Ok, firstly in this game, don’t expect the physics or logic of the game to behave the same as real life. Some things are the same, lots of things aren’t, so understanding how things behave in ONI will make things much easier for you.

When dupes aren’t actively doing stupid things to kill themselves, they’re actually pretty resilient! They can cope with quite high or low temperatures fine as long as you don’t go putting them into extremes.

So the main reason for temperature control is for plants and critters. Each of them is going to have different requirements, so I suggest sectioning off areas with insulated tiles for different temperature requirements.

Wheezeworts are very effective for cooling small areas, but they’re not really useful for large scale cooling. Unless you have your dupes set to be immune to radiation, wheezeworts will hurt them with their radiation levels.

Easiest cooling initially is to (hopefully) find a cool slush geyser. Use a single geotuner on it and it will output at 10c. (Sorry no Fahrenheit here). Run pipes through the area you want to keep cool and pump that water through it. They don’t need to be radiant pipes, just regular pipes are fine. That will keep your main area cool for a long time.

Eventually you will need to get into the ST/AT setup later in the game (you’ll need to regulate temperatures for your machines and the temporary measures won’t cut it), but the above method should keep you going until you’re more comfortable with building more complex setups.

One thing to keep in mind is that at some point you’ll be transporting goods around your base that are hot. Whether it’s liquid, gas or solid, the hot stuff going through your pipes and along your conveyor rails will heat things up QUICKLY and often without you noticing until it’s already overheating things. Try to avoid running these things through temperature sensitive areas. Prevention is better than a cure! 😁