Andy really felt like resting, especially after the anti-climatic ending to that fight.
But everything was either broken, breaking or actively trying to kill him at the moment.
First things first. Andy retrieved the duct tape from his toolbelt and set about taping the tears in his suit. After this, he put it away and flushed his suit to get rid of the toxins, as well as the CO2 buildup. After all, he no longer had a CO2 tank, it had flown off to god only knows where in the distance.
The readouts on the HUD registered a stable reading. No toxins warnings, except for the one about the lack of a waste tank.
Right, next problem.
CO2 would continue to build up in his suit again. He needed a waste tank. He had already lost a third of his oxygen weaponizing it, and now more than ever did not have the luxury of periodically flushing his suit to dispel the CO2 buildup.
He needed to make a new waste tank. Luckily he had a functioning atmospherics constructor.
Andy retrieved his welding torch that was still left behind in the airlock and took out the fuel canister, once more using it to power the generator. It was unfortunately starting to run low, yet another problem for him to add to his never ending list of emergencies.
But he had several things to sort out that were higher priority, so he flicked the generator on.
Luckily, Andy still had some iron ingot left over from his last construction project and he was able to use that to ‘construct’ a new empty canister. If not, then he would have had to spend time ‘harvesting’ iron sheets, scrapping them and smelting them first, not something he wanted to waste time on at the moment.
The suit was already complaining about CO2 levels, but that was fine, Andy was already busy installing the new canister to his waste slot and soon the suit’s CO2 filter would do its job and clean things up.
His CO2 problem taken care of, his health could start to comfortably build up again, from its now rather abysmal thirteen percent. The monster had gotten a few good shots in after all.
But right now, he needed to go back to dealing with his former most pressing concern. The fact that he won’t make it to the next night, without a source of water.
Looking at the PDA, the device that you were supposed to use to make water, was called a ‘hydrogen combustor’. It basically used hydrogen, oxygen and electricity to make water.
Problem was, it required a fair amount of steel to make and Andy’s overall steel supply was a whopping fat zero. He of course did some research, but as he suspected, he would need to construct a furnace to make steel. The furnace in turn would apparently need more fuel mixture (two parts H2 to one part O2).
Not only that, the recipe used by the game to make steel involved both iron and coal. Iron he could get from scrapping, but not coal. He would need to go out and mine that, with a mining drill he did not possess. He also couldn’t make a mining drill, as that required a special ‘equipment constructor’.
He also didn’t see anything that he could easily scrap in the hopes of getting steel.
Andy still had the option of going around and searching for the dead player’s base or lander, but the same problem with that still existed. He didn’t have the resources. Oxygen and Water both too low to risk the extended search.
This game was seriously starting to annoy him.
Andy was reminded of a quote from that movie: ‘The Martian’.
“You just solve one problem at a time. And if you solve enough problems, you get to go home.”
Andy took a deep breath to calm himself. He needed to focus on the problem at hand.
Water.
He needed water.
And had no way of getting the device needed to make it.
Then what? He needed to make the water himself?
Andy started flicking through the atmospherics constructors menu once more, looking for inspiration.
And he found it.
The pipe burner. It used electricity to create a high heat arc inside a pipe. Basically a burner in a pipe.
His only concern was whether or not the game’s engine would support the chemical interaction needed to pull this off. How advanced was the game? Then again it did support the complexity of temperature drop from forced gas expansion. So, it was a pretty decent chance. The other positive indicator is the presence of the pipe burner as a construction option. It could also just be for generating lots of heat by igniting certain gas mixtures, but Andy had hope.
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Okay. First things first. Andy went around once more stripping iron sheets and repeating the process of scrapping them, smelting them and then dumping them in the constructor.
He used this and the existing resources to construct a few things for a test. First up, was the pipe burner, followed by some pipe segments and then a ‘canister holder’. It was basically something you could plug a canister into, that connected to a pipe.
After constructing this lot, Andy began setting up his experiment. He connected the canister holder to a pipe segment, followed by the ‘pipe burner’ pipe segment, followed by one more pipe segment.
He then transferred the fuel canister from the generator to the canister holder. He would need that nice ratio of two H2 to one O2 that the fuel canister held, for his experiment. He kept the canister sealed for now, until he was ready.
Next Andy opened the valve on the fuel canister ever so slightly, until the atmospherics on the PDA confirmed that a little bit of the gas mixture flowed into the pipe. Andy quickly closed the valve again and removed the fuel canister. He did not want the whole thing blowing up in his face when he turned it on after all.
Also, he would need the fuel canister for power. Andy put it back in the generator and turned it on. Next he went and stripped some more copper wires, so that he could wire up the pipe burner, which also needed electricity.
