Combinators should not affected by freeze

[fpx007]

Currently, combinators consume power, and are affected by freeze. However, a recent change have been made illustrated in viewtopic.php?t=131390, increasing their power consumption and thus improve signal system stability. Regarding this, I think they should be immune to freezing.

As removing their heat consumption on Aquilo (and hence the vulnerability to freezing) have a huge impact on game balance, I place the post on this subforum. I know this change will have a huge impact on current game, not only reduces the heat upkeep but also makes designing Aquilo base easier. But I still hope this change take place because:

It improves signal stability on Aquilo.

Unlike power grid that a large area is powered/unpowered instantly and at the exact same moment, heat pipes are heated/cooled one by one slowly. Thus different combinators usually freeze/unfreeze at different time. Due to the complexity of heat pipe deployment, it is almost impossible to predict which combinator freeze/unfreeze first, or to say fail to function/function first.

Such behavior can make cause great trouble when running Aquilo base. When you don't have adequate heat supply and heat pipes gradually lose their temperature, The combinators freeze and thus fail in a unpredictable order, thus makes the signal system's behavior totally unpredictable. What's more, when such failure is spotted by the player and they try to add more heat supply, they also unfreeze in a random order, still causing great trouble. Unless the heat mechanic is updated to something like 2.0 fluid mechanic (which I don't believe will be likely to happen), It is better to simply remove the frozen vulnerability to prevent such issue full of randomness from happening.

[Tertius]

The combinators freeze and thus fail in a unpredictable order, thus makes the signal system's behavior totally unpredictable. What's more, when such failure is spotted by the player and they try to add more heat supply, they also unfreeze in a random order, still causing great trouble.

You describe one of the genuine challenges of Aquilo. It's a task and a challenge, not a balancing issue in my opinion.

What you can actively do is placing programmable speakers and read the temperature of your heating towers. If their temperature falls below a certain value, create a game-wide audible and visible alert with the speaker, so you know in advance before it actually starts to freeze. The speaker itself needs power but is immune to freezing. You can also monitor rocket fuel production and stock this way.

In addition, you can send an "it's freezing" signal to your circuit network if you detect critically low temperature just before the actual freeze and disable crucial resource supply, so your machines will gracefully run empty and shut down production before the circuits freeze as well. You can use pumps as valve, and you can enable/disable transport belt pieces to enable and disable item flow. Or you can just switch on and off the whole factory with a power switch. The red button.

A frozen decider keeps sending its current signal, so the 'it's freezing" signal stays in the network until the decider has thawed and its condition determines it's not freezing any more.

12-03-2025, 15-52-27.png (74.03 KiB) Viewed 404 times

[fpx007]

The combinators freeze and thus fail in a unpredictable order, thus makes the signal system's behavior totally unpredictable. What's more, when such failure is spotted by the player and they try to add more heat supply, they also unfreeze in a random order, still causing great trouble.

You describe one of the genuine challenges of Aquilo. It's a task and a challenge, not a balancing issue in my opinion.

What you can actively do is placing programmable speakers and read the temperature of your heating towers. If their temperature falls below a certain value, create a game-wide audible and visible alert with the speaker, so you know in advance before it actually starts to freeze. The speaker itself needs power but is immune to freezing. You can also monitor rocket fuel production and stock this way.

In addition, you can send an "it's freezing" signal to your circuit network if you detect critically low temperature just before the actual freeze and disable crucial resource supply, so your machines will gracefully run empty and shut down production before the circuits freeze as well. You can use pumps as valve, and you can enable/disable transport belt pieces to enable and disable item flow. Or you can just switch on and off the whole factory with a power switch. The red button.

A frozen decider keeps sending its current signal, so the 'it's freezing" signal stays in the network until the decider has thawed and its condition determines it's not freezing any more.

