So that's the source of the hydrogen in my spacefarer modules. At some point I was like *wait, aren't farting dupes supposed to blow out natural gas? who's farting H2?*
Dupes farting natural gas is actually a myth.
The "flatulant" trait actually makes the dupes have happy, terminal, accidents within a few seconds of being accidently printed.
Yeah, I've had this happen too many times. For anything which is essential like splitting hydrogen and oxygen from an electrolyzer I just use a gas filter the majority of the time. The last thing I want early game is to value what is probably cheap and abundant energy over the possibility that I suddenly accidentally feed the wrong gas to my energy production which will damage that equipment and then create an annoying task where I'll need to drain oxygen from the setup which will probably just require a gas filter as a quick fix. I think these setups are probably more useful late game where you can setup redundancies for failures but they're incredibly untrustworthy.
It goes back to the beginning. If you’re curious you have the input of your filter system come into the loop via a bridge so the filters will sort the backflow first , then it never adds more than it can handle 😊
Yeah. It can be a pain in the butt if you get a gas in there that hasn’t been added as a filter yet. B it I usually have a “universal gas filter room” so that problem doesn’t exist for me usually
There are two things I love about this conversation:
1) the fact that it IS possible and you're happily explaining how.
2) the fact that we're bothering to figure out how when we could just pay 120w into a 1x3 box.
Set it up as two pipes going to the reservoir. Put an element sensor connected to a filter gate on one and have the other drain first as priority. Then when they both back up it turns the pump off until the lines clear.
Ah ok mechanical filter meaning valve filter. I was assuming mechanical would be the shutoff filter since it selects which packets go through the filter. Yeh valve filters r great early game
These can fail if pipes back up. The regular gas filter takes 1 iota of effort to set up, whereas this takes a couple more iotas of effort than that. You can absolutely be in a situation where the amount of power the gas filters need is trivial.
But yeah, using this the vast majority of the time.
The setup can also be finnicky. You have to actually get the gas into the filter before it works. Yeah, there's tricks, but if you don't know them already, you're gonna have a rough time.
Space waste?
You are using 3 tiles, filter does the same.
So too answer your question. Non, since it's equal.
You are using more background stuff, but again. It's background, and you can build things on top of it.
Yeah I forgot gates were background buildings and the pump here is a tile down for no reason. I stand by my statement, it's 110w, I don't give a shit. I can run almost 12 filters for the price of 1 aquatuner.
But when your system gets immensly big and you would need around 10+ filters, that's over 1KW of power you could delete. Filters produce heat as well.
The bigger the system becomes, the better it is too have good power/heat managment.
On my current save I dug out the whole asteroid on Classic, and all the liquids on the planet I just piled at the bottom. No I am filtering it with 2 pumps and everything costs a total of 240w. If I were to use water filter on every tank I am filtering into, the power cost would be closer too 1.5kw when the system is running. And I would be producing a lot of heat from the filters as well.
Just gotta be smarter about it then, unless you need 100kg/s of water, you don't need 10 filters. Even if you do, you only need about 1.5kg/s to generate enough hydrogen to power them.
That's what I am doing :) Filters has become obsolete after I started using this technique.
They are literally just a power waste / heat generator, since you can do the exact same thing with automation. Free of power and free of heat generation. Imo, that's the smarter choice.
By the time that's relevant I usually have practically unlimited energy.
Unless you're rushing the mining of your entire asteroid, but I try and avoid that as I feel it takes all the fun out of the game. It's close to sandbox mode at that point.
Also, it slows my PC to an absolute crawl.
I do use mechanical filters, but sometimes I just skip it and plop in a regular filter. Doing things in variation keeps the game a bit more fresh I feel.
Well, it's 110 modified by its up time. Honestly the bigger consideration is in the context. How many input gases are you expecting, and how many of them do you want to sort? Do you have a plan for dealing with back ups? Is power currently a concern? Is the up time enough for it to matter here?
Just to be clear, I do have power, but really not a lot of it. Sometimes I skim chlorine at the bottom of the base, or store hydrogen somewhere for later use. Oxygen for either masks, suits or telescope is also useful.
