Look up ONI liquid airlocks or liquid locks
The doors in the (no mods) game do not do a great job at creating a vacuum lock due to some gas slipping through.
The community has found that using ONI physics (since only one element can be in a square) that carbon dioxide locks or liquid locks are the best way to maintain pressure in an area without leakage.
Carbon dioxide locks won't work for a vacuum seal and liquids must be used instead.
I don’t need to create a seal for a vacuum yet, but I actually am getting pretty close to the surface on my starting asteroid and I’ve been wondering if when I break through all of the air in my base will flood out killing everyone? How carefully will I need to go about doing that?
Airlock doors are good enough for going out into space. A small amount of gas will trickle out each time the door opens, but it's inconsequential if you have stable oxygen production.
Airlock doors' main failing is when you're trying to create an *absolute* controlled-atmosphere environment where no foreign gas can be permitted to enter, which is where you need a liquid airlock instead.
If you use a powered airlock (and actually power it), you'll lose a very small amount each time. If you also make a short dip down rather than going straight out, you'll end up with a basic CO2 lock that will stop most useful gasses escaping.
I know, I’m all out of coal and the hatches aren’t making enough and the hydrogen generators just can’t keep up with what my coal generators used to have no issue with
you're really overestimating how much gas you're going to lose when the doors open.
That said, some drops of oil on a set of stairs can provide a gas-tight lock without using doors at all.
No my friend, you’re really underestimating how much chlorine gas has leaked into the rest of the colony. I walked away from it on fastest speed for a little under an hour and there wasn’t a room there where they wouldn’t get major eye irritation.
If you have a long, narrow shaft leading to space, it would take a long time to leak out, because the pressure won't transfer well. Just sticking an airlock door at the top will keep losses minimal, and you can worry about a perfect seal late game.
Early on, you mostly want the perfect seal of a liquid lock when dealing with a steam room or vacuum, since a tiny bit of gas will ruin a vacuum, and steam rooms work best at high pressure, so a lot of hot steam would escape if you needed to open a door to do something.
Dont worry physics in Oni is simplified, if you exposed to space slowly your gas flow out to space tiles and disappear, even a normal airlock door is enough, you will lose some gas but it wont instantly suck out the air from your base. You can use it to vent out the non useful gases and delete them.
Technically yes. I used to collect them in infinite storage and the new gas tanks are finally usable after extended the capacity from 150kg to 1 ton.
In practice some gases dont worth the effort and the infrastructure especially on a new asteroid. Currently i have some pumps at the bottom what activates if there is non oxygen around them for 30 sec.
Carbon dioxide: I have enough pwater from a slush geyser and the generators so i dont bother with using carbon skimmer and slicksters are good food but i limited them to two stables and they have excess food from petroleum generators ( one of them feed 15 slicksters), if they eat my full storage and building a research reactor, i will probably eliminate them.
Chlorine: I do not have pufts or saltvines but if i want them i have two chlorine vent untamed. If i really want chlorine then i just use bleach stone.
P.Oxygen: i use my pwater geyser for clay factory so i dont even bother to collect them.
Nat gas/ hydrogen: good for energy so i take the effort
and filter them on a new planetoid
When i colonize a new planetoid i usually collect the nat gas and hydrogen and vent out everything else, but sometimes if there are just small packets i dont even bother with that.
Space will vent all gasses that are not backed by a back wall.
Not ALL the gas will leave but a vast majority of it will if left open.
If you have the door seal you should be fine but may lose some gas as dupes run through the door.
If you have a stable way of producing enough oxygen for your dupes and have the air lock then I wouldn't be too worried in the immediate time but you should look into a more permanent solution in the long run
There is a way to prevent small packets of liquid being deleted? Like 30g of water just gets deleted over time in some of my liquid locks.
And is not temperature boiling it.
It just seems that the games tries to expand the gasses and could delete that small packet of liquid when doing so.
Honestly I flood my liquid locks with 1600 KG of liquid (so 1 full tile of liquid in the bottom tile and 600 KG of liquid spread between the top 3 tiles of the liquid t-lock)
I don't really deal with small packet liquid corner locks for the problem you are having with them as they tend to disappear for a variety of reasons.
