Armor upgrades in Pressure Chamber

Describe the feature

I've always felt a lack of a dedicated air storage block at tier 2 (20 bar). Now that we're getting "tier 1.5" (10 bar) as well, that just means another tier for which one might want air storage.

So instead of asking for two new blocks... why not allow armor upgrades to be placed in the Pressure Chamber? Each upgrade would increase the maximum pressure the Pressure Chamber can handle by 5 bar. Maximum 3 upgrades.

Reasons why it should be considered

Minimizes dev effort - no new assets need to be made, just code changes
It makes sense for something called a Pressure Chamber to be able to deal with high pressures in some way
Thematically fits the armor upgrade
Armor upgrades are pricey, making this an actual player decision rather than just an auto-include
Does not remove the engineering challenge of having to step down air pressure to a dedicated 5-bar circuit for more fragile machinery - it just changes which side of the step-down valve the Pressure Chamber is hooked up to
Enables the ability to create higher-pressure recipes for the Pressure Chamber (f.ex. the 8 coal blocks into diamond recipe might require 9 bar instead of 4)

Additional details

Players foolishly pulling out armor upgrades from a Pressure Chamber under high pressure will blow it (and themselves?) up. Include a 10-second grace period of dangerous creaking before it actually blows, regardless of pressure?

I'm not totally averse to this idea, but I'd like to hear more on how this will directly improve gameplay other than "it makes sense". As in, what will players be able to do that they can't do now?

(Note: high volume air storage is already possible with a chest full of Reinforced Canisters and a Charging Module, especially if you have Thermal installed with its Holding enchantment).

Well, as mentioned, I've always wanted a pressure storage device that goes higher than 5 bar. When coming back from a long adventure and stepping on a speed-boosted chargepad to refill your pneumatic armor, it's not so fun to realize that you're essentially limited by your compressor output, not the speed of the chargepad. Some other applications, such as on-demand conversion to RF or bulk processing of resources in the Pressure Chamber, can also cause short-term pressure dips in the 20 bar circuit.

Volume upgrades help, but because they have diminishing returns, they feel ineffective after a certain point unless spread out over multiple machines. In a past playthrough, I actually build six advanced compressors for the express purpose of stacking them in a corner with some volume upgrades spread between them for air storage. It felt like I was doing something awkward and unintended, which I didn't like.

That's where the idea came from: "I wish I had something like a giant air tank that'll go to 20 bar, so I could buffer a massive amount of air to smooth out those transient surges." I knew that suggesting new blocks has a low chance of success due to the amount of work involved, and remembered that the handbook pitches the Pressure Chamber as an "air battery" of sorts. Enabling it to fulfill its purpose better seemed themely and would avoid the work associated with a new block.

That said, the chest plus charging module? I've never thought to try that before. Let's see... I did notice there's new reinforced canisters now, I assume they'll have the same 3000mL base volume as the regular one...? Then I'd need about 144 of them to match a 5x5x5 pressure chamber's air storage volume, which is exactly 4 reinforced chests worth. That is... I'm gonna be honest here, that's terrible. Together with the chests, that's nearly 1500 compressed iron. Over 23 stacks. I don't think I'm spending that much on the entire rest of my base combined, usually. The thought of hand-mining that in 1.18+, even with Fortune III, makes me dread even starting on such a project. The Pressure Chamber would be so much cheaper, even with 12 diamonds factored in for the armor upgrades.

On a smaller scale, it might be viable, but I'm deliberately contrasting it with the potential of my suggestion here.

And as mentioned, another capability this would enable is higher-pressure recipes for the Pressure Chamber. You could place some recipes in there that would be gated by the pressure capacity of the chamber, meaning it'll need to upgrade it first before the player can use that recipe. But how useful that is depends, of course, on whether you have any plans that would benefit from such recipes...

Nope, Reinforced Canisters have a volume of 6000mL, so 120,000mL air at full 20 bar pressure. 36 (1 Reinforced Chest) of those gives you 4.32 million mL of air, which is exactly what a 5x5x5 pressure chamber with 25 volume upgrades gives you.

As for getting the iron, how about a Programmable Controller quarry? Or even a vanilla iron golem farm? :)

You're comparing canisters at 20 bar with a Pressure Chamber at 1 bar.

Using base volume gives a result independent of pressure. The base volume of a canister is 6k, and the base volume of a 5x5x5 Pressure Chamber is 432k. Ergo, you need 72 canisters to match the chamber at equal pressure - no matter which pressure that may be. Or 720 canisters to match a pressure chamber with 25 volume upgrades ;)

72 is more manageable than 144, but still firmly in the "oof that's expensive" realm.

