Any use for a cool steam vent?

[Gustuv Wynd]

I haven't played in a while and I don't know if there was some update or if the RNG just hates me, but I have tried rerolling my asteroid six times and each time I get a cool steam vent practically ontop of my starting position.

So I guess I am going to try to deal with it. Is there any actual use for a cool steam vent? Seems like just a source of a lot of heat to me that isn't hot enough for a steam turbine.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

So, it never occurred to you that this isn't random? Because it isn't. You are guaranteed a cool steam vent near your base. Always.

This is a good thing. A great thing, even. it's a source of never ending water. Not sure how you can stare a treasure like this in the face and act like it's a bad thing.

In my opinion, the best thing to do with it is use it for oxygen production. Hot water works fine. It's relatively easy to cool the resulting hot oxygen and oxygen from an electrolyzer is always at least 70C anyway. That potentially give you a neverending source of oxygen for your dupes.

You could also potentially cool it and use it for other things, but using it hot like this is simpler, I think.

[zverozvero]

If you place aquatuners in same chamber with geyser it'll heat up steam and let turbine turn it into 95 C water. Can even cool very same water you get from turbine. Just dont run it dry and fry cooler. Some igneous rock tempshift plates in chamber would help.
Can also pump steam with steel pump to separate chamber through high preasure vent. 20 kg works better than 5.

[Gustuv Wynd]

Originally posted by catwhowalksbyhimself:

So, it never occurred to you that this isn't random? Because it isn't. You are guaranteed a cool steam vent near your base. Always.

This is a good thing. A great thing, even. it's a source of never ending water. Not sure how you can stare a treasure like this in the face and act like it's a bad thing.

In my opinion, the best thing to do with it is use it for oxygen production. Hot water works fine. It's relatively easy to cool the resulting hot oxygen and oxygen from an electrolyzer is always at least 70C anyway. That potentially give you a neverending source of oxygen for your dupes.

You could also potentially cool it and use it for other things, but using it hot like this is simpler, I think.

Water is a pretty much unlimited resource as long as you have latrines and sand. Dupes pee a fair amount. Even if you are really using the water up...toss a couple slime stills in and you're golden. I have played 100s of hours and never once worried about water. Even with using water to make oxygen. which is pretty much ever game.

Using this water to make oxygen is going to be hard....I'd have to pipe it out, do the electrolysis, and then pipe the air back in. Otherwise I will 100% of that heat will be in my base. Do able of course and I had already thought of that, but...why when I can use any water and just wall this stupid geyser up and not deal with the heat? I used to like finding them a ways away from my base and would start a oxygen factory around them, but then the heat was a non-issue. As it is I am going to be haven't to take drastic steps to keep things cool until I can insulate it off really good.

[Gustuv Wynd]

Originally posted by zverozvero:

If you place aquatuners in same chamber with geyser it'll heat up steam and let turbine turn it into 95 C water. Can even cool very same water you get from turbine. Just dont run it dry and fry cooler. Some igneous rock tempshift plates in chamber would help.
Can also pump steam with steel pump to separate chamber through high preasure vent. 20 kg works better than 5.

I do this with just aqua tuners and some water that I just cycle through over and over. I will have to play with it I guess. I would think with the geyser putting out water I will have to insulated pipe off excess instead of just hauling a few bottles in and then sealing it up. Water that I will then have to to do something with or it will cook my dupes.

I don't remember this being a standard thing. I find it really annoying. It would be nice if it wasn't so close to my printer...but the thing is visible when the game starts before I've excavated a single square.

[Black_Rat]

Originally posted by Gustuv Wynd:

Originally posted by zverozvero:

If you place aquatuners in same chamber with geyser it'll heat up steam and let turbine turn it into 95 C water. Can even cool very same water you get from turbine. Just dont run it dry and fry cooler. Some igneous rock tempshift plates in chamber would help.
Can also pump steam with steel pump to separate chamber through high preasure vent. 20 kg works better than 5.

