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[Oxygen Not Included] Breath of Fresh Air! (DLC in Early Access)
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Oceania is interesting, but I was playing on a low metal map and that got real old real fast. Not insurmountable, but more grindy.
I'm playing Rime right now and I'm having a blast. Best map type so far.
I spent like 5 minutes re-rolling the mutations between Rime and Oceania before I found one that wouldnt hurt me too bad. :rotate:
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Updated Roadmap!
Im kind of excited :biggrin:
But hte rest sounds grrreat and i love it.
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Honestly, it would probably make it easier. When you break it down most physical resources (i.e. not electricity or morale) can be made with only two or three imput resources, plus whatever you need to keep the dupes running the base alive and sane. The complexity comes from getting those resources where they need to go. Most of those satellite bases will have a nice, simple straightforward set of wires and pipes and belts, and only the asteroid(s) that are, either by choice or necessity, designated to be Fedex of Space (DupEx?) Have to have the complex tubing that you can barely follow anymore.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Generally, the trick to stuff like this is learning how to master things like Aquatuner cooling combined with SPOMs. Generally, yes, less water is better if you're trying to create steam.
I'm not currently playing the game because i'm a little bored of it in the early game, and i'm bored in the early game because i've figured out how to rush things like the SPOM. Which one the spom is online, i only need to feed it water for it to generate oxygen and power for most of my base - cracking the Oxygen produces enoguh hydrogen to power the SPOM 24/7 and power the majority of the base ontop of that - it's only really heavy industry that needs heavy power generation.
Ranches can be optimized once you learn the trick of it - the big thing that i do is using Autosweepers (and getting someone who can build autosweepers asap) to grab eggs and get them out of the ranch asap. This keeps your ranches super productive, and gives you a steady stream of Omelettes, which are pretty decent food.
Then said eggs get sent to the kitchen/hatchery area i build, and my ranchers pick up eggs as necessary to stick in unpowedered incubators early on to hatch me more hatches at a replacement rate... and later once i've got the automation, i set up my Incubators to power on for a brief on amount of time to ramp my critter hatching up. Which means i can switch my dupes to eating BBQ, and eventually, i have everyone in my colony eating Surf'n'Turf (PAcus are stupid productive).
You do run out of resources like metal eventually (Unless you find a volcano), but most stuff that's actually important in the game is stuff you can make. Honestly, i find the biggest issue tends to be Lime - you need tons of steel late game, and once you've stripped mine the fossil from everything you're down to crushing eggshells and relying on Pokeshells. Both of which are pretty slow to produce lime.
This may or may not be all that helpful, but i hope it's at least somewhat helpful.
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Also try to go chevo hunting/playing outside my comfort zone. Probably one of my most exciting first 100 cycles was when I went for Super Sustainable on a Volcanea map with features that added even more volcanoes and magma on Survival difficulty. Had to speed to insulated tiles to keep the heat that was already cooking off the algae on the lower levels of the starting biome from frying the base, and the raise glossy dreckos to get the plastic for the turbines because everything below me was so hot that dupes couldn't make it to the oil biome with exosuits... at least, not until I dumped a whole Ice Biome full of water down there.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Now, I know how cooling works, and I have a very successful liquidtuner setup for industry and an anti entropy thingy rocking, but I'm trying to come up with a good system to store cool oxygen. I know there are better, more efficient ways to cool your base, but I like the idea of having tanks of 70F degree oxygen that I pump into my base. I've tried using a cooling loop going through the anti entropy area that closes a shut off valve leading to the storage tanks if the temp is above 70, and it kind of works, but it seems to be very all over the place in terms of what temps I'm getting (I'll get a 70, then a 59, then a 65, etc). I'm thinking I might have to set up a larger system with another liquidtuner and just run it through a medium that's at 70 until it evens out, but I don't know. I have a feeling that even if I get what I'm looking for, I'll find out it doesn't keep my base at 70 and then I'll look for something else.
How do you guys typically handle base cooling, specifically in regards to oxygen?
Or frying your food.
So i find a liquid cooling system (which i usually run behind the floor tiles/doors of the base) is enough to keep things nice and comfy,m and i only really care about it because plants are a great help for stress management (Buddy blossoms in particular), so keeping my base at around 21c is nice.