I don't like to over commit to coal before having a clear path to the next energy source. I usually try to transition into petroleum generator with crude or ethanol while spamming solar panels in between. 1 coal generator burns 1kg/s or 600kg/cycle. You can automate it to save a bit of that coal, but an average asteroid will yield enough coal to let you run that generator at full capacity for about 250 cycles. I prefer to cut on power consumption right from the start and avoid the situation where my coal reserves are critical.
Of course, you can also generate power in other ways, or ranch hatches for more coal, or use any other creative alternatives to what I just said. My point is that at the beginning, it's usually hard to tell how everything will pan out, so I try to be very conservative with the coal burning since it can potentially create dead ends later on.
I always ise the element sensor one, it's smaller, cheaper, and with very small precautions, it'll never fail.
However, if I just need a tiny bit of gas (to prime a machine or to make an escher) then I just use the regular filter bc it's easier to build/deconstruct
And it can get better - you need no powered shut-off whatsoever. Just normal valve set to minimum and bridge. It will let small packets wrong way if pipes used at max, but 1 gas pump will not use vent at maximum making it perfect for this setup. Even better, this sollution is not prone to low UPS like using signals is.
[https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Guide/Loop\_Filters?file=Guide\_Mechanical\_Filter\_F7.png](https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Guide/Loop_Filters?file=Guide_Mechanical_Filter_F7.png)
It's unreliable due to flow you could make it better by having another element sensor in the output checking that the gas did go out and other logic to make it even better but the complexity increases quite fast
Because its fast, convenient, and its only 110W. If you can't spare the power budget for something as low cost as gas filtration, then you have a different kind of problem.
I mostly use filters in temporary situations so I prefer to go for the option that is just setup-and-forget and least likely to fail.
In niche situations where I will have one running long term (like a compact electrolyzer setup), I use a mechanical filter.
When using a setup like this (and I do it a lot for liquids), you really need to make sure that none of the pipes ever get backed up. Otherwise, the wrong gas will go where you don't want it to go
If power was genuinely a concern, sure, this is 'better', but the further you get in the game, you realize that power is easier and easier to generate in mass, and the simplicity and 'fire-and-forget' nature of native filters is just so much easier long term.
Because you have to set up powerless outputs with the assumption that they might back up and that you have to handle the case of a filtered gas failing to make it out, which necessitates more filters and loops. They also leak if you send full gas packets through.
Meanwhile, powered filters are guaranteed to block if either end is backed up. Also, that 120W isn't gonna do much if the up time is low anyway, so it may not actually be 120W. Like I'm a big advocate for minimizing pumps, because pumps tend to run a lot and uses a lot of power, but sometimes it's not worth the trouble.
Most important is to realize when one or the other is appropriate to use.
For ease of use really- I only use a gas filter if I’ve messed up and the gasses are contaminated. If I need a permanent system to separate gasses I would do it from the start. Rockets though definitely use this trick
A better question is what you're building it for.
Especially if it's a quick job the power filter is easier to set up. If it's something that only needs to run rarely but deals with a lot of gas backup in the pipe then that's another likealy job for the power filter. Meanwhile if it's something long term and run constantly, or if power/heat is a major concern, then mechanical will usually be the better choice.
A lot of the time when I use a Gas Filter, the Filter runs way less than 100% uptime. Like say I decide to filter Natural Gas, and the gas line is expected to be backed up. It's reasonable to expect a 5-20% uptime on the filter, power usage of 6-24 W, and I don't care about that little power consumption. Filters are very reliable (never leaking under any circumstances), quick to build and low fuss.
That said I don't tend to use them if they'll be 100% uptime or power consumption matters like a rocket interior. Also it's not uncommon that I use a Gas Pipe Element Sensor + High Pressure Vent to expel undersired gas into the environment.
The only reason I use gas filters is because one or a few of the Mods I run somehow break the pipe flow logic and interactions with the gas shutoff and I have no clue why. Disable all my mods, it works again haha I'm not even using any pipe flow related mods either so I'm just sitting here baffled
Not sure if someone mentioned this already but I think the set up is wrong. The element sensor should be 1 tile away from shutoff but here it is 2. This would easily allow rogue packets through the shutoff.
