Ice-E Fan

The Ice-E Fan is a manually operated cooling building that uses stored ice to rapidly lower the temperature of nearby gas. When a Duplicant operates it, the fan cools the surrounding atmosphere at a rate of -32 kDTU/s, making it useful for temporary spot-cooling in small areas or for emergency temperature control.

Its cooling is not constant under all conditions. Duplicants will stop operating the building once the surrounding gas becomes too cold, and the exact cutoff depends on the gas in the tile of interest, which is the bottom-left tile of the building. For example, oxygen stops at a higher temperature than hydrogen, so hydrogen allows the fan to run longer and reach lower average temperatures. If the ambient temperature around the building falls low enough, the building itself shuts down and shows the message “Minimum Temperature Reached,” indicating it cannot cool the surrounding environment below 5°C. In normal play this is most likely to happen only in insulated spaces with no other heat sources.

The Ice-E Fan transfers heat into the ice stored inside it, and the ice only exchanges temperature with the environment while the building is being operated. If the stored ice melts into water, polluted water, or brine, the building can still continue to run until the internal material reaches 5°C. At that point, any resulting liquid is dropped on the ground as a bottle instead of spilling. Snow, crushed ice, polluted ice, and brine ice can all be used as fuel for the machine, and they produce bottled water, polluted water, or brine when they melt. Ice from an Ice Maker is especially effective as a heat source because it begins with heat already removed from it.

A notable property of the Ice-E Fan is that it rapidly equalizes its temperature with nearby tiles even when disabled, reaching up to 2 tiles away and bypassing insulation tiles that directly contact it. This gives it an unusually large effective thermal interaction area and makes it useful in specialized heat-transfer setups, not just as a simple spot cooler. In practice, it behaves somewhat like a compact tempshift plate with a larger area of influence.

• Best used for short-term cooling of small, targeted areas.
• Hydrogen around the fan generally lets it run longer than oxygen because of the different overcooling behavior.
• It is especially useful in insulated builds where precise temperature control matters.
• The building stops being practical once the surrounding gas is already very cold, so it works best as a temporary cooling tool rather than a full-scale refrigeration solution.