Thaaaaaat said, the way i do my bases is i have a small living area, and beyond that the expecation is that dupes will be suited. Which really cuts down on the need to manage everything
But actually trying to cool the oxygen just ends up being way too much effort - even when my spom is pumping out toasty 95c oxygen, a properly set up cooling system handles this with zero issues.
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This kind of engineering/management game always stumbles for me when I have to tear down and renovate, though. What are your approaches for that kind of task? Do you build out with new, upgraded versions of rooms and machinery, then decommission the old ones? Do you incrementally upgrade machinery as you play?
Yeah, I'll probably end up just going liquid cooling. I'm kind of at a point where I don't have a lot of time left to mess around with it. What I really wish is that reservoirs would transfer heat with their contents and their environment. Getting a storage room at a constant temp would be much easier, I think. I know that dupes don't really care about heat levels, it's just one of those personal things that I want to have going.
Edit: Or do reservoirs transfer heat? I might need to mess around with different materials.
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They do, but i cannot remember exactly how it works. A big thing with reservoirs that makes them SUPER Useful is that any liquids (or gasses) immediately have their temp (and all other properties in fact) averaged with the rest of the contents. You can use this to create some nifty systems like a germ purge (You fill up X tanks with clean water, and then start pumping your pure water that still has germs into into it through the tanks. Since it's averaged every time it hits a new tank you quickly hit the point where germs die out rapidly)
...Not that germs are a huge issue in the first place (They're uh, pretty toothless outside of zombie spores), but still handy for stuff like recycling your dupe's piss into delicious germ free expresso without having to worry about chlorine rooms or similar.
TLDR: You can prime systems by storing a bunch of chilled whatever in them, which then makes it a lot lot easier to keep everything chilled after that point. (Just be careful about phase transitions which will break pipes if it happens inside the pipes - you can avoid this by putting a valve on and only letting 1kg/s for liquids i belive. Sure it's 10 times as slow, but your pipes arent fractuing constantly so hey!)
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The answer for me is "it depends".
I usually have designs i favour because they're pretty efficent, so i build based around those. So for areas like living quaters etc, i tend to be scoping those out and building from teh word go. For stuff like refining metals, i tend to set up a scrappy system somewhere early on so i can grab what refined metals i need (mainly steel production), and then build a proper industrial brick. My critter ranches tend to go through several iterations - early on they're often pulling double duty as plant farms while i ranch hatches, and later in the game i'll rip them apart and redo them entirely to support things like an active Pacu farm (Where i'm actively feeding and breeding pacu, rather than using the fact that wild pacu still produce at a replacement rate), and feeding shovel voles (because good god i've gotta do something with this regolith other than try and fire it off into space again)
Edit: Here's an example, this is the early game Hatch farm, and then the same area converted to support a whole bunch of different critters later in the game when my base had outgrown the need for having mass hatches around.
Same area, just redivided to handle new needs - the first one is rooms setup to maxmimize the # of hatches (8) per room while keeping them as productive as possible and minmizng the amount of time my dupes have to spend doing work, meaning i can have one well trained animal handler keep 24 hatches happy, pumping out eggs all the while. (The key is the shipping rails sucking up eggs and sending them off).
Then later on, you can see i'm only keeping a couple of hatches, i've got a ton of crabs crammed into an area (because i dont care about harvestign them for meat, i just want their shells), there's a dedicated pacu tank, and various breeding stations for everything that i want to spend the power/dupe time on breeding...and it's all packed into the same space.
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If I remember correctly, heat transfers work something like this:
Items in buildings (i.e. basically anything your dupes build that isn't a tile) transfer heat with the building they are in. This includes liquid and gas moving through pipes/vents.
Buildings transfer heat with the tiles they occupy (But NOT the tiles they are sitting on) and only have 1/5 the heat capacity of the materials they are made of (i.e. they'll warm up and cool off faster because it takes less thermal energy to raise or lower its temperature)
Debris transfers heat with both the tile they occupy and the tile they are sitting on (albeit at different rates)
...and any tile full of matter (be it gas, liquid or solid) will transfer heat with other adjacent tiles (but not diagonally IIRC)
Also it's worth noting that insulated and radiant pipes/vents/tiles use different formulas and/or variables for heat transfer that make them much better at their job than simply what materials they are made of, and tempshift plates are considered to occupy a 3x3 area centered on where you actually build them for their calculations.
