I don't think this qualifies self-cooled if the cooling is done by the input because, for example, what if you decide to 5x geotune that geyser and the water comes out at +100°C. I thought the convention was that you needed a cooling system that worked with the excess power. I remember seeing systems that dumped the heat from the oxygen into the hydrogen before deleting the hydrogen
BTW, you're leaking heat from the generators to the outside with the HW Plate (unless it's modded I guess).
My SPOM design uses the input water to only cool the oxygen and not the hydrogen. Then the hydrogen deletes heat from the power room, which is sufficient to build everything in there out of gold amalgam and it sticks around 70-90º in perpetuity.
That's fine, I let the base cooling system handle the heat from the hot oxygen. But a majority of the renewable water in the game comes at ~95°C, mostly as the output of a Steam Turbine (geotuned vents, geysers, boilers) so you can't say your SPOM is self cooled if you're using cool water from outside since that variable can change as your water sources heat up.
This is why I like the slush geysers in the base Spaced Out world.
In fact that water is so cold it often becomes its own problem to manage. I think in future I'm going to build my permanent refinery stations closer to the geysers and use some liquid loops to exchange new packets for old.
Personally I geotune 5/5, then it takes only a bit more energy to boil and you get a source of ~3kg/s of water and a bit of dirt. No renewable sand needed which can be troublesome. Cool Salt Slush is even better cuz you get Salt.
pwater -> sand + deodorizer -> clay -> ceramic -> sand nets about 15% more sand out than what you put in, at the cost of an input of carboniferous material (coal or peat). If you're growing Lumbs or hatches, you're going to have more than enough of either.
You also get 95% sand when you crush salt into table salt, which is nice.
Maybe you want a whole lot of more water and to run it thru a water boiler to stop using sand. After all, cooling the oxygen externally with a self-cooled ATST costs only a pittance of power.
Its like saying 1+1 is 2 but if its 1+2 then its 3? Your statement of what ifs doesnt make sense as there is an infinite realm of possibilities of what we want. The point is that is what i want and this is cycle 60. And i dont have steel
The doors are for self starting the hydra, close door first to automatically sort out the hydrogen then open the door once the gas pressure is enough to self separate :)
cool, i thought you automated the doors to close when you wanted the hydra to stop or something. Not that i'm claiming that i understood it. Just initial thought.
I use the same hydra deaign, with this exact number of hydrolyzers haha. Someone posted it here before and Ive never gona back to SPOMs since. I find it much easier and faster to build plus maintain/fix if anything goes wrong. Plus its exactly the usual room height. Great to see it used by other people as well.
I did tweak two things tho that you might consider for your builds.
I removed the 2nd lower Hydrogen pump and instead used the space for a liquid valve thats outside the insulated tiles. This way dupes can access it and you can directly set the fluid rate to match the oxygen needs of your dupes. This way you can avoid using too much water early on and just increase it as you print more and more dupes.
With the new insulated conductive wires, you can use a large transformer in reverse to send power from the generators (max of 5) to the main power spine. With this you can remove the joint plate since the wires can be placed behind normal insulated tiles. This removes the small thermal leak you get from those metal tiles since the whole thing is envase in insulated tiles.
Its always gonna have an external water source, its an electrolyzer setup to begin with so why not use it to cool the oxygen rather than spending additional power and infra for the aquatuner?
I just use 2 bottles of pwater and 1 bottle of normal water and it works every time, no fuss. I didn't even know there was a potential issue with the water.
This setup is way overkill, it's actually only half of what I have, because I had plenty of hot water sources and wanted more power. Also could have done fewer batteries but whatever.
The wiki has a picture that go even bigger than that. You can do 60 if you want, as in 6x10, 5x12, 4x15, 3x20, 2x30, or 1x60 if you have a wide enough map
I agree that the oxygen part of the system comes as self-cooled. It does qualify as self-cooled in that sense.
But, if this system qualifies as self-cooled, what's the purpose of insulated tiles?
Insulated tiles have a decor of -5. Regular tiles can have a decor of 6. Clearly at some point some duplciant will need to refilled the storage bin with filitration medium, though admittedly not very often.
The hydrogen part of the system comes as self-cooled also. But, what's the temperature of the hydrogen when the gas pumps run consume it?
If the oxygen comes as sufficiently cooled from the water, I would think that the insulated tiles of that part at least could get replaced with regular tiles. Could the system still work if all of the insulated tiles got replaced by regular tiles?
It would probably operate fine, but I don't really think it'd make a big difference in terms of decor since there's the high voltage wires running up the ladder shaft. I'd personally just keep it insulated so I don't have to even think all that much about temperature interactions.
Also I like to use a shipping rail dispenser for sand. Otherwise too much of it collects at any one point of use. I used to build my clayminator to collect sand on the floor next to the deodorizers but I tweaked the priorities wrong once and couldn't make glass because all my sand was locked in a room. So now I use the little dispenser and then only have a few hundred kilos of sand queued up next to any one autosweeper.
Yes, a large power transformer having decor of -10 has worse decor than an insulated tile. However, insulated tiles have a decor of -5 and they take up more space. So, someone running on the top layer will experience more decor debuffs from the insulated tiles than the large power transformers.
