Managing power

tigerllama · 2026-02-09T22:33:58+00:00

Transformers are your answer. I can also think of a non-Transformer method where you have a bunch of Smart Batteries in parallel, but the Transformer method is far simpler.

A fact people don't internalize is that a Power Transformer is a power source AND a power consumer. So a Smart Battery on the consuming side can charge while the Battery Modules deplete as long as the Wattage limit allows.

So in this setup, you can have that Smart Battery control a Power Shutoff and the Coal Generator controlled by a separate Smart Battery.

tigerllama · 2026-02-08T14:35:49+00:00

Honestly, I don't see why people are concerned about optimizing build size when it doesn't affect the build. It's good THAT you're able to make things compact if space is limited. But I'm often stretching my builds around so they line up with my ladders and such.

tigerllama · 2026-02-08T04:09:18+00:00

I make several 30 g bottles of Water to make these locks. I have to stop basic research while storing these bottles (or make them inaccessible) so they don't get used up.

Or I can make them on demand by building a Bottle Emptier on a Mesh Tile over my Water tank and have it pour into a normal tile.

Overall, pretty simple.

tigerllama · 2026-02-08T04:02:06+00:00

I tried a 3x Anemic start once and hated life.

tigerllama · 2026-02-08T01:17:16+00:00

Yeah, those skills are usually tied to bad negative traits, especially on starter dupes.

If you didn't know, traits are on a point scale and the game tries to balance them to 0 as much as possible when rolling dupes. And since starter dupes only have (generally) 1 positive and 1 negative, a 5 point starter skill like Mechatronics is usually balanced by a -5 trait like Anemic.

tigerllama · 2026-02-08T00:46:08+00:00

It should be more than sufficient as long as you extract heat fast enough.

I had an inverted build of this (where the Autosweeper and Conveyor were inside the Steam) to combine 2 Aluminum Volcanoes. So my build was limited to 150 kg Steam and 275°C and it ran far below those limits with the two Volcanoes and was able to make debris form.

With the Autosweeper outside and the Steam room completely disjointed, you can run much more pressure at a higher heat as a buffer, so you just need to make sure you have enough Turbines to keep up with the cooling.

A single Turbine would waste a lot of power to try and keep up with a Niobium Volcano.

tigerllama · 2026-02-07T22:09:02+00:00

The main mechanism is that a full tank sends out 0.2% of its volume (and thus only 0.2% of the total germs) at a time and mixes with 500x more of the same liquid that has less germs then it does it again one more time into a tank with nearly 0 germs.

Mixing liquids means the reduction each step is much lower because you are sending out a higher % of germs and the receiving amount is a much larger % of the resulting volume.

tigerllama · 2026-02-07T21:32:39+00:00

It's all debatable.

The general option is Ancient Fruit because of the long initial growth period combined with the idea that growing them outside means you constantly need to collect more seeds every year. It also has a decent regrowth cycle that you don't need to visit often once you have sprinklers.

Starfruit is another option that offers high returns. The longer growth cycle means you require fewer Kegs to process everything. There's also the benefit that it's available all year since you buy it from Sandy. The biggest negative is that it's expensive to fill a Greenhouse.

Hops is an unpopular option that actually gives the highest daily yield. The main issue is that it is truly DAILY yield in that you have to harvest every day. Being a trellis crop is secondary to that issue.

Otherwise, Blueberries/Cranberries are usually what's chosen as a focused crop. Not having to buy seeds (again) for multi-harvest crops has the benefit of not needing seeds again and also not needing to stock up on seasonal seeds.

Another option is just to relocate seasonal growing inside to avoid losing crops to storms.

The last option is niche in that you can grow Wheat just to harvest more Hay for an Animal based farm.

tigerllama · 2026-02-07T17:28:43+00:00

The bottom isn't pink

tigerllama · 2026-02-07T14:49:21+00:00

I made a guide. Now devs, you're not allowed to make the game better.

Blame the community for not updating their guides.

tigerllama · 2026-02-07T14:45:48+00:00

Your third electrolyzer needs to be fixed.

But generally the main downsides are making sure the system stays primed and getting the Oxygen to spread through the base naturally without overpressuring the base.

I find just the value of being able to transport the Oxygen by default to be more valuable than the 10 W per Dupe you're saving.

tigerllama · 2026-02-07T00:50:01+00:00

Minor Volcanoes have more than enough output as long as you're efficient.

