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[ChairmanPoo]

I dont think so. Ice biomes have a lower baseline temp I think... which can go up with heat input just ss any other enviro of course. But I think you CAN use them as heatsinks

[Sergius]

Biomes themselves don't do anything, they're just background decoration.

What makes an ice biome cold is all the ice in it. Wheezewort add to the cold, and contact with warmer blocks heats it up.

[EvilTwin]

Biomes themselves don't do anything, they're just background decoration.

What makes an ice biome cold is all the ice in it. Wheezewort add to the cold, and contact with warmer blocks heats it up.

I can confirm this, if I plan on making a comparatively small base I usually try to insulate all ice biomes that I can find (sometimes there's ruptures in the abyssalite) so the colony can live forever on free sleet wheat. Without making sure they're insulated they can melt surprisingly easy...


As for base cooling: I usually just insulate my base with all the farms etc in it, then put my heavy industries in faraway places on the map, mostly the top for free energy from solar panels and the bottom for everything that interacts with oil. That way the temperature in the base can be maintained with a couple of wheeze worts, and if there's a problem with one of the fabricators my colony doesn't collapse from it.


If you want to put some real effort into getting a farm to the perfect temperature though, you could build a 4-high insulated room below the farm tiles, make the bottom row horizontal automated airlocks, then build wheeze worts on top so they're directly below the farm tiles. hook the doors up to a temperature sensor below the farm tiles and set that to 0° C, so the water you're supplying can't freeze as the doors open whenever the bottom room gets close to freezing temp, disabling the wheeze worts. I built this in my current base and one wheeze wort every second tile can handle ~15°C water being pumped in while the sleet wheats can grow continuously without any need for complicated insulated airlocks, and I haven't even filled the room with hydrogen yet for increased wheeze wort efficiency.

[Aoi]

I can confirm this, if I plan on making a comparatively small base I usually try to insulate all ice biomes that I can find (sometimes there's ruptures in the abyssalite) so the colony can live forever on free sleet wheat. Without making sure they're insulated they can melt surprisingly easy...

I'm liking that idea. Do you fill in the cracks with insulated blocks, smooth out the interior and just start piling in farm tiles? Anything special about the entrance, to prevent hot air from leaking in, or are the native wheezeworts generally enough?

[Trekkin]

So running pipes filled with with water in a hydrogen/wheezewort room, then running that chilled water through my base would be better for cooling than gas? (And presumably, there are even better liquids for that out there, that would be a bit more difficult to obtain at my point.)

I've actually been dripping it into my post-sieve reservoir to cook off the germs. Now that I think about it, a dual-chambered polluted water reservoir that gets cooked pre-sieve would probably work out better, since the sieve output is at a fixed temperature, as I recall... Does the frozen biome actually stay cold? I feel like its been warming up, considering I have to mop up my entrance every ten cycles or o.

If you'll forgive my being pedantic, it's better only in the sense that it can absorb more heat. A full pipe of water absorbs 41790 DTU/C compared to full pipe of hydrogen at only 2400. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will do so, thermal conductivity being separate from specific heat capacity, but in general water is a better coolant provided you can run long enough pipes. Wheezeworts just can't breathe steam.

Regarding your dual-chambered idea, it could certainly work to, say, cool your geyser output with clean polluted water (like from Carbon Skimmers), sieve most of the heat away, and remove the rest in an aquatuner loop run through your germy post-sieve lavatory water tanks to heat them, although I'd make careful use of timers to ensure the water stays hot enough for long enough to decontaminate it.

[Jimmy]

Assuming you have two separate holding tanks of equal volume, the first being polluted water with food poisoning from your lavatories, the second being filtered water, it's quite simple to maintain temperature.

If they're the same volume, your first tank will be the sum of the heat deleted from the second tank using a thermo aquatuner. The device is a zero-sum heat transfer, so equal volume means equal heat transfer.

Thus, if you're inputting clean water from your water sieves at 40°C, you can raise the temperature of the polluted water by up to 40°C through circling the clean water. Personally, I prefer to limit my aquatuner's output to 5°C water to avoid accidental freezing, as I've found variance of up to +/- 3°C can occur with stopping and starting the input, depending on the volume in the pipe.

Thus your polluted water can easily gain +35°C, and assuming your polluted water input is above 30°C polluted water (pretty easy when you use water as heat sinks for high temperature areas), you've got a perfect germ killing tank that doubles as a heat deletion tool for your base (since any heat in the polluted water above 40°C is deleted when it's sieved).