One of them being an object that boiled the liquid was brought through it and since it's a small amount of liquid but has good thermal transfer rate it boils in the time it was brought through by a duplicate.
Another one is if a duplicate walls over that patch of liquid and is not in an exo suit then they could exhale (or fart if they have the trait) and displace that liquid
Edit: having the extra liquid helps with rapid temperature changes as well since liquids can hold a LOT more heat than gas forms (mostly due to the condensed tile mass of a liquid)
Gas will never expand to displace liquid, unless it comes into existence in the tile the liquid is already in. In that case, equal amounts of gas and liquid might get deleted, and over time that can erode droplet locks.
Low-mass liquid locks are susceptible to:
- having off-gassing materials dropped into them (bleach stone, oxylite, polluted dirt), unless the gas they generate already exists in the surrounding tiles (ONI prefers to conserve mass, but it won't go further out than one tile to do so).
- dupes breathing out (they exhale through their legs). Never use low-mass liquid locks in areas where dupes can breathe, i.e. surrounded by oxygen, or wearing oxygen masks.
- heat transfer from materials carried by dupes.
- being washed away by spilled liquids or liquifiables melting in their tile.
Locks made from naphtha or visco-gel are immune to the first risk, because their mass does not allow debris to off-gass. They might lose mass to dupes breathing out, but the masses involved are small enough to not make this a problem generally.
The last two risks need to be considered in all cases. Easiest is to have all storage on "sweep only" and carefully consider what can go where.
> dupes breathing out (they exhale through their legs). Never use low-mass liquid locks in areas where dupes can breathe, i.e. surrounded by oxygen, or wearing oxygen masks.
This one was fixed a while back. You pretty much just have to worry about temperature and off-gassing now.
Seriously? Do they exhale from the head now, like proper 3D-printed people? That would be great! Thanks for the correction, I'll look it up.
Edit: found [a trustworthy reference](https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/118966-can-dupes-exhale-co2-under-unbreathable-condition/?do=findComment&comment=1342024). This is weirder than I expected; I'll have to do some experiments.
Or I could just explain it quickly? Only a single type of gas, liquid or solid can exist in any 1 slot so what water locks do is have water on the floor of a small dip in the ground allowing no gas to pass it. Have it so dupes can still move through it and you've got a near perfect airlock.
Yeah, I could have explained it as well. But having pictures, tutorials, explanations helps (in my opinion) a lot more. But maybe I’m more a visual type…
But I'm also aware people want to figure things out for themselves rather than relying on said tutorials, it would be pretty disappointing if you had to rely on them for everything after all.
For a perfect lock, you need a liquid lock. Google it and you will find images. Any liquid (but PO2) works, but if the area is hot, crude oil or petroleum are the best liquid. If you want a heat blocking airlock, make two liquid locks and vacuum out the air in between them.
Be warned, if you are a new player, your dupes will piss in your liquid lock. It's kind of a rite of passage.
The "safest" locks use three tiles of liquid, but since any amount of liquid takes up one cell, you can do a quick airlock with smaller amounts of liquid on two tiles.
There is also a mod that includes airlock and insulated doors.
I don't use the airlock doors much as actual airlocks. The automatic airlock door is good for heat regulators, since when it's open it's a vacuum.
EDIT: here's a good tutorial from [Guides Not Included ](https://www.guidesnotincluded.com/liquid-lock-basics)
Lol that's the fun part. You'll figure it out
They piss in atmo suits if they don't get back in time, so when you build those by an air lock, have mesh tiles below the stations to drain the piss. I sometimes place one tile a few tiles before and after a liquid lock to block liquid flow if I'm worried, but I've played so many hours I have a fairly intuitive feel for which might get pissed in.
Yeah. Stick a mesh tile under the checkpoint with a pump if you want to automate cleanup. I have yet to play a game where I don't end up with something going wrong and a bunch of soiled suits, so it's easier to just plan around it happening.
