Pump-driven liquid eliminator

Tyro

Tyro

Steampunker
A long while back I wanted to make a "volcano" trap for my base - pump a bunch of lava over the top to burn my enemies to ash. I abandoned the idea because of the duplication problem and the lack of an easy way to destroy excess lava.

I've been studying Terraria fluid dynamics lately, and I discovered (both through research and experience) that it's possible to screw up a duper in such a way that you end up with less liquid than you started with (typically by using too fast a timer, so the liquid doesn't have time to settle). I've even done this with water, when I let the levels in the duper get too low.

I lack the experience or focus to figure this out by myself, but with help I think we could design a compact, effective liquid destroyer. Possibly multiple designs for different liquids or with different footprints, if there's a more effective design which requires more space (not just scaled up, but with different mechanics of whatever flavor). Maybe versions with and without logic gates, if they prove useful. Can anyone help me figure this out?
 
I'm interested in an automated (if possible) liquid duper. I've just stuck with the classic bucket and block method of input to create more liquid to use. I will be looking into these pumps duping liquids. References would be nice if anyone has any to share.
 
Something to keep in mind that only works for water is that water will automatically slowly disappear in the Underworld. As for honey and lava, I don't know
 
While building my giant toilet I used this for a water over flow drain. I'm sure something like it can be done for lava. If you place an item in a chest, (I just used dirt blocks as my item) the chest and the 2 blocks they sit on become unbreakable. The water and lava will try to form obsidian but can't because the chest is in the way, so it just deletes the water.
Drain.png
 
SovereignVis said:
While building my giant toilet I used this for a water over flow drain. I'm sure something like it can be done for lava. If you place an item in a chest, (I just used dirt blocks as my item) the chest and the 2 blocks they sit on become unbreakable. The water and lava will try to form obsidian but can't because the chest is in the way, so it just deletes the water.
View attachment 185043
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Evaporators of that type don't work for lava. Something about hard-coded priority.
 
Either by design or chance, lava is the most irritating liquid (as it can readily kill you easily) to handle and so the most difficult to remove. The most I could do is set up a tertiary reservoir that would let me use another liquid to "purge" the lava. Originally it was water (my need and design was from before honey was a thing). Lots of surplus obsidian, but at least you can make Obsidian Skulls and sell them as a cheap moneymaker. (Crisp Honey isn't as useful...) Lava on a chest'ed (or actuated block) water just becomes lava on water...

Otherwise, for Honey and Water, as @SovereignVis's notes, a furniture'd lava pool is the best method for removing them. I believe Honey will eliminate water with that method as well. (On the chance you're just messing with water and don't want a pool of lava anywhere near you for safety or whatever.)

Lava was meant to be a hazard, so I can see why it's so hard to get rid of. They got rid of the old sand workaround for liquids, after all. (It made getting past or working around/with lava MUCH easier/safer.)

Anyway... For lava, just have a tertiary overflow reservoir to handle the excess lava. Have a feed line from a water reservoir feed into it. At the bottom, have a inlet pump that can be isolated (via actuated blocks) that can feed the water back into the water reservoir. When you have lots of excess lava, flood the tank with water and mine the obsidian until you run out of lava. If you have any water left, open the floodgate to the inlet pump and pump it back into your water tanks. (Obviously, ensure that water tank has a dupe system for refilling.)

Or you can do an alt design where the lava flows into a water pool/junction point (the important this is that the water is below the lava at all times.) You can just mine away that one junction point. The flood method usually means the water is on top of the lava, so you need to be more active with the mining by moving around. (Water flows quicker that lava, so the water will expand into the lava area.)

Water on top is safer (you're standing on the obsidian in water, which flows faster, so you're unlikely to hit lava; you just need to move around more as the water eats into the lava), while lava flowing on water at a junction is more convenient (you can stand at one spot, perpetually mining one block, but a mining mistake might cause a flood of water or lava. It's also a bit slower due to lava's flow rate, though lava is faster that it used to be, way back when...)
 
Stahn Aileron said:
Either by design or chance, lava is the most irritating liquid (as it can readily kill you easily) to handle and so the most difficult to remove. The most I could do is set up a tertiary reservoir that would let me use another liquid to "purge" the lava. Originally it was water (my need and design was from before honey was a thing). Lots of surplus obsidian, but at least you can make Obsidian Skulls and sell them as a cheap moneymaker. (Crisp Honey isn't as useful...) Lava on a chest'ed (or actuated block) water just becomes lava on water...

