Hi,

Could we please have a recipe for converting Pure Water into Water?

I don't see any strong argument for not having this conversion. Many times I wished I could just produce steam from pure water or reuse the remaining pure water from other processes as normal water.

Thanks for your great mods, you are the best!

Part of the reason for not currently being able to, is so that you can't put the output from deuterium separation back into the input. There are other reasons too.

I suppose I could make a recipe for it that costs Salt.

Or maybe just allow Pure Water to be heated into Steam... makes sense at least. Steam cannot be transformed back to water, just ventilated.

Or maybe just allow Pure Water to be heated into Steam... makes sense at least. Steam cannot be transformed back to water, just ventilated.

I had thought about that, but due to the way boilers work, the only way to do it would be to make a second copy of boilers specifically to boil pure water.

The alternative would be to make it a recipe in a crafting machine instead of an actual boiler (fake boiler, also the graphics for heat pipes don't work properly on assembling machines) but then there's the issue that it runs in distinctive steps, rather than just based on power and however much water is in there.

Neither options has really been very appealing to me.

Well, I suppose that's also why distilleries exist in bob's: water had to be converted to pure water somehow. If one forces himself to use the "real world" mindset, the distillery should actually be replaced by chemical plants condensing steam.

The "correct" mixing of pure water with salt in a chemical plant for obtaining water also comes from the "real world" mindset. If you stop and think about how salt is produced, you would conclude how pointless it would be for the game: if there is free access to water at a given location, then why would one extract salt from it for producing water from pure water? In this case, many players would just install and use a void pipe for the excess pure water from other mods. I really dislike it, first because it is not a pure bob's solution, and second because it removes many challenges offered by bob's mod.

Now, using a game-oriented mindset: What about converting pure water into water in the distillery? If the distillery can make salt "disappear" from water when producing pure water, then it should be able to make the reverse process too. The distillery is small and has cute graphics, I like it. By giving it another role (it currently doesn't have many) it would appear more often in our beloved factories.

Beyond being a nice addition to bob's, it would provide you some time until you figure out the ideal solution.

Well, I suppose that's also why distilleries exist in bob's: water had to be converted to pure water somehow. If one forces himself to use the "real world" mindset, the distillery should actually be replaced by chemical plants condensing steam.

In theory, it evaporates steam, then condenses it.
I had also thought about the distillery giving you salt, but I didn't want to force you to get salt when you don't want it. if I didn't already have a "Turn water into salt" recipe, I probably would have had it give you salt and pure water.

Just not quoting the rest...
Perhaps I could add an option to change boilers to require Pure water INSTEAD of Water, which means you have to purify it first (Which means it could then accept all 3 types of water after processing, rather than limiting to the one type)
I'd need to add a new Distillery, or water processing entity of some kind that can clean the water without first needing electricity though.

Perhaps I could add an option to change boilers to require Pure water INSTEAD of Water, which means you have to purify it first (Which means it could then accept all 3 types of water after processing, rather than limiting to the one type)
I'd need to add a new Distillery, or water processing entity of some kind that can clean the water without first needing electricity though.

I don't think it is necessary to change the boilers, because this would increase the complexity of this mod a lot, and make it eventually incompatible with other ones. Unless you find a way to make them use both water or pure water.

What helps a lot is fixing many of the recipes which still require water instead of pure water:

All of these are missing reicpes which should exist in bob's:
- coal + pure water => carbon
- coal + sulfur + pure water => explosives
- raw gems + pure water + grinding wheel => cut gems
- iron ore + stone brick + pure water => concrete
- steel plate + iron stick + concrete + pure water => refined concrete
- pure water + nitrogen dioxide => nitric acid
- pure water + sulfur dioxide => sulfuric acid
- galena + pure water => lead oxide + hydrogen sulfide
- seedling + pure water => wood
- seedling + pure water + fertilizer => wood
- crude oil + pure water => heavy oil + light oil + sour gas
- coal + pure water => heavy oil
- heavy oil + pure water => light oil
- light oil + pure pure water => petroleum gas
- pure water + petroleum gas => hydrogen

The whole problem is specifically the Heavy Water separation process. There are 2 points which I would like to address regarding this recipe:
- I always imagined the in-game difference between water and pure water as being the presence of salt in it, and not deuterium. Pure water could indeed contain deuterium.
- The real-life "Girdler sulfide process" separates heavy water using enriched hydrogen sulfide, leaving behind depleted water at high temperatures.

This is the current in-game "Heavy water sepAration" recipe <<< PS: there is a typo in this recipe's name
- 100 water + 1 hydrogen sulfide => 0.5 heavy water + 99.5 pure water

First of all, where has all the salt gone in this recipe? Just imagine the amount of salt produced here...
Second, the output of the real-life "Girder sulfide process" is water at about 130 Celsius. We could simply interpret that as an in-game "steam @ 165 Celsius". Water is already converted to steam in boilers; it costs some fuel.
If the equation outputs steam, it could be intentionally used for creating a power loop by using steam engines / turbines.