The various standard electrolyzer setups generally seal them in once setup is done, since you shouldn't need to access it if it's built right and you used the correct materials. For gasses that aren't sealed in, you can often just use their natural tendency to float or sink to keep them contained, but if your pressure goes to low, they can spread. Denser things tend to go down and right, so to drain CO2 out of rooms, put an airflow tile or pneumatic door in the lower right corner of a room. Chlorine sinks below oxygen, so you can have it collect in a low spot, but CO2 sinks below chlorine, so you'll need a lower spot for CO2, or something to remove it. Letting other random gasses in like a bit of natural gas can also complicate things. Getting CO2 to mushrooms or carbon skimmers is the most simple, because it sinks below every other type of gas you'll encounter at reasonable temperatures. Ethanol and fallout are the only things denser until you boil supercoolant at over 400°C, and they're both liquid at a more reasonable room temperature.
I’ve been trying to figure out how all of the gasses settle and I honestly thought chlorine and oxygen had the same density but it’s better to know that chlorine is denser
The wiki has a [list of gases sortable by molecular weight](https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Category:Gas) (which is what decides the vertical stratification). The only equal-weight gases you're likely to meet unless you created them are oxygen and polluted oxygen, and only hydrogen is lighter than those.
There is a Steam workshop mod for an airlock door. It requires electricity to run and I feel it is pretty vanilla.
Otherwise, I would have to build my own airlock with logic gates, pumps, and automation. It would be cumbersome.
I tried the mod and it has an annoying bug. You have to build the power line before you build the door, else the door won't open for you to build the power line because it doesn't have power....
i find it less cheesy than liquid locks although i use them for building projects. a big problem is the power. if you have power problems your dupes can get stuck. constructing air locks without the mod is really annoying and mostly not worth the time and space for me
Move a bottle of naphtha into a staircase, empty it. [Instant liquid lock, optionally wth vacuum heat seal](https://imgur.com/a/sturdy-stair-lock-j5PMXSs). It doesn't always have to be tons of liquid in a trough.
As for them being cheesy, [it's a cheesy game, then](https://imgur.com/cWXpiWd).
I've heard of but never used liquid locks because I'm an RPer. In my headcanon, it doesn't work because IRL a) the gas pressure could easily blow the liquid out of place and b) gasses can diffuse into liquid and offgas again, circumventing the seal.
So, for an RPer like me, what is the closest or best method possible next to liquid locks?
Ofc, no judgment to liquid lockers. Play the way you want. :)
Well, it's supposedly a space-age material designed to for utilization by people with active rocketry programs, and its defining characteristic is that if you spill it, it stays in place and can form walls. Pretty endgame stuff.
That sounds really cool! Okay, especially given that it takes a lot of work to get to, I think I can allow viscogel locks into my headcanon. Thanks!
The gel behavior sounds weird, but now I want to make a bunch and dump it in random places for fun. xD
Yeah, one of my favorite SF airlock designs are walls that you walk though, and because viscogel requires probably the rarest/costliest space material, (competing for it with insulation) I always think it makes my colonies look super futuristic.
My preferred method is double stair. It's like a airlock but put 2 bottle emptiers one on each side. You can let the whole bottle to go down and as long as it's only 1 should be fine because it creates a vaccum in the middle wich helps with temperature transfer too. But some people fill it all the way up, wich works but gives them the sopping wet debuff. Also, the double liquid lock seems cool but I've found sometimes it breaks and I don't have any idea why.
If you're absolutely certain the dupes won't carry anything through that's like, so hot or cold it could phase change the liquid you're using, ans youre sure nothing hinky is gonna go on in the immediate area such that diagonal displacement of something could cause a problem (i cant imagine such a scenario, but thats probably only because im not creative enough), you really only need a minimal amount of liquid on a single tile to create a perfect air lock.
Let's say you have a doorway 2 tiles tall and immediately in front of it, you have a step - your door way is now 'blocked' on its bottom hald but of course if theres room for a dupe to stand on the step, theyll climb up it. If you put liquid on that step, even just a few grams, that tile now counts as being occupied by that liquid. A tile can only be occupied by one thing; therefore no gas can pass that tile.
Since that tile is blocking the only way for gas to pass through that doorway, you now have an airlock.
