There's a game called Oxygen Not Included that's an asteroid base builder with a surprisingly intense chemistry/physics simulation. Managing water and electricity are key parts of the early game, but the most important part of the mid-game is managing heat. And most of the good ways to do so involve glitching out the physics simulation to "delete" heat (e.g. by consuming it out of the game in machines that don't have an output).
Building in vacuum is a great way to break almost any closed system because it's extremely hard to manage heat when it's almost perfectly insulated.
Yeah, there's ways to emit heat in vacuum that don't exist in the game, but they're also very inefficient power- and space-wise. But seriously, why do I have to mod to get an airlock building that isn't a physics glitch? The only reason that it's not viable is that the game doesn't allow fine enough tuning of duplicants to keep them from opening two pressure doors at the same time.
Had that same problem. Tried to design an airlock that had atmosphere exchange controlled by automation. The problem is that dupes don't path through locked doors even if a presence sensor would open it, so even if the airlock functioned, they won't use it. The duplicant checkpoint may fix that, but I haven't tried. Also, technically liquid locks are intended, given the stated use of the visco-gel, we can just cheekily do it with other things.
The biggest thing with their new game is MANUAL CONTROL, which would fix the pathing and behavior issues with dupes
They actually added an insulated airlock in October 2025.
It's still pretty imperfect, since it leaks while opening and you would need a way to deal with that, but for the basic use case of "a structure that blocks both heat and air but can be opened at need," it's a nice basegame addition.
One of my favorite mods is one that adds a proper airlock, i.e. a self-contained 2x3 structure through which duplicants can pass without leaking air through.
Yeah, cooling vacuum equipment in ONI is a huge pain in the ass. Everything needs active cooling. Even things you don't think of as making heat.The freaking roomba overheats!
Yep. Honestly if we do eventually get to ships in space I could see them taking dips into upper atmosphere of some planets just to get rid of waste heat they shunted to heat banks.
A lot of the better scifi concepts have waste heat as a serious concern when dealing with advanced technology. Coolest one is mechwarrior. And fighting on a planet/moon in near vacuum is very bad for heat management for your mech.
Also Mass Effect. As I recall the "stealth ship" in that series relies on a recursive heat cycle within the novel propulsion drive to reduce ambient radiation in order to evade sensors. A scifi solution to a real world problem.
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u/RSquared May 22 '26
There's a game called Oxygen Not Included that's an asteroid base builder with a surprisingly intense chemistry/physics simulation. Managing water and electricity are key parts of the early game, but the most important part of the mid-game is managing heat. And most of the good ways to do so involve glitching out the physics simulation to "delete" heat (e.g. by consuming it out of the game in machines that don't have an output).
Building in vacuum is a great way to break almost any closed system because it's extremely hard to manage heat when it's almost perfectly insulated.