And for what tempshift plates do, plates made of a low heat capacity material are used to speed up heat transfer in the area (great to use in the room with your EOD to speed up the cooling of those vents) and plates with a high capacity are ideal for helping to create buffer zones to contain sudden heat changes from things like geyser eruptions.
I have no idea how to make that safe and... not damage itself?
I don't have medical tech so I'll probably start over; recovering from disaster seems like a real pain, which is a big downside for this game, I think. I was only at cycle 75 though.
I did the 5 refinery version and while I haven't run all of them at once, once the room gets down to temp, running iron, steel, 2 plastics, ceramics, and refined carbon all at once has hardly made a dent. The room heats up a bit in the immediate vicinity of the machines, but the polluted water running through the cooling loop hasn't really changed. I have it set to 45F and it's actually around 43 at the moment.
I forgot to mention that "Building" in this usage basically means any stationary non-debris object that isn't a solid tile, door, or growing plant, so it includes every individual tile of pipe, vents, wires, etc. but not pneumatic doors or buildable tiles (basically, if it can block solid matter from going through, it's considered a tile full of solid stuff. If it can't, and doesn't grow, then it's a building)
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Aquatuners basically have to be built out of steel. The way they work is they remove 14c from whatever they're cooling and dump that straight into the environment around then.
Given a pipe will contain 10l of water per packet, that's a lot of heat being dumped around!
Usually what's done is to put them in a sealed room that has a thin layer of water in it (with no gases), and a steam turbine above it. The aquatuner vaporises the water around it into steam, the turbine turns that back into water, dropping it back into the aquatuner room and producing power.
You generally need to setup some automation as well, add there are other tricks you can do to make things more efficient.
If you're talking about the Thermotumer that hearts water - you'll again need to setup some automation to really make use of it
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But, crucially, the water in the pipes coming out is dropping to 0 and busting the pipes
This would make sense if it were backed up and it doesn't seem to be?
Dealing with heat is kind of killing my motivation to play this. Based on some reading it gets into some technical stuff connected to how the game tracks time and I want to save my frame counting efforts for Street Fighter pls
edit: it sounds like i'm jumping the gun building an aquatuner so soon -- i don't have any refineries set up. but my temps are getting to 32+ because of the coal generators. probably a base design issue, and being close to a hot biome.
Yeah, sounds like you're a: Jumping the gun, and b: You're not implementing automation. Automation is a HUGE thing in this game.
For instance, for power - Setup a grid of whatever generators, then plug them into a smart battery, and route the power out throguh that. then set the smart baterry's thresolds to say, 80/20, and connect an automation wire from the battery to those power generators.
The smart battery will turn off your power generators when it's more than 80% full. It'll turn them on when it drops below 20% full. You can later on stagger multiple stages of power generators so that your base only calls on each as your power load grows. Like my current base will turn on it's petroleum generators first, hydrogen generators second, then it'll turn on it's natural gas generators and only then will it turn on it's coal generators.
What's happening wiht your pipes is that it's going in at below 14c, and being cooled by 14c. So it immediately freezes when it comes out the other end, and boom goes your pipes. What you need to do is setup a system where a thermo tuner will rout water past the aquatuner if it's below 15c, and only let it in if it's at 15c or above.
Also, again, heat is only an issue if it's killing your plants (Which, past early mealwood, you really dont need - i find it much more sustainble to ranch hatches and just feed my dupes on BBQ), or if it's passing the scalding thresholds. Dupes will complain a bit, but they're otherwise fine. I only keep my bases cooled because i use plants for decor (Buddybuds being the thing i really care about keeping in their growing range)
So, here's my Aquatuner setup that looks after cooling my base's living quaters and it's power supply.
This is a pretty simple setup, even if it dosent look it.
So let's walk through what we're seeing.
The first screen shot is just the structure i've built. You can see that on the right you've got an Aquatuner in the steam room (And the remains of the water lock i used to build the steam room), with a Steam turbine mounted above it. You can see there's a liquid pipe thermo sensor sitting right next to the aquatuner, and another thermo sensor sitting by it. You can also see that there's an output vent for dripping water in.
Then in the middle there's a tank of polluted water. This is my heatsink - it "Stores" the chill the aquatuner is making in this huge tank of polluted water. There's 1000kg of polluted water in each of those tiles, which means it's holding a LOT of chill. The tank's currently at -1c.