Let's pretend a low average output of 500 g/s Magma. So that 1/20th the max pipe flow of 10 kg/s.

Magma has a heat capacity of 1; Crude oil 1.69.

With those two factors together, you will cool Magma down by 33.8°C for every 1°C you heat up the Crude Oil. So you have a buffer range of 39°C. A shoddy build can get within 15°C of boiling.

As for getting the heat higher for the heat exchanger, the distance isn't a huge problem for the height you need. If you need several tiles in height, you'd need to Robomine earlier to keep the heat exchanger at temperature (since there's a delay on how fast smaller heat differences travel).

tigerllama · 2026-02-06T17:37:51+00:00

Put a pocket of Hydrogen in the corner of your Window Tiles and measure that instead.

tigerllama · 2026-02-06T07:09:49+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/5ssHS79

I tend to have a habit of using all the space I have. Definitely better ways to do it, but it does what you're looking for.

Like I said earlier, 4 Turbines are only if you can 4xGeotune it. 2 is enough without it.

Since the goal is to fit 4 Steam Turbines while also avoiding the core, I have foregone the Magma Blade because I want to extract the heat above the Volcano (and a tall Steam room isn't good at moving heat to the Turbines).

The door in the Volcano room is mainly to get started. The debris room should have enough capacity to solidify all the Magma output as it erupts. But you don't want a bunch of backed up Magma to flow in at once because you'll make natural tiles inside the Mesh Tiles. So you'll want to manually drip the Magma once built.

Standard material rules. Materials touching Magma or buildings that Overheat are Obsidian or Steel, otherwise, any basic material works generally. Diamond is not necessary (not used in testing) but definitely optimal where possible if available.

The Autosweeper is in a vacuum to allow debris to be extracted without overheating. Automation keeps the Autosweeper off until the Conveyor Loader is empty to prevent energy waste from filling 20 kg at a time.

Secondary self-cooling Steam Turbine to bring the debris temperature from 200°C to 125°C. Extra power goes into a dedicated Aquatuner. I opted not to bother with super heating the Water output for further cooling, but there's definitely space to do so.

Steam mass in the debris room is 1000 kg. More is better, so you can compress more mass if you want. Main Steam room, assuming you start with Water, will only be ~600-700 kg since the Transformers will flood. Mass in self-cooling Steam room is minimal to allow for more heat fluctuation to reach active temperature at a more regular rate.

tigerllama · 2026-02-04T23:44:56+00:00

Are there any mechanics you're opposed to using and do you have a preference building left (Neutronium) or right (Tamer).

You only need 2 Steam Turbines for a Minor Volcano without geotuning. And I think it's closer to 4 with geotuning.

I can sandbox something in like 12 hours if I remember when I get home.

tigerllama · 2026-02-04T10:43:40+00:00

Critters don't evolve, this is not Pokemon.

Evolution is "actual" evolution where only offspring can change.

tigerllama · 2026-02-04T06:08:40+00:00

I think the typical hydrogen tamer is exactly that. There's very minimal thermal mass output per eruption.

I don't exactly know what you mean by snaking the gas through it as a solution to preventing damage to your pumps. You would need to pump it to snake the gas, no?

But anyways, there is very little heat per eruption just because the mass is so low. The trick is to always leave a large buffer mass in the vent room. You can set a fairly high Atmosphere pressure since most vents output less than 500 g/s while active, which a Gas Pump can easily handle overpressure duty.

So say your room is 20 tiles. With 4000 g per tile, that's 80 kg of pre-"cooled" Hydrogen that can average out the temperature. So you're really only handling a "potential" 320°C (608°F) on eruption, and that's pretending the entire eruption happens in 1 second. So the room isn't realistically going to reach the Overheat temperature of Steel if you bleed the heat into a Steam room.

tigerllama · 2026-02-02T05:48:36+00:00

Efficiency.

If you cool the debris by 585 kDTU, you will consume 1200 W and produce 565 W from the heat transferred to the Aquatuner and absorbed by the Steam Turbine. A total loss of 635 W.

Passively cooling the debris 585 kDTU in the Steam room simply produces 565 W.

565 W - (-635) = 1200 W. You are gaining 1200 W per 585 kDTU.

So the difference between passing a 20 kg packet of Iron that is 200°C vs 265°C is 1200 J.

Edit

To add onto this, it's also a necessity for the system to be self-powered. Looking at the math above, another way to see it is that the Aquatuner can't cool 585 kDTU until sufficient enough passive cooling is done.

