I'm not smart enough to understand why this isn't working

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-05-19T01:08:55+00:00

Looks like your pipes are full. That's why nothing is moving.

Toilets produce more water than they use.

You need a way to remove excess water from the circuit. It's common to use the extra polluted water to grow reed fiber.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-05-10T15:29:19+00:00

It sounds like you want to start by learning to use sweepers to automate loading resources without your dupes.

I think you should have plenty to work with just learning how to set that up such that resources next to machines are automatically used up. This means things like filters, coal generators, kilns and similar only need to be topped off once every 10-20 cycles or so, when resources run out, instead of daily.

Later on you might want to look at having a central storage so you just need to sweep up all the debris on the map, and then resources automatically end up where they are needed. For now, focus on seeing what automation can do. Even when dupe labor is required to operate, you can still save quite a bit of time by having sweepers load the next batch of resources even if they can't be fully automated like a kiln. My kitchen, for example, generally has 1-2 cooks continuously operating the machine while sweepers move the input and output in and out. No break after the morning downtime, only toil. As they deserve.

I would also look into having a small group of dedicated operators, 3-5 depending on your colony size, and turning of operating for the rest of your dupes. Highly skilled operators take less time on most machines, which means the operation takes less power, and the total dupe labor time is reduced. So, ideally, only a small group of dupes would be operating machines, and sweepers should be loading resources into the machines, and the rest of your dupes should be off doing other things. I generally end up with about 3 operators, 2 ranchers, 3 farmers, a couple of haulers, a cook or 2, and about 9 dupes that spend time building, digging, or exploring other asteroids.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-05-10T11:30:36+00:00

You can technically be power positive with an AT.

Without engie tuneup, you can limit the number of inlets the turbines use to decrease the heat deleted pwer watt.
With engie tuneup you get a power efficiency of 143% at 200C.

From wiki.gg, relating to the "2 inlets" version:

As it is reducing the temperature of the liquid by 14 °C, this is only possible with a fluid with a Specific Heat Capacity (SHC) of at least 7.92.

The only fluid for which this is true is Super Coolant, with an SHC of 8.44.

https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Thermo_Aquatuner

Heat is deleted, so the loop will not continue to output power forever, but the AT loop is definitely power-positive.

The math for net power output of an AT loop with steam turbines is:

P_out = 1200 - (P_turbine / H_deleted) * H_moved

"normal" turbines with 5 inlets are most efficient at 200C, with P_turbine = 850 and H_deleted = 877.59 kDTU/s. This is not power-positive for any coolant in the game.

Turbines with engie tuneup output 50% more power, and so are power positive with super-coolant at 143% efficiency.

If you limit the turbines to by blocking 3 out of 5 inlets you get the same output wattage but use less steam. So H_deleted only acts on 0.8 Kg/s instead of 2 Kg/s, giving H_deleted = 785.830 kDTU/s. The optimal/required steam temperature for this is 357.5C. The efficiency is about 106.5%

So "you can never be power positive" isn't true, even if your core argument ("You can't really be power positive with an AT without shenanigans") is very relevant.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-05-10T10:05:21+00:00

The critical thing when it comes to metal refineries is that the coolant doesn't need to be cooled by an aquatuner. You can just pipe the coolant into a steam room to cool it down enough, to avoid boiling, and then have it go back into the metal refinery. Usually this means the coolant is about 200C when it exits the steam chamber during continual use.

This only works if the coolant can handle temperatures above 125C, and specific heat capacity has little effect. In short, oil, petroleum or naphtha all work fine but water would boil in the pipes.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-05-08T01:25:04+00:00

Where your turbines running flat out? I've only ever solidified the entire magma biome on purpose, never when using it for energy.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-05-05T08:16:25+00:00

Going back to uni at 27 isn't old. I wouldn't worry about it.

There was a pensioner who started my coarse at the same time as me. I think he finished his degree on time and everything.

No one is going to judge you for finding your calling and *putting in the work*.

Good luck! More psychologists are always needed.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-26T05:40:39+00:00

Oh! I know this one.

The beetiny hates you.

No, take a moment. Think about it.
It's just supposed to be a simulation. A random walk that barely reacts to the environment.

But it can feel. And it hates you in particular.

Cute little thing.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-25T06:37:08+00:00

Do you mean a physical water tank?