This tank is linked to the cooling loop room by a section that goes Glass tiles (made out of diamond - metal tiles made out of gold or aluminum would work fine too!), Mechaniczed Airlock, Glass tiles.
The airlock door is is linked to an thermo sensor in the main cooling loop room, set to 24c. If that room gets below that temperature, it sends a red signal - and the airlock door will open, creating a vacuum between the two sets of glass tiles, blocking heat transfer. This, strictly speaking, isn't necessary, but it makes it very easy for me to maintain my base's temp at a specific point.
If you look at the automation overlay, you can see the Liquid Pipe sensor links to the aquatuner, and the thermo sensor links to the steam turbine. The thermo sensor is just set to only let the Steam Turbine run when the steam is hotter than 150c, in an effort to maximize the return on power, while minimizing the heat the steam turbine dumps into the world.
Strictly speaking, there should be some cooling behind the steam turbine, but i was lazy (and/or forgot about it apparently)
The liquid pipe thermo sensor is setup so it'll disabled the aquatuner should temperatures in the pipe drop below -3c. (Polluted water freezes at -20c). The piping is a bit harder to see thanks to the bridges, but the way it works is as follows:
Liquid comes out of the bridge and is read by the liquid thermo sesnor. If it's above -3c, it flows into the Aquatuner intake, is processed by the aquatuner, and pat back out the aquatuner's outtake, now much colder. But if it's too warm, it cannot go into the Aquatuner. So it looks for the next intake - the bridge intake below! At which point it "teleport" up to the bridge outtake and rejoins the flow, going back into the heat sink room, where it'll engage in heat transfer with theheat sink room.
The bridges in between the heatsink room and the aquatuner room arent really necessary here, but they're taking advantage of the fact that liquids in side a bridge literally teleport from the intake to the outtake - in otherwords, they dont do anything to the surrounding world in the process. Just a small optimization that makes the system a tiny bit more efficent.
All together, this system means: My aquatuner is only run as necessary, and is kept cold by the Steam Turbine. Cold is "Banked" in a liquid heat sink, and temperature exchange is permitted only when the base's temp rises above 24c. This minimizes the heat the system makes and the power it takes, and maximizes the amount of chilling i get, as well as recycling that heat into power.
---
Hopefully all this makes sense. I strongly urge looking up Francis John on youtube - @Sir Carcass mentioned him earlier, and he posts good, useful stuff, including great tutorials on setting up cooling systems and automation.
In general, it's worth spending some time to learn about automation in this game, as it solves a TON of the problems related to heat/resource consumption/dupes being idiots. Just knowing about setting up smart batteries with your power supply will save you literal tons of coal, and avoid pumping c02 and heat into your base.
Edit:
here's a temp map of the above system - so you can see exactly how precise it actually is, and how it's storing all that chill!
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that setup is wild. what i'm gathering is that i need to climb way up the tech and resource tree before i can build a super effective cooling loop
as far as i can tell, the water is going into the aquatuner at 21C -- I'm not sure why it's doubling up on the cooling
The good thing about that setup is once you understand it, it's pretty easy to apply it to other things...
Like this industrial brick. It's using the exact same principals and design as my base cooler, just... applied much, much bigger. Though consider, this shows you exactly how crazy strong the Aquatuner/Steam turbine combo is - that single auqtuner is chilling the ENTIRE industrial brick. Even when it's running full tilt, it dosent get htat hot!
Without being able to look at your setup myself, i'm not sure either. It's possible there's something werid, but it's always hard to understand other people's piping and wiring. Heck, it's hard to understand my own piping and wiring sometimes when i go back and i'm like 'What the hell was i doing".
But yeppers, you really dont need cooling loops till you're trying to do big ol' bricks or similar. I am lazy, so i like playing on rime maps because they make it easier to deal with the base getting warm (I'm sure @Foefaller will rightfully shame me for this
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My personal gripe with Rime has less to do with how cold it is, and more to do with how every single biome shows up in it, so you never have to come up with any fun alternatives with how to deal with not having Gold Almalgam to make a setup that doesn't overheat, or zero chance for an AEN for straightforward heat deletion, or little-to-no algae to keep everyone breathing till you find a good source of water. The having to deal with things being too cold rather than too hot to start is actually kinda fun.
Now, if you're still playing on No Sweat so you can feed an entire base with a single Hatch ranch, THEN I have no choice but to tut-tut your laziness and lack of adventure!