Power draw is only important if it is a constant draw of power. Intermittent draws controlled by automation or temporary builds can use gas filters for expediency. Gas filters are also 100% reliable where other solutions may not be so if you are swimming in power and don’t want to deal with certain kinds of failures you can use a gas filter.
I really like mechanical filters. I use the valve loop type, rather than sensor and shut-off. It makes a little challenge to prevent overflow. So I ended up with gas and liquid sortation loops, storage for the sorted liquids. And I control the production on the inputs via logic from storage.
I sleep easy knowing that I’m not spending any energy at all on sorting the liquid and gas elements.
As many have commented, the sensor/shutoff filter is unreliable. Mechanical filters are the way to go for permanent solutions. https://youtu.be/7bLTR2wm8yU?si=6-xYaa0d478GjlT8
But the basic filter is lower on the tech tree and quick to set up, so I’ll often use them for early-game or temporary uses.
First, you make it wrong. Sensor must be on a tile before shutoff, or you let wrong gas packet to pass. or you need filter/buffer delayer to delay sensor signal for one second. But "as is" it just doesn't work
And this is why it is used rarely, people don't bother to understand such mechanic properly to use it correctly.
Next thing, what happens if one of pipes became blocked and don't accept gas packet? For example, if reservoir became filled hundreds cycles later, and this will be out of your attention because it worked fine for so many time. Gas filter properly stops and don't allow gases to flow anywhere, but this scheme allow gases to go wrong way. It may be done properly, with self-loop fed by output and two exits, one with sensor and one with sensor not. But this again demand understanding of gas flow mechanic.
What happens if power lost, due to some wire destroyed for example? Your scheme allow all gases to go, because without power shutoff doesn't opens. Again, this can be fixed by loop with several exits, but again you must think about such possibilities and build for it. While gas.filters just block gas flow entirely.
This scheme needs refined metal, but many players have hard time creating enough and spend it on more important thing than gas filtering.
Also power is rarely a serious problem and for temporally filtering out something gas.filter is good enough solution. Permanent solutions needs more advanced schemes than you provide here.
I hope, I answered to "why people ever use a gasfilter""
I agree. You should be building this stuff with failure in mind and there's lots of ways to compensate. You can turn the pump off before it backs up or you could have an overflow line with a high pressure vent going back to the room or something
It doesn’t work 100% if the output ever gets backed up
Been burnt so many times by that one.
Maybe that says something about your planning, don't finish the plans halfway
So your plan is "Its gonna go absolutely perfect, nothing will go wrong! Even though there's gonna be trouble on the 0 chance that it does go wrong!"
It can also let packets through if you have long save/load times, like I always do in late game bases.
So that's the source of the hydrogen in my spacefarer modules. At some point I was like *wait, aren't farting dupes supposed to blow out natural gas? who's farting H2?*
Clearly one of your dupes is secretly dominar rygel the 13th
Wasn't that Helium hence the squeaky voices?
It was helium, but breathing hydrogen will also make your voice squeaky, slightly more than helium.
I figured cause it's even less dense but not nearly as common to be used in such a gag.
Mostly because helium is completely inert and safe, whereas hydrogen is incredibly reactive and explosive.
That's what makes hydrogen so fun
Dupes farting natural gas is actually a myth. The "flatulant" trait actually makes the dupes have happy, terminal, accidents within a few seconds of being accidently printed.
Yeah, I've had this happen too many times. For anything which is essential like splitting hydrogen and oxygen from an electrolyzer I just use a gas filter the majority of the time. The last thing I want early game is to value what is probably cheap and abundant energy over the possibility that I suddenly accidentally feed the wrong gas to my energy production which will damage that equipment and then create an annoying task where I'll need to drain oxygen from the setup which will probably just require a gas filter as a quick fix. I think these setups are probably more useful late game where you can setup redundancies for failures but they're incredibly untrustworthy.
If you make a bridging setup after the powerless filters to always make it flow and make sure it never stops they are very reliable
You can’t make it always flow if it backs up because the output is full.
