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[Urist McGoombaBrother]

Short summary as title says, devices to actively influence temperatures, lets call them air conditioners for now, would be awesome. Within the following lines, I would like to share my idea in little more detail:


How do they work?

By simple installation of Air Conditioners. Each of them has to be connected to power Supply same way as e.g. Millstones. Depending on where these Air Conditioners will be placed and to which hot/cold temperature they will be setted, the use of heat/freezing resistant materials should be necessary for construction. Or things won't work properly possibly leading to "Fun".

Each Air Conditioner covers a specific area, with it's impact decreasing over distance, e.g.

100 % impact: Within one or two tiles of device
75 % impact: Within three to four tiles
50 % impact: Within five to six tiles
25 % impact: Within seven to eight tiles
no impact: nine tiles or more of the device

Maybe even include two operation modi. Standard and Light, with the second cutting the impact range, but also the energy costs of Air Conditioner in half. Light Mode can be useful, when you only want to cover small areas. Each air conditioner needs an included thermostat allowing to enter the desired temperature (similar as indicating the weight of pressure plates). Of course the cooler or hotter you turn the temperatures and the higher the difference to the temperatures of the area it stands in, the more power it requires. Also it should be possible to connect the air Conditioners to a lever e.g. outside the Chambers to turn it on and off without having to enter the area. The temperature changes shouldn't be caused in an instant, but little by little over time. E.g. 8 Urist Degree per day for tiles covered with 100 per cent impact, 6 per day for tiles covered with 75 per cent impact, etc. So that it might take a while till you reach the desired temperatures.

Basic size of an air conditioner is 1x1. Construction of bigger ones should be possible, increasing the distance they cover by one for each device. E.g. an air conditioner of size 1x2 will deliver full impact over a distance of three tiles, 75 per-cent impact within four to five tiles, etc. Also bigger devices will influence the temperature faster (e.g. +2 degrees per day and additional device for tiles covered with 100 % impact, 1.5 degrees for 75%, etc.). Of course an air-conditioner of size 1x2 will use twice as much, one of size 1x3 will use three times as much energy as a single-tiled one.

Not sure, if it is entirely clear, how I mean the above. When there is interest I will draw some basic sketches and post them later on.


Uses of Freezing Chambers:

1) Can be used for Defense. Impact according to how cold it is inside this chamber and the affinity of the creatures inside.

Cool temperatures: Normal temperatured Creatures like Dwarfes, Goblins and Pets won't be effected. Creatures made of flame/fire will severe small penalties. Small Bonus to icy creatures.

Very Cool temperatures: Normal temperatured Creatures will severe medium penalties, Creatures made of flame/fire will severe high penalties, medium bonus to icy creatures

Extremly cool temperatures: Normal temperatured Creatures will severe high penalties, Creatures made of flame/fire won't be able to pass it. Icy Creatures get big bonuses.

Hell freezing temperatures: No one except creatures out of ice will be able to pass it, which become basically invulnerable in there. Everything entering the area e.g. by dropping from a ledge above will instantly freeze into solid blocks of ice (except icy creatures of course).

2) Improved Storage area for food and other perishable goods. Currently food lasts pretty much forever as long as stored in a stockpile. IMHO better and much more realistic will be, when food lasts the longer the cooler the room it is stored in.

3) Agriculture: E.g. Certain crops and/or farm animals need lower temperatures as standard to prosper

4) Source of ice or other frozen liquids: Supply your freezing chambers with water of an underground river for nearly infinite supply of icy blocks. Simply imagine the construction of a fortress completely made of ice in a hot sandy desert. Or even cooler, frozen booze. And super cool, instantly frozen magma. Will also be nice when furniture, statues or other things could be made out of those materials. Or a garden full of instantly frozen creatures within ice blocks.



The opposite way round - Heating Chambers:

1) Again defense purpose: The same way as above indicated at freezing chamber, only the opposite way round for icy and flame/fire creatures

2) Also here Agriculture: Certain crops and/or farm animals need higher temperatures as standard to prosper

3) Quickly drain ponds. Install some Air Conditioners close to it, turn up the heat and evaporate the water.

4) Create pools of liquid metal. Dispose the Undead or garbage in a pool of liquid Gold, Steel or any other meltable material. Will be especially useful when the only magma source is about 150 to 200 levels below surface. The Flow of Liquid stone and metal could possibly behave the same as of Magma. Also high enough tempered pools of Liquid Stone/Metal could be an alternative energy source for Magma Forges.



Last but not least - Create Oasis of Standard Temperatured Areas in otherwise hostile biomes e.g. on top of a Glacier. Make Project Genesis of the Star-Trek Universe become true.