If your polluted water tank runs too hot, the best option I've found is to destroy the heat gained by sinking it into your electrolyzer input reservoir. It's a good idea to dump heat from your electrolyzer output back into your water input anyway, especially if you're using pre-cooled purified water from the system above, as the electrolyzer can also delete heat if you're clever with the output piping.

Out of curiosity, what design do other people use for their bases?

Personally, I like 16 tile wide rooms, with 4 tile high ceilings, and 2 tile wide shafts between them to allow a ladder and a pole for transport. Does anyone else use something different?

[Trekkin]

Out of curiosity, what design do other people use for their bases?

Personally, I like 16 tile wide rooms, with 4 tile high ceilings, and 2 tile wide shafts between them to allow a ladder and a pole for transport. Does anyone else use something different?

I also use 16x4 rooms, except I raise my lavatories to 5 so I can put a better carbon dioxide pit between them in the mess hall above. However, I use a 6 tile wide central shaft in the early game so I can shrink it to 3 tile wide (for better airflow than 2-wide) when I'm ready to move to Heavi-Conductive main power distribution and build little art-filled transformer housings on every floor. Every other shaft is 3 wide.

[AlStar]

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:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

[Mechanoid]

Why the liquid storage and an aquatuner? Wouldn't running it straight through work out?

Liquid storage keeps a larger volume of cold liquid in one space, keeping its temperature more stabilized, and allowing for filling new additions to the temperature regulation pipes inside the base without impacting what's currently flowing around.
If liquid is taken out of storage, and a pipe temperature sensor detects it's "too hot" it can be redirected to an aquatuner with a liquid shut-off by automation, which refills the liquid storage with the cooled liquid. This lets the liquid storage average out the temperature of all stored liquid, allowing for a very fine amount of control over the system.

[Jimmy]

For even more temperature control, store your liquid storage containers in a vacuum. The stored liquid never changes temperature if it's in a perfect insulator, and the floor tile that it sits on doesn't transfer heat when it's in a vacuum. Just ensure that your container never exceeds its overheat range, else you'll have to open the vacuum up to repair it.

[Aoi]

Well. With the thermal advice, I successfully managed to not cook my base for 150 turns despite having a steam vent, cool steam vent, and natural gas vent open and utilized.

This time, I somehow managed to screw up my priority system such that they weren't making enough edible dirt, which quickly lead into a labor shortage (so to speak...) so slime wasn't being mined anymore, which lead to an algae shortage (because I somehow managed to use 30 tons of algae, courtesy of relying on Deoxydizers instead of anything more efficient), which lead to an oxygen shortage!

Good ol' lurching from one near-failure to another, until you miss the 'near' part.

[Jimmy]

How many dupes do you normally use? Personally, I find 8 is enough for my base's needs, especially when they're cross-trained in every job requiring 8 or lower morale.

[ChairmanPoo]

I usually stick to very low numbers of dupes (4-5) until I have a semi stable system. Then increase as I require more workforce.

I'm starting a new game... agh, the beginning is always hard. And for some reason this time arojnd I'm struggling with food when I used to be fairly decent at surviving the early game.
I dont know if there was a big change or if its just that I'm compromising my early game strategy (I suspect the latter because I've been too worried about not getting close to map edges

[Jimmy]

I've finally built a self-contained water filtration and cooling system in my base and I'm dreading the moment I turn it on. It's a massive power and resource sink, and since it's vacuum sealed it's a right pain to uncork and fix if I mess up.

However, if it works I'll have a fully automatic system that takes polluted water in and outputs clean water at 0°C. Here's hoping I didn't screw it up!

[Trekkin]

This time, I somehow managed to screw up my priority system such that they weren't making enough edible dirt,

Well, there's your problem: mush bars are a terribly inefficient way to feed your colony. Calorie for calorie, they need three times the water and twice the labor that liceloaf does, as well as consuming valuable dirt (mealwood plants have the same problem, but more slowly) and running a risk of both sickness and morale problems.

I generally start by making Liceloaf, then go to Bristle Berries as soon as possible, swapping to Gristle Berries once I have a Sous Chef. That works until I can safely handle Slime in order to switch to Fried Mushrooms, which will in turn remain my primary food source until I have the water, power, and time to switch to Pepper Bread.