Now that our temperature is mostly under control, finding a renewable source of water is paramount. Water is consumed by most crops, its used by your super computer and your oxygen production. Water is the lifeblood of your colony (despite dupes not needing to drink it). SHC is less important with our current goal of insulating, but later in the game when we want to look at storing and moving heat energy, using materials with a high SHC that are able to store lots of energy will become more important.
SHC is the size of the bucket, it is how much energy it takes to fill up. TC is the size of the hose filling the bucket, it controls how much energy is poured in to the material. You can think of each tile kind of like a bucket and water as heat energy. We’ll take this opportunity to introduce you to the other dominate metric for temperature control and that’s “Specific Heat Capacity” (SHC). The pan is removing heat faster from your finger than the carpet and so it feels colder to your brain, even though the two things are the exact same temperature. In real life, Thermal Conductivity is why a pan (made of metal) and carpet (made of fibers) can both be at room temperature but the pan will feel colder to you. We will often be pursuing to build with either extremely high TC to transmit heat quickly, or as we are now, with a low TC to prevent transfer. TC will become an important factor in later, more complex builds. You can browse the Oni Material Database for other building materials with lower and higher TCs than Sandstone. Building insulation will always result in a tile with 100 times smaller TC of the material you build it with. This is 100 times smaller than the TC of the base material sandstone. You can see we’ve selected one of the Insulated Tiles and it shoes a “Thermal Conductivity” (TC) of 0.029. In the image below from the starter guide you can see that some of my Mealwood aren’t growing because they are too cold. If your crops can’t grow because they’re too hot/cold, or dupes get injured and stress out through temperature then things can collapse suddenly. Temperature is a hidden killer in Oxygen Not Included. These are only the overarching goals, we will need to address plenty of smaller topics as we progress. We will be addressing these weaknesses loosely in this order, but we will usually be able to work on more than one at a time. Our oxygen production is relying on Algae that will eventually run out.We are relying on a finite source of fresh water.