12-03-2025, 15-52-27.png

But sometimes you are not on Aquilo and are busy doing something else. Also take the long trip to reach Aquilo into consideration, you as well as the necessary resource may be unable reach Aquilo in time and thus unable to prevent the actual freezing. That is to say, players should consider not only how to prevent system failures but also how to recover from system failures. Your suggestions help identify (possible) freezing events and thus prevent them, but when one actually happens, these actions just don't have any direct help.

However, resuming an Aquilo base is much harder than bases on other planets. To resume an Aquilo base, you need to not only resupply power but also resupply heat. And as I already talked, the behavior of heat system is highly unpredictable, so the order of combinators' recovery is also unpredictable, which is the issue here. (Perhaps suggestions about making combinators fail/resume at the same time or in a predictable and expected order help more.)

Actually, I considered post this post to the suggestion subforum. However, as totally removing freezing vulnerability have a huge impact on gameplay, I finally post it here. If moderators think this topic should go to the suggestion subforum, please move this there.

[h.q.droid]

But sometimes you are not on Aquilo and are busy doing something else. Also take the long trip to reach Aquilo into consideration, you as well as the necessary resource may be unable reach Aquilo in time and thus unable to prevent the actual freezing. That is to say, players should consider not only how to prevent system failures but also how to recover from system failures. Your suggestions help identify (possible) freezing events and thus prevent them, but when one actually happens, these actions just don't have any direct help.

However, resuming an Aquilo base is much harder than bases on other planets. To resume an Aquilo base, you need to not only resupply power but also resupply heat. And as I already talked, the behavior of heat system is highly unpredictable, so the order of combinators' recovery is also unpredictable, which is the issue here. (Perhaps suggestions about making combinators fail/resume at the same time or in a predictable and expected order help more.)

Actually, I considered post this post to the suggestion subforum. However, as totally removing freezing vulnerability have a huge impact on gameplay, I finally post it here. If moderators think this topic should go to the suggestion subforum, please move this there.

Well... you can:

- Design your signals so that heating towers get refueled when combinators die (e.g. instead of T<700, use H==0 and make a combinator output H=1 on T>=700). And use a burner inserter to refuel your kick-starting tower: it never freezes, can be connected to signals, and doesn't require power.
- Put all combinators in the same "group" next to the same heating tower or (unfueled) nuclear reactor so that they always thaw together.
- When everything fails, use a spidertron or a tank to restart your Aquilo base remotely.

[Tertius]

Your suggestions help identify (possible) freezing events and thus prevent them, but when one actually happens, these actions just don't have any direct help.
[...]
However, resuming an Aquilo base is much harder than bases on other planets. To resume an Aquilo base, you need to not only resupply power but also resupply heat.

Aquilo is not fundamentally different to other planets. The only thing you have to do in addition is heating. I already mentioned the power switch. Automatically switch off the Aquilo base if temperature is getting critically low, so production is gracefully shut down. Now consider everything freezes.

Everything is deep frozen now.

You return to Aquilo to restart the base. You need to bring a bunch of rocket fuel or better nuclear fuel.

The first thing you need to bring back up is the power supply. If you run with a fusion reactor, it's quite easy. Provide fuel to the heating tower near the fusion power plant until it is thawed, then insert a fusion power cell you kept separate. To avoid the heat running away into the rest of the factory, remove the heat pipe piece that connects the fusion power plant to the factory.
Add one or two solar panels to the power network of the power plant. The reactors will slowly fill their power buffer until they have enough to work for 1 tick. That's enough plasma to get it all running full power. Remember you disconnected the factory from the power plant with a (frozen) power switch, so the reactors are actually able to collect electricity this way.

So include this into the design of your factory:
- power switch to separate the power plant from the rest of the factory
- heating tower at the fusion power plant, possibly a dedicated heating tower

If you have a heating tower and steam based power plant instead, you need to provide water after you manually thawed all of the components of your steam power plant and get the heat exchangers above 500°C. To avoid heat running away into the rest of your factory, remove any heat pipe pieces that lead to the rest of the factory.
So you need access to one thawed chemical plant or cryogenic plant that melts ice to water. Provide a separate power network to that machine with separate power poles and power it with a few solar panels. If you cannot power just that machine, build a machine dedicated for that a bit more far away. Manually fill it with ice, either from local storage or dropped down from your space platform. It will be on low power but it will get the task done.

