Andy contemplated his situation. He clearly only had this one night to solve his oxygen problem, or he would run out. There was a variety of gasses available to him in different rooms, atmosphere and pipes, provided he spent what little resources he had constructing pumps or filters, or whatever else was needed to get at it. Although they were all too hot to be useful, as is. A major problem indeed.

He also didn’t have iron and according to the PDA, most things required it to build. Another major problem.

Should he just go trying to find the dead player's original base or lander? It should be somewhere nearby in theory. But that was an extreme gamble. He couldn’t stay out in the day time, it was too hot and would get him killed at this point. Which means he had one night only to find something and if he didn’t, he would have squandered the only chance he had to do something about his situation.

Andy decided to save that high stakes gamble for a little later, only if he was absolutely certain that there was nothing else he could do to salvage the situation here. He instead focused on the available resources and equipment at hand.

Okay. So what about this shredder thing? Could it get him the iron he needed?

Andy double checked the entry on the PDA. It did say it could turn stuff into raw ores. He would need to power it and test it out.

First he used the wire cutters tool to gather a few units off loose wire from the electrical cables running along some of the walls. Next he needed a power source. He did not want to go into the bedroom right now to try and retrieve the power controller, as he did not want to disturb things in there any further than he already had.

That left only one option, the portable generator. He tried dragging it over near the shredder, then using the wire cutters in one hand and some wire in the other, he was able to connect cable from the shredder, to the floor and then to the portable generator. The game automatically formed a detachable plug on the generator's end of things.

So far so good. Now.

Andy found an eject button on his welding torch that ejected its ‘fuel’ canister. He put the fuel canister in the portable generator instead and clipped it in place.

Now the moment of truth. Andy turned the generator on. It started rumbling to life and soon after, the power button on the shredder lit up. It worked!

Andy quickly grabbed his crowbar and went to work ‘stealing’ a few iron sheets from a couple of intact wall frames from around the base.

He came back to the shredder and turned it on. The shredder started turning its grinding teeth of death and made a lot of noise in the process. Andy held one of the iron sheets out to it and the sheet disappeared from his hand and reappeared in the mouth of the shredder, already busy getting ground down to nothing.

After a while, the shredder's LCD display showed that it now had 2kg of iron ore in it. Andy did not pull on the ‘ejection’ handle yet, like the PDA had instructed him to do, as he did not want a bunch of loose iron ores floating around. He had already seen from the ingots that they could stack. He would abuse that.

He proceeded to feed the rest of the iron sheets in until he finally ended up with 24kg of iron ore. Then only did he pull the release lever. The shredder unceremoniously plopped out a rough ball-shaped chunk of iron ore.

He turned the shredder and generator off for now.

First he had to steal some more cables, then he had to lay them from the generator, along the floor, over to where the electric furnace sat.

After this, he was able to turn the generator back on, followed by the electric furnace.

Andy inserted the iron ore into the intake of the furnace and hit the button to activate it. The furnace flared to life and started generating a ridiculous amount of heat. The atmosphere around the furnace heated up enough that it started flowing outwards and almost made Andy lose his balance.

Andy quickly backed away while it worked. A few minutes later the furnace cooled down and made a ting sound like some kind of microwave. It then automatically ejected the brand new iron ingot. Andy waited for the metal to cool down a bit before picking it up: “Iron ingot (24kg)”.

Nice!

He turned the furnace off and once more laid cables over to where the atmospherics constructor was. He once more turned the generator on as well as the atmospherics constructor itself.

The constructor also had an LCD display that showed a menu of things you could build, as well as the resource contents of the machine. Andy proceeded to dump the iron ingot in the machine and then select a single piece of pipe (0,5 kg iron) to construct. The constructor got to work and after several seconds, ejected a brand new piece of pipe. Everything seemed to work fine, so Andy went over to the first locker and fetched the copper and gold ingots and also loaded them into the constructor.

Now the question was what could he build that would save his life. Obviously most items were still locked out, either due to a lack of more specific resources, or just because they need to be researched or acquired by other unknown means.

He could now print filters for other types of gasses or even oxygen extraction itself. So getting at an O2 supply was no longer an issue. The issue still remained however of cooling the O2 enough for it to be usable. Also cooling the bedroom so he could use it again for eating and drinking.

He could not build any device related directly to cooling, they all costed resources he did not have.

