User:SCD/Ultimate Cooler Guide

So, your freezer ain't working? Or you don't know how to build it? Or you have any cooler related question? Welp, let me introduce to you Ultimate Cooler Guide (UCG for short)

If you spot any mistake, or have idea how to improve this guide, feel free to do so.

How to: The basics

One cooler requires between 20 and 200 wats of power, depening on how much it must cool down the target area. In order to have it working at all, it must be placed in similar way as ordinary wall, with blue arrow pointing into freezer (or any room you may want to cool down) and red arrow pointing best outside, or at least into other room. It can not point directly into a wall.

Then, click on that cooler and using buttons in its menu select target temperature. Take note that cooler is not your average AC unit, it will not heat up the room, if it is too cold. If you want to freeze your food (so it never rots), you can set it to any number less or equal to 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit). -10°C or 14°F is recomended, as it offers a good breathing room as well as not causing Hypothermia in your pawn.

If at this stage, you have any issues, make sure whole room is roofed (right most middle icon in the bottom right corner of your screen to show roof layer. Green = roof), it has no missing walls and red side of the cooler isn't too hot. Opening doors temporary lowers temperature.

What to freeze

Basicly, everything with spoil timer. That includes most of the food as well as herbal medicines, plant matter like psychoid leaves and psilocap. However, you do not need to freeze blood nor organs. Most drugs also don't spoil.

If your pawns aren't hauling stuffs to the freezer, make sure to tick on "fresh" in storage settings.

The red side

As mentioned in start of the chapter, coolers have both blue (cooling) and red (heating) side. coolers aren't some magical thing that lowers the temperature, they move heat from one room to the other, introduce outdoors. They won't work, if "output" room is too hot.

If you point red side directly outdoors, congrats, you don't have to worry about anything, except raiders may destroy it. But that's nothing good gun can't solve. Other way of heat disposal, very similar is to vent it into other room with removed roof. In that case, even 1x1 room with no roof is enough for any freezer.

"But hey, in winter, it is pretty cold, why not reuse that heat to heat up the base?" Great question. This is horrible idea. Heat output is directly dependent on how much cooler is... cooling down. In summer, when it is really hot outdoors, cooler will work much harder, reasulting in a lot of heat. In winter, it will work less, so less heat is outputed. So yea, no good with that idea.

Insulation

You probably noticed that your freeze doesn't always stay cold. Its temperature is leaking into suradning rooms or even outside. Solution? Insulate your room better. The easiest way is to just double wall it. But hey, why not tripple wall it? Beacuse it just doesn't work. temperature system doesn't look past its immediate surroundings. Same thing with doors, just double it.

On the matter of doors; what should you choose? If you have Odyssey DLC, Vac barriers are straight up the best. They use same power as autodoors, but let none of the temperature through. If you don't have the tech or DLC, you can just use autodoors. How well doors insulate depends on how much time they are not closed. Stone doors are slow, what reasults in a lot of temperature "lost".

Do I need a cooler at all?

No. Raw rice or corn spoils in about half a year or more. Only meals and meat spoils in days. So just simply don't overproduce. Set your bills to "Make until X" and set it to like 4 or 8. Pawns will eat those long before they spoil, so no food loss here too.

Simple freezer. Red side points outside, blue one inside

How to: Not so basics

At the start, I'll anserw question about solar flares. You can't stop them, so they would make all your fancy meals rot, no? No. Solar never lasts more than 12h, what is not enough for any kind of food to spoil.

Cooler deep, deep underground

Playing mountain colony and didn't really though how to deal with heat output as you build directly under mountain roof? Welp, you can just dig a tunnel to nearest patch of removable roof and deal with it that way. Or you can lean into dark side of exploits...

The Heat Void Exploit

This section contains information about exploit. If you think it is cheating, don't read it Place a door in the middle of your freezer. Any door. Next, point cooler heat output directly into that doors. You can point up to 3 coolers, with one empty space left. You do not need to open/close doors nor remove the roof.

Following set up represents example heat void exploit.