Hidden Mechanics

This article has not been revised for the current version (***U50-587362***). It was last updated for *CS-442154*. It may contain inaccuracies.
This article has not been revised for the current version (***U50-587362***). It was last updated for *CS-442154*. It may contain inaccuracies.
Due to the nature of the game and its high complexity, there are many mechanics that were not intended by the developers but may be used by the player. Many of these behaviors are debated as to how much is considered "fair game", but it is ultimately up to the player to decide.

Generally, these mechanics are broken down into two main categories: Unusual Behaviors and were put there intentionally by developers for simplicity or easy-of-use, and the other is Exploits, which utilize a quirk or bug in a system (or interactions between systems).

# Unusual Behaviors

Many systems in the game are designed with certain simplifications, either for the player or the developers. Some of these simplifications can be practical if intentionally utilized.

## Heat Deletion/Creation

Many buildings in the game have either a minimum or fixed temperature for outputs, meaning the heat energy on the inputs can be changed without other outside energy.

Some examples include:

* Composts output Dirt at a fixed 75°C, no matter the temperature of the Polluted Dirt that was used for the composting process. Since Polluted Dirt can go up to 1712.85°C, the compost can theoretically delete 135.9 kDTU/s. Like Refrigerators, their internal temperature is at a fixed value that exchanges heat with the stored items, to help them destroy germs, etc.
* Buildings like the Water Sieve and Electrolyzer (and many others) have a minimum output temperature and will add free heat if inputs are below this temperature.

## Germy Water in Sinks

Sinks only need non-polluted Water to function to rid a passing Duplicant of Germs, but the water it uses can itself be contaminated with germs and still function. This allows for the germy Polluted Water of their outputs to be directly fed into a Water Sieve (which only converts the germy polluted water into germy clean water) and back into the Sinks without the water being treated for germs.

## Critter Drop-Off to wrangle non-wranglable critters

Placing a Critter Drop-Off in a room containing non-wranglable critters allow a Dupe to call those critters to the Drop-Off to be wrangled. This is generally considered an intended feature because all critters used to be wranglable. Before launch, critters which were causing pathing issues were made non-wranglable.

## 10% of pipes capacity avoid state change

With packets up to 10% of pipes capacity (1kg for liquids, 100g for gases), contents won't change state (and break pipes in the process) even if they cross a state change threshold.

This can be used to transport liquid and gas without worrying about their temperature, and super-cool or super-heat them in pipes. When exiting the pipe, the liquid or gas will change state according to its temperature without breaking anything. Special care should be taken not to merge packets with other packets of the same type, as merging super-cooled or super-heated packets to above 10% of the pipe capacity will break the pipes.

This is an intended albeit surprising mechanism, which is specifically coded to include exactly 10% of a pipe capacity.

## Petroleum/Sour Gas from an Oil Well

Original thread • Petroleum Well setup

Oil Wells have a minimum output temperature of 90°C, but don't have a maximum output temperature.

Common sense would dictate that you can only have up to 100°C Water temperature, but by restricting pipes to 1kg/s, you can superheat the input water to any temperature you want. The 10% pipe limit of 1kg/s exactly match the Oil Well requirement.

When fed superheated water, the Oil Well will output matching Crude Oil temperature. If it's hot enough, it will immediately change into Petroleum, then into Sour Gas, creating heat in the process due to the specific heat capacity difference between Water and Crude Oil.

## Steam Turbine cooling via its foundation tiles

Original thread

The Steam Turbine building temperature exchange heat with its foundation tiles (the tiles it's sitting on).

Most of the time, those tiles should be Insulated Tiles to avoid exchanging heat with the Steam below it.

On the other hand, the left-most and/or right-most tiles, if they are not in direct contact with the Steam room (heat isn't exchanged diagonally), can be made out of heat-conductive material (Diamond Window Tile or Metal Tile), and used to cool the building.

Since those materials Thermal Conductivity is much higher than any gas, one tile can be enough to cool a Turbine when using active cooling.

## Building construction temperature

With a few exceptions, buildings temperature is clamped between 15°C and 45°C when constructed.
This means massive amounts of heat can be deleted by using materials well over 45°C, and massive amounts of heat can be created by using materials well under 15°C, at the cost of player interaction and Duplicant labor.