Otherwise, for Honey and Water, as @SovereignVis's notes, a furniture'd lava pool is the best method for removing them. I believe Honey will eliminate water with that method as well. (On the chance you're just messing with water and don't want a pool of lava anywhere near you for safety or whatever.)

Lava was meant to be a hazard, so I can see why it's so hard to get rid of. They got rid of the old sand workaround for liquids, after all. (It made getting past or working around/with lava MUCH easier/safer.)

Anyway... For lava, just have a tertiary overflow reservoir to handle the excess lava. Have a feed line from a water reservoir feed into it. At the bottom, have a inlet pump that can be isolated (via actuated blocks) that can feed the water back into the water reservoir. When you have lots of excess lava, flood the tank with water and mine the obsidian until you run out of lava. If you have any water left, open the floodgate to the inlet pump and pump it back into your water tanks. (Obviously, ensure that water tank has a dupe system for refilling.)

Or you can do an alt design where the lava flows into a water pool/junction point (the important this is that the water is below the lava at all times.) You can just mine away that one junction point. The flood method usually means the water is on top of the lava, so you need to be more active with the mining by moving around. (Water flows quicker that lava, so the water will expand into the lava area.)

Water on top is safer (you're standing on the obsidian in water, which flows faster, so you're unlikely to hit lava; you just need to move around more as the water eats into the lava), while lava flowing on water at a junction is more convenient (you can stand at one spot, perpetually mining one block, but a mining mistake might cause a flood of water or lava. It's also a bit slower due to lava's flow rate, though lava is faster that it used to be, way back when...)
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The whole point to this project is to create a better way than the obsidian method to deal with lava.
 
...There isn't much of another way. Well, other than exploiting game saving and loading with actuated blocks.

Blocks have precedence over liquids. While a map is in play, the game tracks overlapped blocks and liquids in active memory. But on save, it discards the liquids in favor of the blocks.

If you're up for save/load cycle every time you need to purge excess lava, there's that. It works well enough for single player games on a small world. Larger worlds take longer for a save/load cycle and MP worlds aren't very conducive to save/load cycling. (I'm pretty sure this mechanic still works. I don't recall a patch note stating that liquids behind actuated blocks are saved...)
 
I've destroyed lava accidentally with this method, so I know it works. I want to build a way to do it reliably and efficiently.
 
Material creation and save/load cycling are the only two reliably effective ways I know of given what I know of how lava is handled by the game. I have yet to hear of another method for the removal/destruction of lava in-game that is more inline with how we can handle water and honey. (Kinda self-evident given that the third method for water and honey exploits the properties of lava that were are currently bemoaning...)

I'm afraid you're gonna have to face the fact that lava is a pain in the butt to remove in the game. I mean, the only other "alternative method" is to use hellevators or long pump lines and dump all excess lava into the Underworld. It won't eliminate the lava, but it will get it out of the way. You could place a massive actuated tank down there and trigger it once in a while when you save/exit.

It's not a very elegant solution, but practicality and/or efficacy is more important given the limitations we're aware of. Lava by design is supposed to be a hazard for gameplay reasons. If it was trivial to get rid of (like how it used to be with the sand exploit), it wouldn't add much to the gameplay, becoming just an annoying nuisance.

Do I find it annoying? Sure, to a degree. The main thing I do is make sure I'm not making excessive amounts of lava all the time. I once tried making it so my main base had a lavafall I could trigger for Blood Moons and invasions (back when pumps were first introduced). It worked, but the overflow was a pain to deal with, as you can imagine. I eventually gave up on the design as it wasn't very practical. Now I'm far more conscious of controlling my liquid production.
 
In what manner of efficiency are you talking about? There's only save/exiting more often or making the overall storage area(s) larger so you can store and remove more lava per save/load cycle. Well, there's also "Don't make so much lava!", but that's dependent on your goals and activities, so I can't say anything about that.

You can only "brute force" lava removal by doing it more often (save/load) or doing a lot of it at once (bigger tanks) via save/load.

The way I see it now, clear out a (large) section of the Underworld, set up actuated blocks, and pump excess lava down there (hellevators take too long and will multiply it more as well). Right before you exit the world, trigger the blocks to un-actuate (solid) mode. When you enter a world, actuate them.