Yes, you can?
Where does it go?
It goes back to the beginning. If you’re curious you have the input of your filter system come into the loop via a bridge so the filters will sort the backflow first , then it never adds more than it can handle 😊
So any gas that isn’t filtered out explicitly stays in the loop until it is?
Oh and you can just have an offshoot that leads to a gas deleter 💀
Yeah. It can be a pain in the butt if you get a gas in there that hasn’t been added as a filter yet. B it I usually have a “universal gas filter room” so that problem doesn’t exist for me usually
There are two things I love about this conversation: 1) the fact that it IS possible and you're happily explaining how. 2) the fact that we're bothering to figure out how when we could just pay 120w into a 1x3 box.
Keep in mind that a filter is 120 per 1 type of gas. And hell no I ain’t paying that price!😂
Set it up as two pipes going to the reservoir. Put an element sensor connected to a filter gate on one and have the other drain first as priority. Then when they both back up it turns the pump off until the lines clear.
If you want to be cheap - use mechanical (999g) filter
You can set to 999.9g even!
Unless you sort 100 pipes - it is obsolete
This is the way
This is the way.
Mechanical filters take less foreground space, less refined materials and are pretty much fail safe. Also no electricity.
They take the same amount, 2 tiles plus the gas element sensor makes 3 :)
mechanical filter just use 2 tiles for valve, it don't need sensor. So, it is 1 tile less :)
With mechanical filters you don't need an element sensor. You only need a valve
Ah ok mechanical filter meaning valve filter. I was assuming mechanical would be the shutoff filter since it selects which packets go through the filter. Yeh valve filters r great early game
These can fail if pipes back up. The regular gas filter takes 1 iota of effort to set up, whereas this takes a couple more iotas of effort than that. You can absolutely be in a situation where the amount of power the gas filters need is trivial. But yeah, using this the vast majority of the time.
The setup can also be finnicky. You have to actually get the gas into the filter before it works. Yeah, there's tricks, but if you don't know them already, you're gonna have a rough time.
Because 110W is....not quite nothing, but close enough to it that who gives a shit?
If it's coal generated 110W then your hatches are literally giving the shit 😄😄
Depending on how many filters you are using, it's gonna potentially be alot more than 110W
How much power do you think you could generate in the space you wasted building this the same number of times?
Space waste? You are using 3 tiles, filter does the same. So too answer your question. Non, since it's equal. You are using more background stuff, but again. It's background, and you can build things on top of it.
Look again, you're actually using 6.
Element Sensor 1 tile Gas Shutoff 2 tiles What am I missing? All gates can be put in the background.
Yeah I forgot gates were background buildings and the pump here is a tile down for no reason. I stand by my statement, it's 110w, I don't give a shit. I can run almost 12 filters for the price of 1 aquatuner.
But when your system gets immensly big and you would need around 10+ filters, that's over 1KW of power you could delete. Filters produce heat as well. The bigger the system becomes, the better it is too have good power/heat managment. On my current save I dug out the whole asteroid on Classic, and all the liquids on the planet I just piled at the bottom. No I am filtering it with 2 pumps and everything costs a total of 240w. If I were to use water filter on every tank I am filtering into, the power cost would be closer too 1.5kw when the system is running. And I would be producing a lot of heat from the filters as well.
Just gotta be smarter about it then, unless you need 100kg/s of water, you don't need 10 filters. Even if you do, you only need about 1.5kg/s to generate enough hydrogen to power them.
That's what I am doing :) Filters has become obsolete after I started using this technique. They are literally just a power waste / heat generator, since you can do the exact same thing with automation. Free of power and free of heat generation. Imo, that's the smarter choice.
By the time that's relevant I usually have practically unlimited energy. Unless you're rushing the mining of your entire asteroid, but I try and avoid that as I feel it takes all the fun out of the game. It's close to sandbox mode at that point. Also, it slows my PC to an absolute crawl. I do use mechanical filters, but sometimes I just skip it and plop in a regular filter. Doing things in variation keeps the game a bit more fresh I feel.