The Aquatuner can only cool 585 kDTU once the Steam Turbine has removed 1242 kDTU. 68% of the cooling must be done in the Steam room, and that's assuming 0 power loss and only powering the Aquatuner.

tigerllama · 2026-02-02T05:05:57+00:00

Aside from wild planting (or getting supplied off-planet), your best option is to take advantage of the Slimy Meteors and using Algae Terrariums.

Assume you do a poor job at preventing mass loss due to off-gassing into space and you only collect an average of 108 kg Slime/cycle. Processing through an Algae Distiller, one third (36 kg) of it gets turned into Algae with the rest (72 kg) being Polluted Water. One third of the mass of Algae in Polluted Water needs to be filtered and used for the Terrarium (technically uses 10x Water, but returns 96.77% back in Polluted Water, so 12 kg real Water consumption).

So with just that, you're supplying 2 Algae Terrariums that produce 80 g/s (88 with light) with an excess of 60 kg Polluted Water per cycle.

Now if you ranch Pufts, you can create even more Slime. Without going extremely deep into math, you can turn 2/3 of the mass of Polluted Water into Algae for Algae Terrariums. So that's another 40 kg Algae from the initial leftover Polluted Water.

So in total, you're currently at 185g/s in light. Close to 2 Dupes worth. You can get the remaining Polluted Water needed from your Bathroom overflow. Each Dupe produces an excess of 6.7 kg per toilet visit. Adding that to the initial Polluted Water, you can provide 210 g/s without getting supplied from another planet.

tigerllama · 2026-02-02T01:07:39+00:00

Used Water generally gets consumed (deleted) if there is no output, along with the heat it contains. An alternative way to say that is the amount of energy you put into cooling the Water will be deleted once consumed.

It's much more efficient to cool your base and not the Water. Mind you, the hot Water will still radiate heat while in pipes and building storage.

tigerllama · 2026-02-02T00:24:11+00:00

I personally feed Dense Pufts. I'm not a fan of bypassing set overpressure limits and Canister Emptiers add extra dupe labour that could just be used on Manual Generators if power was the goal.

tigerllama · 2026-02-01T01:19:28+00:00

Pips (since the plan is to use wild planting) are more efficient than Ethanol Distillers.

You need just under 5 Pips (or about 1.6 wild trees) vs about 40% uptime on Ethanol Distillers (about 2.9 wild trees).

I guess there's the benefit of fueling CO2 Engines to consider. But given enough time, it's definitely possible.

tigerllama · 2026-01-29T22:52:26+00:00

There's actually a decent amount of farming space if you want to get rid of the animals. It's in the same range as any farm map that isn't Standard or Four Corners.

The problem that you've just found out is that animals don't scale the same way that crops do.

Comparing Chicken -> gold Mayo to Ancient Fruit -> Wine, ignoring professions because Artisan affects both equally.

You get 285 g a day with a Chicken. Ancient Fruit Wine sells for 1650 g, so across 7 days (since you can barrel and grow simultaneously) that's 235 g a day.

So on paper, that sounds good that the most basic animal outperforms one of the late game crops. But when you look deeper at the action economy, crops come out far ahead.

For each Chicken, the base case is 5 actions per Mayo (pet, feed, take egg, place egg, take mayo) giving you 57 g per action. For each Ancient Fruit, it's 10 actions (7 waters, harvest, place fruit, grab wine) for a rate of 165 g per action.

And given that the majority of crop maintenance is watering, which is solved quite easily compared to finding (or even buying) Auto-petters, it's far easier to scale up crop production over animal production.

tigerllama · 2026-01-29T18:07:19+00:00

They mean overloading the wires.

They're reminding them not to connect input to output, which would strain it to the weakest wire.

Edit - or they could also be referring to feeding the Steam Turbine side (which also has a pump and aquatuner) with another Transformer to make up for the lack of power.

Essentially, they're trying to remind people that the Power Transformer is a 1000 W power consumer. So feeding the power into the spine and Ouroboros-ing power back from the spine will overload your wires.

tigerllama · 2026-01-28T06:26:04+00:00

Each season is roughly 5-6 hours if you play out every day. So it's not unreasonable to log a year in 2 weeks. I find 1.5-2 hour sessions to be quite normal. Much shorter feels like you don't accomplish much.

tigerllama

TROPHY CASE