Welp…that saved me about 3 hours of my life. Thanks mate! Kinda sucks I gotta ponder what exactly would blast a tight radious and all the other crap unscathed. 
True… But since building a small vehicle might be faster than the recovery, it might still be worth it (the ramp probably takes up the most time to set up).
No problem. Hm, you give me some ideas. Can those lumps… burn? Fight heat with fire! I’ll add it to the test…
Lumps can’t burn it seems. Neither does setting off c-4 on top of it destroy them. Smashing them with 250 strength and a sledghammer works, but I highly doubt you can get there without debug. It is pretty stupid that they cannot be dsetroyed by a player without cheating, except, you know, vehicle ram spam, which on the second floor is impossible.
Only solution now would be negative warmth clothing, essentially a cooling suit, the opposite of the thermal suit. Unfortunately, even though setting an item’s warmth to a negative value results in something that makes you colder, we don’t actually have anything that does that in the game.
If you don’t mind using magic mods arcana and magiclysm has spells to deal with extreme temperature if I remember correctly.
Aw man, vehicle coolers output hot air now ? I’m playing on stable, and after a lot of experimenting, a foldable frame with a built-in battery, and a cooler and dashboard to be mounted on it, have allowed me to get the resin pods.
If they now generate hot air on the exhaust, maybe a several-tiles-long foldable vehicle could still do it ? Deploy one on the ground floor, shaped so that it links the outside (where you can work safely on installing a muffler) to the stairs (where the cooler could send enough cold air upstairs to do that again on the upper floors) ? When I go for the resin pods, I always let the cooler run for a little while to saturate the place with cold air - the whole process with two separate vehicle could be too long to be useful.
On a semi-related note, I’ve felt a bit frustrated that 56°C air can get you to a half-dead state in ten minutes flat. Moreso because of the simplicity of the instinctive IRL solution to overheating : dousing oneself in water. I think being wet should help cool down a lot more than just decreasing the warmth of clothing.
This game really makes me want to learn programming to be able to help.
Lol I tried that. There is a swimming pool right next to this tower for some reason. The “wet” morale penalty makes deconstruction impossible. Maybe that was in combination with the heat penalty, I don’t remember, but yeah.
Also in my build you don’t need a dashboard to operate the cooler. But if you see my screenshot, the area just outside the door has the same heat issues, so I’m not sure a longer folding vehicle does the trick. How long can a folding vehicle be? And this is, of course, before we consider that there are only a couple of resin pods on the 1st floor, most are on the 2nd.
You can turn that morale penalty into a morale bonus if all the clothing you have on have the WATER_FRIENDLY tag (“This piece of clothing performs well even when soaking wet. This can feel good.”). Also works naked, I think. Plus you get to picture your survivor mutant cyborg in swimming trunks, rigging a vehicle made chiefly of pipes inside a hot giant mushroom.
Even so, I’m not aware of anything in the game that mitigates a 200+ “heat” effect.
Installing a muffler to dispose of the heat elsewhere in a foldable vehicle makes it not capable of being folded anymore unfortunately.
Honestly I’m tempted now to make a full-body suit that uses battery power to cool you down, a lot, enough that you’d probably freeze if it wasn’t summer or a mi-go environment.
Could we just reduce the resin pod harvest time to a minute? That seems like the simplest way to make this a feature people can actually use. You still have to conquer the tower and deal with the heat, it just won’t take real-life hours of micromanaging heat damage/debuffs. I’m all for more creative features but like, this seems like a small change that doesn’t run the risk of breaking anything else in the game.
How about wearable ice packs ? One plastic bottle of frozen water per limb, a couple of strings, and voilà. Awful encumbrance and short-lived, but it should work for short-term heat management.
Right, as I noted earlier mufflers take 30 minutes to install and aren’t foldable, so you’d have to install it externally and I don’t think folding vehicles can be long enough (you’d need at least 6 tiles, going by my screenshot.
Do note that vehicle coolers don’t just cool the tiles next to them, AFAIK ; they generate a cold air field that spreads. You don’t need to setup the vehicle cooler right next to the pods, just give time to the cold air to spread through the room. Before coolers generated hot air, I typically only had to move it once per floor to be able to clear them after an hour of waiting outside picking strawberries. And you can just use a regular pre-built vehicle to chill the air outside.
I should be trying this out instead of just rambling about it, but I don’t really want to update.
I’ll take any solution at this point, I could just cheat these pods to my inventory but I specifically went through the trouble of clearing this tower and purging the hundreds of zombies that had been drawn to the tower because I liked the idea of being rewarded with quick, easy to use building materials.
But that said, why would this work when CBMs & Power armor don’t? What about an insulation system using liquid Nitrogen (produced via fractional distillation, which is already in the the game) as a coolant? Liquid nitrogen is like -195 C according to wikipedia.
The tower contains several gas producing vents (and we’ve established that these are basically indestructible), how many coolers would it take to neutralize this? I think at point were talking about a solution so complicated no one would even try it without debugging tools, if it even works. But, I’m basing that on my limited knowledge of these mechanics. If it only takes a few coolers to neutralize the effect of like ~10 hot gas vents (plus there’s always one adjacent to the pods), that sounds more like a cheesy, tentative exploit than a solution the game deliberately accommodates.
