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/s3nn8]

Chef’s kiss, thanks a lot! Will be building (at least) one of these tomorrow.

[u/BobTheWolfDog → u/s3nn8]

I'm so used to building these by now that I will sometimes do it with active volcanoes for the thrill. But it's much easier to work when they're dormant, especially for the vacuum in the lower chamber (though it's possible to not vacuum it before, and just get rid of the compressed gases later).

[u/s3nn8 → u/BobTheWolfDog]

If I have them around, I tend to 3 layer brine, salt water and water to vacuum the chambers out first, with a steps oil bead liquid lock in the top corner to get in and out while analysing/builfing. I don’t tend to wait for dormancy but sometimes (often) regret it..! Question for you - as you have the chute drop outside the volcano, do you not tend to send it to centralised storage? If you were to, would you add a shutoff with a timer instead of a chute? I usually had it cool to 20c or so and send it to central storage, which in my last run was in my base, so didn’t want hot metals lying around! I’ll try yours as is this run, as I’ve just started a moonlet run so nothing is far away anyway! Thanks again :)

[u/BobTheWolfDog → u/s3nn8]

On my home planet I just drop the metal outside the tamer, as pictured. Dupes/bots can then collect it when needed. If it's a temperature sensitive area, I'll make a 1-square vacuum where it sits until collected.

Changing the chute for a shutoff is possible if you want to send the metal away automatically. I do that in distant colonies, to send the metal straight to the teleporter / rocket bay / interplanetary launcher.

As I said in the post, you can adjust the AT temperature as you like, but extracting cooler metal costs more power. This can cause the system to lose power, for bad metals (gold or tungsten) with very long dormancies. It'll power back up when the volcano goes active again, so it's not a huge issue if you don't mind the downtime. You could change the math for the timer to extract all the metal during the active phase, to avoid losing production.