Heat management is kicking my ass

[Devilfish]

I always have tons of fun with this game and I went to reinstall it again, but then I remembered I always get stuck on the bits that require heat management. I can just about wrap my head around how to handle the gasses, but temperature? Pff, forget it, I just can't get the hang of it. And when I try to look for advice I mostly find these insanely complex hyperoptimized NASA machines that I'd have to start over to even begin to build.

So, what do? Git Gud? Or is there some *basic* info that would help? (Again, not looking to build perfect systems, put those links to 200-page physics essays away. I just want to get the hang of this here vidja game.)

[some moron]

sink your heat into the cold biomes
that is what im learning now
pipe your hot water through there and keep lowering the pipes as the ice melts

also, you don't need to cool your whole base mostly just water for the plants, and coolant for refinery

[Black_Rat]

For early game i like to pump my oxygen though the cold biome before sending it back to the base which will keep the base cool for a while. Then once you are able to get to steel you should be able to create a perm cooling loop around the source of the majority of your heat by using the aquatuner and steam turbine. I wont go into more detail at the risk of "spoilers", but you can find many setups online if you dont care about that.

[zverozvero]

Go for simple and straightforward solutions and dont hold back. If it makes/is cold try it and if it breaks, can improve on it after. As allready suggested - cold biome. Exploit it, destroy it, let it melt. See how well piped stuff will transfer heat and what wont freeze in pipes. Same for weezeworts or AETNs.

[Devilfish]

Thanks guys, this is helping! One question though; I'm a very slow player. Won't I run out of cold biome after a while? What do I do then? Or is it a rush to the end once temp management becomes important?

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Devilfish:

Thanks guys, this is helping! One question though; I'm a very slow player. Won't I run out of cold biome after a while? What do I do then? Or is it a rush to the end once temp management becomes important?

Yes, the cold biome is a limited resource.
However, there is sustainable heat destruction with the Steam Turbine. Pair it with an Aquatuner to get temperatures below 125C.

[some moron]

You get five cold biomes. I am halfway through the first one, so there is plenty of time. Enough time to make steal to make the stronger coolers. So far there is plenty of time. Thaw that cold zone. It will teach you a bunch of things.

[zverozvero]

Can allways place aquatuner into sea of melted water and lock biome away with insulation. Will double on allready big reserve and show what tuner is capable of.

At this point though reading wiki about tuners (and weezeworts) is very recommended. Their mechanics is not intuitively apparent and output might be 2-3 times higher if you pick 'correct' coolant. Its not very long either.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by zverozvero:

At this point though reading wiki about tuners (and weezeworts) is very recommended. Their mechanics is not intuitively apparent and output might be 2-3 times higher if you pick 'correct' coolant. Its not very long either.

Their mechanic is not intuitive because they do not have a real ingame description. It says "cooling" and no numbers shown. Could be DTU or flat cooling.

You don't have to do any complex stuff in ONI. There are a lot of complex solutions and people like posting them and others copy them without learning much about the mechanics or basics in the process, which can leave them with the feeling you described. Apart from using the limited low temperatures available on the map, you can also try to reduce heat bleed and production. The area that needs to stay somewhat cool is usually your plant area. See where your heat comes from and stop it from getting to your plants. You do not need to cool down their water specifically, just the plants/air.

Machines can do a lot of heat. Hot stones carried in from hot biomes bring a lot of strong but slow thermal energy into your base. Hot gases transfer the heat quickly. Piped hot water carries as lot of heat and usually transfer it throughout your base etc. Apart from your metal refinery and some power plants you shouldn't get too much heat produced but mostly just be sneaked upon from the outside.

Longterm solution is usually the steam turbine and an aquatuner below it, but that costs quite a bit of energy if you are using water as a coolant. Wheezeworts and AETN can help but are not really scaleable. Early game is always raiding the natural ressources of the asteroid for what it offers. When you reach the long term solutions and clean up your waste production, you learn enough for the future/your next run.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Machines can do a lot of heat. Hot stones carried in from hot biomes bring a lot of strong but slow thermal energy into your base. Hot gases transfer the heat quickly. Piped hot water carries as lot of heat and usually transfer it throughout your base etc. Apart from your metal refinery and some power plants you shouldn't get too much heat produced but mostly just be sneaked upon from the outside.