A notable exception is when any building is made from an Ice or most other frozen substances, in which case the 15°C temperature limit is not applied, this means that the Ice Block can in fact be built without it immediately melting. This exemption applies to nearly all materials that are liquid in the 15-45 C range, except Solid Visco-Gel which will result in the building immediately melting.

## Building Heat Capacity

Buildings, referring here to all buildings that are not some form of Tile, have only 1/5th the heat capacity of their materials. This is an unlisted property of buildings, nowhere in the buildings details does the game indicate this greatly reduced heat capacity. Effectively this means a DTU will change the temperature of a building by 5x more than it would the same mass of tile or debris.

This has numerous ramifications, for example buildings provide much less thermal mass than one would expect, with the 800 kg Tempshift Plate effectively only offering 160 kg of thermal mass, less than that of a Rock Tile, it also means that buildings that produce large amounts of heat such as Aquatuners and Polymer Press heat up very quickly.

It can be deliberately exploited by melting buildings or deconstructing them after they have changed temperature as the resulting liquid or debris will retain the original building temperature, effectively multiplying all heat input to the building by 5x. This is one reason why Ice Tempshift Plates are a particularly good way of melting ice (but also a particularly poor way of cooling down areas with ice) and it makes building melting exploits dramatically more effectively.

## Debris formation manipulation

When a liquid freezes into a debris, the debris will try to form in the cell the liquid froze.

By placing a Mesh Tile at that position, the debris will to try form on all 8 tiles around that tile, following the order: Up, Down, Right, Left, Up-right, Down-right, Up-left, Down-left. If none of those is available, the debris will be trapped into the Mesh Tile. Any solid tile, or other mesh tiles, can be used to prevent a debris from forming in those 8 locations.

This allows separating liquid and debris thermally, as well as having the debris form in a different room than the liquid, making, for example, Magma and solidified Igneous Rock much easier to handle.

*When a debris is melted into another solid, it does not follow the same rule and instead try to form a tile at the position it's melted, then try all cells upwards until the top of the map, without trying any other adjacent cell.*

# Technical Exploits

Many mechanics are derived from how systems in the game are implemented in a technical sense. These are generally stable and not likely to change.

## Doors as floors

Pneumatic Doors can serve as floors where Duplicants and Critters are able to walk on, yet they let items and debris fall through them, which neither Airflow nor Mesh Tiles allow. However, no buildings can be built upon them since they lack foundations.

This is an unintended feature that arose through the related mechanics.

## Airlock doors as foundation

Manual Airlock and Mechanized Airlock can be used as foundation for buildings, and will work as a foundation when closed, while any building sitting on top of them will become disabled when they open.
This can be used to automate the operation of a building that does not have an automation input port by placing it on top of a Mechanized Airlock and controlling that Airlock instead via automation.

For example:

* A Wheezewort in a Planter Box can be controlled via a Thermo Sensor.
* An Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier can be controlled via a Thermo Sensor to have a better control than is possible when regulating the incoming fuel.
* A Liquid Reservoir output can be regulated.

## Automatic Duplicant Regolith clearing

Ordering Crown Moulding to be build on the surface allows to order Duplicants to dig Regolith when they are covered, without having to re-order digging every time the Regolith is cleared.

Since it's an Invalid Build Location, Crown Mouldings will never be built, but Duplicants will still dig anything falling on those cells.

## Natural tile heat sinks

Most natural tiles have far more mass than built Tile, and far more thermal mass than any other building since buildings besides Tiles are treated as having 1/5th of their actual mass for thermal calculations, which makes them very effective and readily available heat sinks in the early game. Furthermore, they lose half their mass, and therefore half of their stored heat, when mined. These facts can be leveraged to keep your base cool in the early game and buy more time until you need to build an active cooling system.

By building a heat-producing building such as an Oxygen Diffuser or Coal Generator in a location surrounded by natural tiles, you can effectively contain almost all of the heat the building produces to its immediate area, rather than primarily warming the air around the building which will then heat up your entire base. When you later mine out the natural tile after it's been heated significantly, you'll delete almost half the heat produced by that building thus far.

For the same reasons, natural tile is also very effective as a temporary insulator and heat sink to keep temperature-sensitive areas cool. Each Farm Tile in a Mealwood farm is made of 100kg of dirt, and might contain another 10kg of dirt on average during operation, for a total 162 kDTU/C° heat capacity; by contrast, a 1200kg natural dirt tile has 1776 kDTU/C° heat capacity, and a 950kg natural sandstone tile has 760 kDTU/C° heat capacity. So, leaving just one or two natural tiles per Farm Tile near your Mealwood farm can make it heat up several times more slowly than it would if all the surrounding natural tile were dug out immediately.