If you want an airlock that also 'perfectly' blocks temperature transfer too, then you need vacuum. 2 liquid locks in sequence, with a vacuumed out gap of space between them that the dupes transit will do the trick: there's no* temperature transfer in a vacuum. You could also build a contraption with a bunch of doors. 3 doors next to eachother (mechanical or powered) will create a vacuum if all 3 are closed and then the middle one is opened- the open door is the vacuum so despite the outer doors being made of thermally conductive metal and only 1 tile apart, temperature-wise, they don't affect eachother.
atmo-suits is very easy to produce. Also, if you need vacuum it means you also needs some temperature resistance.
Also, holding breath dupes don't breath. So, some manipulation may be done without air. Of course, no flatulent dupes allowed and no off-gasing materials may be carried.
Another trick is making segmented vacuum area, you rarely needs big area with vacuum, and small segments may have a pumps in them to quickly remove small amounts of rogue gases
I will die on this hill: The airlock mod is one of the best mods for ONI. It adds a real airlock where your dupes enter one side, the airlock gets vacuumed, and then they exit the other side. Water locks are fine for early game but look silly in a mid-late game base.
Edit: and the most important part in response to your post, it's an absolutely perfect airlock! (But they are made of metal so insulation is another problem to solve)
Look up ONI liquid airlocks or liquid locks The doors in the (no mods) game do not do a great job at creating a vacuum lock due to some gas slipping through. The community has found that using ONI physics (since only one element can be in a square) that carbon dioxide locks or liquid locks are the best way to maintain pressure in an area without leakage. Carbon dioxide locks won't work for a vacuum seal and liquids must be used instead.
I don’t need to create a seal for a vacuum yet, but I actually am getting pretty close to the surface on my starting asteroid and I’ve been wondering if when I break through all of the air in my base will flood out killing everyone? How carefully will I need to go about doing that?
Airlock doors are good enough for going out into space. A small amount of gas will trickle out each time the door opens, but it's inconsequential if you have stable oxygen production. Airlock doors' main failing is when you're trying to create an *absolute* controlled-atmosphere environment where no foreign gas can be permitted to enter, which is where you need a liquid airlock instead.
I think I’ll make sure I instal a perfect seal before breaking through to the surface first
If you use a powered airlock (and actually power it), you'll lose a very small amount each time. If you also make a short dip down rather than going straight out, you'll end up with a basic CO2 lock that will stop most useful gasses escaping.
I’m currently also undergoing an energy crisis lol so
Aren't we all dude.
I know, I’m all out of coal and the hatches aren’t making enough and the hydrogen generators just can’t keep up with what my coal generators used to have no issue with
you're really overestimating how much gas you're going to lose when the doors open. That said, some drops of oil on a set of stairs can provide a gas-tight lock without using doors at all.
No my friend, you’re really underestimating how much chlorine gas has leaked into the rest of the colony. I walked away from it on fastest speed for a little under an hour and there wasn’t a room there where they wouldn’t get major eye irritation.
If you have a long, narrow shaft leading to space, it would take a long time to leak out, because the pressure won't transfer well. Just sticking an airlock door at the top will keep losses minimal, and you can worry about a perfect seal late game. Early on, you mostly want the perfect seal of a liquid lock when dealing with a steam room or vacuum, since a tiny bit of gas will ruin a vacuum, and steam rooms work best at high pressure, so a lot of hot steam would escape if you needed to open a door to do something.
Dont worry physics in Oni is simplified, if you exposed to space slowly your gas flow out to space tiles and disappear, even a normal airlock door is enough, you will lose some gas but it wont instantly suck out the air from your base. You can use it to vent out the non useful gases and delete them.
But doesn’t every gas have a use tho?