So additionally include this into the design of your factory:
- separate power supply with solar panels to just one machine for melting ice.
- separate and enough heating towers for power supply and factory heating

While doing this, you run around and manually feed all the heating towers around to thaw the rest of your factory. I didn't do this, but I bet this can be semi-automated with construction bots in spidertron/modular armor with a personal roboport and construction bots in the spidertron/player inventory, and with ghost requests to insert fuel. The spidertron is the way to do all this remotely, you don't need to travel there in person.

One way or the other, you will get power. With this power, supplying the heating towers with fuel is now automated. After everything has thawed, you can power up that part of the factory that's creating ice, water, rocket fuel/fusion fuel. Don't start the secondary production such as science packs.
After your fuel supply stabilized, power up the rest of your factory.

So additionally include this into the design of your factory:
- segmented power grids for 1 ice melting machine + power plant + fuel generating factory part + science pack production factory part

All this is part of the original Aquilo challenge I mentioned. Design your factory properly and don't ask for game engine changes to fix your design flaws. Gleba has a comparable challenge: how to boot up a factory without nutrients and has its own solution: nutrients from spoilage. For Aquilo it's fuel supply from space platform.

[fpx007]

- Put all combinators in the same "group" next to the same heating tower or (unfueled) nuclear reactor so that they always thaw together.

This is a good suggestion. I'll take it. Thank you.

Your suggestions help identify (possible) freezing events and thus prevent them, but when one actually happens, these actions just don't have any direct help.
[...]
However, resuming an Aquilo base is much harder than bases on other planets. To resume an Aquilo base, you need to not only resupply power but also resupply heat.

Aquilo is not fundamentally different to other planets. The only thing you have to do in addition is heating. I already mentioned the power switch. Automatically switch off the Aquilo base if temperature is getting critically low, so production is gracefully shut down. Now consider everything freezes.

Everything is deep frozen now.

You return to Aquilo to restart the base. You need to bring a bunch of rocket fuel or better nuclear fuel.

The first thing you need to bring back up is the power supply. If you run with a fusion reactor, it's quite easy. Provide fuel to the heating tower near the fusion power plant until it is thawed, then insert a fusion power cell you kept separate. To avoid the heat running away into the rest of the factory, remove the heat pipe piece that connects the fusion power plant to the factory.
Add one or two solar panels to the power network of the power plant. The reactors will slowly fill their power buffer until they have enough to work for 1 tick. That's enough plasma to get it all running full power. Remember you disconnected the factory from the power plant with a (frozen) power switch, so the reactors are actually able to collect electricity this way.

So include this into the design of your factory:
- power switch to separate the power plant from the rest of the factory
- heating tower at the fusion power plant, possibly a dedicated heating tower

If you have a heating tower and steam based power plant instead, you need to provide water after you manually thawed all of the components of your steam power plant and get the heat exchangers above 500°C. To avoid heat running away into the rest of your factory, remove any heat pipe pieces that lead to the rest of the factory.
So you need access to one thawed chemical plant or cryogenic plant that melts ice to water. Provide a separate power network to that machine with separate power poles and power it with a few solar panels. If you cannot power just that machine, build a machine dedicated for that a bit more far away. Manually fill it with ice, either from local storage or dropped down from your space platform. It will be on low power but it will get the task done.

So additionally include this into the design of your factory:
- separate power supply with solar panels to just one machine for melting ice.
- separate and enough heating towers for power supply and factory heating

While doing this, you run around and manually feed all the heating towers around to thaw the rest of your factory. I didn't do this, but I bet this can be semi-automated with construction bots in spidertron/modular armor with a personal roboport and construction bots in the spidertron/player inventory, and with ghost requests to insert fuel. The spidertron is the way to do all this remotely, you don't need to travel there in person.