Similarly, you may want to place a polluted water cistern/heat sink somewhere that it can have a wall of natural tile (ideally at least 2 cells thick or with an outer layer of constructed tile so it's easy to replace the natural tile without spilling), only digging out the natural tile after you have an active cooling system ready.

## Kiln melting to refine Metal Ore

Since Kilns do not have an overheat temperature and can be built with Metal Ore, operating them in vacuum will make them heat up with no limit, eventually reaching their material Melting point.

When that point is reached, the Kiln will melt, and the resulting liquid metal will instantly freeze into a Refined Metal because of the hysteresis temperature loss.

It will take a few cycles and a few tons of Ceramic or Refined Carbon production to reach the Melting point, depending on the material SHC. Since Gold Amalgam has the lowest SHC, it is the fastest to melt.

This allows converting Metal Ore to Refined Metal 200kg at a time at a 1:1 ratio.

## Aquatuner melting to refine Metal Ore & produce Liquid Steel

Similar to Kilns, Thermo Aquatuners can be melted to refine Metal Ore by operating them in vacuum: when runned constantly, they will reach the material melting point long before breaking to overheating damage.

The process is much faster due to the large amount of heat Aquatuners use and won't require Coal or Clay, but will instead use power and produce cooling, which can be dealt with a Liquid Tepidizer.

How much time and power is needed depends on the material SHC. Since Gold Amalgam has the lowest SHC, it is the fastest to melt.

This allows converting Metal Ore to Refined Metal 1200kg at a time at a 1:1 ratio.

It's also a very convenient way to produce Liquid Steel for very high temperature builds.

## One element per cell rule applications

The One element per cell rule has several applications that are considered exploits by part of the playerbase, despite being intended mechanisms, like Infinite Storage or Hydra.

## Arbor Tree auto-harvesting

Original thread

Arbor Trees branches cannot grow in liquids and are broken after being in liquids for too long.

This can be used by making a Waterfall fall on branches once they are fully matured to harvest branches without Duplicant interaction.

When doing so, Lumber will fall on the floor, ready to be swept by an Auto-Sweeper for a fully automated farm.

## Boosted Arbor Acorns production

Original thread

Arbor Acorns have a chance at being spawned when a new branch start growing and there is a Pip in the same room.

By submerging branches in liquid, either with waterfalls or liquid stacking, branches will automatically be destroyed a short time after starting growing, cycling through branches at a fast rate.

As a consequence, there will be a much faster Arbor Acorn production, but this won't produce any Lumber because branches are destroyed before being fully matured.

## Beads upward teleportation

Pumping setup • Setup using condensation teleportation

When a bead is trapped in a tile it shouldn't be in and it cannot be moved to any adjacent cell, it will be teleported upwards, in the first valid cell found.

This can be used in two ways:

* By making liquids form a bead when falling and closing a Mechanized Airlock over that bead, it will be teleported upwards. Since airlocks closing timing is not exact, it's advised to have a way out for liquids that isn't trapped in time: having airlocks close on liquids that have no way to move can destroy them instantly.
* By making a Gas condense in an Airflow Tile, the resulting liquid forms as a bead and is forced to teleport upwards.

It's useful to teleport liquids in Infinite Storage without using a Liquid Pump, saving on power as well as being much faster. When using the condensation variant, this also means you can insulate the gas from the resulting liquid, only cooling the gas just enough to condense it while not cooling the resulting liquid.

*This does not work when melting debris, as debris melting form droplets, not beads. The liquid will only attempt to form in directly adjacent cells (excluding diagonal cells) before being deleted.*

## Liquid/gas diagonal swapping

Original thread

Under some circumstances detailed in the original thread, a liquid and a gas can exchange places diagonally, with the gas going upward and the liquid downward.

This teleportation happens through a drip Liquid Airlock and as such can be used in various ways, such as high pressure gas storage, making vacuums, deleting some liquid or gas without Space Exposure.

