How To Melt Ice With Algae Terrariums In ONI: Spaced Out! Sandbox Showcase #25

Welcome to Sandbox Showcase! In this series, I talk about various problems in Oxygen Not Included and how I've solved them with my own designs in previous streamed and non-streamed runs, by building them in Sandbox mode.
In this video, I talk about when to use Algae Terrariums instead of Oxygen Diffusers to convert your Algae into Oxygen. Algae Terrariums are quite a niche building that potentially require a lot of dupe labour and water filtration to function, but do technically produce more Oxygen for a given amount of Algae than the Oxygen Diffuser. It turns out both machines produce their outputs at 30° C minimum, so the Water throughput of the Terrarium allows it to generate a lot of power-efficient heat! This can be used to melt glaciers on Rime maps, which I think is the strongest use case for these buildings. Let me know in the comments how you like to use Algae Terrariums in your playthroughs!
Feel free to follow me on Twitch at / erisia_gaming to see the current Frozen Foresters ONI run live. You can find all of my streamed ONI playthroughs and other discussion videos uploaded to TH-cam and become a member for special perks and video credits by joining / @erisia_gaming . There is also the Discord where we frequently discuss this game, share builds, memes and stories, etc: discord.com/invite/h7W8Cp4T5T
Music provided by Chillhop Music: chillhop.ffm.to/creatorcred
Intro: 0:00
Oxygen Diffuser Comparison: 1:16
Terrarium Heat Generation: 4:41
Terrarium Room Setup: 7:56
Glacier Melting Setup: 16:50
Water Filtration: 19:07
Terrarium Gas Deletion: 21:04
Emptying The Terrariums: 21:33
Efficient Melting/Pumping: 23:03
Alternative Layouts: 29:46
Algae Terrarium Maths: 31:08
Summary and Outro: 34:00
Credits: 35:34

[@darkehartplays]

The terrariums ability to overwrite small tiles of gas plus their bit of carbon dioxide consumption also makes them useful for creating little breathing pockets in your carbon dioxide sink. Create a little U bend off the main shaft and put the terrariums there. They'll consume/overwrite enough carbon dioxide to fill the upper part of the bend with oxygen. You don't need very many per pocket since the dupes will only be running over here to catch their breath while working in the carbon dioxide shaft.

[@Joakico]

There is a sustainable and simple way to melt glaciars. Use a bathroom loop, pwater output is fixed.

[@erisia_gaming]

Yes this works too, at a slower rate.

[@adudzik]

Do you really get a full pipe of incoming water in this setup? The way you've set up the buffer some packets will combine before going in, but some won't, and it seems like this will ultimately limit average throughput when pumping mixed water and polluted water.
One naive thing I often do to solve throughput issues is use a pair of liquid buffers in parallel. One thing I like about this is that you can set it up so that the buffers can be deconstructed individually without halting the system, if you want to convert the stored liquid into bottles.

[@erisia_gaming]

Yes I was struggling to find a way to do this neatly so that it works independently of where the Water and Polluted Water are. I think using the Liquid Reservoir is definitely part of the solution but I'd love to see some better takes on this. The easiest solution may be to just have one Pump on the top and one on the bottom, and move them every now and then. Or to build the system slightly smaller so that a buffer is built up for the occasional mixed packets.

[@adudzik]

@@erisia_gaming If you feed two different reservoirs with different pumps, and combine their outputs, you should have 100% throughput as long as the inputs aren't too imbalanced.
A fully robust solution does seem tricky without messing with each pump output individually.

[@darkehartplays]

When I used a similar build to this inspired by the Rime Revenge run I simply left the initial water supply bridged on to the pipe so that it would fill in gaps in the pipe between the sieves and terrariums. Eventually, after melting the second pocket of ice, I switched to permanently using the main water tank as the source for the terrariums and began feeding the water from all sources to it. Around halfway through melting the second pocket I also installed a tepidizer there and experimented with different settings on it, and by the time I was ready for the third pocket I didn't pump any of it out until I had melted it all with an initial bit of terrium water and a tepidizer. At some point I also had the warmed water pipe run all around the base for temperature control instead of a separate loop, and doing this helped a bit with keeping the pipe spaghetti under control.

[@azrobbins01]

About how many cycles of Algae is in the starting biome for a setup like this? What about on the whole map? How long would it take for you to blow through all your algae?

[@erisia_gaming]

This question would be a lot easier to answer if ToolsNotIncluded still worked. I believe there is somewhere in the order of 100 tonnes of Algae on a classic Terra asteroid. 33 Algae Terrariums would use about 1kg/s of Algae, so that would last for about 170 cycles? Useful in the early game but would eventually be deprecated in the mid game.

[@azrobbins01]

@@erisia_gaming Thanks!