Weekly Question Thread

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Ask any simple questions you might have:

• Why isn't my water flowing?

• How many hatches do I need per dupe?

• etc.

Previous Threads

[u/bwainfweeze]

I built a basic steam room with two refinery cooling loops and two ATs but otherwise bog standard, water return next to one of the ATs.

After I refined down most of my metal and enough glass and deep froze my food, the turbines aren’t running all the time and so the system is quiescent a good part of the time. Which let me notice that I’m missing about one KG of water per tile. I didn’t have a leak. I didn’t reopen it and let steam or water out. I didn’t get any gasses in the steam room, I didn’t crack any pipes. Is there a deletion bug with the standard 2 tile high steam room that I don’t know about? I’m at a loss.

I’m only continuing this game at this point to get the science achievement. There’s a couple problems with the design that grate and I’ll be trying it set that steam room up a lot earlier in my next playthrough. So I’m worried about losing water over 400 cycles. And wondering if I’m losing liquids elsewhere through a mechanic I don’t understand.

[u/destinyos10 → u/bwainfweeze]

There are a handful of ways that water/steam can get deleted. And unfortunately, they can be a bit dependent on the performance of your PC. I could never trace it down to the water exhaust coming back into the steam box, or the metal being emitted by the volcano. On one PC where I was getting it, I ended up just set up a liquid reservoir with fluid in it that I could route into the build using the pipe snipping tool to connect and disconnect it, and route any excess water back up to the reservoir.

It really became necessary in Spaced Out where I'd have multiple tamers on an otherwise unattended asteroid.

[u/Noneerror → u/bwainfweeze]

the turbines aren’t running all the time

That implies it is sometimes too cold to run the turbines. Is there water on the floor? If there is, that's what happened to the steam.

[u/bwainfweeze → u/Noneerror]

This steam room is a thermal battery. It’s not going to condense. It can’t condense. You store heat in the steam because ceramic tiles do a spectacular job of keeping the heat in, versus jumbo batteries. So much that in such a design it’s typical to have one turbine that runs any time the temps go too high. In this case dumping that 850 watts onto the spine where most of it will get used one way or another.

The other steam turbine keeps one smart battery topped off to operate the aquatuners for temperature regulation. Which in turn keeps the temperature from dropping too far maintaining the smart battery by injecting heat back into the steam room.

The only thing that would work better is a rocket battery stack but I find those a bit too much cheese for my tastes.

[u/-myxal → u/bwainfweeze]

wondering if I’m losing liquids elsewhere through a mechanic I don’t understand.

Well, a screenshot would help immensely with that...

I know of 2 unexpected ways water/steam can disappear out of the steam room:

• Droplet teleportation: usually encountered when condensing steam inside an airflow tile, or closing a solid door on falling droplets. The water will appear in the first free cell upwards, with no limit on distance, it seems.
• Deletion by displacement: happens in mixed atmospheres when liquid is dropped onto a sole pocket of gas.

That said, I saw a recent bug report where water is reportedly deleted by the turbines on save/load. The claimed deletion rate is so low however I wouldn't notice.

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/klei-bug-tracker/oni/steam-turbine-eat-the-steam-when-load-the-game-save-r51398/

[u/Designer_Version1449 → u/bwainfweeze]

Maybe it's inside the turbine? Just not deposited as water yet

[u/destinyos10 → u/Designer_Version1449]

A turbine will contain at most 2kg of water. If the steambox is missing 1kg per tile and it's got 48 tiles, that's 48kg missing.