## Pumping superhot liquids

Original thread • Setup example

Liquid Pump and Mini Liquid Pump have different pumping range and liquid detection range, based on its foundation tile F. Two cells P1 and P2 that are in pumping range are not in direct contact with the Liquid Pump, and more on the Mini Liquid Pump depending on its orientation. This can be used to pump very hot liquids like Magma that would otherwise overheat or melt pumps without any thermal exchange. Since those two celles are not in the detection range, Pumps must be tricked into pumping by providing a liquid in its detection range. Since F is in direct contact of P1 and P2, it cannot be used, and the cell above cannot either because the liquid cannot be blocked above. This means T1 or T2 needs to be used to trick Pumps.

To trick the pump:

* A droplet can be dropped on T2, which will be pumped by a Liquid Pump and re-ejected at the same place. This halves the hot liquid output to 5kg/s. Show in example (2)
* With 3 of the 4 orientations of a Mini Liquid Pump, a tile can be placed on T2 and a droplet left on T1, which will not be pumped, keeping the full 1kg/s hot liquid output. Shown in example (3)
* A Waterfall can be dropped on T1, and broken just before it reaches T2 (by having an empty cell right of T1), allowing to get the full 10kg/s output out of a Liquid Pump. Shown in example (1)

To pump the hot liquid:

* It can be pumped from P1 by ensuring the liquid doesn't get above that level. Shown in example (2) and (3)
* A Liquid Blade can be used to have a liquid reach P2 but never exceed it, especially with a high viscosity liquid like Magma. Shown in example (1), which also allows dripping some of that into P1 for added safety.
* A Waterfall can be dropped on P2.

*Note that example (3) isn't cooled: the Mini Liquid Pump will eventually overheat from its own heat creation and will need to be repaired or replaced, dropping Plastic in the hot liquid pool and creating Sour Gas. The other 2 examples can be cooled by the liquid used to trick the pump as depicted by Wheezeworts on the examples.*

## Rover workforce

After achieving space flight and the necessary technology, one can drop rovers on its own colony, increasing the workforce, lowering dupe stress; rovers are useful working in inhospitable areas. The technique is lossless because rovers and rover modules can be deconstructed, and the rocket exhaust recycled

## Starving farming (ranching)

It is possible by swapping out starving hatches out of stables with non-starving hatches, and the use of incubators, to ranch without feeding the hatches at all and feed the whole colony with barbecue created out of nothing, or just duplicant labor. Downside: micromanaging

Certain critters can lay an egg before starving when tame, such as Pacu and Shine Bugs. As long as these critters are not overcrowded, these can provide infinite food.

# Bug-Driven Exploits

Some mechanics derive from a bug or similar in systems: they are generally unstable, may break games, and are liable to be fixed in future updates.

When the underlying bugs are fixed, they will be moved to the Obsolete Exploits page.

## Instant bottle/canister emptying

When emptying a bottle or canister, a Dupe is locked into an errand of a few seconds. If you cancel the emptying errand during that invisible animation, instead of staying intact, the bottle or canister is instantly emptied.

This allows saving a few seconds for each emptying errand.

## Natural Tile from Airlocks

When deconstructed while the bottom cell is surrounded by tiles (for a total of 7 tiles as shown in the example), a Manual Airlock or Mechanized Airlock will produce a natural tile rather than debris. Those tiles can be used for Pip planting.

1. Build the Airlock surrounded by tiles.
2. Deconstruct it.
3. There is a natural tile with the Airlock where its bottom cell was.

## Diagonal access

Duplicants can construct everything except buildings through diagonal access. It has been confirmed as an intended mechanism by Game Update 463874 in Spaced Out DLC.

This allows deleting gas/liquid by trapping them into 4 tiles then constructing a fifth one in the center, and easily creating a vacuum by deconstructing tiles diagonally.

Auto-sweepers can access items diagonally, which can be used to have them access items that are in a different room.

Duplicants can enter rooms under a locked door built at a diagonal, while the room retains liquid/gas contents, performing a climb animation

## Plastic to Metal conversion

Some items are built from several materials, but when melted only converts to their main material for the sum of all their materials mass.

The most interesting example is the Liquid Pipe Germ Sensor, which is made out of 25kg of Refined Metal and 50kg of Plastic. When melted, it will produce 75kg of Refined Metal.

This can be used to convert Plastic into Refined Metal using Magma to melt arrays of sensors, making Refined Metal renewable even without a Metal Volcano.