Taking all that into account, the recipe could be replaced by the following, and be run only by chemical plants:
- 100 pure water + 1 hydrogen sulfide + "FUEL" => 0.5 heavy water + 99.5 steam (165 Celsius)

The fuel is there to compensate the energy contained by the steam output. Please correct me if I am wrong: 99.5 Steam ~= 3MJ
So "FUEL" could be any non-liquid fuel with about the same amount of energy as this steam, e.g. 2 Wood, 1 Coal, etc.
For liquid fuels, the "Oil refinery" could be used - if its name was just "Refinery" instead. This is not so weird, given what the "Girdler sulfide process" actually is.

This additional fuel input offers an improved challenge to this end-game industrial process, even if not "all kind of fuels" are supported.
The steam is heated at only 165 Celsius, which can then be reused for extra energy generation with turbines, or just ventilated.

The distillery could produce pure water + salt:
- 100 Lithia Water => 100 pure water + 4 Lithium chloride (ok)
- 100 Water => 100 pure water + 4 Salt (not ok)

Now we get tons of salt to "burn" if this is the only way to get pure water (yes, I am ignoring the ground water pumps, because some people disable this option).

Furthermore, even if we replace all bob's recipes which require water with pure water, which is ok, there could be mod compatibility issues: other mods will stick to the "common" water, and at some point, the conversio nfrom pure water to water is needed, especially on dry maps.
Thus, I strongly believe we would never be able to completely suppress the need for converting pure water into water.

In any case, even if everything above gets implemented, I would still recommend to keep the distillery as a flexible tool due to the reasons above.
It should convert water to pure water, and vice-versa:
- 100 Water => 100 pure water (2s)
- 100 Pure Water => 100 water (2s)

One thing I miss in bob's is some kind of Chemical Plant with high power consumption. It could be used to inefficiently boil water / pure water into steam, which would provide a kind of electric boiler to bob's mod, and allow new recipes requiring high energy requirements, especially stuff with steam as output. Maybe make it use heat from heat pipes, since it would be a mid- / end- game thing.

Another idea: a new fluid called "Cold steam" i.e. or just "steam @ ~100 Celsius" could be some kind of new byproduct, and just get ventilated, or even reused in new recipes.

In theory, anything that does take water and give pure water should give salt, but I didn't want to overwhelm the player and give it from the distillery, at those early stages in the game, if you don't need it, you probably don't want it at all.
As for the Separation recipe, I just wanted two different water types so you can't pipe the output back to the input.

In theory I could also fix the "Other mods require water" issue, because my library has a command, Replace ingredient in all recipes, which does what it sounds like. If I were to tell it to replace water with pure water in all recipes, IT WILL, then I'd have to fix the recipes that actually want water afterwards (Distillery and Separation), but it is something that can be done. But it only effects recipes, not other things like boilers.

Also please keep in mind here that you're toying with one of those things in my mod that I have put a lot of thought into. one of those "Please don't talk to me about this" problems that I know exist, but the solution I want to use can't be done (boilers just taking both types of water) and the other possible solutions are like... playing with fire.

Keep in mind I am very familiar with changes that a huge chunk of the community dislike, then I get stuck in the middle having to cater to both sides of the argument by adding an option to turn it on/off. I even get people bugging me about those kinds of changes about which version should be the default.

You haven't really said anything I haven't thought of before, but there's reasons why I haven't done it. actually, the "Recipe requires FUEL and gives out steam instead of pure water" is actually a new one that could work, but I don't really want "Fuel" as an ingredient.

Also I was going to write a new piece of code to handle the situation where boilers can only handle a specific fluid by adding Fluid Categories, but they took source access off me. So the real reason why there's no solution to this problem is because of that.

I understand the responsibility behind managing this huge mod, and also accept your conservative point of view regarding avoiding breaking stuff which is tested and working. You are right being careful here. At the same time you are the change agent, providing a better version every on release. Regarding uniformization of recipes to pure water, you could just add recipes instead of replacing them, if you intend to keep the mod retro-compatible.

So, back to the very initial topic, I hope you can give a thought on the [pure water => water] conversion, preferably without the use of salt, which would be "correct" but pointless in most cases. In the mean time, just as a workaround, I'm gonna write a mod myself to temporarily provide this recipe on distilleries - this seems to be the most obvious solution to the issue, without changing other delicate bob's recipes.

And thanks for all your dedication to all of this, I am a fan of your work. I hope I could contribute somehow giving new insights to you.

I'll talk about this with the group on discord and see if we can come up with any ideas for favorable changes.