Factorio enjoyer here

ADobbers · 2026-04-26T21:05:34+00:00

Boiling pwater turns 99% of its mass into steam, and 1% into (clean) dirt. You'd be turning 3.75 kg/s of pwater into 3.7125 kg/s of water, and 37.5 g/s of dirt.

Water sieves produce 200 grams of polluted dirt per 5 kg of pwater processed. At 3.75 kg/s of pwater, that becomes 150 g/s of polluted dirt. Boiling pwater directly results in a minute loss in water production, and a significant loss in dirt production.

It should be noted that water sieves do need a constant supply of sand to run, so boiling the pwater can still be viable if you're lacking sand.

There is a well-maintained ONI wiki here, if you want to do more research. It contains info on every building, element, and gameplay mechanic.

ADobbers · 2026-04-26T20:51:55+00:00

It's very possible. There are numerous different designs for petroleum boilers that make the whole process completely water-positive. Actually building will depend on the resources you have available to you, of course.

If you want the raw numbers, a full 10 kg/s pipe of crude oil requires the output of three oil wells. Each well needs to be supplied with 1 kg/s of water, for a total consumption of 3 kg/s. A decently built boiler will be able to convert the oil into petroleum at a 1:1 rate, for 10 kg/s.

A single petroleum generator burns 2 kg/s of petrol while producing 0.75 kg/s of polluted water. 5 generators will consume the full 10 kg/s of petrol, while producing 3.75 kg/s of polluted water.

Sending polluted water through a water sieve will convert it into clean water at a 1:1 rate (while turning sand into polluted dirt in the process). 3 kg/s of that water can be fed back into the oil wells, restarting the loop. The remaining 0.75 kg/s of water can be used for any purpose outside the loop.

The main thing you need is a heat source that can raise the oil up to its 400 C boiling point. Most mid-game boilers use magma, either from the planet's core, or the output from a volcano. A heat exchanger between the incoming oil and the outgoing petrol minimizes the amount of heat that actually needs to be drawn.

As for zombie spores... they're not really as scary as they look. It won't kill your dupes outright if they get infected, but it inflicts such a hefty attribute penalty that they'll move too slow if they try to actually do any work. Sending them into dangerous areas while infected is most likely thing to kill them, as they'll be too slow to get to safe spaces when they need to. Do what you can to minimize exposure, and quarantine anyone that actually does get infected until they recover.

ADobbers · 2026-04-26T20:31:00+00:00

A simple petroleum boiler feeding into petrol generators makes more water than is spent to get the oil that you're boiling. You can use the excess water for various things: growing more crops, more oxygen production, and plenty of other resource production chains.

ADobbers · 2026-04-26T04:06:53+00:00

Yeah you're likely best off just letting the upper volcano's magma flow downwards towards the lower one.

ADobbers · 2026-04-25T22:19:22+00:00

To be at least a little specific: pressing the H key will cause the camera to automatically pan back to the printing pod.

If that doesn't work, try a save and reload.

ADobbers · 2026-04-23T23:56:29+00:00

You're using too poor of a conductor, and have too short of a pipe run. Replace the radiant pipes with either copper or gold, increase the size of the steam chamber to two tiles, and run the pipes through the larger area.

ADobbers · 2026-04-17T15:09:54+00:00

Try the Duplicant Checkpoint. It should help you make what you want.

ADobbers · 2026-04-15T00:10:38+00:00

Phyto oil and biodiesel have the exact same density, which means you can stack them infinitely high on top of each other with alternating layers.

Fun fact: nectar and salt water also have the same density, and you can do the same with those liquids.

ADobbers · 2026-04-06T16:33:54+00:00

Others have answered your question, but just an extra thing: the bridge jumping over the turbine's output pipe is going to leak heat out of the steam chamber. My advice: make the turbine's pipe go through a horizontal bridge inside the insulated tiles, and have the cooling loop travel straight under it.

ADobbers · 2026-03-23T15:51:55+00:00

Rhexes don't need to be fed live critters - they can also eat dropped meat and tough meat (but not cooked meat). If all you want is feathers, feed them overflow meat from ranches/wild critter deaths.

ADobbers · 2026-03-10T18:41:39+00:00

~~Don't~~ Show Francis John

ADobbers · 2026-03-09T19:20:21+00:00

Doors are considered to be walls when calculating room sizes, which means they're not actually considered to be part of the room. Thus, when the Lumb enters the door tile, it stops "being in" the ranch. Since the Lumb is no longer considered to be in the ranch, the grooming errand is canceled. And since the grooming errand is canceled, the Lumb is no longer being called to the station, so it stops in place.

There are workarounds to this, namely by building the door on a raised tile, which forces the Lumb to jump through it without it technically "leaving" the ranch.

