Liquid Tepidizer

The Liquid Tepidizer is a submerged liquid-heating building that warms any liquid touching it. Its primary use is to raise liquid temperature, including for sanitizing Polluted Water by heating it until germs die off. It is one of the most power-efficient heating buildings in the game, producing about 4,064 kDTU/s while consuming 960 W, which works out to roughly 4.2 kDTU per watt. In practice, a full tile of Water can be heated by about 1°C per second.

Because it can only heat liquids up to 85°C, it is not intended for steam production. If a liquid source needs to be turned into Steam, another heat source is required. For many colonies, the Liquid Tepidizer is most useful as the core of a central heating loop, especially when steady, efficient warming matters more than rapid extreme heating.

A few practical details affect how it behaves in use:

• It can disinfect Polluted Water by heating it, but this costs a lot of power.
• If new germs are introduced into the liquid after it has been heated, the contamination process starts over.
• The building checks whether it has reached its target temperature by averaging the temperature of all liquids above 400 kg on its four tiles, so the liquid can be heated slightly past the target before it stops.
• Its target-temperature check is not always limited to the four tiles directly under it; the game can use a larger line-of-sight-based check area centered on the middle-left tile.

There are also a few notable quirks and bugs. When first built, it can be pulsed on and off through automation to push liquid well above the normal 85°C limit. After a reload, that behavior is restricted: the building still reports its normal output below 125°C, but above that temperature its heating output drops sharply to 64 kDTU/s despite the displayed value. This acts as a soft fix for the overheating exploit. Because of these issues, automation-based cycling can produce results that differ from normal continuous operation.

Overall, the Liquid Tepidizer is best treated as an efficient, controllable liquid heater rather than a boiler. It shines when a colony needs reliable warming, temperature maintenance, or germ control without the power cost of less efficient heating solutions.