I mean, you can still feed an entire base on a hatch ranch on normal difficulty. Hatch ranches are stupid productive dood =P. All it takes is a little automation to suck up eggs the moment they're laid and the results are deeelicous. If i remember rightly, ih ad al ot of fun running tis base on a knife edge of food for a while the hatch ranch spooled up to MAXIMUM MEATY PRODUCTION. Once you actually have a ranch going, they're easy mode for food. Low dupe cost (one rancher can look after 24 hatches no sweat, and still have time for other duties), power free, recycles useless resources into meat and coal and good for morale.
I cant actually remember the math on how many dupes an 8 hatch ranch can support, but i know that my 16 dupe colony was more than amply kept fed by 24 hatches. Checking now reveals there's a 760,000kcal of Surf'n'Turf avaible, and another 1.3mil Kcal of BBQ if i somehow run out of Surf'n'turf. Food of the gods, that stuff (It's honestly probably way too good for how easy it is to make en mass. The only better food the burger, and that requires way more effort... for food that makes your dupes run slower. And honestly, how much morale do you actually NEED?), so you know, i've kinda got a meat overflow happening but oh well.
...Oh yeah, @Evil Multifarious - Did you know if you keep food in a vacuum, it counts as being both refrigerated and in a sterile atmosphere, meaning it can never ever decay? Now you do! Nowadays i build neat liddle vacum chambers looking into my food rooms - thanks to the fact that dupes guns are magic, they can suck food out of a vacum sealed area no problem. And sweepy cleans up after the lazy fucks who drop it on the ground and sends it back.
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I think Francis John said that it takes about 1.5 hatches per dupe for the "evolution chamber" method.
Also, an easy way to preserve food in the early game is make a small room for your food, and make a 4 tile long section that sets a tile below the rest of the floor. Build 2 ration boxes in that recess, then put a coal generator next to it. The CO2 will settle into the recess and keep it fresh. I did that initially, but a little later decided to just insulate the room and put a few weezworts in there on farm tiles. I like the idea of an actual refrigerated room.
I have set myself an end game goal of vacuuming out the entire map, with atmosphere only where necessary. I realized too late that I can cool things with a thin layer of super coolant on the ground and piping behind it, but, alas, I have hydrogen cages for my steam turbines. oh well.
I have progressed to the point where I had to upgrade all my heavy watt to conductive as I'm passing 20kw use, which is further than I've ever taken my power needs before.
How am I generating that power? Renewable sources, of course!
My six steam/three volcano powerplant:
Space biome dominated by solar:
The whole base, with big battery bank in lower left:
I have two backup powerplants for when meteorshowers and nighttime come together too well for the solar source. 2x petroleum generators running off ethanol and 10x coal generators. The coal almost never runs, though. Still, they're needed once in a while. The ethanol comes from two arbor tree farms planted by pips. The rate of consumption of wood is low enough that I can allow the wood to naturally fall off the trees, and then sweepers pick it all up. Zero resources needed, zero dupe labour needed. Coal is being renewed by a single hatch farm, and the volcanoes ensure I have infinite igneous rock to feed them. Interestingly enough, the coal is coming into the coal plant at -20 degrees, and the coal plant runs infrequently enough that the whole area is being successfully cooled by the incoming coal. No other cooling needed. Unintentional, but welcome!
For food, there is a nosh bean farm and a peppernut farm for spicy tofu (Ethanol from arbor trees, polluted water from vent), and the hatches combine with a stable pacu farm for surf n turf. Pacu farm is in self sustaining form. No food, no dupe labour. I also have a pokeshell ranch for lime. That plus the eggs from the pacu farm are keeping my steel reserves stable now that I have pretty much all my rocketry stuff built.
I'm currently using another three volcanoes to build a rust/regolith/mafic rock melter. Not completed yet, but on its way. I totally overengineered the cooling, but I thought safer was better, and the stuff comes out of the cooling system at about -10 degrees or so.
My water comes from 2x hot steam and 2x cool steam vents and I'm slowly hollowing out the frozen core.
I don't know what to do with the oil on the map. I have no need of petroleum, but I might set up a petroleum boiler with one of the unused volcanoes for funsies and just have a massive petroleum tank.
Just need to finish digging out the rest of the map and vacuum it out to achieve my final goal. Then I'll probably retire this map.