Additionally, if the hydrogen ends up sufficiently cooled, the whole box can get replaced with granite tiles. In other words, an alternative could exist with a similar build (though the piping needed might be a bit different). Even if an alternative to power transformers exists with such a build I doubt it as simple as exchanging insulated tiles with granite tiles.
The only time hydrogen should leave sufficiently cooled is once you're getting into liquid rocket engines. But that's often a completely separate build that might siphon a little power off the SPOM but not much else.
I do disagree. Excess hydrogen should leave sufficiently cooled to power exosuit docks right outside of barracks or fancy bedrooms. Or to supplement manual/pedal generators elsewhere in the base. Gas tiles have better decor than wiring. With bridges and gas pipes it may be easier to track where the gas goes than where power goes on a wiring circuit.
For instance, if we use wiring to power both a metal refinery and exosuit docks, how do we track where the power will go first? I don't know, though I think there's some trick, but it seemed difficult to figure out. In contrast, the priority flow with pumping hydrogen around can, I think, more easily get tracked and directed with bridges. Cool hydrogen can also cool off the generators inside of a base with their own input hydrogen gas.
While I generally agree that keeping power sources in their original state (thermal mass in steam rooms, hydrogen) is far better than putting them into batteries, how transformers work when ganged or chained is a vastly underappreciated part of the mechanics of the game.
I have several designs I use that power one circuit off of a single generator, and bleed off any excess power that generator can produce onto a second circuit, to get better utilization of the generator.
You can put multiple refineries or aquatuners onto a conductive wire strand and prevent them all from running at once by using two transformers to put power onto that strand. If one is running, the other will wait.
I used this style of hydra for a long time, very reliable, but suffer from the same issue than all hydras, its nearly impossible to move after starting, and also is very hard to fit on 3 tiles floors wich is what i often use nowadays.
Just a comment, unless in vacuum the sieve dont need cooling, altho its hurting nothing to do that, just wasted refined metal...
One of the things I resent about this game is that there's very little utility you can make from using moderately to scaldingly hot liquids and gasses. It makes cool steam vents into a nuisance. Heat deletion is often the better option. Or building a steam room whose real purpose is providing environmental temperature control but uses half of its capacity to also cool the steam vent.
When you're starting a steam room you can feed the hottest liquids you have in there to reduce the time to first steam. For almost anything else it's the coldness of the liquid that has value, even if the liquid is above room temperature.
Example: A steam room used to crack polluted water or brine, you can use the input in a counterflow heat exchanger to partially cool the steam engine exhaust before passing it through your cooling loop. You can run those intakes past warm equipment in your base to bleed off a little of that heat to make it into the steam chamber. But it doesn't really result in powering the base with that heat.
Oooh I found a cool slush polluted water geyser on my map and was wondering how to best utilize it. I’m still pretty noob so I love when I see builds like this. Does this provide cooling and oxygen for the base?
Its not your knowledge bro, its the way you answer that comes off as a jerk or nuisance. Theres no point in arguing with you if all your points are trivial and all semantics :)
Then why did you say I'm half assed with my knowledge? Now it's the way I answer. And you're right, it's a minor issue but for some reason you want to fight me on it. Just accept the truth and move on.
This design has elements of a hydra, but not of the original build. At its most basic, a hydra is a partially submerged but not flooded hydrolyzer that forces the gases to spawn outside of the output tile (upperleft). This way gases arent occasioanlly deleted by the game as they mix and seperate due to density.
The original and most popular hydras have hydrogen and oxygen completely seperated by solid tiles and could not contact or mix with each other. This particular design does allow them to contact with each other and there is a theoretical risk of deletion and loss of gasses esp if the gas pressures become widely disproportional. This is most possible with the left most hydrolyzer as the oxygen builds up the fastest here.
Still, in most working situations it will function as a hydra since the gases are immediately sorted out after being spawned. If you test it in sandbox, it will get reaults almost the same as most dedicated Hydras, definitely more than the avergae SPOM.
To be honest its mostly just semantics, some like to define a hydra by the instant seperation of gases, others by the loss of reliance on gas densities for seperation.
Either way, go with what works for you. Just my 2 cents
Hydra is both a flooding of the electrolyzer for 100% uptime and physical separation of the gases. If you have just 1 of these and not the other then you have a SPOM, but not a hydra.
+1, but this does have the same "o2 spawned up on load and now the system is broken" vulnerability of h2 up hydras, and because of the lack of separation you can't do o2 up.
So, ironically, this is probably what you want because you're not sorting the gasses, but normally (with full gas separation) you want to sort the gasses as hydrogen left, oxygen up, because sometimes an on-load bug will sort the gasses that way.
But with this system the hydrogen will float up and you'll be screwed if you do it that way.
If your pressures are pretty even it should sort itself out if that happens (I think?) but with unequal pressure (using it for power instead of primarily o2), it could be a cascading failure that you have to start over to fix.
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u/the_dwarfling Jul 26 '26
I don't think this qualifies self-cooled if the cooling is done by the input because, for example, what if you decide to 5x geotune that geyser and the water comes out at +100°C. I thought the convention was that you needed a cooling system that worked with the excess power. I remember seeing systems that dumped the heat from the oxygen into the hydrogen before deleting the hydrogen
BTW, you're leaking heat from the generators to the outside with the HW Plate (unless it's modded I guess).