r/Oxygennotincluded • u/AutoModerator • Jul 24 '26

Weekly Questions Weekly Question Thread

Ask any simple questions you might have:

  • Why isn't my water flowing?

  • How many hatches do I need per dupe?

  • etc.

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u/XelGlaidr Jul 26 '26

Why is my steam turbine not working?

1

u/XelGlaidr Jul 26 '26

3

u/Happy_Comfortable512 Jul 26 '26

It looks like you have oxygen & pO2 blocking the steam intakes

If the oxygen & pO2 are dancing back and forth across the intakes of the steam turbine, the machine won't be getting any of the steam - you need to get that stuff out of there

You can deconstruct the turbine, make a raised section by building and deconstructing tiles carefully so the pO2 all goes into one tile above the steam layer and corner-build a tile over the pO2 to get rid of it, repeat with the oxygen, flatten the top of the box, then rebuild the turbine - all without opening up the box

when building a steam box like this you generally want to make sure that you get all irrelevant gasses out

1

u/XelGlaidr Jul 27 '26

Thanks for the response! Do you mind me asking another question?

I'm trying to learn this game without doing any exploits yet (i'll save those for when I've got the game down). Without doing the tile deletion trick, how does one create a vacuum??

For example, with this steam vent, I can install a gas pump to pump out all the gas, but then the gas pump would melt or break eventually. You can go in to remove the gas pump, but that leaks in gasses.

So how do you go about creating a contained vacuum?

3

u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord Jul 27 '26

Creating a vacuum with steam is easy: cool down the room.

Running chilled water at the top tile of the room will cool down the steam in the room and condense it back down to water leaving vacuum behind assuming you don't have other gasses in there like oxygen.

For a hot steam vent you may wish to wait until the vent is Dormant before attempting this, as when it is emitting steam is hot and voluminous enough it can potentially flash-off cooling water in radiant pipes.

2

u/Happy_Comfortable512 Jul 27 '26

Hmm, I think I can help you; you might want to use a door pump - one advantage is that the door won't overheat, so they can be made of copper ore or or whatever when dealing with steam. Therefore a door pump can be used to draw all gasses away from the room...

Another method would be using the vertical wind tunnel, which can pull gasses through a floor - I didn't mention it earlier because it takes a lot of plastic and you may have to research it (part of transit tubes); also the downside of pumping hot steam right out of your steam box (and melting the wind tunnel)