Of course many other things, I am currently not thinking of, could be possible with this. And also lot's of possibilities of "fun" are included, when not handling those Air Conditioners carefully. E.g. turning the temperatures to high will set flamable materials onto fire, when exposed to heaten up areas. Melting too much ice too quickly could flood your fortress. Etc.


Thx for reading. I hope, you like my idea. :-)


edit: After writing down, the whole thingy, I noticed that according to the wiki already some tokens for heat and frost damage exist. Maybe these can be applied to creatures too and used for the above mentioned process of calculating the penalty or bonus they severe in different tempered areas?

"[HEATDAM_POINT:#] — This is the temperature above which the material will begin to take heat damage. Burning items without a heat damage point (or with an exceptionally high one) will take damage very slowly, causing them to burn for a very long time (9 months and 16.8 days) before disappearing.
[COLDDAM_POINT:#] — This is the temperature below which the material will begin to take frost damage."

Source: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Temperature

[MDFification]

While this is interesting, air conditioners don't really fit with the roughly 14th century tech-level Toady's decided to use. I'd personally prefer if we used more advanced tech in-game, but I guess that's what mods are for.

That axes the air conditioner, although your could have ice lower the temperature in surrounding tiles while melting. After enough ice is stored in a defined space, if you keep adding in ice and add an airlock or two to stop temperature from returning to normal when the doors are opened you could lower the temperature of the area to the point that water will freeze upon entry.

Heating rooms would be nice - although rather than a mechanism it'd probably be better if you needed to have fire/magma in a room below the room you're trying to heat, just like a Roman Bathhouse. A big furnace you keep shovelling fuel into could also be used to heat a room, and there's no reason not to incorporate both - the prior is just closer to current game mechanics, where you can melt ice by flooding a room below the ice with magma. Speaking of which, you could make a distinction between stone and metal floors/ceilings between the heat source and the room in question to alternate the amount of heat transferred. For example; (Magma Safe?) stone floors/ceiling = melt ice. (Magma Safe?) metal floors/ceiling = the room above has a temperature roughly equivalent to that of the heat source below - living creatures that enter it die, the appropriate metals melt, etc.

All of this is kind of related to having building material properties actually matter - for the system described to be implemented, you'd probably first have to ensure that magma touching a non magma-safe construction melts that construction, or that ice constructions/boulders actually melt at room temperature, etc.

[FrankMcFuzz]

Heating rooms would be nice - although rather than a mechanism it'd probably be better if you needed to have fire/magma in a room below the room you're trying to heat, just like a Roman Bathhouse. A big furnace you keep shovelling fuel into could also be used to heat a room, and there's no reason not to incorporate both - the prior is just closer to current game mechanics, where you can melt ice by flooding a room below the ice with magma. Speaking of which, you could make a distinction between stone and metal floors/ceilings between the heat source and the room in question to alternate the amount of heat transferred. For example; (Magma Safe?) stone floors/ceiling = melt ice. (Magma Safe?) metal floors/ceiling = the room above has a temperature roughly equivalent to that of the heat source below - living creatures that enter it die, the appropriate metals melt, etc.

You could just do a fireplace that creates steam; creating the need then to make chimneys (which are cool jutting out of a mountain), which could just work by throwing in excess wood (wood blocks, maybe?) or charcoal, similar to the steam game Banished, you just specify a stockpile for "Fuel" or similar. That's when cold temperatures actually become bothersome to dwarves. Which is a while off.

That's just for housing though, and it fits with the setting (also it's decidedly human), but magma is obviously more dwarven!

[gtaguy]

Heater: High speed grinder, a large quern spinning very fast. Friction creates massive amounts of heat. Powered via axles and such. Heat output depends on power going into quern.

Cooler: Ice.

Theoretically this could work, human traders could carry ice blocks.

[GavJ]

Allegedly vinegar + washing soda (NOT baking soda!) is an endothermic reaction. One comes from fermenting, one comes from burning salty plants (like kelp), both available medievally. I've never actually done this though. KCl and water are also endothermic. Potash contains more or less KCl or washing soda, depending on what you burnt, and stuff. Some mines have pure native KCl. I don't know how common this was in the medieval era.

Still... we are talking something along the lines of several pounds of chemicals + a gallon of water getting maybe a few degrees Celsius colder. And the water is then saturated... I wouldn't exactly be quaking in my boots as a goblin.

A fan and a large tray of water (a "swamp fan" in modern parlance) also cools with dwarven level technology, due to evaporation being endothermic. But it is limited to pleasant, refreshing breezes, not freezing traps of death.

