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Author Topic: How to get magma to flow faster  (Read 843 times)

johnny_cat

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How to get magma to flow faster
« on: July 12, 2011, 11:42:49 pm »

I dug a tunnel to the nearby volcano to get my magma factory working. But it's been 2 years and the magma has only reached the point where it's small pools of 1/7 under my workshops. Is there any way to speed this up so I can get my workshops up and running faster? I don't mind modifying the raws.
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IT 000

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Re: How to get magma to flow faster
« Reply #1 on: July 12, 2011, 11:49:47 pm »

Not possible through modding. Use pumps.
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noodle0117

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Re: How to get magma to flow faster
« Reply #2 on: July 12, 2011, 11:56:23 pm »

Natural magma flows relatively slow, so yea use pumps to force them down a tunnel.
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Cruxador

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Re: How to get magma to flow faster
« Reply #3 on: July 13, 2011, 12:20:27 am »

If you'd stuck pumps in there to start with, it'd go faster. If the place is already flooded with magma, nothing you can do now but wait.
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Sizik

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Re: How to get magma to flow faster
« Reply #4 on: July 13, 2011, 12:40:27 pm »

Use one tile wide tunnels so there's less area for the magma to evaporate.
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Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

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Re: How to get magma to flow faster
« Reply #5 on: July 13, 2011, 01:21:31 pm »

There are a couple tricks you can use, but almost all of them require prior planning.

The first is to just pump the stuff with screw pumps, it'll come out like a rocket.
The second is to build floodgates and levers every (embark map) tile or so. Magma cools/evaporates if it spends too long as a 1-depth tile. Then new magma has to flow into that spot. By building floodgates every so often, you can let the magma build up to a "good" depth, then release it in stages, so none of it's lost to evaporation. Still takes a while, but you don't have to worry about pumps or powering your pumps.
The third is to minimize the area that the magma has to fill, ideally with single-tile-wide corridors and no more.
Breaching the volcano wall in multiple places seems to make magma flow out faster, but can be tricky to set up and will require very skilled miners to do safely.

If it's been a year or so since the magma last "advanced" -- i.e., if it's the same depth in the same place, generally speaking, for more than a few months at at time -- you may have hit the balance point between distance, flow rate, and evaporation rate. At that point any solutions are probably going to be more complicated than simply starting over.
« Last Edit: July 13, 2011, 01:24:36 pm by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy »
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