Pipe leaks

[Thorin]

I really like the game, and even liked my first meteor storm (which hit my base), but had some issues with the pipe leaks, i can somewhat accept that there are no automatic shut of valve in them (even if this is quite basic stuff today, not in some close future.) But the meteors hit right on the pipes leading from my main water source and my base. And the pipes managed to leak even when completely cut of from any water source. The even managed to leak the water generated by the moister vaporators, despite not even being linked to them anymore.

Than I tried the valve, to use it as manual shut of valve, and yet the leaks managed to teleport the water right to the leaky part and waste it.

 

[Boyan_Haemimont]

That sounds like a bug. Will investigate. In the meantime a hint building smaller pipe/cable networks will result in fewer leaks.

 

[jfjohnny5]

I really don't understand the logic behind that game decision. The length of pipe/cable run shouldn't make it any more likely to fail. Five small networks of five segments each shouldn't have a different chance of failure than one larger network of twenty-five segments.

That aside, can someone explain why it takes so much longer to repair a broken pipe/cable than it does to just build a brand new one?

 

[harishrajan96]

I really don't understand the logic behind that game decision. The length of pipe/cable run shouldn't make it any more likely to fail. Five small networks of five segments each shouldn't have a different chance of failure than one larger network of twenty-five segments.

That aside, can someone explain why it takes so much longer to repair a broken pipe/cable than it does to just build a brand new one?

It actually makes sense in case of pipes, if you build in one go you give a huge gap between the support which can cause stress to increase in the middle part of the pipe.

 

[jfjohnny5]

It actually makes sense in case of pipes, if you build in one go you give a huge gap between the support which can cause stress to increase in the middle part of the pipe.

Debatable. I'd imagine an engineer would design the supports to a standard. The supports always appear a set distance away from each other. The length of pipe in between two supports doesn't change if the run is 5 tiles long or if it's 50 tiles long.

 

[MacroNova]

Not necessarily a bug, just potential confusion. I had a set-up where I was piping resources into a dome from two directions in case one failed. I had valves - one on each side of my resources - to control leaks. Well, it turns out that's not enough valves! The resources flow through the good pipes, into the dome, out the other side, and into the leaky pipe!

tl;dr: you usually need a pair of valves to isolate a leak.

 

[jfjohnny5]

tl;dr: you usually need a pair of valves to isolate a leak.

That's the micromanagement you need in order to deal with the problem, yes. I still feel the larger issue at hand is why longer pipes are so much more prone to failure in the first place. It seems like an arbitrary decision. The failure rate of one section of pipe shouldn't be dependent on how many other sections of pipe are next to it. It might fail more if there is a high throughput of materials flowing through it (it's being used more, so wears out quicker), but the simple fact that it's longer... I don't know why the devs made that a factor at all.

 

[Cymsdale]

I really don't understand the logic behind that game decision. The length of pipe/cable run shouldn't make it any more likely to fail. Five small networks of five segments each shouldn't have a different chance of failure than one larger network of twenty-five segments.

That aside, can someone explain why it takes so much longer to repair a broken pipe/cable than it does to just build a brand new one?

I'm guessing the reason was "gameplay", but splitting up networks for no reason is annoying and no one is really going to want to do that.

 

[jfjohnny5]

splitting up networks for no reason is annoying and no one is really going to want to do that.

Oh, I totally agree. Just look at any Twitch stream right now. You'll find someone creating a central hub for power and life support generation, then connecting that to their grid. Hell, the game even gives you a stat for the total output of your grid. However, if you actually run lines to hook that grid up to multiple domes, you're penalized for it. I really want to like this game a lot more than I do, but they just made some design decisions that really leave me (and a lot of people it seems) scratching their heads.

 

[Trinite]

There's a tech that gives you unbreakable, free to build pipes. I got it on my first play through, definitely a game changer.

 

[Thorin]

that one is a breakthrough, if you have both for pipes and cables, you are free to do all the routing and redundancy you want, otherwise welcome to leaking country.

 

[jfjohnny5]

Man, I just have to share this. I'm on my 4th restart now. (I kept discovering I was doing something woefully inefficiently or outright incorrectly, and it was usually the better move to just restart.) Anyway...

I'm now on Sol 25. I've been using short runs just about anywhere I can. One thing I'm doing is putting tanks and batteries one tile away from a dome. Near as I can tell, it's impossible for a single piece of cable or pipe to ever break. The power/air/water generators are farther away. I'm using switches and valves all over so that I can isolate a leak when it happens on one of my "longer" runs. I say longer in quotes, because my longest run is only 10 tiles. And you know what? In 25 Sols, I've had a total of 4 malfunctions. Four. Compare that to my first playthrough using really long runs where I ended up quitting because I had something like 5 leaks at the same time on like Sol 15.