I do this with just aqua tuners and some water that I just cycle through over and over. I will have to play with it I guess. I would think with the geyser putting out water I will have to insulated pipe off excess instead of just hauling a few bottles in and then sealing it up. Water that I will then have to to do something with or it will cook my dupes.

I don't remember this being a standard thing. I find it really annoying. It would be nice if it wasn't so close to my printer...but the thing is visible when the game starts before I've excavated a single square.

That has been normal for a very long time. And taming a steam vent for unlimited water is pretty easy overall, what you do with the water is up to you.

[glass zebra]

Even if you are not using water a lot right now, you can use water a lot more. Electrolysers are pretty easy to automate. Pumping it in and out is something you have to do, but you only have to build up the system once and then never touch it again. The hydrogen produced can also just be used to power the system itself, which is likely more energy efficient than adding slime distilling, which just uses energy (and if you don't conveyor it a lot, also dupe time) before you can use the water. A single tile of slime will also only give you ~60kg of water.

On the normal staring asteroids you have an unbelievable amount of water just because of stuff like all the polluted water in the slime biomes, but people still manage to run out of it at some point and the geyser is just "infinite", which people do like. If you don't wanna deal with it, you can just wall it off work a double layer of insulated tiles. It will quickly overpressure and stop working and producing heat.

You can also use the heat it produces for a steam generator, if you heat it up just a little bit, but in that caste all that you get is a just a discount on heating up your water a bit. No heat useable heat energy is produced under 125°C. It's all coming from the aquatuner if you build a loop and if you don't you are just cooling it 15°C. If you don't want the water, there is very little use for the geyser.

You can also use it for the 2-3 steam rocket trips you have to do in the game, but it's often easier to just produce your own steam close to the rocket, due to how badly gas pipes insulate.

You could use the temperature to preheat some stuff you wanna heat a lot, but it's mostly just there for infinite water. You can ignore it if you never play 2k cycle colonies or maybe 1k cycle ones with 30 dupes.

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by Gustuv Wynd:

Water is a pretty much unlimited resource as long as you have latrines and sand. Dupes pee a fair amount.

You get 6.7kg of water per dupe. If you have 16 dupes then it is 107kg per cycle or 179g/s. I wonder what would you like to do with that amount of water.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Originally posted by Gustuv Wynd:

Originally posted by catwhowalksbyhimself:

So, it never occurred to you that this isn't random? Because it isn't. You are guaranteed a cool steam vent near your base. Always.

This is a good thing. A great thing, even. it's a source of never ending water. Not sure how you can stare a treasure like this in the face and act like it's a bad thing.

In my opinion, the best thing to do with it is use it for oxygen production. Hot water works fine. It's relatively easy to cool the resulting hot oxygen and oxygen from an electrolyzer is always at least 70C anyway. That potentially give you a neverending source of oxygen for your dupes.

You could also potentially cool it and use it for other things, but using it hot like this is simpler, I think.

Water is a pretty much unlimited resource as long as you have latrines and sand. Dupes pee a fair amount. Even if you are really using the water up...toss a couple slime stills in and you're golden. I have played 100s of hours and never once worried about water. Even with using water to make oxygen. which is pretty much ever game.

Using this water to make oxygen is going to be hard....I'd have to pipe it out, do the electrolysis, and then pipe the air back in. Otherwise I will 100% of that heat will be in my base. Do able of course and I had already thought of that, but...why when I can use any water and just wall this stupid geyser up and not deal with the heat? I used to like finding them a ways away from my base and would start a oxygen factory around them, but then the heat was a non-issue. As it is I am going to be haven't to take drastic steps to keep things cool until I can insulate it off really good.

The amount of water you get from dupe pee is tiny.

And also the hot oxygen is not that big a deal. The SHC of oxygen is tiny. It takes hundreds of cycles to heat up the base with hot oxygen at all, and very little power to cool it down.

I'm not sure what a slime still is, but slime will run out on your map pretty quick if you are somehow getting water out of it.

I'm very skeptical of your claims to magic up water without an actual water geyser of some kind.

but yes, it's useful and the heat is pretty much not a big deal if you turn it into oxygen.