And yeah... I could try a quarry... once I start remembering that that is an option... eheheh. (shifty eyes towards the drone programmer in the corner, set down there days ago and forgotten) This thing always gives me a bit of trouble. I understand, on some abstract level, all the problems it could solve. Yet whenever I encounter a challenge in gameplay, I don't usually see it in the list of solutions front of my mind's eye. Probably because it's a blank slate. Not a solution, but rather the potential of one.

As someone that has played multiple varieties of Pneumaticraft-only packs at this point, and as someone who built those packs himself, and as someone who tends to build projects on a massive scale, I think this suggestion needs to be thought out a lot more.

For one, we need to ask what the benefit of adding a 20-bar pressure chamber is. As far as I understand, the benefits would be:

More Storage Capacity
Less Resource Cost than Alternative Methods
Faster Air Throughput
Faster Crafting Operation.

That first benefit is not really a benefit, as @desht pointed out, a chest full of Reinforced Canisters is equal or more capacity at a higher bar than a pressure chamber, with a much smaller size footprint and a much bigger resource cost.

So, lets focus on the second benefit. Less Resource cost.

In my playthroughs, I have made several silo'd and independent "pressure networks" that each have their own smart chest + reinforced air canister buffer, being supplied with air from an Aerial Interface and Ender Chest + Charging modules. This generally works, and it works well, but as @lOmicronl has pointed out, it does have a pretty expensive material cost. being someone who uses this setup frequently, I am no stranger to the grind of getting those materials, but the grind definitely isn't as bad as @lOmicronl makes it sound.

The thing is, PneumaticCraft gives you all the tools you need to handle this expensive material cost long before you actually need it. A Vacuum Trap (or a drone with a kidnap routine, or even the vanilla methods of capturing villagers), some villagers, some beds, a smart chest, a zombie and a pit with some Construction Brick flooring is enough to get a player all the Iron they may ever need. It is even easier now in 1.18+ to get the materials to build this farm as the early game Iron progression rate in Vanilla has effectively doubled. Here, as an example:

The way this works is, the villagers spawn 2 golems, the golems see the zombie, which they aggro, they walk over to it, thinking the lights on the side are fixed flooring, they fall into the pit, the construction bricks kill them, they drop iron and roses, which the smart chest absorbs (it has a pretty generous range). Here's a video to see it in action: https://streamable.com/iyeo1a

Now, this isn't the most optimal setup for an Iron Golem farm. I could improve this in many ways. The problem with this design is that it doesn't separate the "kill" zone from the "spawn" zone enough. I could increase the spawn rate just by moving them further apart, which would result in increased iron yield. It also doesn't kill the golems fast enough - I could improve that by using a faster mechanism than the construction bricks at the bottom of the pit, or I could fully upgrade this system to use a Pressurized Spawner to spawn the golems - but I don't need to, because this small setup is capable of producing this much iron in just 45 minutes:

It can even do this while you're away if you have a Programmable Controller nearby doing nothing except keeping the chunk loaded. There's no need for advanced quarries or world eaters (which I have also built using PNC), this suffices.

That much Iron is not just enough, it's more than you may ever need unless you're like me and like to build on a massive scale. (Think having 64 Assembly Systems running at the same time just to beat the production speed of the etching acid PCB setup, that's the kind of "massive scale" I'm talking here).

In addition to the iron, the other expensive component is probably the Obsidian, but this can be made using Heat Frame cooling and with Lava being infinite in Vanilla now, it's not going to be any tougher to get than the Iron is. As for Diamonds, a Wither Farm producing coal + a Pressure Chamber converting coal into Diamonds is effectively infinite diamonds.

So, the resource cost of the compact air canister storage method is effectively a "non-problem". What is a problem (and is a problem I encountered myself when I first started playing this mod) is the visibility of solutions to these sorts of things. When I first started playing PNC, I had zero idea that I could use the air canisters as a much better alternative to the Pressure Chamber. Once I realized it was possible, I also had to "realize" all the methods available at my disposal to get there. I'm sure many other players (like @lOmicronl) have also experienced this particular phenomenon of the "New PNC player" experience overall.

There are a number of other questions to ask before we can conceive of a solution to this problem, though:

Did @desht and @MineMaarten originally intend for the air canisters to be more effective at storage than the Pressure Chamber? (I'm fully aware that nothing is truly unintentional in game/mod dev, but sometimes players even surprise the devs with the emergent behaviors they discover, so it is always worth asking this question).
If the answer to the prior question was "no", then we need to ask if making this particular mechanic more transparent in the player onboarding process is worth it. Should the player be informed about it, or should it be left for them to discover on their own? Which would make it more engaging to the player?
Similarly, if the answer was no, then we also need to ask if the numbers surrounding this mechanic feel right. Should this more compact storage method be equivalent or even better than the original mechanic that is actually intended for air storage? Perhaps it should have a tradeoff, considering you get so much space efficiency from it. We can't really change the storage numbers as that would echo through the entire mod and change things, but perhaps some scaling inefficiency could be introduced (if this is decided on). That would add more incentive to building a more expensive, higher tier Pressure Chamber, but as it stands, there's practically no reason to do so when you're only factoring in the material cost.
Is there a way to "tighten" the core game loop of the player discovering this mechanic + all the required steps in order to be able to reproduce the mechanic conveniently. Should recipes be changed to make it more achievable? Should the manual contain information about this style of mob farm as well as the "canister chest battery"?

