Deodorizer

The Deodorizer is a power-free air-cleaning building that converts Polluted Oxygen into Oxygen and Clay, making it one of the earliest ways to control polluted air and support ceramic production. It is especially useful in areas where Polluted Oxygen is being produced by nearby buildings or where polluted pockets have formed during exploration.

A Deodorizer can draw Polluted Oxygen from up to 2 tiles away, covering a 5-tile-wide, 5-tile-tall star-shaped area centered on itself. Its reach is blocked by mechanical doors and by solid tiles, though liquid tiles do not block the effect. Because of that, it can be used to create very tight air separation setups, including a sealed boundary between Oxygen and Polluted Oxygen with a liquid barrier in between.

In operation, the building converts 90% of the Polluted Oxygen it processes into Oxygen. It also produces more Clay than the Filtration Medium it consumes, so running them over polluted air can be a net source of Clay rather than a drain on resources. Since it does not require power, it is a good fit for early colonies and for passive cleanup in remote areas.

Common uses include:

• Cleaning polluted air produced by buildings such as Outhouses, Wash Basins, Algae Distillers, and Sublimation Stations.
• Clearing pockets of Polluted Oxygen while exploring, then pumping the resulting clean Oxygen back into the colony.
• Placing Deodorizers over open pools of Polluted Water to slowly clean the polluted air they release over time, without generating heat.

Deodorizers do not remove germs from the air. However, once the air has been converted back into Oxygen, germs in that cleaned air will slowly die off. This makes the building useful for air quality control, but not a substitute for sanitation if the goal is immediate pathogen removal.

They can also overpressure the surrounding area, even though a normal gas vent is limited to 2000 g of gas output in a tile. This makes them useful as an early-game high-pressure output point when filtering Polluted Oxygen into storage, especially when feeding a gas tank or other oxygen buffer.

One practical advantage is that Polluted Water naturally breaks down into Polluted Oxygen over time, so a field of Deodorizers above exposed Polluted Water can eventually convert it into Oxygen, albeit very slowly. This is not a primary oxygen source, but it is a clean, heat-free way to reclaim polluted air while generating useful Clay.