Wound up having this huge cave under me. Pretty neat.
(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/159153022652059885/A786EB14EBEB38D789752C455CF0AC76FB561EBE/)
This is my current hellhole, sadly after a while new resources (water, coal) are to far away for duplicants to do much. The ladder above goes 2-3 screens high but they can hardly get up there before turning around for food & other needs. I built a shitter up there, but really it just makes waste rain down on the others coming up.
There is at least 15 or so dead duplicants around... I kinda let it run while I was out shoping and they surived somehow. No fresh water without Power, no Power without Coal, Coal is to far away. Hydrogen is used up all around... Just seeing how long it takes for em to die. Cycle 80 shortly.-
(http://i.imgur.com/pFjt9vr.jpg)
Big image;
http://i.imgur.com/LduAIfm.jpg
The bodys you see are often stacked pretty high, here is one with 4 people in it:
(http://i.imgur.com/SN9D8AJ.jpg)
This is my current hellhole
I'm impressed you lasted this long honestly, it's very hard to keep up with atmosphere if you don't enclose your generators in a tight space without pollutants. How are you getting enough alga for all those buildings?
Here is my setup, but it's a bit boring to play now. I could expand the amount of people, but i'll probably just wait for some bug fixes.
(http://i.imgur.com/efzK9hg.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/0qVuqth.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/aeWnbnp.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/kPQevdd.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/TR5gCQe.jpg)
Current game I'm at cycle 143 and using a very simple narrow design.
(http://i1312.photobucket.com/albums/t532/grimportent/20170315160752_1_zps5dxacgvz.jpg) (http://s1312.photobucket.com/user/grimportent/media/20170315160752_1_zps5dxacgvz.jpg.html)
Lowest floor is a pump in a small hole to collect vomit from the floor above, which contains my algae terrariums, and sent it to be filtered and added to my cistern, which is off to one side of the colony proper.
Immediately above the algae terrariums is the bio distillers in a sealed room to one side and the power apparatus to keep them running.
Above that is storage and a generator that powers the plumbing for the toilets and shower, and some compost heaps in a sealed room.
Above that is the microbe musher, ration box and associated power. To either side outside the mesh chimney design is the portal, the toilets/shower and two airlocked mines I use to collect extra water, slime, sand, dirt and algae.
Above the musher is the farms and above them the dining room.
(https://i1312.photobucket.com/albums/t532/grimportent/20170315160803_1_zps7rwremxz.jpg)
Then it's the beds, and above them the unused medbay, which I plan to deconstruct eventually, and the gas pump that scrubs chlorine and hydrogen from the air and dumps them into a hydrogen generator, other gases are dumped at the bottom of the chimney to make their way back up.
(https://i1312.photobucket.com/albums/t532/grimportent/20170315160819_1_zpsjumldxgv.jpg)
(https://i1312.photobucket.com/albums/t532/grimportent/20170315160834_1_zpsuddpbdfj.jpg)
The mines extend far more vertically than shown, with big tunnels dug up and down to access water and other resources. That tiling above the ladders in the top image was a funnel to direct water from the cave above into the pool on the left, which worked with only minor spillage.
Stress is 100% across the board, and in past colonies I've found it to be too difficult to keep it down in the long run, so this time I went 'fuck it! Embrace the vomit!' and just decided to make it part of the design. It now makes a small contribution to my cistern when it occurs in the main chimney stack, but elsewhere it is still a nuisance.
The air is highly contaminated as a lot of it came from the caves to the right hand side, which has a handful of Morbs running around polluting it. Since diseases are not really a huge problem I just decided to deal with it, so I have only a handful of deoderyzers now.
Scattered around are remnants of the original layout, which was a simple flat plan spread out on either side of the printer, and an experiment with cooling chlorine to a liquid to mop it up, which I abandoned when just destroying it with the hydrogen generator turned out to be easier and more efficient.
Despite my recent cheese and whine session, I've managed to get a handle on running a colony, even in the thermal update. I'm up to cycle 130 with no sign of slowing down.
Beware, 9 large screenshots and a scrollbar ahead. Hold your middle mouse button for easy scrolling
Starting from the most complex system (which I've named Sector 3), we have the lowest section of my main colony. This is where I tap into polluted water from a swamp biome and refine into two thirds of my water supply.