The normal way of cooling stuff was to use something else that was already colder, to absorb the heat, but he had nothing colder anywhere. Pretty much everything in this place was varying degrees of ‘hot’ by this point.

So then what could he do? How did he solve this?

Andy wracked his brains. He searched his rudimentary knowledge of chemistry and all his experience playing any kind of science or engineering oriented sim games.

And then he had an idea.

He didn’t quite know if it would work, a large part of it depended on how accurately this game modelled physics and chemistry, but it was worth a shot and probably his only viable option at the moment.

Andy got to work constructing first: a ‘electric pump’ and then a ‘flow valve’. Then he made a vent. Followed by a dozen pipes, the regular kind, not the insulated kind as those ones would cost more and defeated the purpose of what he was trying to do anyway.

Andy then got to work. First he checked if he could pace pipes against walls, as well as through them, using the wrench. This all seemed to work fine.

Next, he started his experiment. Using the wrench, he placed down a small loop of pipe on the floor. Then, on one side of the loop, he placed the pump and on the opposite side of the loop, placed the pressure valve. He also needed to connect power to the pump with wire.

Now he placed a vent connected via T-junction to ‘side A’ of the pipe loop. As soon as he did, the 150kpa atmosphere pushed into the vent and filled side A of the pipe.

Now he adjusted the setting of the pump that would transfer gas from side A to side B, to be very fast. He also closed the valve completely. Turning on only the pump, side B began to fill up with atmosphere from side A, which in turn just kept sucking up more and more atmosphere through the vent.

According to the wiki on the PDA, these standard pipes could handle up to 50mpa of pressure. He wouldn’t need that much and had no intention of pushing things that far regardless.

Slowly but surely side B’s pressure got higher and higher as more and more atmosphere was forced into it. Eventually Andy removed the vent, with the pump still turned on. This had the effect of letting side B suck up all remaining gas and leaving side A in a vacuum state.

Now he also turned the pump off, trapping the high pressure gas on side B.

Next up was to set the valve to allow a small amount of pressure through at a time and then wait a little bit for some gas to flow into side A. Now the tricky part.

Andy changed the pump’s setting to match the flow rate of the valve and then turned it on. Only a small amount of time passed between these two events and only a little bit of gas had accumulated in side A..

This created the effect where side B was constantly very high pressure. Side A was constantly very low pressure. And the whole loop would have gas flowing around it permanently.

Andy quickly whipped out his PDA and turned on the atmospherics function. He first confirmed that the pressures were all roughly what he expected and then he took a close look at the temperatures.

It turned out that side B of the loop was always ever so slightly higher in temperature than the atmosphere and side A of the loop was always slightly lower in temperature than the atmosphere.

The experiment was a success! This would work!

Basically, when a gas is allowed to naturally expand into an area on its own, it expends energy to do so and has to take that energy from somewhere else, hence cooling it’s surroundings. On the other hand, when a pump pumps the gas into the high pressure area, the pump doing the ‘work’ puts energy into the gas and causes it to heat up. So side A would always be colder and side B would always be hotter.

Gas expansion was a dumbed down version of what refrigerators used for cooling, with those, they actually used the extreme expansion version of evaporating a liquid into a gas.

Either way, this setup would solve all his ‘immediate’ problems. All except one.

Andy still needed to salvage the ‘breathable’ atmosphere in the bedroom. In other words, not toxify it further.

So he went ahead and built two ‘active vents’. They were pricey in that they each cost some gold to make, unlike everything else he had constructed so far. Active vents were basically vents and bi-directional pumps all rolled in one. He could turn them on and off and set them to pump atmosphere into a pipe or pump the contents of the pipe into the atmosphere instead. A very versatile device overall. Albeit a bit expensive.

Next, Andy went and ‘stole’ some of the insulated pipes that were running to nowhere at the back of the wrecked base. There wasn’t that much, but it was enough. Regular non-insulated pipes would not work for what he had in mind.

Now Andy unplugged the portable generator and moved it into the bedroom entrance ‘block’. It took soom finessing but he eventually got it through the wall frame and into the ‘block’.

Using the hand drill, he was able to mount the two active vents onto one of the solid walls. He added four units of insulated pipe onto the end of each active vent to serve as gas storage for each vent. Then he wired both of them up to the generator, all within the single block. It was admittedly a bit cramped in here now.

Now it was time for Andy to test out his makeshift airlock.