Hatch meat is 533 kcal a cycle, omelets is 466. That's a little less and a little more than 2 hatches per dupe respectively at survival difficulty (which in my head is "normal", since that was the default difficulty for almost all of EA.)
24 hatches should only be enough for 12 dupes. Of course you're making surf&turf and pacus can be easily scaled up to whatever number you need (since even tame, starving and overcrowded pacus will lay an egg within 14ish days before dying) so if you also have 28+ pacus for the fillets you need that's totally believable.
Main thing is that you have to hurry up and reach a slime or rust biome ASAP for oxygen production. Then you can start doing the fun stuff you can do with aboreal biomes, like making massive pip-planted farms that make free food, or get power and more dirt that you knew what to do with using arbor trees to make ethanol.
Yeah, i make a point to get a passive pacu farm up as early as possible so i can supplement the inital bbq cookery with cooked fish, and once things are online, there comes the Surf'N'Turf train.
Re: Ethanol - do you really find it worth it? I poked around and the math on ethanol just didnt seem to make it worthwhile, compared to a petroleum boiler. The dirt's a pleasant bonus, but Ethanol for power ends up having a very low return on investment vs the effort to set it up. Honestly, it seems like something that's more useful if you want to mass produce polluted water (So much CO2) or dirt. For pure power generation you end up having to do a lot of shennagins involving dumping C02 into space to get anywhere near it being worth while.
(Though, i'd also argue that Petroleum Boilers are a bit broken, since they let you generate SO MUCH power for "Free" once you get em running)
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I don't see ethanol and petroleum as an either/or thing; Rather, it's usually my step between wood burners and oil refinement (especially on Aboriea, which has no swamp biome and therefore no 100% guaranteed nat gas geyser) since a proper setup with domesticated trees typically needs only about 56kg of water per full-time generator pumped into it per cycle, which is usually less than one tenth of what your average cool steam vent outputs over its entire active/dormant cycle. Even then, unless I run into an actual no nat gas situation I try to keep my base power needs below 600 kJ/cycles until I find a geyser or strike oil so I only need half the distillers for a generator and therefore only two skimmers to keep the CO2 from building up. Then usually what happens is that the generator gets dismantled (because apparently once it takes ethanol it can only ever do ethanol, or visa versa) and that ethanol and its byproducts are instead used to make spicy tofu.
Fair enough - My bases tend to run off coal for a long time because they're pretty low power and i've got all those hatches anyway. Once i get my SPOM up that often sorts the base for power needs. In the mid game i tend to have bunch of dupes undergoing Mandatory Leg Day (read: stuck on hamster wheels) so they'll skill up to being able to wear exosuits. my attitude being i basically treat them as a drain on food, trading that for an increase in pWater + a massive amount of power, and eventually i get super fast dupes who are also skilled operators and can wear suits with no issue.
Which is hand,y because i build all my bases around the "You must wear an exosuit to leave" style designs and it really makes things simpler to just have dupes in exosuits whenever they're not resting/eating/doing other base things
I'll have natural gas in there but eh. I just never found the effort of Ethanol worth it to setup vs going a pretty steady Coal -> Coal + Nat Gas -> SPOM overflow + Nat Gas/Coal -> Petroleum boiler. If i'm lucky enough to find a steam vent, i'll turn that into power too.
I also build a massively overkill SPOM - the design i use outputs something ridiculous like 3kg/s of Oxygen, so i often either have the Oxgen Box (Do Not Open), or just have my asteroid constantly farting. Usually the latter, the infinitely compressed oxygen box always feels like a hazard waiting to happen. "And if you open this wall..." *The Golden Cantaloupe became a small sun!*
Great for a ton of free delicious power from all that hydrogen though (and useful to train up my early operators, though i'm increasingly convinced it's not really worth the dupe time/labor for the increased power output, except maybe for Petroleum generators). Also so i can pump a bunch of hydrogen wherever i need it for heat purposes (like the brick, or cooling the powerbank) Then again, what else is my scientist going to do once she's eaten the tech tree early?
I will note i tend to build a big ol' Smart battery powerbank at some point, usually around the point new dupes are undergoing Mandatory Leg Day. You can hold a ton of power overflow with very minimal wastage that way, and it really helps to smooth out any hiccups once i start to kick my industrial brick online (and before that's spooled up to the point it's recycling heat into power again). Often i'll build it as part of my first base cooling loop - easy to cool it with the same loop that cools the steam turbine itself that way.
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