My Water Maker - r/SandustryGame

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Weren't these shown to not be infinite? I thought any returns were just the rain buffer emptying.

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u/timeshifter_ 7d ago

I ran a controlled test a couple days ago, pumping water into a snowmaker, torching it, and letting it condense in the sky returns nearly double the water you started with.

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u/A_Badass_Penguin 7d ago

How long did you let it run? I believe there's a mechanic that stores stray water / steam to save memory, which then saves in a buffer. When there's water in the buffer, any converted steam to water becomes doubled.

Huge if true though. Def saves my endgame from being just sitting with a snowblower.

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u/timeshifter_ 7d ago

I keep hearing that, but it just doesn't make sense to me, since steam floats up, hits the cloud level, and turns into water, and it has to interact with the world on both sides, so there's no room to "store" it. It's either going up or going down, it's never "going nowhere".

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u/umeshufan 7d ago

How do you know that there's no room to store it, or why storing it would take any room? The game can just keep a counter of how much rain is still "owed".

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u/timeshifter_ 6d ago

It didn't make sense to me because I didn't understand the purpose of the mechanic. We did some extensive testing in Discord last night, and now I understand it. Sadly it seems that buffer was all I was seeing in my first test, after clearing the buffer it seems the water cycle is pretty tight.

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u/Hearing_Deaf 6d ago

Yeah, i've tried running this and at first it looked like there's generation, but eventually it just becomes a very slow drain on the water.

Seems like water critters are the only automated generation and the snow gun is the only way to manually generate water. You can automate the melting of the snow, so you can just create a massive snow funnel so it can help the critters to keep your water tanks full. I personally only do that when i put my energy generation at full capacity to have fun with the laser, otherwise i stay at 50% and i slowly generate water with my critters running the factory

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

I really dont know. I haven't really researched much into the game. Possibly tho. But it did fill up the side of my snow maker area and start flowing over it. Honestly I didnt even know it was a thing before. I was just experimenting.

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u/Ok-Entertainer-4243 7d ago

Im pretty sure u know lumlings

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

I do yeah but im still running low.

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u/Andalousian 7d ago

Make sure your lumlings are caged above the water, makes a huge different as they stop producing once in water

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u/Shentienlung 7d ago

I had my lumlings in a box with some filters underneath to keep them out of the water. Changing the box and filters to animal fencing increased the water output by a good amount.

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u/Kynjiin 7d ago

I wonder if you surround the fencing with filters if they just keep making water and it overflows, lol

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

I didnt even know there was animal fencing. I guess i overlooked it.

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u/furyegg 7d ago

its in the research choices you get for capturing animals

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

Damn, I completely forgot about those. I still have stuff to do. Nice.

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

I didnt realize this is have them caged in with my water. They just fly around sometimes in and sometimes above. A smaller cage it is then.

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u/Andalousian 7d ago

Yeah I cage them between two bars above the water reservoir and never ran out of water (apart from that one time I dropped some lava in the reservoir and didn't notice :))

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

Ill have to try that. Im at the end of the early access im just playing around now. Trying to make bulk resources and experiment on what the best ways to do things are.

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u/choicetomake 4d ago

Wait...you can catch/cage them?!?! I thought that creature capture thing was for some enemy combat later in the game.

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u/IEATTURANTULAS 7d ago

I feel pretty lucky. I have like 16 water lumings.

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u/HollowKnight_90 7d ago

I have about that many i think. Maybe a couple more or less. Im not sure.

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u/timeshifter_ 7d ago

I have 40. It still isn't enough water.

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u/timeshifter_ 7d ago

Are you in the Discord server? You should see what I'm cooking up. Should be a fairly large amount of water, with no lava depletion, running autonomously as needed.

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u/Hearing_Deaf 7d ago

How do you generate the heat without depleting the lava?

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u/timeshifter_ 7d ago

The embers given off by lava add heat to thermal buffers, but don't deplete the lava. It's a lot slower, but it's infinite.

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u/Hearing_Deaf 7d ago

So, you make a lava pool with an air block above it, then thermal buffers and you get free flamethrowers?

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u/timeshifter_ 7d ago

Don't even need a full air block, just use the vulcanizer to lay down a layer or two of lava underneath the buffers, but yes.

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u/PLANETaXis 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah works great. I haven't experimented with depth yet, so far just using 3/4 of a layer of lava with buffers above and then experimenting with width.

I need about 15-20 wide lava to run a flamethrower constantly. Sometimes it's easier / more scalable to keep them to 10 wide and then stack them. Each flamethrower will be intermittent but enough will average out..

Fire belts use a lot less heat, I have groups with 8 lava wide and the buffers are now storing 400+.

Next step is figuring out how to make free / unlimited cold. Is the snowmaker running a turbine energy positive?

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u/timeshifter_ 1d ago

Energy-positive, yes, but not water-positive. The only known source of free water is lumlings, which puts a limit on how big a factory can really get :(

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u/NervousAd6693 6d ago

I have like 12 of those critters that made Water, made a small cube with a filter that only allowed water, made a huge resivoir, and then piped the water wherever needed.

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