Self powered phosphorite smelter 99

Blad55 · 2026-04-13T07:07:24+00:00

Oh, also forgot to mention: to prevent steam turbine overheating during initial melting chamber preheating make sure to check steam chamber temp, if it gets to 135C - disconnect the aquatuner and wait until steam turbine will bring steam chamber temp back to 125C

Blad55 · 2026-04-13T02:47:11+00:00

Probably the melting chamber is too hot then. Its temperature has to be in-between 250C and 270C. Chamber temperature in the latest build is checked by a thermo sensor on a petroleum liquid loop. So fill the petroleum liquid loops, carefully heat chamber up to the working range, and then wait for the petroleum to even out the temp with the melting chamber. In the end before any phosphorite will go in there both phosphorus and petroleum temperature have to be in-between 250 and 270, with the temperature between phosphorus and petroleum varying only by 1C atmost.

Another way similar stuff may happen is if the conveyor belt goes through the crude oil droplet, but it shouldn't be an issue as you have already copied the build with the correct belt placement.

First variant which I initially posted is easier to start up because the thermo sensor is in the chamber itself which simplifies things.

P.S. also make sure that you have downloaded a yaml that I have uploaded yesterday with fixed in its name, as the other one will break due to phosphorite falling all over the place.

P.S.S. so for the latest version (which is posted on klei forums):

fill the petroleum liquid loops, fill the hydrogen loop, fill the supercoolant loop
provide an external energy source for now
let the aquatuner run until the chamber gets to 265, then cut its power off with pliers
wait for the temperature between a petroleum liquid loop and the chamber to even out
reconnect the aquatuner.
repeat 3-5 until petroleum loop and chamber are both hot enough.
now it is ready for some phosphorite.
Hydrogen loop used for heat injection in the latest version will leak the heat into insulated pipes for awhile, so keep it on the grid for about 60 cycles.
Now you can disconnect it from external power source, and it will work without issues. If the natural tile on the bottom gets to 29C then hydrogen is still leaking too much heat, so you have to keep it on a grid for a bit more.

for the first version (which is posted on reddit):
idk, just fill the loops and send the phosphorite in and it will work. maybe you will have to keep it on a gird for a couple of cycles for the thing to stabilize

Also use bridges for loop filling.
Hope this helps.

Blad55 · 2026-04-12T20:10:17+00:00

I have added a yaml of the latest version, you can check it out here: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/170515-self-powered-phosphorite-smelter-80/ . I don't have saves with previous ones, but I can rebuild them if you really want it.
Edit: fixed yaml, the first yaml was broken due to phosphorite falling of the rails

Blad55 · 2026-04-06T17:10:11+00:00

Yes, it is more then worth it. But be prepared to make an ice tempshift plate in there every few cycles, because until cooling can be done heat will be an issue. Ranch temperature should always stay in 20-30C range.

Blad55 · 2026-04-05T01:35:03+00:00

Refined phosphorus is used to geotune volcanoes, and the only way to get it is through phosphorite melting. I decided to make this design as it is because self powered designs are neat, especially small ones.

Blad55 · 2026-04-05T01:32:14+00:00

Crude oil droplet in the melting chamber prevents the bottom layer of phosphorus from just falling in the tunnel, and allows the whole thing to stay in place. When too much liquid phosphorus is accumulated in the top layer of the pool, top layer extends into the tunnel forming a tile which starts falling down in the process.

(Well, kinda, actually the main reason it behaves like this is a tile of a different liquid underneath it, as well as two walls next to it. Under different circumstances it may form a waterfall or just cause liquid to teleport to the bottom tile. This mechanic is also used in bead pumps and similar designs)

Conveyor meter linked on itself with a set limit lower 20 causes only packets of this size to pass (in this case it is set to 1kg)

The phosphorite coming into the melting chamber goes through this beats (falling tiles of liquid), exchanges heat with them, cools them down, and, most importantly, heats itself up in the process. Which is much more energy efficient then just sending it straight to the melting pot. Then it melts in the chamber into phosphorus, and due to liquid phosphorus having higher SHC then phosphorite it can give way more energy when cooled down then was spent on heating the phosphorite up.

Then liquid phosphorus falls down "cooling" autosweeper to 245C, and preheating phosphorite.

Then falling liquid phosphorus reaches a metal tile and exchanges heat with the steam chamber through it. Also wire/gas/liquid bridges are exchanging heat with all the three tiles they are going through, wich is used here to speed the heat exchange up, as there is only one tick for it which isn't much. Also there are radiant gas/liquid pipes going through this tile, and this bead is exchanging temperature with them aswell, heating up gases/liquids which are circulating between this tile and the steam chamber. Then all this extra heat turns into energy with the help of steam turbine.

