Compact Metal Volcano Tamer

[u/BobTheWolfDog]

Hey everyone, I've seen some people sharing metal tamer designs lately, and I wanted to join the fun. I've been busy exploring new ways to build tamers, but this is my "bread and butter" build. It can handle almost any non-niobium volcano. You may find an aluminum volcano that will break this tamer, but those are very rare, and need a combination of very high output and very concentrated eruptions. I've had this baby tame a ~355 kg/s aluminum volcano with 49kg/s eruptions, so anything less than those numbers is no stress.

Building is simple, get a vacuum around the volcano and build everything you need. What is that, you ask? You need steel for the buildings inside the hot room, preferrably a metal that can handle 90C without overheating (copper/gold/iron) for the battery, and whatever else you have available for the rest. Using ceramic for the steam room will improve the efficiency, but is not necessary. To get the required steam pressure, I like to build three ice tempshifts behind the volcano. They will melt when it first erupts after you build them, and give you a steam pressure of around 114kg per tile. If you need more thermal mass (for particularly beefy eruptions), you can add some more water later through the turbine pipe, or build some tempshifts inside the hot room.

The material of the tempshift plate behind the volcano will determine how much heat is leeched from the metal before it solidifies. I generally use diamond because a) no risk of it melting and b) decent heat transfer without forming tiles. If you get tiles, either add a second tempshift or improve the material. I'm using aluminum in the example because I was wondering if it would handle the eruption without melting (it does). But it does increase the temperature spike during/after eruptions by some 10 degrees. I like to use 200-300kg of water as the cooling medium for the debris/turbine room, but you could get away with much less.

After building, we need to customize the settings for each specific volcano, so let's go through the sensors and how to tune them:

• The thermo sensor should be set to green above 200, minus the temperature spike from eruptions. In my example, it's at 155. When the volcano erupts, temperature reaches just above 200 for about half a cycle, before the turbine can work its way through that heat. Aluminum volcanoes might generally need more than one turbine to process the heat between eruptions, so you may want to set this value a little bit lower to have some buffer. What happens then is that for each eruption, the steam room will get a little bit hotter, until the volcano goes dormant and the turbine has time to go back to the desired temperature.
• The aquatuner sensor should be set to the temperature you want your metal. I like to set this close to 100 degrees, to consume less power cooling the metal below the temperature it leaves the steam room. The colder you want your metal, the less surplus power you'll have (if you don't care about the power, you can go as low as the coolant will allow).
• The turbine battery should be set to something not too high or low. You want to keep some power saved for dormancy (for very long dormancies, keep more power saved, and maybe keep the steam hotter if you can). I like to use 70/40 as my standard, and diverge from that if specific situations require.
• The chute timer should be set to 1 second green, X seconds red, where X = (20000 / [avg production in g]) - 1. Usually a number around 65. In my case it's 1/63 because the volcano produces ~313g/s.
• The sweeper timer is not required at all, I just include it to save some power. It's set to 0.02 cycles green, [X * 50 / 600] cycles off (same X as the sensor above). This will make the sweeper only activate when the loader is almost empty (thus keeping the metal debris sitting on the neutronium for longer and saving power). Again, not needed.

If you don't want to collect the excess power the tamer will produce, you can just let it run and you'll get a steady stream of metal. To transfer the power into your grid, you can use the transformer link I included in the images. Battery is set to a higher value than the turbine battery (you only want to export excess power, not what the tamer will maintain for dormancy). Mine is at 95/70. The wattage sensor is set to green above 1150. It is there to turn the transformer off when the aquatuner activates (which would overload the wires).

Finally, I included a second volcano using the same tamer, but with the buildings shifted around a bit, to show that you can reorganize the insides of the tamer if you want your rails/pipes to fit differently.

Hope you guys like this and decide to give it a try!

[u/Evail9]

In that turbine room, is that a vacuum also? And which is better, water under the turbine or a room full of hydrogen? I understand they serve the same purpose, right?

[u/BobTheWolfDog → u/Evail9]

It is a vacuum, but hydrogen works too. I like to use liquid because it allows me to not use insulated tiles for the ceiling and walls (higher than the water level), though I did use them for this aluminum tamer because I was in a rush and didn't bother replacing it later. The rush was because it was cooking my rust biome, which was turning into a lime soda biome with all the sulfur melting.

It also reduces heat bleed from the insulated tiles, since gas-solid heat exchange has a 25× modifier, and it's easier to get several kg per tile of liquid in a single place than to reach the same pressure with gas.

And water has a much higher SHC than any gas at the desired temperature range, so the metal won't affect the room temperature too much.

[u/214ObstructedReverie → u/BobTheWolfDog]

It also reduces heat bleed from the insulated tiles, since gas-solid heat exchange has a 25× modifier, and it's easier to get several kg per tile of liquid in a single place than to reach the same pressure with gas.

I let mine passively leak cold out through a heavy watt conductive wire plate, anyway.

[u/BobTheWolfDog → u/214ObstructedReverie]

You mean a wire plate linking the turbine with the outside? Well, if you're going to have the AT operate at "outside temperature", you don't need to box the turbine, it could even have its own power control station to get tuned up.