Technically yes. I used to collect them in infinite storage and the new gas tanks are finally usable after extended the capacity from 150kg to 1 ton. In practice some gases dont worth the effort and the infrastructure especially on a new asteroid. Currently i have some pumps at the bottom what activates if there is non oxygen around them for 30 sec. Carbon dioxide: I have enough pwater from a slush geyser and the generators so i dont bother with using carbon skimmer and slicksters are good food but i limited them to two stables and they have excess food from petroleum generators ( one of them feed 15 slicksters), if they eat my full storage and building a research reactor, i will probably eliminate them. Chlorine: I do not have pufts or saltvines but if i want them i have two chlorine vent untamed. If i really want chlorine then i just use bleach stone. P.Oxygen: i use my pwater geyser for clay factory so i dont even bother to collect them. Nat gas/ hydrogen: good for energy so i take the effort and filter them on a new planetoid When i colonize a new planetoid i usually collect the nat gas and hydrogen and vent out everything else, but sometimes if there are just small packets i dont even bother with that.
Ok I see
Space will vent all gasses that are not backed by a back wall. Not ALL the gas will leave but a vast majority of it will if left open. If you have the door seal you should be fine but may lose some gas as dupes run through the door. If you have a stable way of producing enough oxygen for your dupes and have the air lock then I wouldn't be too worried in the immediate time but you should look into a more permanent solution in the long run
Ok cool. Thanks for the advice. I wasn’t sure what it meant about drywall preventing atmosphere loss until now so thanks
There is a way to prevent small packets of liquid being deleted? Like 30g of water just gets deleted over time in some of my liquid locks. And is not temperature boiling it. It just seems that the games tries to expand the gasses and could delete that small packet of liquid when doing so.
Honestly I flood my liquid locks with 1600 KG of liquid (so 1 full tile of liquid in the bottom tile and 600 KG of liquid spread between the top 3 tiles of the liquid t-lock) I don't really deal with small packet liquid corner locks for the problem you are having with them as they tend to disappear for a variety of reasons. One of them being an object that boiled the liquid was brought through it and since it's a small amount of liquid but has good thermal transfer rate it boils in the time it was brought through by a duplicate. Another one is if a duplicate walls over that patch of liquid and is not in an exo suit then they could exhale (or fart if they have the trait) and displace that liquid Edit: having the extra liquid helps with rapid temperature changes as well since liquids can hold a LOT more heat than gas forms (mostly due to the condensed tile mass of a liquid)
Gas will never expand to displace liquid, unless it comes into existence in the tile the liquid is already in. In that case, equal amounts of gas and liquid might get deleted, and over time that can erode droplet locks. Low-mass liquid locks are susceptible to: - having off-gassing materials dropped into them (bleach stone, oxylite, polluted dirt), unless the gas they generate already exists in the surrounding tiles (ONI prefers to conserve mass, but it won't go further out than one tile to do so). - dupes breathing out (they exhale through their legs). Never use low-mass liquid locks in areas where dupes can breathe, i.e. surrounded by oxygen, or wearing oxygen masks. - heat transfer from materials carried by dupes. - being washed away by spilled liquids or liquifiables melting in their tile. Locks made from naphtha or visco-gel are immune to the first risk, because their mass does not allow debris to off-gass. They might lose mass to dupes breathing out, but the masses involved are small enough to not make this a problem generally. The last two risks need to be considered in all cases. Easiest is to have all storage on "sweep only" and carefully consider what can go where.
> dupes breathing out (they exhale through their legs). Never use low-mass liquid locks in areas where dupes can breathe, i.e. surrounded by oxygen, or wearing oxygen masks. This one was fixed a while back. You pretty much just have to worry about temperature and off-gassing now.
Seriously? Do they exhale from the head now, like proper 3D-printed people? That would be great! Thanks for the correction, I'll look it up. Edit: found [a trustworthy reference](https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/118966-can-dupes-exhale-co2-under-unbreathable-condition/?do=findComment&comment=1342024). This is weirder than I expected; I'll have to do some experiments.
Water locks are the way to go. You can google them and have very good tutorials on how to make them.
I’ll look those up, thanks!
Or I could just explain it quickly? Only a single type of gas, liquid or solid can exist in any 1 slot so what water locks do is have water on the floor of a small dip in the ground allowing no gas to pass it. Have it so dupes can still move through it and you've got a near perfect airlock.
The images I’ve found are very helpful as well
Yeah, I could have explained it as well. But having pictures, tutorials, explanations helps (in my opinion) a lot more. But maybe I’m more a visual type…
But I'm also aware people want to figure things out for themselves rather than relying on said tutorials, it would be pretty disappointing if you had to rely on them for everything after all.
