Pneumatic Door
Sets Duplicant Access Permissions for area restriction.
Door controls can be used to prevent Duplicants from entering restricted areas.
Red: Close
Pneumatic Doors enclose rooms without blocking the flow of Gases or Liquids. They open faster than unpowered airlocks and are useful to limit the movement of Dupes and Critters, so they stay in their preferred Biome or Stable, and to designate boundaries of morale-boosting rooms that dupes can cross.
Light and Decor can pass through Pneumatic Doors. Solids can't pass through it.
Assignation
Duplicants can be assigned individually the permission to path through the Pneumatic Doors in both ways, in one way or in another way, or not.
Dupes obey access restrictions even when doors are open!
This allows fine-grained areas control, as it can be changed at any time by the user. For example, it allows to completely forbid an area. Another use is to force all duplicants to come back inside the base after their current trip, without having the right to go back outside.
Automation
As Mechanized Airlock, Pneumatic Doors has an automation input allowing to open/close the door giving an on/off signal. This allows traffic control and solids dispenser, among other usages.
Pathfinding
Be aware that switching a door state with automation (from open to close or close to open), will "break" the pathfinding of duplicants that were going to use it. More accurately, it'll remove the current errand of the duplicant if this switching hinder him to finish its task. For example, if your duplicant grabbed sandstone on one side of the door to supply a construction errand on the other side of the door, and, before it can pass the door, the door closes due to a red signal, it'll drop its sandstone on the ground and change its errand to another one available, or simply go idle if none is available.
This can be prevented by using Checkpoints, which don't break pathfinding. In our example, our duplicant won't stop its errand and drop its sandstone on the ground, it'll simply wait for the checkpoint to allows it.
Both of them have their usage; using an automated door or a checkpoint will depend on what you need to do.
Tips
- Pneumatic Doors cost the same as Airflow and Mesh Tiles, and require no Research, so using one door is cheaper than two tiles.
- You can set a door to be always open. It will save some waiting time.
- Critters, do not care and treat open doors as non-existent. Although, you still might want some of them wandering in your base for their decor value. Notice that leaving one Stable room will automatically re-assign them to the other, and may generate an infinite loop of wranglings. Also, Critters inside an open door will get the "Confined" -10 Happiness penalty, which may be detrimental to ranching.
- Pneumatic Doors do not block effects of the Loud Sleeper trait.
- Dupes can stand on top of a door and climb there from an adjacent tile. So it can be a weirder, slower alternative to ladders.
- Pneumatic Doors have a base overheat temperature of 75 °C167 °F. Therefore, when building them in the Oil Biome, Gold Amalgam needs to be used as the building material to increase the overheat temperature to 125 °C257 °F. Note however that temperatures inside the Oil Biome may exceed 125 °C257 °F sometimes, in which case Steel needs to be used.
See also
Bugs
- As of AU-218235, Pneumatic Doors do not properly block critter and item movement. Items will fall through them, Hatches will jump on them only to fall through, Duplicants will jump through locked Pneumatic Doors from Ladders as if the doors only prevented standing on the tile below them, but not actually moving through them.