## Instant Sink use

Bug report • Original video

The Sink performs the germ removal part of its action even if the action bar doesn't complete because of an interruption.

By temporarily emtombing a Sink when a Dupe is trying to use it, the Dupe will be cleared of germs in a fraction of the time it should take to use the Sink. ~~Note that this also reduce the amount of Water used and Polluted Water produced to about 2kg instead of 5kg.~~ PW production is proportional to use time, which can only be reduced to 75% currently (October 2022). An automation filter is useless since airlock opens from automation without electricity at the right time

The Wash Basin. For the Dupe to be disinfected currently (October 2022) using a Wash Basin, the airlock needs open at about 75% of Wash basin operation time to disable it, making an automation filter pointless because the airlock opens from automation without electricity at the same time.

## Buildings in tiles

Bug report • Original video

By replacing a Tile with a tile of the same type but a different material just before it's deconstructed, you can build another building inside. Once built, the tile and the building will co-exist in the same cell, leading to some unusual behavior that can be exploited to build a few contraptions:

1. A Manual Airlock or Mechanized Airlock set to "Open" inside tiles will create a perfect airlock that doesn't leak gases. A save and reload is needed after opening the door
2. Wall Pots can be embedded in tiles to work correctly without the need for a floor compared to a Flower Pot. This is especially useful when combined with the Pip planting in Flower pots exploit.
3. It can be used to put a liquid over the trick cell of a Liquid Pump to pump superhot liquids

The same technique cannot be used with Gas Pumps, as putting an insulated tile over its cell of interest (bottom left one) prevent heat transfer and allow it to start the pumping animation, but prevents it from actually pumping any gas.

## Pip planting in Flower Pots

Bug report • Original thread

Pips planting can be abused to have Plants in Flower Pots and Wall Pots. This also applies to Hanging Pots and Aero Pots, but it's not useful. Those plants will grow at the Domesticated rate, without the need for solid fertilizer (but will still need irrigation, making this exploit a poor match for plants that requires irrigation).

To use this exploit:

* Build a Flower Pot. If you want to use Sand in the next step, do so under Sand tiles.
* Entomb those flower pots in a natural tile. There are several ways, for example letting Sand fall over pots or cooking Algae debris into Dirt.
* Make a Pip plant seeds.
* Once you have a flower pot with a plant, you can copy its settings to other flower pots to propagate the exploit without repeating those steps. Digging up the natural tile is not required.
* After copying the settings, you can remove the seed and plant another one.

Good candidates for this exploit are Mealwood, Dusk Cap, Wheezewort and Grubfruit Plant (Spaced Out!) because they don't require irrigation, require solid fertilizer and have a normal growth direction. Plants requiring irrigation can be planted using this exploit to eliminate solid fertilizer requirement, but they will have to be irrigated by Duplicants. Disabling the Flower Pot does not negate the plant's requirement of irrigation.

To make a plant accessible to critters, so that Dreckos can eat Mealwood and Divergents can rub plants, a tile must be constructed next to the Flower Pot, just like when using a Planter Box.

If using Grubfruit Plants, make sure to copy from a Spindly Grubfruit in a flower pot, not a Divergent-rubbed one. As there are no seeds for a non-spindly Grubfruit, those are unable to be copied into flower pots properly.

## Pip unlimited planting

Original thread

Pips planting calculates where they are going to plant when they take a seed, and don't properly re-check all conditions when actually planting the seed.

This can be abused to make them plant in illegal tiles, or more importantly to make several Pips plants each a seed in the same tile, resulting in several plants overlapping on the same tile.

## Liquid germs deletion

Bug report • Exploit example

By creating beads out of germy liquid (using a Liquid Vent with a Mesh Tile just below it), a significant amount of germs will be deleted from the liquid. By looping germy liquid through that contraption, germs will be quickly deleted.

For practical purpose, there is little advantage to this exploit compared to the intended mechanism of letting liquids sit in Reservoirs in a Chlorine environment.

## Duplicants recovering breath without consuming Oxygen

Bug report

By making a Duplicant wear an Atmo Suit or Oxygen Mask forever, without refilling its Oxygen, that Duplicant will have to recover its breath through the Atmo Suit or Oxygen Mask by removing the helmet from time to time.

When recovering its breath, the Duplicant will refill its Breath meter, but no Oxygen (or Polluted Oxygen) will be consumed.

