Overview
Now with less explosions!Remember when your series filtration units would rapidly explode? Me too! So I built a loop that won’t try and kill you.
Why do it this way?
Well, that’s pretty simple.
Explosions are bad. They waste valuable resources and, if you’re nearby, can easily kill you or throw you so far from your base that you never make it back.
My little remote control robotic spacemen (welcome to the Matrix) don’t like dying. So I built this style of filtration to prevent that. When the robots are happy the game glitches less.
Death Bad. Filters Good.
So here’s the setup. This is what is generally called paralell filtration. The other “series” style is well documented in other guides. Basically it pipes the waste output from one filtration to the input of another. If you put your filter units in series there’s a good chance that explosions will occur. So let me run you through the various parts of the setup.
WASTE LOOP
Everything painted yellow is part of the “waste loop”. This consists of mixed gasses not fit for consumption. Everything is collected in the waste loop from every source on my base. This includes ice melted in the furnace, gasses filtered from my greenhouse, base, or automated smelting room. Even the atmosphere if you’re on Mars.
Generally I keep this part buried within fully built frames to keep everything tidy. You only need one waste loop and can have as many inputs as you like. What I typically do is have all the waste outputs from filtration within my base going to a single input on the waste loop using a volume pump to move all gasses to the storage tank. If you use active vents to drain your base for deconstruction and service this is ideal. Just add a ball tank before the volume pump to prevent blowouts.
FILTRATION UNITS
Only use one filter for each. This way, you’ll have a single, pure gas stored in each individual tank. Just repeat the configuration shown with three filtration/tank pairs for X, H2O, and N2.
FURNACE
The input chute next to the furnace is where you throw your mined ice ore. Build this as large as you like, drop in your ice and walk away. Everything will smelt at the correct pace and it’s very hands-off. I’ve got two of these in my creative setup with chute lines as long as 25 pieces each. That’ll smelt a TON of gas in short order.
ACTIVE VENTS (Only useful on Mars)
These vents I use to cool down the waste tank if there’s any hot exhaust in storage. Generally anything hot from the furnace or gas generator will be piped to a large radiator array and only added to the waste loop when it’s cooled to 0 C. You can also collect a decent amount of gas over time. Very useful for gathering Nitrogen.
Wire them up with a switch and a batch writer to make life easier.
In-base Filtration
On the right is a filtration unit to be placed in your pressurized base area. Connect the waste port of the filtration unit to the waste loop.
For normal base areas use the following filters: O2 + N2
For a greenhouse it’s a little bit different. I have three of these in my greenhouse set to filter Volatiles and X. Everything else gets recycled into the greenhouse atmosphere. This prevents CO2 from being removed. These filtration units run constantly.
To reduce oxygen content in the greenhouse atmosphere I’ll use another set of filtration units set to filter N2 and CO2. This way the excess O2 is pulled from the atmosphere and pumped into the waste loop. These units are only turned on when the oxygen ratio exceeds a set amount. See my thermostat guide for more details on controlling this automatically.
That’s it! Easy peasy.
Any questions or comments? Let me know below.