Rimworld Temperature Mechanics Tested (Vanilla Patch A15c)

[podium86]

To help players design better bases for centrally heated/cooled bases and/or freezer designs

Tested 11 Room Styles for cooling efficiency :

"Room Size 5x5"
Ambient Temperature 15
Cooler set to max negative temp -270

Primary Findings :
1) 1 Tier Wall Temperature Differential = 40 degrees approx
2) 2 Tier Walls Temperature Differential = 50 degrees approx
3) 3 Tier Walls are a waste of time, similar to 2 Walls
4) Air locks do help maintain more efficient cooling especially if pawns are entering/exiting
5) Exploit Trick of cooling 1 square room and venting to freezer room works

Misc Findings:
1) Wall insulates better than a door
2) Doors Count as a separate room
3) Gaps Between triple doors count as 2 separate rooms
4) Temperature calculations seem to ignore diagonals, *see bottom right most corner
5) "Air locks" don't matter in size if no one is entering or leaving

Please pardon me if i have missed anything. Or suggest a different layout to test.

[attachment deleted by admin - too old]

[MikeLemmer]

Nice job.

I would suggest testing out a 5x5 room with the corners cut off (similar to the room just above the stockpile in the picture) to see if that changes the room's temp at all.

[sadpickle]

Impressive! I notice the upper-left design looks to be highly inefficient, because the "pocket" around the cooler is getting heated by the freezer exhaust. What happens if you put a freezer in the outer wall? More or less stable than the triple-wall coolers in the lower right?

[ThiIsMe007]

This is going to be useful.

If you had the intention to push your tests a little bit further, I would be interested in knowing how many coolers are needed / size of the room to cool, and if the geometry of the room (a square, an "L" shape, etc.) matters all that much.

In any case, thank you for your testing this far.

[brcruchairman]

+1

You rock, Podium. This is an excellent experiment to find empirical evidence for insulation. Now I know to always use two-tiered walls. That's also very good information regarding air locks. Thank you again for this good guide.

[carbon]

I did my own temperature testing in 15b analogous to the above (but with heaters) to test a few more things. Figured out that:

1) Wall material is irrelevant

2) Wedging one of the two airlock doors open behaves almost identically to having only one door, but if you still want to do it (for movement speed), leave the inner door closed
(at least for small airlocks under static conditions)

3) Colonists don't produce heat
(had a spontaneous large party during testing)

4) Autodoors conduct the same as unpowered doors
(static conditions)

[Franklin]

I really hope Tynan fixes the vents.  I feel like they've never worked like they should.

[zandadoum]

posting to keep track of this one

edit: game certainly needs some fixes on temperature, when the 2nd cooler achieves -70 with barely any effort

[alxddd]

I did my own temperature testing in 15b analogous to the above (but with heaters) to test a few more things. Figured out that:

1) Wall material is irrelevant

would love to see if cave walls are any different than structures. thanks for the great testing!

[Mehni]

alxddd, they do not.

See this thread on reddit for proof. https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/52980c/the_thermodynamics_of_rimworld/

It also shows that a room with the corners cut off is equal to a room with corners in terms of temperature (MikeLemmers question), but I would say that the bottom right corner in OPs image already proved that.

[deepSeaKing]

posting to keep track of this one

edit: game certainly needs some fixes on temperature, when the 2nd cooler achieves -70 with barely any effort

you have to keep in mind that the cooler is set to -270C, and the outcome is only -70 much lesser from target so i don't think it's a less of a effort. 

[zandadoum]

posting to keep track of this one

edit: game certainly needs some fixes on temperature, when the 2nd cooler achieves -70 with barely any effort

you have to keep in mind that the cooler is set to -270C, and the outcome is only -70 much lesser from target so i don't think it's a less of a effort.

All coolers in the example are set to -270 which is "unrealistic" anyways unless you have liquid nitrogen.
But of all coolers set to -whatever- this one achieves the biggest difference. And I actually tested it in my colony and was able to cool 3 extremely huge freezers with this setup using only 1 cooler, where I normally would have needed 6.

[deepSeaKing]

hmmm i understand its unrealistic, but also kind of cool. actually i'm using the similar setup like the upper left even before i'have seen this post and i was able to reach -270c just 3c more than to reach absolute zero using 35 cooler. now i think i can reach absolute zero with just 10 cooler or less.

Edit: it will be cool if Dev implement liquid nitrogen cooler in game.

[SpaceDorf]

I did my own temperature testing in 15b analogous to the above (but with heaters) to test a few more things. Figured out that:

4) Autodoors conduct the same as unpowered doors
(static conditions)

Even though they should open/close faster ? So less conducting time ?
I always used autodoors in my climate controlled rooms because of that logic

[Zhentar]

Opening/closing aren't "static conditions". The amount of time that the door is open does matter.