[caseyas435943]

Originally posted by catwhowalksbyhimself:

Originally posted by Gustuv Wynd:

Water is a pretty much unlimited resource as long as you have latrines and sand. Dupes pee a fair amount. Even if you are really using the water up...toss a couple slime stills in and you're golden. I have played 100s of hours and never once worried about water. Even with using water to make oxygen. which is pretty much ever game.

Using this water to make oxygen is going to be hard....I'd have to pipe it out, do the electrolysis, and then pipe the air back in. Otherwise I will 100% of that heat will be in my base. Do able of course and I had already thought of that, but...why when I can use any water and just wall this stupid geyser up and not deal with the heat? I used to like finding them a ways away from my base and would start a oxygen factory around them, but then the heat was a non-issue. As it is I am going to be haven't to take drastic steps to keep things cool until I can insulate it off really good.

The amount of water you get from dupe pee is tiny.

And also the hot oxygen is not that big a deal. The SHC of oxygen is tiny. It takes hundreds of cycles to heat up the base with hot oxygen at all, and very little power to cool it down.

I'm not sure what a slime still is, but slime will run out on your map pretty quick if you are somehow getting water out of it.

I'm very skeptical of your claims to magic up water without an actual water geyser of some kind.

but yes, it's useful and the heat is pretty much not a big deal if you turn it into oxygen.

He's not living off water from bathrooms. True they use less than make. But it's not some water fountain.

Now I have had starts where they were tons of water everywhere. One play thru I went 500+ cycles and I still didn't need a geyser. But more times than not you'll need to tap at least one.

I'm with you he's full of it.

But I guess it all depends how this person plays a map. Probably anything less than 400 cycles you'd probably never need a geyser. But anything over that you will need to.

[glass zebra]

The default world just has so much polluted water around in the slime biomes. Not sure how much the map generation got changed, but in the past I played close to 1k cycles on the (back then only) starting world without ever opening a geyser and I used the old noob trap algae terraria which just consumed a ton of water. Not sure if they majorly reduced the water from those.

Tapping into regenerative sources is just always better in the long run and deciding to start doing that after 1k cycles will leave you with very little back up resources and a lot of wasted potential from the 1k cycles of letting the geyser overpressure. If you are not interested in the future and just want to play short games, it does not matter.

[bwhitejr]

Originally posted by Gustuv Wynd:

I haven't played in a while and I don't know if there was some update or if the RNG just hates me, but I have tried rerolling my asteroid six times and each time I get a cool steam vent practically ontop of my starting position.

So I guess I am going to try to deal with it. Is there any actual use for a cool steam vent? Seems like just a source of a lot of heat to me that isn't hot enough for a steam turbine.

They're not entirely useless, or hard to deal with. They won't power a steam turbine themselves, it's true, but you can build a chamber around one and dump heat into it with an aquatuner and use the combined heat to run one. Put a water lock onto the chamber to get access to upgrade everything to steel and finalize the build, later on when you have exo-suits. Then seal it.

Or, just get insulated tiles, surround it, and forget it until you're ready to deal with it. If it's an enthusiastic one, it'll flood the space and go dormant from over-pressure. It can be pretty handy later for oxygen and hydrogen, for power, or your space program in the vanilla game, and sending water to other asteroids if you have the DLC. I've used them for hydroponics, too - pincha, bristle, and reed fiber like warmer water - build a deep enough chamber for the steam to convert to water, drop, and cool enough to pipe to them.

Trust that they're way, way easier to deal with than a hydrogen or hot polluted vent, which emit at 500C, a cool steam vent is a mere 100C. If pooled that should cool during dormant periods to use.

Remember that a big part of the ONI game is moving temperature around. Your goal is to either figure out how to use the temps of the geyser, or change it's temp to use the resource from it. Me? I seal them off until I'm ready to use them - and I've experience mostly that they're not too close to my starting area on most maps - your mileage may vary. And, insulated tile is your best friend.