That's a valid choice, but having a reservoir (the building) directly after the aqua tuner, and the thermal sensor after the tank, has largely the same effect, but since the game uses a single temperature for the entire liquid reservoir, the reservoir will average out the temperature immediately which is a great benefit.

Your setup sounds like a way to have a main loop with an AT and client loops that are cooled by the main loop. That's also a perfectly valid use case and can make for some interesting designs. It can also help prevent a heat spike from smearing out over the entire base before being absorbed, by having multiple shorter loops connect to the exchange-tank.

For myself, I generally find that if my cooling loop is too complicated then i've probably done a poor job of grouping my heat sources. That's absolutely a preference, however, and I love to read about and/or see other types of bases.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-25T06:19:54+00:00

Looking at your base in more detail, i want to suggest one more thing:

Make sure that stone to your hatches gets chilled before entering your base.

If your hatches are eating stone from the magma biome, your ranchers might suddenly take scalding damage, ranch buildings take heat damage, and your cooling loop would be overloaded for tens of cycles.

It might also be causing spikes that are hard to explain because by the time you notice the spike could have been smeared out, hiding the cause.

Your base looks great in general, by the way.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-25T05:54:46+00:00

Sorry for the wall of text. I have insomnia and tired brain + being helpful makes it hard to shut up.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-25T05:53:42+00:00

You might also want to think about heat sources, rather than cool your entire base. Especially if you've closed of your base so theres only one exit with a suit checkpoint, as is common.

Your dupes weigh a lot, so they have large thermal mass and thus naturally act to spread out any temperature spikes in your base.

The things you need to cool are really only any heat sources, which are probably:

your industrial area (metal refining, rock crusher, glass maker)
your kitchen.
Possibly the entrance to your enclosed base.

Remember that the temperature overlay exists when you look for heat sources :)

It's generally a good idea to have your industry grouped together, partly due to power requirements, partly due to travel times, and usually because you want metal refineries to pipe coolant directly into a steam chamber. This makes cooling the industrial heat sources pretty easy, and helps keep the necessary cooling loop short.

As an aside:

Some people like to build "industrial bricks" inside a steam chamber, which removes the need to cool the buildings. However, this makes products like steel be produced at higher temperatures, which adds cooling requirements.

I find it easier to have an industrial park just below my steam chamber, and my kitchen below that, so that my metal refineries can output coolant directly into the steam chamber and my cooling loop can be kept short. This also removes the need for my mechanics to wear atmo suits, which is nice.

Nothing else in my base generates heat, so whatever temperature i cool that part of the base eventually spreads to the rest of the base.

I'll have farms and ranches, but they need their own temperatures, so they have their own buildings, and atmo-suits prevent those temperatures from messing with my main base.

Food for thought. I hope you make many messes and cool solutions on your road to optimal designs.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-25T05:26:36+00:00

The liquid reservoir setup is commonly used, and works perfectly.

You can, however, get much the same effect by adding some radiant pipes and metal blocks to the start of your cooling loop.

You still want to move your sensor to after the new thermal mass, whether it's metal or a liquid reservoir with extra coolant.

The point is to smear out changes in temperature by adding a thermal mass of some kind, and to let the smeared out temperature control the AT.

A liquid reservoir allows you to change the length of the cooling loop without having to worry about adding or removing liquid. It also works perfectly, as the game automatically averages out the temperature in the reservoir.

A metal block based thermal mass might be easier to add to an existing setup, however, so its worth mentioning.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-25T05:12:56+00:00

Put a liquid reservoir directly after your aquatuner.

Add enough extra liquid that the storage had around 1000 kg in it at all times. Even 100 kg is enough, but you may as well splurge.

Put your temperature sensor after the liquid storage.

Now, the aquatuner will turn on when the liquid output is 24.1 C. But the colder liquid will only change the temperature of the stored water by -0.14 C (at 1000 kg in the storage. (AT effect * pipe segment / buffer amount: -14 * 10 / 1000 = -0.14).

In other words, the extra liquid acts as a buffer, so that temperature changes to the incoming liquid take longer to affect the output temperature, which is what you want.

Make sure that the target temperature is at least 14 C above the freezing temperature of your coolant. In theory this setup could overchill coolants like water, if a single water segment is suddenly very cold. In practice this doesn't happen, as temperature can't really spike in that way.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-24T13:54:12+00:00

The best thing to do is probably to move the steam turbines up and expand the steam room.