Part of it goes into a small reservoir for the showers, which is then outut back into the polluted water.
The second part goes into a single electrolyzer, which pumps oxygen to several vents and hydrogen to the hydrogen tank (more on that later).
The third part goes into my primary access reservoir, which is where my dupes get most of their water. This was one of my original water pools, so it's where I have a shower and two toilets (more on this later also).
You can also see 6 dead dupes on the bottom right. They made a suicide pact while building the generator room and I couldn't dissuade them.
Sector 3
(http://i.imgur.com/NfRLbn2.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/rxj59NR.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/rxj59NR.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/x3yMerg.png)
Next up, we have Sector 2. This is where most of my power gets drained. I have my primary oxygen providing electrolyzers here that receive water from another one of my original water sources that I've had closed for about a hundred cycles. It fills up from bio distiller systems, and a small polluted water pool as a backup that I can easily connect/disconnect if I need to.
There was a small gap between the release of thermal and the current update (from 210199 - 210489) where the bio distillers produced obscene amounts of water and algae. I survived for months on a single distiller for all my water and algae needs, but the current version is back to where it was, making distillers practically useless. As is, I like to keep them there for a bit of algae production, but that's just to cover my terrariums cleaning co2 without taxing my power, which brings us to my saving grace.
You might have seen in the first set of shots that I have 3 coal generators all next to eachother, and all cool enough to work. I spent so long trying to keep a single coalgen cool that I gave up and relied on manual power and the hydrogen generator for almost 100 cycles.
I tried everything, from surrounding them in ice, surrounding them with wheezwort (which was pointless), and layering a small amount of water on the bottom. Eventually I figured I'd try dropping water on them using melted polluted ice. The right generator in the below screenshots sits about 0.7c consistently.
Sector 2
(http://i.imgur.com/s8tbDKv.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/l22b8c8.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/kEZmjJc.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/gEWWFmC.png)
And finally, we have Sector 1. There's not much to see here, except for all the piping and the muck/coal farm full of CO2 for some reason. It was a pain to get oxygen through this area until I used electrolyzers. Now I'm actually worried about overpressurising everything and killing everyone (is that even possible?).
Sector 1
(http://i.imgur.com/6M4029R.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/BuYWRbr.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/djEezNE.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/PliYCK9.png)
ptw for the day that being sustainable is actually a thing.
The day has come! Sorry for the necro but starting a new thread felt wrong considering the game is still in Alpha (I think). Picked it up around a month or two ago, it's much better now than you guys have been describing. But let me introduce you to my base first: I have 6 duplicants which have ridiculous skills at this point and am beyond cycle 400 at this point. I don't see anything in the next couple hundred cycles that would just end my current game, except the eventual heat death of this relatively small universe (speaking of which, I have finally broken through to the surface, which the most recent update added^^).
This is the main part of my base, I tried to keep everything as simple and spaced apart as far as possible so I don't end up burning out on the clutter:
(https://i.imgur.com/Mg6Fcsf.jpg)
My farm, where I currently grow Bristle Berries and Pincha Peppernuts and ship them to my kitchen automatically (the dupes only have to do the actual harvesting and some crop care to get a growth speed bonus) :
(https://i.imgur.com/034cmIZ.jpg)
My power station, situated in a cold biome to allow me to worry about cooling it later (I might have to worry about that now come to think of it...) :
(https://i.imgur.com/8xmd3Zr.jpg)
For those of you who were worried about longterm sustainability of the base, they added geysers now. Randomly strewn about on the map they can help your colony by giving off different gases and liquids. Here's an example of a geyser that gives off crude oil, but beware as it comes out at 326.9°C in this case:
(https://i.imgur.com/g9MMaeR.jpg)
There's several different types of these, in this map I have two that produce steam at 110°C which instantly condenses into very hot, but clean water, but I didn't see a need to use them as there's another one that produces more than enough polluted water to serve my small colony.
There's also a bunch of critters that look way too cute :) and that can turn one resource into another, the drecko for instance eats mealwood plants (among other things) and poops out phosphorite for use in farming. They can also be sheared for reed fiber in case you don't want to grow the plants for that.
So I'm fairly new to this, but what's the best way to avoid overheating?
The obvious temporary solution is to put all heat generators on one side of the base, and all heat-sensitive objects on the other. Don't have 10 small batteries and a coal generator blasting heat into the air, directly inside your mealwood farm. It's obvious but i've seen it happen before.