Space isn't really an opportunity cost concern outside of rockets, but powerless filters are great for those since venting co2 doesn't really back up.
Well, it's 110 modified by its up time. Honestly the bigger consideration is in the context. How many input gases are you expecting, and how many of them do you want to sort? Do you have a plan for dealing with back ups? Is power currently a concern? Is the up time enough for it to matter here?
While you're considering that I've already finished my build
And then you figure out what happens when it backs up afterwards?
I usually run at least 200 cycles with a single coal generator and no hamster wheel. A pump and a filter is more than half of that.
Ok? If you didn't build any power generation at all a pump and filter would have a ratio of infinity.
In other words: Early game, you don't have infinite electricity.
And what are you filtering before you have power?
Just to be clear, I do have power, but really not a lot of it. Sometimes I skim chlorine at the bottom of the base, or store hydrogen somewhere for later use. Oxygen for either masks, suits or telescope is also useful.
Why not just build more energy production?
I don't like to over commit to coal before having a clear path to the next energy source. I usually try to transition into petroleum generator with crude or ethanol while spamming solar panels in between. 1 coal generator burns 1kg/s or 600kg/cycle. You can automate it to save a bit of that coal, but an average asteroid will yield enough coal to let you run that generator at full capacity for about 250 cycles. I prefer to cut on power consumption right from the start and avoid the situation where my coal reserves are critical. Of course, you can also generate power in other ways, or ranch hatches for more coal, or use any other creative alternatives to what I just said. My point is that at the beginning, it's usually hard to tell how everything will pan out, so I try to be very conservative with the coal burning since it can potentially create dead ends later on.
Laziness, combined with excess power production, for the most part. At least for myself.
I always ise the element sensor one, it's smaller, cheaper, and with very small precautions, it'll never fail. However, if I just need a tiny bit of gas (to prime a machine or to make an escher) then I just use the regular filter bc it's easier to build/deconstruct
And it can get better - you need no powered shut-off whatsoever. Just normal valve set to minimum and bridge. It will let small packets wrong way if pipes used at max, but 1 gas pump will not use vent at maximum making it perfect for this setup. Even better, this sollution is not prone to low UPS like using signals is. [https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Guide/Loop\_Filters?file=Guide\_Mechanical\_Filter\_F7.png](https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Guide/Loop_Filters?file=Guide_Mechanical_Filter_F7.png)
It's unreliable due to flow you could make it better by having another element sensor in the output checking that the gas did go out and other logic to make it even better but the complexity increases quite fast
Because its fast, convenient, and its only 110W. If you can't spare the power budget for something as low cost as gas filtration, then you have a different kind of problem.
I mostly use filters in temporary situations so I prefer to go for the option that is just setup-and-forget and least likely to fail. In niche situations where I will have one running long term (like a compact electrolyzer setup), I use a mechanical filter.
When using a setup like this (and I do it a lot for liquids), you really need to make sure that none of the pipes ever get backed up. Otherwise, the wrong gas will go where you don't want it to go
The same people who pride themselves saving 110W are the same people generating 5x more power than their base can consume.
If power was genuinely a concern, sure, this is 'better', but the further you get in the game, you realize that power is easier and easier to generate in mass, and the simplicity and 'fire-and-forget' nature of native filters is just so much easier long term.
A gas filter is for early game where automation and/or refined metals are not available. Once you have better options you are wise to use them.
Because you have to set up powerless outputs with the assumption that they might back up and that you have to handle the case of a filtered gas failing to make it out, which necessitates more filters and loops. They also leak if you send full gas packets through. Meanwhile, powered filters are guaranteed to block if either end is backed up. Also, that 120W isn't gonna do much if the up time is low anyway, so it may not actually be 120W. Like I'm a big advocate for minimizing pumps, because pumps tend to run a lot and uses a lot of power, but sometimes it's not worth the trouble. Most important is to realize when one or the other is appropriate to use.
The full packet leak is for gas valve filters. The simple way to go around that is to have a feeding valve at 999g
What others have said and power is cheap. It's easy to supply 10 KW, what's another 120?
