lets you support 16 dupes and WAY too much water heh. Have a polluted water vent that puts out 10kg a second about 50% of the time while active and a relatively short dormancy. Havent even needed to tap the cool steam vents or the regular water geyser on the map.

[Keramane]

Well, if water isn't as critical then, I might reconsider other water-burners, like Hydroponic Farms. I'd been using the step down so as to preserve water, polluted or otherwise.

I know that a closed-circuit lavatory setup ends up with a net water gain, after filtering, but since my filter wasn't rolling well, I was being super careful with water.