I honestly can't decide how I feel about this little strategy. It works, but... I don't know. It somehow feels like cheating. ((shrug))

 

[Barefoot]

It actually makes sense in case of pipes, if you build in one go you give a huge gap between the support which can cause stress to increase in the middle part of the pipe.

Not really; it puts supports intermittently, which are presumably spaced correctly to prevent such issues.

HOWEVER...

Long runs of pipes -are- subject to unique stresses in the form of pressure hammer. Basically if a significant portion of a pipe system's draw starts or stops abruptly, it can cause a pressure wave to feed back through the system, causing its weakest point to burst. In real life, we deal with this by essentially engineering a "weakest point" in the form of a pressure relief valve, but it -does- make longer pipes more susceptible to problems, realistically enough that the handwave for "gameplay" is justifiable.

Power cables on the other hand... *shrugs* I got nothin'. There's no reason a longer power cable should be more susceptible to damage than a short one, other than raw statistics.

All told, I think the rate of pipe and wire failures could use being toned down by about half... either that or the rate of repair needs to be significantly improved.

 

[Barefoot]

Man, I just have to share this. I'm on my 4th restart now. (I kept discovering I was doing something woefully inefficiently or outright incorrectly, and it was usually the better move to just restart.) Anyway...

I'm now on Sol 25. I've been using short runs just about anywhere I can. One thing I'm doing is putting tanks and batteries one tile away from a dome. Near as I can tell, it's impossible for a single piece of cable or pipe to ever break. The power/air/water generators are farther away. I'm using switches and valves all over so that I can isolate a leak when it happens on one of my "longer" runs. I say longer in quotes, because my longest run is only 10 tiles. And you know what? In 25 Sols, I've had a total of 4 malfunctions. Four. Compare that to my first playthrough using really long runs where I ended up quitting because I had something like 5 leaks at the same time on like Sol 15.

I honestly can't decide how I feel about this little strategy. It works, but... I don't know. It somehow feels like cheating. ((shrug))

In other places, I've seen it said that it isn't necessarily length that creates faults, but density and complexity. My first game to Sol 100 and completion of the Power of Three mystery seems to bear that out. Faults tended to appear near intersections and in denser areas. On the other hand, I had a pair of water extractors all the way across the map from my colony, with a long pipeline running the water to the colony, and in about 30 Sols, I never got a single failure in that long length of pipe, other than right near where it joined my network.

Can a Dev confirm that it's density, not length that increases fault chance?

 

[Cymsdale]

Man, I just have to share this. I'm on my 4th restart now. (I kept discovering I was doing something woefully inefficiently or outright incorrectly, and it was usually the better move to just restart.) Anyway...

I'm now on Sol 25. I've been using short runs just about anywhere I can. One thing I'm doing is putting tanks and batteries one tile away from a dome. Near as I can tell, it's impossible for a single piece of cable or pipe to ever break. The power/air/water generators are farther away. I'm using switches and valves all over so that I can isolate a leak when it happens on one of my "longer" runs. I say longer in quotes, because my longest run is only 10 tiles. And you know what? In 25 Sols, I've had a total of 4 malfunctions. Four. Compare that to my first playthrough using really long runs where I ended up quitting because I had something like 5 leaks at the same time on like Sol 15.

I honestly can't decide how I feel about this little strategy. It works, but... I don't know. It somehow feels like cheating. ((shrug))

I'm not entirely sure I'm following your strategy. You only connect a dome to the tower and battery? How does the tower and battery get filled if that system is not connected to the generators?

Or does the water and power somehow magic itself between different pipe systems?

 

[Cymsdale]

Reread the post. It's in there.

This is not helpful.

 

[Barefoot]

I'm not entirely sure I'm following your strategy. You only connect a dome to the tower and battery? How does the tower and battery get filled if that system is not connected to the generators?

Or does the water and power somehow magic itself between different pipe systems?

From how I read it, he just means that it's unlikely that a dome would be cut off from air/water/power if the storage is right next to the dome's connectors. The generators/Moxxies/vaporators can then be elsewhere with pipes/cables running to a different connector because domes act as pipes and cables, if you didn't know.

Then, if there's a fault in the cable/pipe connecting the generation equipment to the dome, you can just delete and replace without worrying about disruption, and/or use switches to isolate it to cut the losses to the network, and the dome will be fine because it has storage connected with just a single pip of cable and/or pipe that's pretty much never going to have a fault.

 

[Cymsdale]

Thanks, I got a bit confused when he said his longest pipe run was 10 tiles, which seems impossible to me, but my domes tend to be very spread out. Perhaps others are making much more compact colonies than I am, in which case splitting up the cables with domes makes a lot more sense.