With that over, we can focus on the third benefit: Faster Throughput.

The reasoning for this benefit: The current Pressure Chamber can push out a maximum of 5.0 bar into a single tube via a single valve. A "high tier" pressure chamber would have a faster throughput, being able to handle up to 20.0 bar.

Let me posit you with a scenario: What do you think will happen when you add 4 valves to a Pressure Chamber (which is possible), each with their own basic pressure tube + regulator tube module pointing into one advanced pressure tube?

To save you some time, the throughput of the 4 valves + basic tubes will combine: 5.0 + 5.0 + 5.0 + 5.0 = 20.0. This air will flow into the advanced tube, and the regulator modules will prevent the now-20.0 bar air from flowing back into the basic tubes and causing problems.

So, fast throughput is achievable with just a bit of clever piping. There's no real benefit to introducing a whole new tier of Pressure Chamber just for this benefit, other than the convenience. The convenience factor is still a benefit worth considering though: Do we want this to be more convenient? As a player, I personally find that it is more interesting when I have to come up with creative solutions like this to solve these sorts of problems - but again, not everyone has the capacity or time to think of solutions like this, and respecting the player's time is always a worthy endeavour for any game.

That doesn't mean that you have to change the implementation, though. There are many number of ways to respect a player's time, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to simply prevent all the guesswork they have to do to accomplish something. This could be done with hints in the manual, or in more interesting ways, like having the world generation code present the player with physical examples of this sort of setup in those mechanic villager houses. Monkey see, monkey do - at leas tin theory, anyway.

Now for the fourth and final benefit: Faster Crafting.

This is probably the only relevant benefit I can see in this suggestion. When you build things at the scale I do, crafting time becomes a huge bottleneck. This is easily solved by just scaling up - when you need more production, add more production. However, you're still locked to the bottleneck of the time it takes for a single crafting step.

If you require 10 thingamajigs per second, but a single Pressure Chamber can only give you one thingamjig per 3 seconds, then it doesn't matter if you have 1, 10 or 100 Pressure Chambers, you're still only getting your thingamgics at intervals of 3 seconds. There is a point at which the timing of your production equalizes with your demand, but balancing it so you don't overflow your production is tough. There is a certain charm to this sort of minmaxing that attracts a certain type of player, and it might be worth keeping as-is for those players because it's part of the core game loop of one of PNC's most iconic inspirations (Factorio), and that's the sort of audience it's targeting.

That being said, having to build dozens of chambers just for faster crafting all the way through the very end game does get very old very fast, even to the audience that enjoys the minmax efficiency playstyle. So it is worth having a clear end goal in mind that can reduce the amount of minmaxing required.

This benefit is the real incentive for an advanced tier Pressure Chamber.

I do think that this new tier of Pressure Chamber would need to effectively communicate the scale of what it represents, so it would definitely have to be a very large multiblock that is tall and imposing (11x11x11 at minimum is my thinking). Atmosphere is important, but so is history, and communicating the history of players having to make dozens of pressure chambers to reach the speed of just this one chamber via the atmosphere it presents to the player would be a nice detail.

There is one final question to ask: If this is ever added, should it just be a boring old "clone-but-better" of the original machine, or should it have actual mechanics?

I can think of a few pretty cool mechanics that would add more incentive to having a higher tier chamber. One particular mechanic of the existing chamber is that it will kill any alive entity stuck inside it - but it isn't resiliant to explosions.

This makes me wonder - what if a Pressure Chamber could be used for mob farms and what if it could survive an explosion? It is already possible to automate killing the Wither with vanilla (and consequently with PNC+Vanilla), you just need that "bedrock nether roof" trick to do it (or some way of moving End Portal Frames).

If this supposed higher tier Pressure Chamber would let me use a programmable controller to summon a Wither inside of it, that would be pretty damn interesting as a mechanic. It wouldn't be giving me anything I don't already have in Vanilla, it'd just be making it easier for me.

Plus, it could lead to more interesting emergent mechanics: for example, what would happen if a Wither or a Block of TNT explodes inside an Advanced Pressure Chamber? We've long talked about an "Impact Compressor" (see the relevant suggestion here). This could be it. We could even think of a way to incorporate entities falling on top of it to generate pressure.

Perhaps it could also be implemented as a sort of puzzle - Maybe you have to feed a supply belt of some resource to it to keep it in operation, or maybe it needs some sort of super-advanced pipe next to it that degrades over time (the replacement of which can be automated)? Lots of interesting things to think about here.