One way or the other, you will get power. With this power, supplying the heating towers with fuel is now automated. After everything has thawed, you can power up that part of the factory that's creating ice, water, rocket fuel/fusion fuel. Don't start the secondary production such as science packs.
After your fuel supply stabilized, power up the rest of your factory.

So additionally include this into the design of your factory:
- segmented power grids for 1 ice melting machine + power plant + fuel generating factory part + science pack production factory part

All this is part of the original Aquilo challenge I mentioned. Design your factory properly and don't ask for game engine changes to fix your design flaws. Gleba has a comparable challenge: how to boot up a factory without nutrients and has its own solution: nutrients from spoilage. For Aquilo it's fuel supply from space platform.

Although you wrote so much, your answer still doesn't help solving isuue of unpredictable order of combinators unfreezing and thus unpredictable signal system behaviour. This is the key isuue I encountered and the reason why I demand such change. (Anyway, still thank you for the effort.)

[Tertius]

I admit I don't get the point. I don't see a compelling reason for a balancing change. This would be for the whole player base, not just you alone. I am obsessed with circuits, all of my factories including the Aquilo base are heavily depending on circuits. There are numerous combinators controlling all kinds of things all over all of my factories. But I really don't see an issue while unfreezing. It just doesn't matter if there is some more control or some less while it's all thawing. It's only for a short time, and production will stabilize quite fast after that. If your setup is so fragile it doesn't work even for a short time in this state, I recommend you make your setup more stable.

Don't overengineer. Every circuit introduces edge cases you have to deal with. Keep it simple and purely mechanical for the crucial production parts. What has happened to you, what circuit glitch made you make this request? What happened? Did you request thousands of unneeded items from a platform by accident? Did you recycle all your legendary cryogenic plants?

For the 3rd time, I recommend the power switch. Only switch it all on after all the relevant combinators have thawed. Manually, to make sure.

[fpx007]

I admit I don't get the point. I don't see a compelling reason for a balancing change. This would be for the whole player base, not just you alone. I am obsessed with circuits, all of my factories including the Aquilo base are heavily depending on circuits. There are numerous combinators controlling all kinds of things all over all of my factories. But I really don't see an issue while unfreezing. It just doesn't matter if there is some more control or some less while it's all thawing. It's only for a short time, and production will stabilize quite fast after that. If your setup is so fragile it doesn't work even for a short time in this state, I recommend you make your setup more stable.

Don't overengineer. Every circuit introduces edge cases you have to deal with. Keep it simple and purely mechanical for the crucial production parts. What has happened to you, what circuit glitch made you make this request? What happened? Did you request thousands of unneeded items from a platform by accident? Did you recycle all your legendary cryogenic plants?

For the 3rd time, I recommend the power switch. Only switch it all on after all the relevant combinators have thawed. Manually, to make sure.

Because combinators not only do the calculations, their connected wires also store data. when some of combinators fail to work while others still work, the data may be corrupted and thus cause unknown trouble. Also because the unpredictable nature of heat system, the wires containing corrupted data are hard to spot, making resetting the system also a painful job.

As for power switch, I don't know the behavior when they are power-off. Do their output signals get locked or simply vanish? If it is the former, then it can be a solution.

[h.q.droid]

Because combinators not only do the calculations, their connected wires also store data. when some of combinators fail to work while others still work, the data may be corrupted and thus cause unknown trouble. Also because the unpredictable nature of heat system, the wires containing corrupted data are hard to spot, making resetting the system also a painful job.

As for power switch, I don't know the behavior when they are power-off. Do their output signals get locked or simply vanish? If it is the former, then it can be a solution.

I think they're zeroed out. From my understanding, on each tick, each wire first accumulates signals from all nodes they connect to. Then each combinator reads the wires, do the computation, and update their output node. When a combinator or other signal producer is disabled, its output becomes zero. On the next tick, the relevant wires get zeroed too.

Just my curiosity, what exact signals are you storing and needing to keep? Belts, item stacks and storage tanks can all work as more permanent (and freeze-proof) storage solutions but they don't respond as quickly.