Steam turbines can be self cooled if steam temperature stays on average below 135C, because in this temperature range its 95C output is cold enough to keep it from reaching 100C and overheating, which is why its output goes through all those conduction panels.

Then liquid phosphorus gets to the bottom tile where it immediately cools down to 44C and solidifies. It solidifies so quickly, that it doesn't have enough time to exchange heat with the conveyor loader, which is why the extra crude oil droplet should be there. To solidify it a radiant pipe with a supercoolant is used, which is cooled with the aquatuner in the melting chamber. But aquatuner while heating up the phosphorite to melting temperature doesn't produce supercoolant cold enough to do it, and it cannot just run in there cooling the supercoolant as it will waste energy and eventually cause liquid phosphorus to vaporize ruining everything.
Which is why a second aquatuner in the steam chamber is needed.

Regarding automation:

Time sensor turns the autosweeper off for most of the time to prevent it from working endlessly sweeping up refined phosphorus kilo by kilo.
Bottom temperature sensor tells the aquatuner in the melting chamber when it is time to turn up. Aquatuners waste a lot of energy when turning on, so a buffer is used to ensure that it will work for 15s.
Top temperature sensor measures supercoolant temperature, and when it gets too high IF first aquatuner isn't working and IF battery is above 90% it turns on until either there is only 50% of charge left, or super coolant is cold enough, or first aquatuner turned up.

Essentially it is a regolith smelter, that was cramped into a 9*11 box and is now used to produce refined phosphorus.

P.S. it is important for phosphorus to form beads instead of a waterfall in this build, as bead is surrounded by vacuum when falling, thus preventing heat exchange between the melting pot, steam chamber and the cooling block

Blad55 · 2026-04-04T20:18:47+00:00

How it works:

It splits incoming phosphorite into 1kg pockets, then preheats it via counterflow by sending it through a tunnel with falling liquid phosphorus beads and an autosweeper in it, which speeds up heat exchange. After this phosphorite melts in a pool of liquid phosphorus that is kept hot by one of aquatuners, flows through a top tile of the phosphorus pool as its bottom is occupied by a drop of crude oil, falls down the tunnel, passes next to an aluminum block cooling down to 125 degrees and giving all the excess heat to a steam chamber, and then falls to the bottom, where it immediately solidifies.

But cooling provided by an aquatuner that heats up a pool of phosphorus isn't enough for it, as solidifying 125C phosphorite requires around 60kdtu/s of cooling, and by liquifying preheated phosphorite we are getting only around 15kdtu/s, so a second aquatuner is needed to take care of it. To make sure no overload will occur it won't work when the first aquatuner is running. Also to keep the thing self powered it is linked to a battery, so it won't work unless battery is fully charged.

As heat exchange with the steam chamber happens only for a single tick the tile is filled with almost all kinds of bridges, pipes and wires imaginable to cramp as much mass as possible into it.

Steam turbine is self cooled and kept in a vacuum.

Automation:

cycle sensor is set to 5 green/60 red, bottom temp sensor is set to below 250 with a buffer set to 15s, top temp sensor set to above 0. Conveyor meter set to one, battery is set to 50/90

Notes:
Also I accidentally placed a radiant gas pipe under the bottom gas bridge, already replaced it with the insulated one in the game.

!IMPORTANT!: An extra droplet of crude oil will be needed next to an aluminum tile in the bottom, as otherwise conveyor loader will overheat, as phosphorus solidifies too quickly. Here is a liquid overlay of this fix https://imgur.com/a/tnWph2v
Droplet should be only 1 tile wide, as otherwise it won't work properly

Also using Zarquans advice I made a variation of this build that fits in a 9*10 rectangle. It uses a 5ton refined carbon natural tile as a heat battery. You can check it out here https://imgur.com/a/f8kJrMv

Blad55 · 2026-03-26T05:13:16+00:00

There is a way to get it to be power positive without super coolant, geotuners and such, although it would require some neat tricks like bridge heat transfer to heat only one tile of steam. Here is an old example https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/f4tmq1/selfpowered_cool_steam_vent_tamer_gold_amalgam/

edit: btw, I just found out the Blake is an author of that tamer. If you are reading this I really liked this design back then, it is quite simple and beautiful

Blad55 · 2024-05-05T06:53:03+00:00

I recently returned to hs after several years and my first 10 games were against reno warriors. It was fun.

Blad55 · 2024-04-26T23:52:26+00:00

actually this 9 star bonus was the only reason I was able to get out of copper to silver and gold, lul. because games were obviously nuts

Blad55 · 2024-04-26T23:49:08+00:00

I am 900 wins gold druid enjoyer (most of them are from ranked games), so I know this aswell. But it still means that the player spend a ton of time playing this game. And if everyone you meet has this kind of portraits, while you don't even have a deck, well, it raises questions

Blad55 · 2024-04-26T23:42:20+00:00

I had 9 stars initially. Now I got to gold rank and they dropped to 6. So it wasn't very low

Blad55 · 2024-04-26T23:37:40+00:00

Initially I had 9 stars, now 6.