This can be exploited to remove the need for providing Oxygen to Duplicants, at the cost of frequent gasping interruptions.

A lesser exploit works without Atmo Suit or Oxygen Mask: as Duplicant recover breath at the same rate regardless of Oxygen consumed, it's possible to save on Oxygen by making them recover their breath in a very thin Oxygen atmosphere.

## Buildings internal storage heat manipulation

Bug report • Original thread

Buildings internal storage temperature sometimes set the wrong value to output elements just before pushing them to their pipe output, using the element previous temperature rather than the current temperature of element being converted.

This can be exploited for example on the Water Sieve, by feeding it a small amount of cold Water, then switching to hot Polluted Water. The output water for the converted polluted water will sometime have the previous cold water temperature, deleting a massive amount of heat.

It can also exploited the other way to heat up elements.

Other buildings known for exhibiting this issue are the Desalinator and Oil Refinery.

## Thermo Aquatuner/Regulator pulsing power-saving

Thermo Aquatuner and Thermo Regulator only need to be enabled and consume power when a liquid/gas packet pass through them to enable their cooling effect.

By designing a special timer sensor that's based on liquid/gas flow rather than actual time (since liquid and gas flow change when building pipes), it's possible to enable both buildings only when a packet pass through, to save on power. Using this, it's possible to use only a third of their normal power, about 400W for the Aquatuner (versus 1200W in normal operation) and about 80W for the Regulator (versus 240W in normal operation).

This special timer sensor is designed to work against a single liquid/gas packet being looped in a pipe with 3 pipe sections linking input and output of that pipe, with an Element or Temperature Sensor to detect when the packet is passing through, and only activate the Thermo Aquatuner/Regulator for a short time based on that.

Since this exploit is dependant on a precise timing, it might not work fully as expected depending on game performance.

## Power supply pulsing

Another variant that saves more power and is simpler but reduces the throughput is to pulse the power supply (rather than the building itself) of a Thermo Aquatuner or certain other buildings using a Power Shutoff and a Timer Sensor set to 0.2s/0.2s.

Using that method, you can expect to see a 95-100% reduced power consumption, while still achieving 50% throughput.

An Aquatuner on a 0.2s/0.2s pulsed power supply will very rarely consume power, perhaps around 5% of the time. It is unclear why it occasionally does consume power, as it will go for long series of ticks without consuming any power at all.

Most buildings can be power-pulsed in this manner to eliminate nearly all their power consumption, however their throughput will always be reduced. Most buildings that don't require Duplicant operation will maintain 50% throughput: a non-exhaustive list includes Thermo Aquatuner, Thermo Regulator, Liquid Tepidizer, Electrolyzer, Oxylite Refinery, Filters and Lights (if you don't mind epilepsy).

The main exceptions are Pumps, Water Sieve and Desalinator, which lose dramatically more throughput or even produce nothing, possibly due to long "wind up" animations or complicated multi-tick sequences: these buildings still consume nearly no power, they just perform little to no useful work, possibly to the extent of making them less power efficient when 0.2s/0.2s power-pulsed.

This exploit can come with downsides like intense rapid hammering sounds and blinking.

## Left-to-right liquid/gas flow heat transfer

Bug report

Liquids and Gases flowing from left to right don't properly calculate heat.

This can be exploited with liquids with a staircase going from left to right: any heat difference is going to be amplified. It's not as obvious nor as easy to exploit for gases.

This can be exploited both for cooling or heating:

* For heating, input cold liquid at the top, and counterflow something hot.
* For cooling, input hot liquid at the top, and counterflow something cold.

It can be exploited in a late-game Petroleum Boiler using Thermium: by making Crude Oil flow in a staircase counterflow heat exchanger, Crude Oil heating is amplified, which allows massive savings in heat required to boil the Crude into Petroleum.

Due to the nature of the bug, the effect drops off exponentially as the staircaise gets longer.

A high difference in temperature at each step is the key to exploit this bug efficiently.

## Lavatory used without emptying Dupe bladder

Bug report • Exploit example • Original video (chinese)

When interrupting a Duplicant going to a Lavatory, the Lavatory will be used, outputting more water than it uses, but the Duplicant bladder won't be emptied.

This can be exploited to create a lot of Polluted Water out of nowhere by repeatedly interrupting a Duplicant going to relieve itself.

