Early-Easy-Decent Polymer Press (Plastic)

[Death and Taxes]

Marie the Dupette: "Life is perfect here inside our little meteor.
Lemming the Dupe: "Yeah, the paintings. cots, and liceloaf are ~~ to die for ♪♫ ~~
Orion the Dupe: "Morons... we need plastic or we all gonna die."
Marie the Dupette: *Stress Vomits*
Lemming the Dupe: *Trashes your hydrolysis room*
Orion the Dupe: "...♥♥♥♥♥♥♥." *Grabs atmo suit and slogs around in 170f crude oil.*

Joking aside... plastic is a pain the ass if you hate ranching... means ya gotta get enough to cover your bare necessities, which means a hot and messy polymer press. I played with a few real-survival based run-throughs, (no debug mode bs) and find this to be a pretty easy and manageable setup for early/mid game plastic using the dreaded polymer press.

This ghetto setup is good for making 1000'ish plastic between cooldowns which is good enough to get your basic QOL goodies made. It is made with the most basic of materials. It's cheap enough and pretty space efficient to make several if ya wanted to.

(7) Tiles for Polymer nook are made from Sedimentary Rock.
(18) Tempshift plates are made from Sedimentary Rock.
(1) Polymer Press is made from Copper Ore... DO NOT USE gold amalgam.
(1) Bottle emptier to dump a little oil into the nook where the press sits in the tiles.
(1) Switch (important)

Once you get around 1k or so, flip that switch and let it cool a bit. Go make plastic stuff. :)
Don't get attached to it. There are far better setups once you get rollin', but this is pretty spiffy early on.

Here ya go:

https://imgur.com/gallery/8GUuKYs

Game on.

-Xynxie

[cswiger]

If it works and you're happy with it, congratulations.

You don't really need to use sedimentary rock and the tempshift plates if you simply have a cooling loop using the petroleum going to the polymer presses. If you have a water line running nearby, say going to the oil well, you can use that as well.

However-- the key to not overheating the polymer presses is simple automation with a temp sensor. If you've got good cooling, then the temp sensor will let your presses run full speed.

If you've got limited cooling, they'll slow down as much as needed so that nothing breaks:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208005637
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208005936
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208006244

Note that the power plant directly below is being cooled as well; nothing is above ~35 C.

[Death and Taxes]

Dude, that is a pretty sweet set-up, but early game it is not. :)

[Gamefever]

Thing is that Drecko is early game access.

There are a lot of ways to skin the Drecko, er right that.
One of the ways I've done it is to simply hook up my pee water to a electrolyzer to create the H2 needed for the farm. The area to be used I just block it up tile by tile, at one end make a water lock, then just subtract from the massive block the space needed for about 2 ranches.
Pump in a mix of O2/H2 of course it requires a mix that is more H2 than 02. Place Atmo suit docks outside the ranches of course so that no dupe can breath up the O2.

Another time, I just made open air exchange drecko ranches, then collected H2 released with a gas canister releaser right under the ranches, wasnt pretty but it worked.

A lot of times I just build the ranch above the caustic biome with air flow tiles on the bottom, then bull doze the whole caustic biome below it, the H2 drifts up and collects inside the ranch.

Just 1 Drecko Ranch can make massive amounts of plastic, maybe not enough to tile up everything but certainly enough to ladder up and create express dupe air zip tubes vertically to travel to the oil biome and space. Alright well maybe more than enough plastic for all your needs.

I use 2 ranches though, 1 is for reed fiber, since I my Dupes like shag carpet ceiling tiles. Nothing says push dupe base like carpeted ceilings and metal floor tiles all across the base proper. I dont double floor/ceiling tile everywhere but where I do its metal floors and carpet ceilings.

[Xilo The Odd]

yeah a glossy drecko farm can be a hassel and is very dupe labor intensive comapred to a press. so its sto be expected that, the polymer press being a end game option for plastics production. and all one has to do is pump oil, but if you run a glossy dreck farm for a bit to get a decent stockpile of plastic, building a cooling solution becomes incredibly easy. at one point i built my press room so that i'd recycle the steam as the coolant, that would then pump up more oil, producing power in the long run to run everything.

long run, building a press room with excellent cooling is the tricky part, but once that is solid keeping that goin is pretty easy. it just takes a bit of up front supplies to make it last.

[Strygald]

You can make it simpler than that:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208254779

just drip water on it... can make a lot more than 1T and without stopping for a long time.

[Xilo The Odd]

İlk olarak Strygald tarafından gönderildi:

You can make it simpler than that:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208254779

just drip water on it... can make a lot more than 1T and without stopping for a long time.

i built something similar, except i have my dupes build ice tempshift plates on it periodically and start with less water.. thats just if i dont want to put effort into a cooling system yet xD.

[JasonS]

Honestly I just let my press Overheat. You'll waste a bit of Gold repairing it, but it only needs to produce a few 100 Kg of Plastic to get your Smelter + Steam Turbine setup.

Then you have Steel at which point you can make a Steel Polymer Press which can run hot without trouble.

When it comes to Glossy Drekos, the main disadvantage is they take a while to get going and consume your dirt supplies. If you have plenty of food, converting Dirt into Plastic is a pretty good deal but it really depends on what you have available to you on the map. A sweeper delivering Dirt to the farm tiles helps reduce the amount of Dupe labour required.

[cswiger]

İlk olarak JasonS tarafından gönderildi:

Honestly I just let my press Overheat. You'll waste a bit of Gold repairing it, but it only needs to produce a few 100 Kg of Plastic to get your Smelter + Steam Turbine setup.

You can save time and resources if you disable repairs, and then disassemble the press once it breaks entirely.

However, you can also save time and resources by simply adding a thermo sensor. If you have to, set the temp to only run when below 25 C, and the press will never get hot enough to suffer damage...even using regular materials and even not having cooling in place.

[Bokonon]

I've never tested it myself but I have heard that when you repair something overheating the new materials you're using to fix it with become the temperature of what's being repaired. The suggestion is to deconstruct and rebuild which will "reset" the temperature and give you more time before it overheats again.

Personally I do what cswiger says about a thermo sensor or run an active cooling loop past it.