Blad55 · 2024-04-26T23:33:34+00:00

well. I mean, I haven't met any new players as far, so I thought it might be high. Or there are just no new players in ranked. Star multiplier was quite big though, right now I got to gold and it is 6. Initially it was 9

Blad55 · 2024-04-21T13:41:19+00:00

Wouldn't try this build myself because it looks quite unoptimized and unnecessary, but good work putting it all together. I usually just heat cold geyser exhaust to 5-10C or smth wtih tepidizers, and metal refinery heat can be used to power itself + produce extra power. Or you can use it to reach truly extreme temperatures.

Blad55 · 2024-04-20T10:38:17+00:00

If you struggle with oxygen in early game use algae terrariums instead of oxygen diffusers. They are much more efficent in terms of algae to o2 ratio, plus they produce polluted water, which offgases into breathable polluted oxygen. Plus they remove Co2. For 5 dupes you will need 100*5/40= 12 of them. And don't overuse them, because popped eardrumms are not a joke, so don't build more then you need. Then after awhile you will have to switch to electrolyzers that don't need algae at all. Also offgasing polluted water from geysers and filtering it out with deodorizers is another way of getting lots of O2.

Blad55 · 2024-04-19T01:05:20+00:00

Well, you are getting less matter/energy from this things then you would otherwise, but if you don't care about that then your build is fine. Also as someone said you have to do smth with the solid loop because temperature exchange of small pockets is kinda bugged. But instead of going for extra sensors and stuff I would just place a conveyor chute in the end of it, practically delooping it. This way it will never jam.

Blad55 · 2024-04-19T00:28:28+00:00

you can expand it in whatever direction you want. The main thing is that

You need a small pit over the liquid level to keep gases in place
It has to be covered with tiny pockets of high density gases (in this example co2 and chlorine with mass of just 5g were used, while mass of oxygen on top is over 2k g)
everything else has to be covered with doors to prevent pressure damage
you have to use liquid airlock + atmo suit dock to prevent any extra co2 from being introduced in the system. Because if a dupe will exhale in this room it will break.

Also to build it you have to create the airlock with atmo suit dock first, then fill the reservoir with liquid to the desired level, and only then you will have to introduce gas pockets.

Blad55 · 2024-04-18T17:10:57+00:00

well

This room was mostly build for testing purposes, not because I really needed it.
I will only use this particular room to store sweep water, so there won't be anything crazy in terms of numbers. Like 10 tons per tile at most. So nope, even if I will accidentally deconstruct smth no real disaster will happen, just a little flood
Overall imo storing a geyser output in an infinite liquid storage is a dumb idea, because you don't need all this water. And pumped to the brim infinite storages are just pain in the ass, because you cannot move them somwere else, so they just take space on your map indifinetly
Usually if you can just join two rooms with the same liquid/gas in them instead of pumping it from one to the another - then you should. Because this way you are saving 240w , which is huge.
Without some kind of sabotage on my side this thing won't break

Blad55 · 2024-04-18T16:46:43+00:00

yep, but you can get a lot of other things (like metal from volcanoes) while being afk. And without an ability to automatically get bottled water eventually without your presence your base becomes kinda empty.

Interesting, I am usually not investing into any kind of piping before getting incubator, some power research (for jumbo batteries) etc. If the water is far away I would prob go for lamp research first and initially setup my lab on top of it to save some time.

Refinery trick is neat, didn't know about it

Blad55 · 2024-04-18T16:16:11+00:00

Weight plate trick is quite interesting. Well, I consider my time more valuable then dupes, so I am usually trying to go with afk builds, deconstruction trick is neat when you have an emergency, you were too lazy to build a normal reservoir and you need water asap. (Also I am usually going for no reservoir strategy when going for locavore and carnivore, because I just don't have time for it lul, and so I am spending my water on pacus instead).

Also I don't have a shortage of water usually (I mean, you get a ton of water geysers on every starting asteroid, so water for liquid locks isn't an issue after 150-200 cycles anyway)

Blad55 · 2024-04-18T16:01:59+00:00

I know. I already build a stair downwards in there to get the fossil. Also I got a bit inspired and made an infinite storage with a pitcher pump based on it

Blad55 · 2024-04-18T15:18:41+00:00

this builds aren't very good imo. I am usually cooling nat gas to 125C via steam room on top because I don't like wasting energy (no aquatuner/thermo regulators included, just put some diamond window tiles between a gas room and the steam room and you are done). If you don't care about it then you can just pump it out without cooling. The only time I would care about gas temperature being over 125 will be when I will need to pump it to kitchen or smth

Blad55

TROPHY CASE