Again, I’ve only ever tried this in stable, so all my info might be outdated. But since sauna hot air is not the same as hot air, cold air fields and sauna hot air fields do not cancel each other ; they stack. With even a single cooler (though I’d expect several to be faster and more practical), the air inside the tower will eventually be saturated by both fields, making the temperature bearable everywhere (although subject to random variation which will still end up scorching you once in a while, as the intensity of the fields vary when cold air dissipates naturally).
Okay, tested this out on the 1st floor (debug spawning materials). Built a long string of frames starting outside and leading in through the doorway. Inside the building are two attached coolers, and on the outside end I have a muffler, storage battery, and electronics control unit.
This cools the tower substantially after a few hours. Doesn’t seem to get lower than 100 F, even after waiting another 3 hrs. and I’m a little suspicious that the lower temperature outside is doing some of the heavy lifting here. Adding a 3rd cooler had no effect. I went ahead and just waited (without using a cooling system, pic below) and yes the local ambient temperature has a pretty substantial effect. This suggests there’s a pretty serious limit to how much cooling you can actually do on your own. That said, 100 F makes pod extraction on the 1st floor (with internal cc & rm13) totally reasonable, only going so far as “warm”.
But this gets much more complicated on the second floor, where most of the pods are (and you need several to actually do anything). If it would even work, you’d have to build a ramp up to the second floor, punch a hole in the wall (does anybody know how to do this?), and repeat the extruded cooler process.
To be clear, this only works because vehicle construction is a bit cheesy, I can install frames and coolers and mufflers without actually being inside the tower. I’m not sure this is really an option on the second floor.
To elaborate further on how coolers work : they generate a cold air field with 3 possible levels of intensity, each level reducing the temperature in that square by some value. So yes, there is a hard limit to how much you can cool the place, and once you’ve reached it by saturating the tower with intensity 3 cold air, additional coolers or time won’t help.
That field goes through Z-levels if there’s an open way and dissipates with time, so it’s possible you might use the lower-temperature squares outside the staircase on the second floor to build another cooling contraption, although I have no idea how you could deal with the exhaust there. Maybe deploying a foldable vehicle that goes to the door to the outside (is there even one on the second floor ? I’m not sure) and installing an exhaust there, if the temperature on the staircase is low enough ? I agree that it seems like an ungodly amount of work if you’re trying to build your basecamp out of mi-go resin. Even with the simpler coolers I eventually wrote that plan off.
Hmm, I tried deploying a longer folding vehicle but I “didn’t have enough space”, so I’m not sure this is doable. As far as the 2nd floor layout goes, here’s a screencap.
Turned off the temp display for visibility, but the temperature is uniform throughout. Resin walls all around.
It takes 8 pods just to build half of a shelter. When I saw it in the menu I thought “hey, that’s a really cool way to get a base up quickly, since it builds very quickly and doesn’t require any other materials”, so I spent a day conquering the closest tower (was in the middle of a city, so you can imagine the situation). If the pod retrieval time could just be shortened to a minute it would become a feature that warrants the effort. You’re still having to contend with all the threats in the towers, and you’d still get scorched if you aren’t careful. I don’t mind having to undergo additional challenges, tougher enemies, etc. But having to micro manage scorching for hours and hours is just miserable and I don’t think anyone is actually going through the trouble to use these nifty pods.
Eureka! You can cool the second floor with a vehicle from the first floor if you build it up to the ramp and install a cooler there. This can all be done from outside the tower. This (together with late night ambient temperatures) lowers the second floor to ~100F, meaning you can extract pods without getting scorched with the right gear. In the following screenshot I am standing on the same tile as the ramp, where I have installed a frame and a cooler.
I started constructing this cooling unit several tiles outside of the tower, building towards the door and then down towards the ramp. I used light wooden frames since they’re the fastest to assemble (5min) afaik. On the outside “end” I installed a muffler, storage battery, and electronics control unit. All you need on the opposing is a vehicle cooler(s). It is imperative that you do this construction outside of the tower (especially parts like the muffler, which take a while). I did not have any luck trying to “unfold” an elongated set of frames within the tower. Here is the vehicle construction interface.
Materials required:
- ~13 light wooden frames and short ropes (5 min install each) [39 planks and, um, 52 ropes].
- 1 storage battery, fully charged is preferable (5 min install).
- 1 dashboard/elec ctrl unit (2 min install)
- 1 muffler (30 min install), very important: install before turning coolers on.
- 1 vehicle cooler, at least (1 min install).
Note that removing materials tends to be even faster than installation, so you can definitely recycle your equipment.
After a few hours, 2nd floor should be a tolerable temp at night. I’m in day 77 at spring, night temp drops as low as 48F, from mid 60s during the day. This might not work in the summer. And yes, this is some intense cheese that might get broken by a patch. But as of 10847, it works.
Edit: You can also build a single string of folding frames (recommend 7-8), anything more elaborate is not going to work in towers that have the doorway facing another direction (didn’t actually test this, but the orientation of unfolding vehicles seems to be hard-coded). Unfold outside the tower and push through the doorway, then attach 6 light wooden frames, building through the interior towards the ramp. Since medium storage batteries and elec controls are fold-able, you would just need to install a muffler and the cooler(s) once the frames are in place. (1 hr in-game, 30 min for interior frames and 30 for the muffler).
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Well done ! I didn’t think a cooler would output enough cold air through the stairs to cool the whole upper floor, congrats on your persistence.
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