Ice is also rather unlikely to kill anything, since you'd have to go to superhuman efforts to use ice to actually freeze new water, and getting a chamber from room temp to ice would take forever. And ice cold isn't that damaging to tissue in any short period of time (esp. enemies wearing clothes or very large in size)




I think your best bet would be nethercap-related shenanigans, if it were fixed to actually interact with the environment like the text in the game suggests unlike now (the preference string "___ likes nethercap for their coldness to the touch" necessitates that they actually interact with surrounding temperatures, not just maintaining a fixed temp. Otherwise they would always feel like room temperature to your fingers). Seems like a bug to me.

Think of something like this, but "cold gases" instead, and the blue being a drilled block of nethercap. Totally impractical design with ice, but quite reasonable with nethercap:

Due to being infinitely heat sinking, this would cool air probably dramatically faster than any modern air conditioner with the tiniest holes dwarves could drill. Just from a single rickety clockwork fan, some pipes, and a block of the wood. And unlike ice wouldn't melt into nothing in 5 seconds if you built it, but rather last forever.

It still only gets you down to ice cold, but does so very quickly.

[GavJ]

Or, if you're of the mindset of "what could the dwarves physically build reasonably easily in a year or so on the site of a fortress, if we pretend they had modern knowledge?" then they could probably easily manufacture dry ice, maybe even liquid nitrogen.

1) Make a very strong compressor (just a reverse steam engine basically with some one way valves added) -- they have steel and they seem to be able to work it intricately, so this is quite doable.
2) Seal the valves with high pressure gaskets -- more critical in high pressure compressors than boilers. However, rubber is fairly easy to obtain low tech from trees, vulcanization is low tech if you know about it, and we happen to have a supernaturally helpful material available to add for complete heatproof and strengthening - adamantine threads! it's like asbestos on crack ^1,000,000 (we also have actual asbestos - serpentine mineral)
3) Get some CO2 (readily available from the brewer's still), and compress it a whole bunch, until it liquefies. Let it cool off or help it by passing water over the pipes it is in.
4) Now you have room temperature liquid CO2. When goblins arrive, spray it through a nozzle at their faces and you now have conveniently freeze-dried goblin jerky.

But dwarves could surely do much sillier things if they actually had modern knowledge, even in a year with just a wagon. So probably don't wanna go down that road.

[Waparius]

Heating via fireplaces, braziers and as a byproduct of certain workshops (kitchens and furnaces in particular) would be great. Central heating with pipes and furnacework would be fine too - the Romans had it so it's prior to the 1400s cut-off - and magma or other geothermal methods would certainly be dwarfy.

The cooling methods I could see working would be ice-cutting, nether-cap constructions and evaporative tricks like fountains and the evaporation pools used in Indian architecture.

 Mechanisms for doing so should be indirect though. Pipes can direct air/water, certain materials can cool or heat air/water/the surroundings, certain workshops can heat their surroundings as well. More direct stuff is both less interesting and less likely to get through the cut-off.

[Urist McGoombaBrother]

Thx for all the feedback and your interest in that topic. :-)

That axes the air conditioner, although your could have ice lower the temperature in surrounding tiles while melting. After enough ice is stored in a defined space, if you keep adding in ice and add an airlock or two to stop temperature from returning to normal when the doors are opened you could lower the temperature of the area to the point that water will freeze upon entry.

Using ice to cool rooms sounds like an interesting idea. But it leaves up following questions:

1) How to get ice in first place? Many biomes don't feature any. Even when traders somehow manage to transport it through areas with warm/hot climate, how to avoid it melting as soon as unloading the goods? Similar happens when mining out ice below a frozen brook. Turns into puddles of water immediately.

2) How far can you cool down with ice? Freezing temperature of Ice is at 10000°U. Underground Glacier Ice Temperature is at 9990°U. Standard temperature underground is 10015°U. There's not much difference. when you want to freeze alcohol, you need 9850°U acccording to the wiki. Any chance to achive that with ice-cooling method?

I think your best bet would be nethercap-related shenanigans

Due to being infinitely heat sinking, this would cool air probably dramatically faster than any modern air conditioner with the tiniest holes dwarves could drill. Just from a single rickety clockwork fan, some pipes, and a block of the wood. And unlike ice wouldn't melt into nothing in 5 seconds if you built it, but rather last forever.

It still only gets you down to ice cold, but does so very quickly.

Looks cool. Seems like the game needs one more material with basic temperature way beyond those 10000°U (or simply amending Nethercaps?). Then also a lot cooler temperatures could be featured by this. Just needs something to regulate, the temperature output. Probably also requiring a power-connection, using up more energy, the more you want to influence the temperature.