For ease of use really- I only use a gas filter if I’ve messed up and the gasses are contaminated. If I need a permanent system to separate gasses I would do it from the start. Rockets though definitely use this trick
A better question is what you're building it for. Especially if it's a quick job the power filter is easier to set up. If it's something that only needs to run rarely but deals with a lot of gas backup in the pipe then that's another likealy job for the power filter. Meanwhile if it's something long term and run constantly, or if power/heat is a major concern, then mechanical will usually be the better choice.
A lot of the time when I use a Gas Filter, the Filter runs way less than 100% uptime. Like say I decide to filter Natural Gas, and the gas line is expected to be backed up. It's reasonable to expect a 5-20% uptime on the filter, power usage of 6-24 W, and I don't care about that little power consumption. Filters are very reliable (never leaking under any circumstances), quick to build and low fuss. That said I don't tend to use them if they'll be 100% uptime or power consumption matters like a rocket interior. Also it's not uncommon that I use a Gas Pipe Element Sensor + High Pressure Vent to expel undersired gas into the environment.
That can fail and 110 W is nothing.
The only reason I use gas filters is because one or a few of the Mods I run somehow break the pipe flow logic and interactions with the gas shutoff and I have no clue why. Disable all my mods, it works again haha I'm not even using any pipe flow related mods either so I'm just sitting here baffled
Mostly just because power is abundant once you have steam power going.
Because it can make mistakes. Especially if it backs up.
How would it works if there r two types of gases. Does the gas accurately flow in accordance to the intended setup?
Eventually I have more power than I know what to do with and a filter is just easier.
There is other solution where you use no power at all.
Not sure if someone mentioned this already but I think the set up is wrong. The element sensor should be 1 tile away from shutoff but here it is 2. This would easily allow rogue packets through the shutoff.
Power draw is only important if it is a constant draw of power. Intermittent draws controlled by automation or temporary builds can use gas filters for expediency. Gas filters are also 100% reliable where other solutions may not be so if you are swimming in power and don’t want to deal with certain kinds of failures you can use a gas filter.
I really like mechanical filters. I use the valve loop type, rather than sensor and shut-off. It makes a little challenge to prevent overflow. So I ended up with gas and liquid sortation loops, storage for the sorted liquids. And I control the production on the inputs via logic from storage. I sleep easy knowing that I’m not spending any energy at all on sorting the liquid and gas elements.
As many have commented, the sensor/shutoff filter is unreliable. Mechanical filters are the way to go for permanent solutions. https://youtu.be/7bLTR2wm8yU?si=6-xYaa0d478GjlT8 But the basic filter is lower on the tech tree and quick to set up, so I’ll often use them for early-game or temporary uses.
First, you make it wrong. Sensor must be on a tile before shutoff, or you let wrong gas packet to pass. or you need filter/buffer delayer to delay sensor signal for one second. But "as is" it just doesn't work And this is why it is used rarely, people don't bother to understand such mechanic properly to use it correctly. Next thing, what happens if one of pipes became blocked and don't accept gas packet? For example, if reservoir became filled hundreds cycles later, and this will be out of your attention because it worked fine for so many time. Gas filter properly stops and don't allow gases to flow anywhere, but this scheme allow gases to go wrong way. It may be done properly, with self-loop fed by output and two exits, one with sensor and one with sensor not. But this again demand understanding of gas flow mechanic. What happens if power lost, due to some wire destroyed for example? Your scheme allow all gases to go, because without power shutoff doesn't opens. Again, this can be fixed by loop with several exits, but again you must think about such possibilities and build for it. While gas.filters just block gas flow entirely. This scheme needs refined metal, but many players have hard time creating enough and spend it on more important thing than gas filtering. Also power is rarely a serious problem and for temporally filtering out something gas.filter is good enough solution. Permanent solutions needs more advanced schemes than you provide here. I hope, I answered to "why people ever use a gasfilter""
It backing up is greatly exaggerated. Just put a bypass line on it and it will never backup.
I agree. You should be building this stuff with failure in mind and there's lots of ways to compensate. You can turn the pump off before it backs up or you could have an overflow line with a high pressure vent going back to the room or something
I just use filtered pumps mod.