Air Vent

Air Vent


Category:	Functional
Function:	pressurizes or depressurizes an airtight room

Fits small grid
Mass:	189.0 kg
PCU:	10
Size:	1x1x1
Time to Build:	10 sec

Fits large grid
Mass:	1001.0 kg
PCU:	10
Size:	1x1x1
Time to Build:	20 sec

Data Controls:	[edit] [purge] (?)

You use the Air Vent block to fill an airtight room with oxygen, or to empty a room of oxygen to store it safely in tanks.

The Air Vent is the block that is the main driver of the life support game mechanic that was released in the 01.074 update. For a definition of airtightness, see Airtightness.

For a fully airtight block variant, see also Air Vent Full. The Air Vent Fan is a variant from the purchasable Automatons Pack DLC; it has the same functionality but has an animated spinning fan.

Usage

The block has two modes:

Pressurize means fillig a room with breatheable air from e.g. a tank
Depressurize means removing oxygen from the room and pushing it into tanks

How to fill a room with air

Build an airtight room.
Connect the conveyor system to Oxygen Tanks, or Oxygen Farms, or an O2 H2 Generator, depending on your use case.
Open the Control Panel and disable Stockpile on the oxygen tanks (if applicable).
Build the Air Vent so the vent slats face into an airtight room. It can be in the wall, floor, or ceiling.
Connect the Air Vent to the conveyor system.
Open the Control Panel and enable Pressurize.

The Air Vent will slowly fill the airtight room in front of the slats with oxygen which provides life support for the engineers within, so they can open their helmets.

How to fill oxygen tanks

If you are low on ice or oxygen and cannot afford to waste it, use depressurization to make an air vent suck the air out of one airtight room, either to fill an empty tank, or to use the air to pressurize another room or airlock.

If you are on a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, here's a valuable survival tip: Build an Air Vent on an outside conveyor port and set it to depressurise.

An outside Air Vent can suck in oxygen from the atmosphere into a connected Oxygen Tank -- you "depressurize the planet"^[1], so to speak.
An outside Air Vent can also provide oxygen to a player seated in a closed cockpit on a low-oxygen planet.

This knowledge can save you in an emergency if you run out of oxygen bottles, are out of ice, or your O2/H2 Generator breaks down.

You know the Air Vent is in the process of depressurizing when its status lights are blue. If it doesn’t depressurize, check whether the tanks are not already full.

How to tell if a room is pressurized

Air Vents have four status lights that display (de)pressurization progress and status.

If the Air Vent lights are...

red, the vent is switched off or has no power -- switch it on before looking for leaks.
yellow, the room is not airtight, e.g. the doors are open or it's an outside vent for a cockpit.
(Note that, if you are in atmosphere, the room still contains oxygen, despite not being airtight!)
blue, the room is depressurizing. The room is airtight and the vent is sucking the oxygen out of the room into tanks.
green and the engineer's HUD does not say “Oxygen:High and Temperature:Warm”, the room in the process of being pressurized. Wait a minute and check again.
All green and the engineer's HUD says “Oxygen:High and Temperature:Warm” in green, the room is airtight and pressurized.

How to build an automatic airlock

You set up actions that depend on a room being pressurised inside an Air Vent block, not in an Event Controller.

Open the Air Vent's Control Panel Screen.
Click Set up Actions. You'll see two action slots:
- The first action is triggered once, when the room is full of oxygen.
- The second action is triggered once, when the room has no more oxygen in it.

"No oxygen" means either that the room is no longer airtight because a door has been opened or a wall block was destroyed; or that the room is still airtight but active depressurization has just completed.

Typical actions to set up with this button are air lock related. An air lock cycle may require opening and closing doors combined with audio-visual alerts, and so on. To start a whole series of air lock actions, build several Timer Blocks, one that pressurises the room and closes doors, and one that depressurises the room and opens the doors. And make the action slots start the Timers.

For details, see airtightness.

Troubleshooting

When the vent slats face outside:

If you attempt to depressurise airless space or planets/moons without atmospheres, simply nothing happens.
If you attempt to depressurise a planet's atmosphere, the atmosphere is not affected but the tanks slowly fill with oxygen.
If you attempt to pressurise anything but an airtight room, nothing happens. You can't pressurise space nor airless planets/moons nor voxel-enclosed areas such as caves.

In the presence of an air leak or vacuum, an Air Vent will not function. In the simplest case, if the Doors are open, the vents will not pressurize the room until you close the doors again. Careful: A small number blocks display unintuitive airtightness behaviour. For example, certain window blocks allow the player to walk in their concave volume indoors; the block space registers as unpressurised as if outdoors, and at the same time, the room registers as properly airtight and pressurised...

As many blocks, the Air Vent block itself is an example of a not-full-sized block whose airtightness depends on its rotation and on whether it's flush with other blocks. See Airtightness for the definition of leaks so you can avoid them. There is also an Air Vent Full that is always airtight.

Tip: The Steam workshop also offers leak detection mods, such as Digi's Leak Finder

Construction

This functional block is available for large and small grid sizes. It needs power to function.

The Air Vent Block has ventilation slats in the front and one conveyor port in the back. This port must be attached to a conveyor system for the Vent to work.

Recipe

Air Vent
Component	Large Ship/Station Required	Large Ship/Station Optional	Small Ship Required	Small Ship Optional
Computer	5	—	5	—
Motor	10	—	2	—
Construction Comp.	20	—	10	—
Steel Plate	20	10	2	1