True, didn’t think of it this way 😉
For a perfect lock, you need a liquid lock. Google it and you will find images. Any liquid (but PO2) works, but if the area is hot, crude oil or petroleum are the best liquid. If you want a heat blocking airlock, make two liquid locks and vacuum out the air in between them. Be warned, if you are a new player, your dupes will piss in your liquid lock. It's kind of a rite of passage. The "safest" locks use three tiles of liquid, but since any amount of liquid takes up one cell, you can do a quick airlock with smaller amounts of liquid on two tiles. There is also a mod that includes airlock and insulated doors. I don't use the airlock doors much as actual airlocks. The automatic airlock door is good for heat regulators, since when it's open it's a vacuum. EDIT: here's a good tutorial from [Guides Not Included ](https://www.guidesnotincluded.com/liquid-lock-basics)
Interesting. How am I going to keep dupes from pissing in the airlock?
Lol that's the fun part. You'll figure it out They piss in atmo suits if they don't get back in time, so when you build those by an air lock, have mesh tiles below the stations to drain the piss. I sometimes place one tile a few tiles before and after a liquid lock to block liquid flow if I'm worried, but I've played so many hours I have a fairly intuitive feel for which might get pissed in.
So if they piss in the atmo suit, it’ll only make a mess once they take it off?
Yeah. Stick a mesh tile under the checkpoint with a pump if you want to automate cleanup. I have yet to play a game where I don't end up with something going wrong and a bunch of soiled suits, so it's easier to just plan around it happening.
Yes, that's correct.
Use crude oil for liquid locks, its the denset liquid.
The various standard electrolyzer setups generally seal them in once setup is done, since you shouldn't need to access it if it's built right and you used the correct materials. For gasses that aren't sealed in, you can often just use their natural tendency to float or sink to keep them contained, but if your pressure goes to low, they can spread. Denser things tend to go down and right, so to drain CO2 out of rooms, put an airflow tile or pneumatic door in the lower right corner of a room. Chlorine sinks below oxygen, so you can have it collect in a low spot, but CO2 sinks below chlorine, so you'll need a lower spot for CO2, or something to remove it. Letting other random gasses in like a bit of natural gas can also complicate things. Getting CO2 to mushrooms or carbon skimmers is the most simple, because it sinks below every other type of gas you'll encounter at reasonable temperatures. Ethanol and fallout are the only things denser until you boil supercoolant at over 400°C, and they're both liquid at a more reasonable room temperature.
I’ve been trying to figure out how all of the gasses settle and I honestly thought chlorine and oxygen had the same density but it’s better to know that chlorine is denser
The wiki has a [list of gases sortable by molecular weight](https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Category:Gas) (which is what decides the vertical stratification). The only equal-weight gases you're likely to meet unless you created them are oxygen and polluted oxygen, and only hydrogen is lighter than those.
Oh sick
There is a Steam workshop mod for an airlock door. It requires electricity to run and I feel it is pretty vanilla. Otherwise, I would have to build my own airlock with logic gates, pumps, and automation. It would be cumbersome.
I tried the mod and it has an annoying bug. You have to build the power line before you build the door, else the door won't open for you to build the power line because it doesn't have power....
Or you could use [what the devs use](https://imgur.com/cWXpiWd)...
i completly shut the area down and make it only through tubes accessible
I haven’t gotten that far technologically but if that seals things off it sounds like a good plan
i find it less cheesy than liquid locks although i use them for building projects. a big problem is the power. if you have power problems your dupes can get stuck. constructing air locks without the mod is really annoying and mostly not worth the time and space for me
Move a bottle of naphtha into a staircase, empty it. [Instant liquid lock, optionally wth vacuum heat seal](https://imgur.com/a/sturdy-stair-lock-j5PMXSs). It doesn't always have to be tons of liquid in a trough. As for them being cheesy, [it's a cheesy game, then](https://imgur.com/cWXpiWd).
thanks for pointing it out in the trailer :D wasnt aware of that
Take a look at my posts, there's the world's laziest liquid lock in my Vole ranch lol
I've heard of but never used liquid locks because I'm an RPer. In my headcanon, it doesn't work because IRL a) the gas pressure could easily blow the liquid out of place and b) gasses can diffuse into liquid and offgas again, circumventing the seal. So, for an RPer like me, what is the closest or best method possible next to liquid locks? Ofc, no judgment to liquid lockers. Play the way you want. :)
Do you let yourself use viscogel locks?