Keep a wider margin between your base and the neighboring high temperature biomes. Remember that mining a tile destroys half its mass. 1800 kilograms of sandstone takes much longer to heat up than 2kg of oxygen, and the 900kg of sandstone that's now on the floor only really interacts with the floor's temperature, not so much the air that's around it. Realise that raw metal will conduct heat faster than oxygen can, so having a large copper deposit touching the hot caustic jungle is a bad idea, and it would be preferable to mine it out immediately. The ideal place to put your heat generators is at the top of the starting biome, and the farms beneath the pools of water or near the center of the biome.
Heat rises and cold sinks. Don't dig too far down until you can get insulated tiles between your living and farming spaces, and the rest of the asteroid beneath you. Keep in mind that every single tile will perform heat calculations based on its neighbor, with a bias towards rising or falling based on its surrounding relative temperatures. If there's cold above hot, the materials adjust each others temperatures much faster than if it was hot above cold. Similarly, a series of tiles that look like "Oxygen - Insulated Tile - Oxygen" is only slowing down the heat transfer by 1 insulated tile math calculation; 2 insulated tiles are much better because of this. (a width of 3 tiles of any kind prevent liquid from breaking through due to over-pressure; 2 insulated and 1 regular tile surrouding a 10,000kg water tank won't ever rupture and will be very thermally insulated.)
If you absolutely can not research insulated wall tiles in time (due to finding an active steam geyser point of interest) build a vacuum wall to keep the heat at bay, which is done by removing an orthogonally surrounded tile through exploiting diagonal deconstruction:
Numbers as build orders for tiles, periods are spaces:
.2.
212 < After all 5 tiles are built, remove the 1
.2. that tile is now vacuum
Double-wide vacuum space flooring:
5665665 < top of the horizontal vacuum floor
4334334 < remove 4's when 5's above are built
1221221 < remove 2's when 3's above are built
1111111 < bottom of the horizontal vacuum floor
You can shrink the vacuum space to just 1 tile if you want to, but i find this method is generally faster to build or change due to more tiles being accessible diagonally.
Vertical vacuum wall:
DEFG < remove F when tile above it is built
9ABC < remove A when E above is built
5678 < remove 7 when B above is built
1234 < remove 2 when 6 above is built, etc
1111 < starting floor
obviously just rotate the build order 180o for building downwards
You can even integrate a water-lock into these designs to prevent gas infiltration and do work inside the vacuum... HOWEVER, do not send a flatulent dupe to do these jobs, or your vacuum will be filled with natural gas, destroying the perfect insulation the vacuum provides. Don't send a slow dupe either, or they won't ever finish the job. The tiles don't need to be insulation, but if you decide to change the tile type you'll have to rebuild the vacuum tiles. Remember: Any orthogonally connected tiles will transfer their heat to the other -- Diagonal tiles don't.
edit - The ultimate solution to heating problems, however, is to research automation, liquid storage, and the aquatuner, then setup a cold-water cycling pipe in your base to keep your dupes comfortable.
As a side note however: Never ever use the special thermal-adjustment clothing, as they don't work as you would expect. Sweaters increase insulation which means they take MORE time to change temperature (even standing in liquids!) but they do still change temperature. Cool vests remove insulation on a dupe which means they'll immediately become hypothermic or heat-stroked if they step in a puddle for too long or stand near an active space heater.
Out of curiosity, what design do other people use for their bases?
I tend to a much more 'naturalistic' base layout than virtually all the bases I see online - my base is pretty much just joining together the natural caverns, paving over sections that my dupes are regularly running over. I'm sure it's not as efficient, but I find the strip-mined perfectly boxy bases I see depressing.
My current base, cycle 147:
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/945090934202879918/3637D2321AA809059221A8D50928B96DF775DF73/)
Edit: in case anyone's curious, the reason my base is so studded with wheezeworts is because when I first tried tapping that crazy-productive cool steam geyser in the top of my base, I badly underestimated how much water there was. Nearly-boiling water flooded my base, drowning my mushroom growing room almost two blocks deep. I managed to get all that pumped out, but even dozens of cycles later, we're still dealing with the residual heat.