## Refrigerator as a cooling device

Bug report • Exploit example • Original video (russian)

A Refrigerator can be used as a cooling device because it outputs much less heat than it removes from its contents, and those contents are not insulated when the refrigerator is unpowered.

This can be automated with a Timer Sensor and a Power Shutoff. The Timer Sensor optimal values depend on the atmosphere temperature, but does not need to be pulsed fast. Setting 2s green / 2s red will work reasonably well.

To maximize the cooling potential, as many different items as possible should be placed inside. 6 items are convenient to get and don't spoil: Muckroot, Nutrient Bar, Allergy Medication, Curative Tablet, Immuno Booster, Vitamin Chews. More items would mean more cooling, but they are either more difficult to produce (Berry Sludge, Serum Vial) or spoil, which would require refreshing them.

The cooling is more effective at higher temperatures, which is why the Refrigerator should be built with Ceramic to raise the overheat temperature to 275°C.

This can be effectively exploited to cool a Steam Turbine or condense the Steam from a Cool Steam Vent for example.

## Tepidizer target temperature bypass

Bug report • Exploit example

There are two ways to trick the Liquid Tepidizer into working above their target temperature:

* Pulse them on/off with a Timer Sensor.
* Add a 400kg+ cell of liquid inside their target temperature zone check.

By using either method, you can get a Liquid Tepidizer to heat up to very high temperatures before a game reload.

After a game reload, there is a soft limit of 125°C after which the Tepidizer will only heat at 64kDTU/s, but you can still use the full 4064kDTU/s under 125°C to boil Salt Water and/or extract a very small amount of power using a Steam Turbine.

## Solidifying liquids to debris temperature

Bug report • Power generation exploit example • Cooling exploit example • Abyssalite melter exploit example

When forcing a liquid to solidify on an existing debris, the resulting debris is automatically merged with the existing one, but only the existing debris temperature is kept.

This bug can be exploited for both heating (and thus power generation with a Steam Turbine) and cooling.

## Liquid Duplication

Bug report • Exploit example

By dropping beads of a liquid on the same liquid, while a small quantity of another liquid above blocks it, you can duplicate a liquid.

With the exploit example, it can result in 2kg/s of liquid created for a power cost of 240W.

## Enclosed Telescope Oxygen Rationing

The Enclosed Telescope requires a supply of oxygen in order to be used by a dupe. However once the dupe is inside the Enclosed Telescope no more oxygen is required and the Duplicant's breath will not deplete even if there is no oxygen. This exploit is most useful when an Enclosed Telescope is inside a rocket, where oxygen supply may be more limited, and the easiest way to do the exploit is to set a Gas Valve to a small value such as 0.1 g, that will trickle oxygen into the Enclosed Telescope, keeping it active without consuming any real amount of oxygen.

## Infinite copper ore farming

Building then deconstructing Solo spacefarer nosecone drops an extra 100Kg copper ore from the free Rocket control station built within. This can be farmed for infinite copper ore

## Skipping repair costs and saving metal on wiring

Repairing damaged wires costs 2,5Kg metal. Replacing the damaged wire with one of a different metal type skips the 2,5Kg metal cost. Of course deconstructing and reconstructing would work too but requires two actions instead and interrupts the power flowing. Should work with buildings also by deconstructing / reconstructing, and is useful on low metal starts

Wire (1 tile) costs 25 Kg Metal. Bridge (3 tiles) costs 25 Kg metal. A 4 tile wiring costs 100 Kg metal with just wire, and 75 Kg metal with a bridge and 2 wire tiles. Repeating the latter saves 25 Kg Metal every 4 tiles. Downside: looks ugly and is harder to deconstruct, plus wire bridge is a building which can't be replaced directly as wires

## Spiced returns food to 100%

Example

If the spiced food manages any positive decay, it actually goes back to 100%. e.g. refrigerated (powered refrigerator) in sterile atmosphere yields 0.9% per cycle (+decay). Below -18 C (cold biome) yield is full 2%

## Great hall can be achieved with floating / disabled water cooler

Example

Great hall can be achieved with floating / disabled water cooler. Benefits: save floor space and water

## Disabled batteries contribute electricity but not heat

Disabled batteries participate electrically on the grid but do not produce heat. Manual generator replenishes them as if enabled. This seems to work on Classic mode not SO, about the time jumbo batteries are researched