Hi. As some may have heard on our Discord server, we’re most likely going to be switching the method that power is generated at CVRF over to Geothermal. This means that our current plans do not include a nuclear reactor to be built in CVRF anymore, but instead an underground geothermal plant in its place. Below is our future plans for how we want to execute this (which we are still discussing), and a bit of an explanation why.
How?
If you don’t want to know the technical details, you can skip this part.
We plan to build a geothermal plant built into the CVRF that uses the “flash cycle”, in which hot water/steam is pulled from natural reservoirs to the surface using drilled wells. This steam is pushed up and drives generator turbines that supply the facility with power. This hot steam is then re-condensed and moved through passive cooling towers and pumped back down. With this structure, we would be maintaining a lot of existing equipment you would expect to see in a PWR reactor (which is what we planned to originally build) as the fundamentals are similar. The difference here is that we’re using geothermal energy to heat water and push steam through turbines instead of the heat generated by nuclear fission.
On the gameplay side, you will be able to control the geothermal plant, and cause it to fail, by building up temperature and pressure until a blowout occurs. This would cause damage to many parts of the system (but not catastrophic damage to the entire facility) and require repairs, as well as temporary blackouts through the facility. A failure of this magnitude would require multiple departments working together against security and other administrative roles to both adjust the plant’s parameters to unsafe levels and disengage safeguards that would otherwise stop this kind of activity from happening. Gameplay is going to be effectively unchanged from if it was a reactor, except for the minor technical differences of it now being geothermal.
Why?
Our reasons for making this decision can be summed up to:
- An over-abundance of “core games” already on Roblox. We think it’d be better to try and go for something not as oversaturated to bring to CVRF.
- Considering we don’t want the damage to be as extreme as a result of any type of failure (with whatever we decided to choose), geothermal makes more sense. The risk of a blowout still exists if improperly handled, but doesn’t come with the same catastrophic risks as something like a reactor meltdown or radiation leakage and is mostly contained to the system itself.
- Development is made easier. The gameplay remains almost the same, but means we don’t need to build as much equipment, or keep radiation containment in mind.
- Having a catastrophic reactor event would likely cause interruptions and conflicts with the gameplay aspects of the labs, shipping, etc (when that’s all implemented). This would get annoying for players who would prefer not to deal with a meltdown and just play normally.
What will this change?
The way we generate power will now just use the Earth’s heat instead of nuclear fission. That’s about it. When we implement this it will not have radiation or a meltdown/explosion, but instead a blowout that damages equipment and causes power loss. We will most likely use the existing control room for this and change up the GUIs to have useful information on the pressure and temperature of the line at different locations, the flow rate, the turbine RPMs and power output, etc. We may not end up using the “reactor control” section below the control room and instead move controls to the control room itself.
More info on this will come out as we flesh out the ideas and get closer to actually working on it. Just like the reactor, we have no current planned period that we’ll be working on it, nor a release date. But we thought this information was important for people who play CVRF or are following its development.