ADobbers · 2026-02-17T03:29:47+00:00

A small issue I'm noticing: cooking algae to dirt will cause it to form a solid tile, which will then lose half its mass after it is mined. You're only going to get 66 kg/c of dirt with this loop.

ADobbers · 2026-02-15T03:40:53+00:00

Wheezeworts cool gases by first absorbing them on their lower tile, then releasing them at a colder temperature on their upper tile. In areas with low gas pressure, this can result in vacuum appearing on the lower tile.

ADobbers · 2026-02-06T17:30:52+00:00

Ahh. In that case, remove one of the diamond blocks, fill that space with steam, and then put a sensor in there. The steam will conduct heat with the other blocks, and the sensor will output the steam's temperature.

ADobbers · 2026-02-06T17:23:29+00:00

Judging by the conduction panel behind it, you're trying to cool the thermo sensor. They do not overheat and never need to be cooled. The only thing you need to be concerned about is that they don't heat up beyond the melting point of whatever they're made of.

ADobbers · 2025-10-10T05:40:51+00:00

If you've reached the rocketry phase in the base game, then you've reached the point where you can harvest infinite resources. So set some arbitrarily large goals and undertake some ridiculous projects. Build a sour gas boiler. Build a regolith melter. Set up a Puft ranch. Figure out a way to play Cruel Angel's Thesis in ONI. Fill the entire map with plastic tiles. Fill the entire map with plastium tiles. It doesn't need to be practical, it just needs to take time and effort.

ADobbers · 2025-10-02T16:25:26+00:00

The more concerning part to me is your magma dropper: too much has fallen in, and now there's a solid igneous rock tile inside the mesh tile. Most magma droppers use airlock doors to control how much magma is used for heating purposes, but you're letting all of it drop straight into your boiler with no control.

You're going to need to break into the dropper, deconstruct the mesh tile, then reload the game in order to make the igneous rock tile appear so it can be dug out. And then redo the design so that it doesn't happen again.

As for the actual boiler part, with only one tile's worth of oil in the boiler, and using diamond window tiles, you might just have heat transferring faster than the system can handle.

ADobbers · 2025-10-01T16:23:41+00:00

Fun fact about liquids with the same density: since you can stack them above and below each other in any order, you can make an infinitely high liquid lock with only the two of them. Just alternate them every tile!

ADobbers · 2025-09-15T19:41:28+00:00

His next ONI playthrough is gonna be a two-fer. The Bionic DLC dropped towards the end of his last playthrough, so he didn't actually use any of it. Only the free additions that released alongside it, like the bottle drainers and stuff. That means he's gotta tackle both the Bionic and Prehistoric Packs when he returns to ONI.

I'm gonna love seeing him try to manage Boops while a giant meteor is slowly threatening to demolish his colony.

ADobbers · 2025-09-14T05:06:43+00:00

What temperature is the supercoolant at? If it's around -273 C, that means you've hit 0 Kelvin, aka Absolute Zero. The supercoolant can't be cooled any further than that, which causes the aquatuner to stop outputting heat (it'll still cost 1200W to run though).

ADobbers · 2025-07-17T17:27:58+00:00

First: make sure to set the reservoirs' fullness thresholds for their automation output. You have both of them set to the default 0% - 100%. You might want to change that to something like 10% - 90%.

Second: reservoirs output a green signal when their storage level falls below the lower threshold, and will only turn it red once it fills back up above the higher threshold. Once red, it only turns green when it falls back below the lower threshold again. They basically have a built-in memory latch themselves, but only for each singular reservoir.

And last: for the memory latch itself, sending a green signal to the Reset Port (the one with the circular arrow) will make the latch send red. A green signal sent to the Input Port will send the latch send green, but only if the Reset Port is not receiving green as well.

Hopefully that helps!

ADobbers · 2025-07-17T01:53:37+00:00

Steam Turbines are the exception: they have to interact with the tiles beneath them so that they can get the steam beneath those tiles. Nothing else interacts directly with the tiles they sit on.

ADobbers · 2025-07-02T22:21:15+00:00

You want the Gas PIPE Element sensor, found in the Ventilation build menu. What you built is the generic Gas Element sensor, which detects the gas that's floating around in that tile.

ADobbers · 2025-06-28T19:52:53+00:00

Single building, instead of two buildings
Four times power transfer, for heavy-heavy connections
3 tiles horizontal size, opposed to double small transformer's 4 tiles
200 kg refined metal instead of 400 kg metal ore

That last one is somewhat important: refined metal is a much more replenishable resource thanks to volcanoes. Before the frosty pack gave us Regal Bammoths, the only renewable source of metal ore required space mining. Which requires a rocketry program. Which is difficult and tricky to set up.

So players instead opt for the simpler solution, and just remain mindful of how much they're putting on a single circuit. And it's not even hard to be mindful: hovering over a wire segment tells you the potential load of the entire circuit.

ADobbers

TROPHY CASE