You can also opt to make the heat generated by your industry be a positive rather than a negative, which will also cut down on heat bleed into the rest of your base.
By isolating your industry in a "hot box" and building it out of steel, you can run it at 125C and fill the room with steam, and just hook a steam turbine straight to the room. Then the turbine will get rid of most of the heat generated by your industry and give you power for the trouble.

[DolphinWing]

You can try Rime start. There you don't have to worry about cooling, but you might need to warm up your base. Another way to cool the base is to use cool slush geyser or cool salt slush geyser. Both of them are easy to find in DLC but not guarantee in base game. Way easy to cool things down than Steam Turbine and Aquatuner.

[some moron]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Machines can do a lot of heat. Hot stones carried in from hot biomes bring a lot of strong but slow thermal energy into your base. Hot gases transfer the heat quickly. Piped hot water carries as lot of heat and usually transfer it throughout your base etc. Apart from your metal refinery and some power plants you shouldn't get too much heat produced but mostly just be sneaked upon from the outside.

You can also opt to make the heat generated by your industry be a positive rather than a negative, which will also cut down on heat bleed into the rest of your base.
By isolating your industry in a "hot box" and building it out of steel, you can run it at 125C and fill the room with steam, and just hook a steam turbine straight to the room. Then the turbine will get rid of most of the heat generated by your industry and give you power for the trouble.

How would I do this? First of all, I think this is mid game at least because that's a lot of steel, and in the process would have generated a lot of heat which I would have to already had to deal with.
But okay lets say I dumped all that heat and melted all my cold biomes. Now I have a lot of steel.
So then rebuild every machine of say 5kDTU or greater of steel, in an insulated box with some water which is the steambox for a steam turbine? In other words the relatively low heat generated by a gas-powered power generator not only gets contained but adds to the heat of the steam?
Is this true in general, that if something that doesn't put out enough heat to boil water, if you build it in the same box as say a thermo regulator, the two combined can boil water for the turbine (saving twice, once on the heat required and again in not needing to cool the base)? I tried this twice on steam vents and it didn't work but I think that's because it creates too much steam and stops the generator which I don't understand why. Why can't it be high amounts of steam in a steambox for a steam turbine?
But anyway, maybe this is true for all things except steam vents or anything that adds more water to the steambox because for some mysterious reason, too much steam is too much. Can anyone explain the numbers on that? So I know how much steam is too much and how much is too little.

[Angpaur]

There is no too much steam for a steam turbine. There can be too low temperature of the steam though.

[glass zebra]

The problem with the steam vent is that the turbine needs 125°C+ and the cold steam vents spit out 110°C, which evens out with the steam you already have in that room.

Originally posted by some moron:

So then rebuild every machine of say 5kDTU or greater of steel, in an insulated box with some water which is the steambox for a steam turbine? In other words the relatively low heat generated by a gas-powered power generator not only gets contained but adds to the heat of the steam?
Is this true in general, that if something that doesn't put out enough heat to boil water, if you build it in the same box as say a thermo regulator, the two combined can boil water for the turbine (saving twice, once on the heat required and again in not needing to cool the base)?

There is nothing that does not put out enough heat to boil water except if the building has a cap on max temperature of the surroundings (like the 2 heating buildings). Heat just adds and adds and can reach any value before the machine overheats or melts. Most of the time you won't reach water boil temperatures because the heat escapes into the surroundings. Insulation will fix this and the room will just continue to get hotter (if there is nothing filled into it that cools it down again). DTU/s just adds energy and does not stop at a certain value. A simple light bulb will boil steam given the time and insulation.

The tip with the box is more of an anecdote than something you should be focusing on if you have basic trouble with heat. Having certain buildings made of steel can help a lot though, the most common probably being the aquatuner or stuff build in the oil biome (if you have no gold amalgam).

[some moron]

So you are saying this build with the vent should work? Cause it seemed to stop (so I tore out the guts). It still required power, which I was disappointed in. But I guess any SGAT will require power unless you have enough crap in there generating heat?
Jons video says you only want two tons of water in there, and some stuff written online said something about it not working with more than 140kg of steam. What is that about?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2776613907

[some moron]

my goal was to harvest the heat of the vent and also harvest water, but I think that's a mistake to try to do both. So I built the other nearby to cool the water, but it required so much energy I couldn't afford it. So I rebuilt it on a copper volcano and that helps except it goes dorman. Next I see a small volcano and I plan to build a SGAT including that in the steam box. To cool the water from the steam vent. Thoughts?