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Answered

Has oxygen production rate been changed?

Mr. Fusion 7 years ago updated by Tyler Owen (Lead Developer) 7 years ago 6

I seem to be getting considerably less oxygen in 0.59 / 0.59.1 than in the previous versions, so much so that I'm slowly running out of oxygen even though the reoxygenator is running constantly, while in previous versions I have always been bulding up a healthy excess over time, and I'm doing things in the exact same manner / pattern than before so my oxygen usage should be about the same.


I have a suspicion that oxygen production may be stopping completely while the player is not "near" the habitat; maybe outside of terrain load/unload range? Can't think of any other reason why I'm getting much less oxygen than before as when I'm in/around the Hab, it seems to be producing about 6L / hour, and if it continued to do that while I'm away on a 35-40 hours long exploration trip, I should be seeing quite a lot in reserve once I'm back, but it's actually not even enough to refill the canisters I used up while away.

Under review

Just have to check a few things to rule out other possibilities.


  1. Did you check that your oxygen tanks are not broken?
  2. Were you on EVA at night? Production of all exterior modules is reduced at night to reduce the electricity consumption.
  3. Was there water available to provide for the production of oxygen?

There should be nothing in the code that would require you to be near the hab in order for it to produce oxygen. If that were the case all the other modules should be exhibiting this problem since they are all treated very similarly in the code.

Oxygen tanks are fine, I have two installed at the moment, and I'm not losing producion due to the capacity being filled up and the excess being lost as that never happened in 0.59 so far, while it did occasionally before, eventually even when I had 4 tanks installed.


During long distance EVAs, there are almost 2 full daylight cycles before I get back; I head out before dawn and get back late afternoon on the next day, so the hab has time to work without any consumption, even taking the reduced rate at night into account.


Water reserves are always (near) capped, I occasionally turn the water reclaimer off to save power, but not longer than a day.


Actually, if I take the 6L / hour day time production rate, not knowing exactly how much is produced at night, that would mean maybe about 150-160L produced in close to two days. During the same time, I use up about 3-4 canisters on EVA, so that's also 150-200L, which means that the current production rate is in fact not enough, or rather, it is just barely enough. Previously, there was a notable excess; I'm pretty sure of that since as my previous games have progressed, I gradually had to add more tanks to the reoxygenator to avoid it becoming capped while I'm away and I also filled and stored plenty of canisters with the excess on top of that. But if the rate was not changed, and production happens when it should, I have no idea where the excess did come from before and why it doesn't appear to be there anymore.

So you are saying that the amount produced is not enough to refill your empty canisters? Could this be because previously you were filling the canisters with the bug that allowed you to fill them even if there was not enough oxygen in the reserve tanks to do so? Otherwise, you are not running a deficit of oxygen correct? If you only used your suit's supply and refilled that for EVAs you should always be able to refill it with the reserves from the hab and never run a deficit. So then I think we are just discussing what amount above that seems reasonable for filling the consumable canisters to extend your EVAs.

I totally forgot that oxygen production is supposed to be impacted by the filters and hoses installed as well. And actually, in the process of reviewing this I discovered that hoses currently are not impacting the production rate at all, even though they are supposed to. So basically, carbon filters are disproportionately impacting oxygen (and water) production. Having broken (dirty) filters pretty drastically reduces your output. I will be fixing this so that hoses also impact production, but both together should be less impactful than filters alone are currently. Hopefully that is your problem and it is not some other more serious bug.

I'm starting to think that it's indeed only due to a number of unfortunate concidences, and not some fundamental and unintended change.


One factor is that I just recently (a few days ago) filled all filter and hose slots, and until then I was running with only the minimum required. So prior to that point, I was getting less than I'm getting now, so I was effectively losing oxygen over time during that period due to lower than "nominal" production rate.


And another is that I appear to have been very unlucky with resource cache location and content randomization in my current game. I've explored maybe 2/5th of the map (roughly the Northern half) so far and I've hardly found anything. 5, maybe 6 white locations (including the escape pod, which doesn't really count) and about the same amount of blues, most of them containing only components and materials, but hardly any consumables (I'm actually starting to get low on food too, that's what made me start thinking in this direction). Normally I find filled canisters at least every other trip, which contributes significantly to maintain oxygen reserves (as such trips sort of pay for themselves in terms of oxygen use), while this time I think I found maybe 6 total (2 x 3) out of at least 6-7 trips, so compared to what I got used to seeing in previous games (there was one where almost every other white site was a Remote Outpost, which always has 3 canisters each), this time I'm missing at least 150-300L coming in in the form of pre-filled canisters.

Answered

Okay. I'm going to mark this as answered for now, but there very well could be something else funny that I'm not seeing in the code right now (like the hoses not contributing to production impact). We'll keep an eye on it.