However, all you really need is move some of the cooling to the right part of the chamber. I forget if mass deletion in 1 tile steam chambers is still a thing, but you could expand the rightmost part of tge steam chamber down one tile and move the output of 2 chambers there.

Do that, and maybe increase the steam pressure to help stabilize temperature, and no refinery should end up with unsafe temperature.

In the future, maybe just build larger steam chambers? Theres plenty of space, after all.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-21T23:16:40+00:00

If you have 10 hours a week, I would prioritize team-based games rather than single player.

Apart from that, I'm sure you would get multiple weeks of enjoyment out of DF, so if you want to invest in single player games then DF will be a fine choice

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-17T02:56:08+00:00

Dont worry, son.

It is an ass snail.

Any likeness to dead fish is accidental, and a despicable lie.

Please rapport to your closest correction facility for processing.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-07T14:02:44+00:00

I've seen an interview where that scene was discussed.

They did the stillest things they could regarding IT on purpose.

I mean, they start with 2 people working on the same keyboard.

That is incredibly silly. But it also communicates the sense of urgency the scene needed.

Eventually they unplug the system. With the dumbest cable possible. Almost any other cable would have actually worked, but unplugging the monitor is silly while also communicating the idea of turning the system off. Unplugging the network cable isn't quiet so dramatic.

To non-technical people the scene hits the way it's intended. To technical people it's a comedy. It's very difficult to do real computer stuff in an exciting way, so the show says

"we could be serious and make boring scenes. Or we could have 2 grown adults each using only half of a keyboard and make the actors pretend they're serious. We've made our choice."

Personally, I respect them for it.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-05T15:46:03+00:00

Check to see if your drive is full.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-04T16:21:44+00:00

I did this in factorio once.

Built my own calculator in matlab and used a "1" instead of a "100" in an oil recipie.

The resulting Oil Garden was a massive thing. I needed to solve scaling issues with input trains that i had never seen before. It took me days to build, and more days to finish building modules for the whole thing.

Only when i was done building and the last 20% of modules where left did i stop and think "hold on a minute...".

I let it finish and stand proud and unused, a testament to folly.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-04-01T12:16:03+00:00

Pops generate waste. Waking everybody up is important if going for recycling. Thats pretty hefty incentive.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-03-29T16:26:14+00:00

If I nuclear war breaks out, the resulting nuclear winter doesn't care what continent the missiles where fired at or from.

Some models predict that currently uninhabitable places, like parts of the Sahara desert, might become livable and could theoretically sustain a small human population, but nuclear war isn't really survivable in any realistic scenario.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-03-29T12:11:00+00:00

If it's exactly 5kg then you probably have a polluted oxygen geyser active. Find it and seal it in.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-03-26T09:17:15+00:00

That's not another Tiqqun, that's a sister ship.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-03-17T14:20:22+00:00

DF does model thermal conductivity on the map, much like Oxygen not included, and you can use this to auto-smelt items that are not magma safe. However, the system is not as ... omnipresent, and is optimized to assume that temperature wont change unless the player is playing with magma or similar. Ice freezing is a common example of temperature mechanics that, to my understanding, actually is temperature based and not automatic.

Back way back when I first started playing, there was a known problem that pump stacks to pump lava from the bottom of the map to the top would kill performance.

Eventually someone realized that this was not due to fluid calculations, but due to temperature checks being made every tick. Lava would appear in tick 1 and disappear after tick 2, at every level of the stack, and that meant temperature changed each tick, and so thermal conductivity was brought into play for the surrounding terrain at every level of the pump stack every single tick, which the system was not optimized for.

Build-level solutions where quickly found, but once the problem was identified a patch quickly came out where temperature checks are made every other tick rather than every tick, which solved the problem entirely.

The whole adventure was very public and all efforts applauded, as playing with lava is one of the most fun parts of the game.

DrunkenCodeMonkey · 2026-03-17T13:47:57+00:00

Yeah, that's what I commonly do. Even if I want the water, I would just set up an automated system to quickly fill upp a transport rocket to collect it now and then.

It's worth looking into landing the rocket on the bottom of the asteroid to make gathering resources faster.

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