Easy Submerged Electrolyzer / SPOM Guide

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Some of you may be familiar with my original guide on Fail-Safe Electrolyzers . The design in that guide had a singular purpose, to ensure that H2 and O2 gasses would never mix in the output pipes from the electrolyzer. Like many of you my first couple colonies used a "Rodriguez" design, popularized by Francis John. I later discovered the Kharnath design in the Amazing Compendium here on Steam. Both designs served me well, but I always ran into (self-inflicted) issues when my water supply would get cut, or an output pipe would back up, and the whole electolyzer system would start mixing gasses, potentially even needing to be opened up, vacuumed and re-primed. My previous guide set out to solve that issue, but in the year-plus since then the ONI meta has changed. Nowadays submerged electrolyzers are the rage, and they have some distinct advantages over conventional designs: They exploit a game engine quirk to automatically filter hydrogen from oxygen for free. There is neither a power cost nor a "mechanical filter" required They will never over-pressurize, so you get 100% uptime / efficiency for free Because of the above, you also get "infinite storage" of both H2 and O2 for free With one small exception, discussed later, you get "fail safe" operation for free That combination of perks makes conventional electrolyzer designs obsolete, unless you happen to consider submerged vents and infinite gas storage an exploit of unintended game mechanics. I won't judge either way anyone's single-player game experience, but at least now I'll have a guide available for both groups of players. My goal this time was to take advantage of the simplicity of the submerged electrolyzer mechanic to create a stupidly simple design. Like all my guides I wanted something modular that could expand with your colony as you take on dupes or find extra water sources. I also wanted something that could evolve from the most basic "I need more oxygen right now!" in the early game to later adding hydrogen generators, pumps for atmosuits and oxylite, etc. The idea was to not have to build all those extra frills at once as you're watching your colony's algae count dwindle. My design objectives are listed below: Requirements Must be a scalable design pattern that can work for various numbers of electrolyzers Must be capable of running as a Self-Powered Oxygen Machine (SPOM) Must be "Fail-Safe", e.g. not allow mixing of output gasses during any failure condition, and not allow a situation where the electrolyzer needs to be opened up or re-primed Loss of power input Loss of water input Blockage of oxygen output pipe(s) Blockage of hydrogen output pipe(s) Goals / "Nice to Haves" (In approximate order of importance) Should be relatively easy to build, no tricky order of operations or dupe pathing Should be dupe accessible while operating, as much as possible I recently played on Desolands with no gold amalgam and had to keep opening up my electrolyzer to reconstruct broken copper parts. Eventually I replaced everything with steel, but that also required opening it up. I'd prefer a design that you can work on while it's running without "breaking the seal", especially since submerged builds will have "infinite" gas storage. Should be as compact as possible (arbitrary, but smaller is better) Should fit within a standard 4-tile height room layout I discarded this objective and settled on modules which are 3 tiles high instead. SPOMs aren't generally integrated with your "core" base (beds, baths, etc.) so I gave priority to "smaller is better" The design consists of a series of modules, each one containing a small "v" shaped cavity with a submerged electrolyzer. One side of the "v" will fill with hydrogen and the other with oxygen. A hydrogen generator can optionally be put in the hydrogen side, creating a Self-Powered Oxygen Machine or SPOM. Additional modules, up to a stack of 5, can be constructed below the first to increase the total oxygen output. Pumps can be added to either the hydrogen or oxygen side as needed. Finally, the entire stack can optionally be turned into a power plant to increase power output. Speaking of power output, it hardly seems right to call this design a SPOM. Typical SPOMs just barely power themselves, and have next to no power leftover to feed into the rest of your colony. For that reason I always built my SPOMs on their own electrical network, isolated from my main grid. This ensures that in times of intermittent power issues the electrolyzer wouldn't be interrupted, or even worse run out of stored hydrogen, lose power completely, and need a jumpstart from a hamster wheel. The submerged electrolyzer mechanic supports an entirely different concept where your electrolyzers can be a major power producer for your colony. As long as you can supply enough water (1kg/s per module, 5kg/s for a full stack) the stack could produce 3-4 kW of excess power. For that reason I expect this SPOM to be plugged directly onto your main power spine, and I wired the internals with heavy watt wire. I thought it'd be fun to make up a new name for such an electrolyzer-based power plant, so I came up with Hydroelectric Oxygen Producing Power Plant or HOP3 ("hope"). Yeah that's definitely not going to catch on, so I guess we'll just stick to calling it a SPOM :) Most readers can skip this section and jump straight to the step by step build instructions in section 5. This section is for people who want to learn about the game mechanics of a submerged electrolyzer, and potentially design their own system rather than build mine. It's funny that the mechanics for submerged electrolyzers can be so confusing when the name is so perfectly descriptive. I know I'm not the only one who struggled with the mechanics at first, as I see "why won't my hydra run" posts on Reddit just about every week. At the most basic level a submerged electrolyzer is an electrolyzer sitting in a pool of liquid (minimum 2x2 tiles) so that the entire electrolyzer is in the liquid. There are really only two requirements for this pool: There must be two different liquids, a layer of one liquid on bottom and a second liquid on top Both liquids must be below the total weight which would trigger the "flooded" building debuff Basic Mechanics - Submerged, or Flooded? To clarify that second point, if you put "enough" liquid in a tile, any building sharing that tile will become "flooded" and inoperable. The exact amount varies by liquid, as it is 35% of the maximum amount of that liquid that can be in a single tile. Using plain water as an easy example, a single tile can hold 1000 kg, so the flooded debuff will occur at 350 kg or more. Any amount of plain water less than that is perfectly OK to create "submerged" buildings. Ethanol and polluted water share the same 350 kg value as plain water, and saltwater and brine are slightly higher. Crude oil causes flooding at ~304 kg, petroleum and naphtha at ~259, and I doubt there's any other liquid you'd ever use for this purpose. So the main takeaway is that you can always use a full 200 kg bottle from a pitcher pump to create each layer, regardless of what liquid you're using. There's no need to get fancy measuring amounts, just dump in 200 kg per layer and it will spread out to a maximum of 100 kg per tile, far less than the threshold for triggering flooding. Intermediate Mechanics - Diagonal Gas Displacement This is where things can get a little tricky. Lets say we've built a basic submerged electrolyzer according to the above. One 200 kg bottle of polluted water (or similar) on bottom, and another 200 kg bottle of plain water on top. If we then power up the electrolyzer and provide water it will start generating gasses. The important thing to know is that it always generates gas in the upper l