Hi, I was looking at FrancisJohn’s video on geothermal power (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyoLDP2tUaI), and tried the trick for building a “spike” deep down into lava (shown off at around 4:30 mark in the video).
However, my dupes do not seem able to build through the closed horizontal airlock. Has this trick been patched out?
Nope, has been patched out quite some time ago. For heat transfer, a small interface is normally enough, e. g. to power a few steam turbines. The biggest problem is that the lava will disconnect as is starts to solidify into debris. You will need to keep your spike walkable to fix that.
If you want to extract heat faster, instead of a deeper spike you can move heat, use a conveyor rail with refined carbon rotating on it, it transfers heat well. Rotate it into diamond windows at the source and at the destination.
Thanks for confirming this!
I know that having just one or two tiles touching the lava surface should be enough for many hundreds of cycles, but I just know that those lava tiles will solidify in the most inconvenient moment, so I wanted to have a bit more leeway - thousands of cycles. That way I can be sure that I will stop playing that particular colony long before enough heat is extracted. :)
For now, I made a mini-spike about three tiles deep - basically, as far as the dupes could build with a ladder built just above lava.