Mechanisms for doing so should be indirect though. Pipes can direct air/water, certain materials can cool or heat air/water/the surroundings, certain workshops can heat their surroundings as well. More direct stuff is both less interesting and less likely to get through the cut-off.

Construction of Pipes for redirecting the heat/cooling to whereever you need it specifically would be awesome. Might probably need some temperature-flow-system in place to work correctly? Anybody knows if there exists already one, which could be used? Or if temperature is currently calculated in a more simple way, e.g. magma temp is 12000°U, each tile adjacent to it is 10085°U, other tiles underground are 10015°U, etc.?

What do you mean by cut-off? When this is some sort of official idea-evaluation process, how to qualify an idea for it?

[Sizik]

What do you mean by cut-off? When this is some sort of official idea-evaluation process, how to qualify an idea for it?

Toady's general guideline for features is that, since this is a fantasy/medieval-themed game, anything invented after the year 1400 is too modern/anachronistic.

[Larix]

2) How far can you cool down with ice? Freezing temperature of Ice is at 10000°U.

With ice alone, you can't get significantly lower, because as soon as the temperature gets lower, the ice will stop melting and absorbing warmth. (Melting is an endothermic process, so ice does consume heat while melting. Depending on circumstances, you _could_ still experience a small amount of cooling from sublimation.) However, you can depress the melting point by adding salts. NaCl (table salt/rock salt) is among the most efficient agents, allowing to reach temperatures well below -10°C just by mixing ice with salt in your own kitchen. For reference, here's a little list:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooling_baths . As you can see, NaCl is in a pretty good position there, lower temperatures would require CaCl, which afaik would be somewhat out of reach for DF's technology standard, or liquefied/solidified gasses, which woud _definitely_ be out of reach.

And as long as you don't have any ice to begin with, there's not much hope of getting freezing chambers built. Evaporation of liquid water can soak up a pretty decent amount of heat (that's the main purpose of sweat), but can't really get you down to freezing.

I think your best bet would be nethercap-related shenanigans

Due to being infinitely heat sinking, this would cool air probably dramatically faster than any modern air conditioner with the tiniest holes dwarves could drill. Just from a single rickety clockwork fan, some pipes, and a block of the wood. And unlike ice wouldn't melt into nothing in 5 seconds if you built it, but rather last forever.

It still only gets you down to ice cold, but does so very quickly.

I have my doubts about that claim - nethercap is supposed to keep _itself_ at 0°C; the cooling of matter in contact with it should be just the effect of heat transfer towards the nethercap wood (which is then magically diverted into the magma sea). And since the heat capacity of wood is very low and those of gasses (including air) _really_ low, i wouldn't expect any speedy changes of temperature. Assuming you're starting with air that's less than ~50°C (enough to melt a dwarf, eventually); with really big temperature differences like in steam kettles, heat exchange can be fairly fast, although i think heat radiation accounts for quite a bit of that, and radiation's a rather minor factor in cooling machinery.

[GavJ]

Nah, since nethercap is absolutely, instantly, completely kept at that temperature, none of that stuff is a major concern. Under those conditions, specific heats can be overcome no matter what they are to achieve whatever cooling rate you want, by sufficiently increasing surface area alone. I.e., given small enough and numerous enough holes, and if necessary, a handful of tiles of nethercap instead of one *shrug.*

[MDFification]

The ice thing was trying to base the dwarven refrigerator off of the historical ice-house, which essentially was just an underground chamber filled with ice.

Have read more in the OP; if food is made to rot at an accelerated pace unless refrigerated, other measures such as smoking, salting, drying or storing in a jar full of lye should also be implemented.
Noting that food also rots slower underground (no sunlight, less oxygen etc) we already have one of the basic food-preservation methods in game.

[Ramaraunt]

Coolant fluid would be cool in my opinion. You could pump it around like water, and use it carefully to lower the temperature of a room.

[gtaguy]

Yes but you all forget the most important question in an intricate fortress?

Hpw will this affect FPS?
Having inconsistent and changing temperatures everywhere would result in a massive drop of FPS.

[MDFification]

Yes but you all forget the most important question in an intricate fortress?

Hpw will this affect FPS?
Having inconsistent and changing temperatures everywhere would result in a massive drop of FPS.

You can turn temperature off in the raws already. And temperatures changing does already happen based on proximity to magma, fire etc. Adding two more sources of temperature change wouldn't be all that bad.
The real issue would be for Toady to fix the bug that makes temperatures fluxuate wildly instead of settling into equilibrium with items. That's the main temperature-related source of FPS drain right now if you're not running a pumpstack.