I think there are world-load detector mechanisms you can try to build and use to make this a little easier on yourself in the long run. I can't comment much on them as I don't do anything that requires mechanisms being on all the time in my worlds.
 
I don't know if this is possible (I haven't tested it), but I think you might be able to use actuators flicking on and off after it hits a lava gate
[doublepost=1507679766,1507679656][/doublepost]I also think it's possible to pump it into a tiny box, so when lava comes in, it has no space in the box, thus getting destroyed.
[doublepost=1507679945][/doublepost]
Predious said:
I'm interested in an automated (if possible) liquid duper. I've just stuck with the classic bucket and block method of input to create more liquid to use. I will be looking into these pumps duping liquids. References would be nice if anyone has any to share.
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You can always use Ymir's 25*49 water duplication box
 
benji_is_7 said:
I don't know if this is possible (I haven't tested it), but I think you might be able to use actuators flicking on and off after it hits a lava gate
[doublepost=1507679766,1507679656][/doublepost]I also think it's possible to pump it into a tiny box, so when lava comes in, it has no space in the box, thus getting destroyed.
[doublepost=1507679945][/doublepost]
You can always use Ymir's 25*49 water duplication box
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  • Actuating the blocks alone doesn't do anything. You need to exit the world and re-load it to eliminate liquids with that method.
  • If a pump is fully submerged, it just stops pumping. Players could be peeved if the liquid in a reservoir got lost because it was pumped into a full tank and just disappeared.
  • Pump-based liquid duping it easy: Input and output in the same tank. Add a repeating trigger (like a timer). Connect all three with the same color wire. Basic liquid duper is done. Anything else is for convenience or fail-safes. (An example for the latter: I set up my tanks with a reserve area to ensure they never run out of liquid to dupe.)
 
terraria water dupes working together.png


On the topic of manipulating water, I did a little experiment and found that these two glitches work with each other.

The Staggering blocks method, or also called the pyramid, multiplies the water as it goes down, and the platforms above the staggering blocks produce an infinite source of water for a limited time.

The discovery of these two glitches working together may be mine, i am not certain so don't quote me on it, but the glitches themselves are obviously not my find and I know they are widely known.

Thought I'd share these with you guys, and even though this is still a bit slow, its mostly automatic and can be a good option for water duping.
 
I find the pyramid scheme not as efficient/productive as one would think. The thing about liquid duping is not how much looks to be flowing; it's about how much liquid you have once the game consolidates it into a meaningful volume.

The funny thing is, liquids only dupe when they are flowing. In the end, I did experiment with water back in the day and found that letting masses of water fall for a distance was the best overall method for duping water efficiently and effectively (the amount of water generated over time given a starting amount of water.) Flows over horizontal distances (a.k.a. over blocks) wasn't as good unless you had a wall of water coming at you (and really, that eventually turned into vertically falling water being redirected horizontally.)

My method when I flooded a world once was to let a mass of water fall, pool, and repeat, splitting some of it off when enough of it duped. The primary benefit of this method wasn't quite the dupe rate: it was the fact it prevented having a massive flow of water, which would eventually make the game force settle the water to maintain performance. (At which point duping had to be restarted.)

If you want infinite water flow, the better method would be the "distant source flow" where the primary source of your water (like a lake) is nowhere near you, and therefore the game is not rendering it quite right. Water will keep flowing, but the source won't drain until you (or another player in MP) get close enough to it that the game has to start rendering it for possible interaction with the (or a) player.

Anyway... Getting off-topic here. (This thread is about getting rid of liquids, not making them.)
 
Tyro said:
Again, I know this method works. I just need help making it more efficient.
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Hmm, I did some test with this chest approach it seems not to work for lava on top and honey at ground.
For Water top and lava bottom also inactive blocks work (instead of chests).

If I remember correctly it worked in an older version also for lava honey. There you could also use crystal shards.
Have you tested it with actual version?
 
Unftf said:
Hmm, I did some test with this chest approach it seems not to work for lava on top and honey at ground.
For Water top and lava bottom also inactive blocks work (instead of chests).

If I remember correctly it worked in an older version also for lava honey. There you could also use crystal shards.
Have you tested it with actual version?
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It's on my to-do list, but I've done it accidentally by using a 1 second timer on lava or honey, and by running a water duper when the starting level was too low
 
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