Andy checked the pipe once more with his PDA. It had a small amount of fuel mixture in it at two to one H2 to O2 ratio.
He then flipped the switch for the pipe burner, hoping it wouldn’t blow him up. After a short while, he turned it off again and used the PDA to check it. The pipe now read 100% H2O. It had worked! Granted the temperature of the steam was in the four digits, and the pipe was causing a mass of atmosphere to flow outwards from it as it bled all that heat off.
But it worked! The amount of H2O he got out of this was barely a drop, but he at least had a path forward now.
He would need to construct something that could work full time to make him, ultimately, a decent amount of water.
So he needed a large amount of H2 and O2 to make decent quantities of water.
Well the H2 was in abundance in the atmosphere, but the big problem was O2. If he used the fuel canister, which coincidentally had the exact right gas mixture, he’d use all of it up and get not a whole lot of water out of the deal. Furthermore, he’d have lost his only current power source.
O2. The one of things he normally struggled with. And now he needed a fuck ton of it.
Come to think of it though, he did have an abundance of it. The greenhouse!
Andy went back to stripping iron sheets for iron. He also started stripping more copper wires. Not only would he need more power cabling for the new setup, but he was also running out of copper for construction and would need more.
Scrapping and smelting all that, he was ready to start constructing.
First he constructed two pipe filter units. Then he constructed an H2 filter and an O2 filter for each respectively. He also constructed two valves. In addition to this, he constructed a whole lot of pipes.
He ran a power cable over to where the greenhouse was as he wanted to do this build there, localised to where the oxygen source was.
Andy connected one of the filters to the ‘broken’ pipe of the greenhouse. The pipe that could, given enough time, suck up all of the greenhouse’s atmosphere and ultimately gain access to its full O2 load.
A pipe filter had an input and two outputs. One output for the filtered gas and another for the rest of the (waste) gasses. Andy put an O2 filter in it and took the ‘excess’ pipe and connected it back to the main broken pipe. This would allow the extraction of the O2, without having to discard the other gasses, something that he did not want to do, since there was Nitrogen in the greenhouse, that was not available in this planet’s atmosphere, and so seemed unwise to waste.
Next he led the pure oxygen pipe into a valve that he kept closed for now.
Next up, he placed a vent down nearby and piped it to another pipe filter, this one with a hydrogen filter installed. This one’s waste pipe was also redirected back to the vent, since he did not care for the other gasses at all. The pipe filters did come with a pump of their own installed, so it would be able to pull atmosphere in through the open vent as it needed.
Next he led the pure hydrogen line to another valve.
Andy then took both of the ‘valved’ pipelines and brought them together and connected it to a pipe burner. The result of this was then connected to a canister holder. Andy then proceeded to wire everything up.
He set the pressure for both valves quite low, since he didn’t want to overtax either the H2 or O2 line beyond what the filter units could handle, thus causing an imbalance. He set the O2 valve to be just slightly above half of the H2 lines flow rate. This would result in a water combustion with a tiny amount of oxygen to spare.
The reason for this, was the water was going to initially come out as steam and he was reasonably sure that no matter how much he cooled it, it would never condense back into water if there was no gas in the bottle to provide pressure. His understanding was that for a liquid to condense, not only did it need to reach the condensation temperature, but there was also a minimum pressure threshold required. If memory served him correctly
Andy printed a new empty canister to serve as steam capture. After inserting it, he turned everything on as quickly as he could to keep things in sync. Andy quickly whipped out the PDA to monitor everything.
The filters were both doing their jobs as expected. Next up was the combustor. The pipe reported constantly fluctuating between none and very little H2 and O2. What it was slowly but surely building up however, was extremely high temperature H2O.
It was working! It was making water!
It was also making an absurd amount of heat, that was causing rather strong winds in the area, but it was working!
Andy actually sat down and just watched for a while taking a moment to rest and drinking in his success.
Eventually he noticed the sky getting lighter, indicating the sun was going to rise soon. Time to move.
Andy constructed another canister and swapped it with the one that now had a little water (steam) in it.
The canister was still several hundred degrees celsius, so Andy waited outside longer, to let it bleed off as much of its temperature into the atmosphere as it could before the sun started peeking over the hills. By that time, it was almost the same temperature as the atmosphere and Andy retreated into the bedroom for the day.
The canister of water would do the remainder of its cooling in the bedroom, thus not taxing his ‘cooling system’ too much. Eventually it would be cool enough to condense into water and after that cool further until it was drinkable without injury. Andy drank from his last mostly empty water bottle to delay his hydration until the new water was cool enough.