Thanks for your insight, @HipHopHuman. It is certainly a different viewpoint than mine.

Different players enjoy playing different games. For example, I do not enjoy mob farms, and do not build them. The thought behind that is: I want to obtain the resources I need from my environment, not spawn them in; I might as well turn on creative mode otherwise. For you, building these farms with the limited set of tools at your disposal is a gratifying challenge, and maybe you do not really understand why I would intentionally deny myself that. But at the same time, I don't really understand how you can enjoy resource acqusition when all you do is generate an infinite amount out of thin air. @desht suggesting the drone quarry is entirely fair to me; it is making use of the resources the world holds ready for me. And it was definitely my mistake in forgetting the option existed. But your images and videos just show me a game I have no interest in playing.

Thus, we are two entirely different players, looking for two different experiences. Both are equally valid, I'm sure; Minecraft is a sandbox, and we are all free to explore and focus on specifically what we enjoy.

But that also means that making arguments that are entirely rooted in just one particular playstyle is a flawed approach. Your entire first half's argument is that, because you can effortlessly spawn in an infinite amount of iron with a small amount of effort, the recipe cost "is effectively a "non-problem"", quote. Yes, I too can go into creative mode and just pull out the resources I need, or even the canisters directly if I feel so inclined, and their cost will be a non-problem. But that is not the game I am looking for.

Honestly though, I feel this thread is getting a bit out of hand. I did not expect my suggestion to draw so much discussion about resource cost and playstyles. Perhaps we could go back to the original suggestion, and address one more thing I have not yet seen brought up in all of the arguments so far?

There have been plenty of variations of the question "do we really need this?", and that is entirely fair for any suggestion that requires work for the mod author(s). Things need to have at least some sort of justification. But instead of disagreeing on the minutiae of what precisely constitutes justification, you can also ask another question: "what is the downside of having it?" As in - if this was implemented as written, would it circumvent progression gating? Would it enable new exploits? Would it remove interesting player choice? Does it make future development more difficult or restrict future features? And so on and so forth.

Since, if there is no significant downside, and the inclusion would have advantages in the eyes of at least part of the playerbase, then that in itself could be a justification. A new feature does not need to be beneficial to every last player and playstyle to be worth considering, as long as it does not get in the way of the playstyles it does not benefit, and the effort of implementing it is small enough.

And if downsides can be found, perhaps they can be used to refine the suggestion to be more agreeable.

I urge you to go back and read my post again, this time at length. It does not disagree with your suggestion or reasoning, all of what I said that you found issue with is just contextual information for the text that follows. I am fully aware of the different playstyles and I've even been the player that prefers more traditional resource acquisition, as you do. I just didn't highlight it because @desht already did.

As for why there is so much discussion about this, it's because you're not the first person to suggest an "Advanced Pressure Chamber" (but you are the first person to give a solid lengthy system of reasoning for the suggestion). We have been discussing this for ages, and it has always been on our minds what the best way to implement it would be and what implications it would have for the rest of the mod. (that, and that there is an active discussion on the mod's discord about this specific github issue).

And I do want to point out that there are genuine implications to adding this feature:

It removes the incentive to use the air canister storage method, and the entire puzzle around figuring it out
It potentially moves the benefit of the air canister storage method earlier into progression
Which in turn removes one of the incentives for using Aerial Interfaces
It removes the logistical puzzle of upscaling basic tier tube airflow to advanced tier tube airflow while maintaining throughput
Which in turn removes one of the reasons a lot of people actually play this mod for. Without the need to solve a puzzle, why am I here? Why would I not just use the piping systems from Thermal or XNet instead?

That doesn't mean that the suggestion is bad or we shouldn't have it in the mod, it just means we need to think more about how to implement it in a way that is enagaging, without removing incentives or eclipsing existing mechanics.

You're comparing canisters at 20 bar with a Pressure Chamber at 1 bar.

You're right, my math was off there, sorry.

Anyway... as I mentioned earlier, I'm not ruling this out, but I need to consider it further. There are definitely some persuasive arguments for this (primarily: a bigger battery, and the option for pack makes to add some higher-pressure recipes). But there are implications too as @HipHopHuman pointed out (primarily: it negates some existing functionality, but also it may not be quite as simple as you think to implement, although that remains to be seen).

That's fair. I will keep my fingers crossed in the meantime :)

Re: Better Throughput

Yes please. Whether it's just increasing the flow rate of charging modules to match the tube tier they're connected to, or increasing the pressure capacity of the chamber, low throughput was probably the biggest PNC related hurdle I encountered while working on end game e6e.

Charging modules just don't compare to the rates of machines, and something like an assembly table running full speed will quickly become air starved if fed uniquely by remote air through a charging module.

TeamPneumatic / pnc-repressurized