I'm not finding much in searches other than "it's super broken lol." Below, I list known things, and desired information. I plan on investigating these things myself using !!Science!!, but if you already know an answer or mistake, please chime in and save me the trouble and I will try to update.
What I can gather:
1) Only things resting on solid ground OR gases (?) seem to transfer heat between co-occupying objects or tiles. Maybe not on the gases - this might be a special hardcoded thing, rather than tile by tile basic thermodynamics. But the behavior of magma mist makes it seem like tile-by-tile.
2) Heat transfers through unmined tiles or constructed things, as well as through at least 1 z layer of floor.
3) Materials can have fixed temps and specific heats (amount of heat required to change temperature) in the raws controlling how quickly they heat or cool off, but this doesn't seem to be the case for unmined rock (or it's hard coded if it is? Might be wrong about that), only objects.
4) Underground seems to have a sort of fixed temperature, always being habitable for instance even when outdoors is absolute zero or as hot as dragonfire.
5) [HOMEOTHERM] tags in creatures appear to give them an active buffer - they create that temperature with some amount of influence, but it can be overwhelmed by external influences. (Is there a way to modify the weight of that influence? As in, homeotherm = 10067, and it REALLY sticks there? Versus it sort of tries to stay there but not very hard? I suspect you may be able to use specific heat of body tissue materials to do this if not some other parameter). Removing HOMEOTHERM from a creature will put it at the mercy of its environment, i.e. make it cold blooded, and it will melt on floors above magma, etc.
Things I want to know and will conduct !!Science!! to investigate, but only if nobody has a quick answer:
1) Is any of the above wrong?
2) Is there a limit on how many tiles heat will transfer through, or is the falloff simply sharp enough that it is effectively 1-2 for anything important (like magma tubes in the middle of your fort)? I would imagine there is not limit, and that each tile just affects its neighbors, thus it could chain along, but it doesn't because the ambient underground temperature rapidly outweighs the influence of the magma through the wall.
2.5) Heat seems to transfer further horizontally that in z levels. Is this simply because each floor and each wall counts as a layer to pass heat through? Or some other reason?
3) If no hard limit, then can the radius be changed in any way? E.g. by changing the specific heat of unmined rock or the underground contributing temperature, or whatever? Or can we not do anything to unmined rock properties. I am not optimistic. Doing a search in the raws folder shows results for things like fat's melting point, but not for, say, underground temperature, making me assume it is hard coded.
4) Do things heat up outdoors even if they aren't touching any hot tiles? Like if you build a constructed floor of nethercap in a boiling hot atmosphere, and stand on it, would you be A-OK?
5) Are tiles "exposed to light/surface" the temperature of the biome?
6) Does fire spread heat in any special way? Or does it essentially just temporarily make the temperature of the burning object higher and then heat transfers as normal? I.e., is there a difference between a burning object versus a fixed-temperature material at a standard burning temperature?
7) Can HOMEOTHERM be used on inanimate objects? Easy to answer, haven't gotten around to it yet. It would be like nether cap, but less absolute. Merely "preferring/tending toward" that temperature.
Even if you can't change the "weight" on homeothermal strength, I would still like to know what that weight IS. In order to be able to calculate where the equilibrium point is for a given homeothermal temperature and environmental temperature combination. This could be figured out through painstaking research.
8 ) Is there any way to CONDENSE a gas into a liquid or solid? Similar to how a glob of molten rock will recondense back into the rock boulder type (actually, I'm not 100% sure I remember seeing that happen either. It does happen with metals though yes?)
10) Speaking of which, what determines whether a material melts into a glob, versus melting into a contaminant like the water that comes from an ice boulder?
11) Do contaminants transfer heat? Like the blood of a super hot clown sprayed on the wall?