Not sure if I can put the link directly, this is what my base looks right now at cycle 167.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/960854969914045194/C4832DF51FE144249FA2484B68F02E3E4B6546D2/) (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1599795084)
EDIT: The top and bottom floors could be replaced by a washroom and a great hall respectively if I'm not using that many dupes.
EDIT2: D'oh! I stupidly misread the requirement for bedrooms, "single comfy bed" doesn't mean it has to be at most one bed. You can still cram several dupes together. Disregard this silly design.
Now, off to make the perfect shinebug decorbomb room.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/960854969915799038/457AD5D03DD4D1960DC74F4F51173BA186ADE40D/) (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1600235511)
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/960856720987268981/FF292B47E5759FC3231CFB8747254A81473690D3/)
EDIT: This is the liquid reservoir, full of infected water and inside a sparse chlorine atmosphere:
(https://i.imgur.com/YZiAfZE.png)
Making steam for the, thing that you need steam for later in the game, is a pretty giant pain in the ass. Most ways of making steam produce steam jusssstttt over 100 C, so if you try to pipe it long distances you get broken vents and some water. I probably should have just made 300 degree steam at the bottom of the map and carried it up in canisters, but I found a way that didn't require that (and used the water that just happened to be near the site).
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/946223007745141644/E919A9439E4E700195D262017E8477087514A316/)
Ignore the overly complicated crap everywhere, a lot of that is failed attempts that weren't fully cleaned up. The important thing is the two chambers with different heating methods. That's all I'd replicate if I had to do this again.
After two years on and off, multiple binges, hundreds of cycles, and dozens of hours dedicated to this project, I have finally achieved a longstanding goal of mine that's distressingly modest:
Actually get an expletive SPOM working properly in a live game... and, for extra points, it's one of my own design, based on working out what hasn't been working for me in other people's designs. It doesn't have built-in cooling, but I'm usually playing on Rime, so extra heating's actually a plus.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/778498271542870975/CAC4F53CD7679639E8FDA2E26BF3E8BE881D4852/)
Now to either launch a rocket or do something useful with magma; not sure which one to aim for first. I suspect magma, in true dorfy fashion. (♫Never seen the blue moon glow...♫)
Edit: ...Yep. Time to wrap up this binge.
Attempt 1: I had to dig downwards seven hundred blocks for the nearest source of oil. I also didn't get Slicksters until like cycle 80, so I couldn't get oil from them. Death due to starvation from running out of resources before getting to expand outwards with my barely completed exosuits.
Attempt 2: On Oceania... I'm cooking myself to death. (...My uncooled SPOM isn't helping.) Left: Natural Gas Geyser and Polluted Water Geyser. Right: Cool Steam Vent. Down: Salt geyser and oil biome. Right under me, with gaps in the abyssalite. Up: WTF is this biome-sized block of 2500F abyssalite? (Turns out there was... a bubble of 3000F steam surrounding an office building in the middle. Nothing else of note.) The nearest ice biome was three biomes away, and I pretty much had to cut right through at least one geyser's heat bubble to get there. Thankfully, it had an AETN in there so I could get that spun up, but now I have to drag coolant how far? Maybe I should just relocate my SPOM there and pump the cooler desalinated salt water instead of the steam vent water...
Perhaps I'm simply inexperienced, but I don't see how the 100K challenge is difficult. Heat creation is so universally available it's hard to imagine a problem arising from having the rest of the map being cold. A steam geyser would quickly warm everything up again, wouldn't it?
As you noted, the easy way is with a vent/geyser/volcano, since those spew out things at a fixed temperature that trivalizes the challenge... which is why it comes with an option built in to disable them.
The major problem is producing liquid water that's required for advanced research before the cold catches up with you. The longer it takes and the more you dig out, the colder your pocket of relative warmth gets. (Spoiler includes two tricks that make it easy, so don't read it if you want to try it yourself.)
I've only seen two tricks pull it off successfully-- using corner de/construction to make vacuum to act as a perfect insulator that you can then set up a warm pocket inside of to melt your first few precious drops of water and taking advantage of how buildings function, so you can constantly de/construct tiles around your block of ice until it warms up or faff about with input/outputs. Neither of which I like since they're both take advantage of quirks in the engine.
Edit: Thinking on this further, I think there might be a facepalmingly stupid way of doing it easily. I'll have to give it a shot tomorrow.