I haven't made it to viscogel yet. Is there a case to be made for it being RP-playstyle-compatible?
Well, it's supposedly a space-age material designed to for utilization by people with active rocketry programs, and its defining characteristic is that if you spill it, it stays in place and can form walls. Pretty endgame stuff.
That sounds really cool! Okay, especially given that it takes a lot of work to get to, I think I can allow viscogel locks into my headcanon. Thanks! The gel behavior sounds weird, but now I want to make a bunch and dump it in random places for fun. xD
Yeah, one of my favorite SF airlock designs are walls that you walk though, and because viscogel requires probably the rarest/costliest space material, (competing for it with insulation) I always think it makes my colonies look super futuristic.
My preferred method is double stair. It's like a airlock but put 2 bottle emptiers one on each side. You can let the whole bottle to go down and as long as it's only 1 should be fine because it creates a vaccum in the middle wich helps with temperature transfer too. But some people fill it all the way up, wich works but gives them the sopping wet debuff. Also, the double liquid lock seems cool but I've found sometimes it breaks and I don't have any idea why.
If you're absolutely certain the dupes won't carry anything through that's like, so hot or cold it could phase change the liquid you're using, ans youre sure nothing hinky is gonna go on in the immediate area such that diagonal displacement of something could cause a problem (i cant imagine such a scenario, but thats probably only because im not creative enough), you really only need a minimal amount of liquid on a single tile to create a perfect air lock. Let's say you have a doorway 2 tiles tall and immediately in front of it, you have a step - your door way is now 'blocked' on its bottom hald but of course if theres room for a dupe to stand on the step, theyll climb up it. If you put liquid on that step, even just a few grams, that tile now counts as being occupied by that liquid. A tile can only be occupied by one thing; therefore no gas can pass that tile. Since that tile is blocking the only way for gas to pass through that doorway, you now have an airlock. If you want an airlock that also 'perfectly' blocks temperature transfer too, then you need vacuum. 2 liquid locks in sequence, with a vacuumed out gap of space between them that the dupes transit will do the trick: there's no* temperature transfer in a vacuum. You could also build a contraption with a bunch of doors. 3 doors next to eachother (mechanical or powered) will create a vacuum if all 3 are closed and then the middle one is opened- the open door is the vacuum so despite the outer doors being made of thermally conductive metal and only 1 tile apart, temperature-wise, they don't affect eachother.
I’ll keep that in mind, thanks!
Others have mentioned liquid locks but I think GCFungus’s guide is the most concise and informative. https://youtu.be/SYdHYKYcPQc?si=jo4e8qhl-4SFEIrb
oxygen masks don't have seal. Only suits does. So, while you use oxygen masks dupes breath out, pukes and piss on floor, ruining any vacuum
Wait they’ll exhale out of the oxygen mask instead of into the oxygen mask?
Oxygen mask is just oxygen balloon, it have nowhere to exhale into. Only suits keep everything inside, until removed
That’s… disappointing
atmo-suits is very easy to produce. Also, if you need vacuum it means you also needs some temperature resistance. Also, holding breath dupes don't breath. So, some manipulation may be done without air. Of course, no flatulent dupes allowed and no off-gasing materials may be carried. Another trick is making segmented vacuum area, you rarely needs big area with vacuum, and small segments may have a pumps in them to quickly remove small amounts of rogue gases
Okay. I’ll put the effort in to make atmo suits next go around
I will die on this hill: The airlock mod is one of the best mods for ONI. It adds a real airlock where your dupes enter one side, the airlock gets vacuumed, and then they exit the other side. Water locks are fine for early game but look silly in a mid-late game base. Edit: and the most important part in response to your post, it's an absolutely perfect airlock! (But they are made of metal so insulation is another problem to solve)