Chemistry Suggestions

[Cottage Cheese]

I love this game concept! However, the chemistry slightly sucks. While I recognize the need to keep the ingredient pool simple in order to make the game accessible to a general audience, some of the current chemistries are unrealistic enough to pull me out of the game for a face-palm. I have a few suggestions below; some may be more implementable than others.

First, I suspect it's highly unusual to find both water/ice and metals (as opposed to metal oxides) in the same natural environment. The two probably would have long ago reacted until only the more abundant species remained. For example, on Mars the surface iron is present as iron(III) oxide, rather than as metallic iron. Exceptions to the rule would be the noble metals (Ru, Rh, Pd, Os, Ir, Pt, and Au) and elemental carbon, which don't react at ambient temperature with typical oxidants. Terraforming a planet where oxidants are in the minority w.r.t. reductants (metals) would be impossible, as the produced oxygen gas would be immediately consumed. Solution: replace in-game "iron" with "iron ore," and similarly for the other base metals. Removing oxygen from the metal oxides would be readily achievable by using a player-built electrolyzer (requiring nickel, iron, salt, and water to build the electrolyzer), and would consume electricity while generating oxygen gas as the byproduct. Incidentally, this is a far more realistic process for acquiring oxygen than converting two equivalents of cobalt. Alternatively, the metal can be forged by reaction of the ore with carbon or other reductants, though this doesn't give you oxygen as a byproduct.

Second, given that you're having to short-list the periodic table into just a few essential elements/compounds for simplicity's sake, it's odd that nickel, copper, carbon, tungsten, chromium/tin, and platinum/gold are not present. Meanwhile cobalt, magnesium, titanium, iridium, osmium, zeolite, and "pulsar quartz" are of questionable grand-scheme relevance. There is also a naturally occurring "salt" class of compounds that is missing, but would make a lot of sense in several existing formulations (e.g. explosive powder, fertilizer T2, biology lab, incubator, bacteria sample, etc.). The introduction of "pulsar quartz" is a little bit insulting to the player - I'd strongly suggest replacing with lithium, as some of the more feasible aneutronic fusion reactions involve combinations of lithium with different hydrogen and helium nuclei. The crafting requirements could then involve lithium and water/ice, plus "superalloy" or tungsten to hold it all together.

Third, some of the crafting recipes seem a bit off to me (maybe a result of game-balancing?). A few suggestions: explosive powder should probably have ingredients resembling either those of black powder (carbon, salt, and sulfur) or thermite (aluminum and iron oxide), NOT iridium. Solar panels should involve a majority silicon, with some copper and other metals to frame it, rather than cobalt. Glass windows should be predominantly silicon oxide, rather than the strange existing recipe. Alternatively, a polycarbonate window could be made from majority bioplastic. Heaters relying on iridium would make more sense if relying on tungsten or carbon (as heating elements). Any recipes with significant electronic components should probably involve copper, silver, or gold (gold if corrosion-resistance is needed). The lake water collector should likely be a lot simpler to build than the existing recipe requires, as well as much faster to collect water than the atmospheric collection towers, otherwise why bother, just remove it. The ingredients of the rocket engine (iridium rod, uranium, super alloy) are quite strange - would suggest significantly lighter metals, or even carbon as the minority component, plus whatever fuel as the majority (maybe salt + some kind of organic/foodstuff). Similar comment for jetpacks, though admittedly since they are fully hypothetical there's more wiggle room. Zeolite could be made craftable from the combination of silicon, aluminum, and water.

Fourth, it seems inconsistent to me that my backpack can hold ~10x more air (in the form of bottles) than my T5 oxygen tank can hold. Can we either significantly nerf the replenishment from using a bottle, or somehow incorporate the bottles as part of the tank? For example, perhaps the tank has its own inventory, which can be filled with up to x number of air bottles, but they no longer replenish automatically when I enter my dwelling. (Side note: if you choose to retain the current bottles of air, as well as inventory food/water, can I ask for an unlockable microchip that automatically refills each from my inventory when they hit a critical level?)

Feel free to take/leave/embellish the suggestions, or correct/add. Thank you very much!

[EmilyHunter]

Bloody hell... I take a wild guess here - you're a chemist? 🤣

Some of these things do sound logical and implementable, but since there are already many issues with the physics side of the game which aren't taken care of (the devs even said not to expect realistic physics, I suppose same goes for chemistry), I highly doubt there will be changes in that regard.

For now let's just pretend that this isn't our universe and things in this universe work differently 🤷‍♀️
(Full disclosure: Chemistry was my worst subject in school 😅)

Merry Christmas 🎄😉

[mezmeriza]

I had to admit i did chuckle about the compounds when i first played the game. The use of things out of common sense made me squirm but the game itself is ok. The abuse of biology is another thing entirely, how is a flower easier to grow than algae? The other part is the varying temperatures at which the Ice melts? I know an impurity can effect the melting point of ice but within a tiny scope. The other annoying part is the ease the sky turns blue and yet does not affect the meteors, even though an atmosphere dense enough to support O3 will actually reject all but the most direct strikes surely reducing the meteor issue. One would say the result would be to END with a blue sky and pass through other stages, from a none atmospheric to a nitrogen/ O2 dominant, from red, yellow, green and finally blue. Not accurate but at the least would make sense.

[dollars202]

Way i view it is there is tech there that isn't being explained to us, one of them is you can build rockets but for some reason you can't leave on those rockets. I'd imagine that someone is actually monitoring your progress and is in a station or ship that randomly comes around and tractors asteriods into the world and make even use that tractor to open a hole that allows them to come through it. I'd imagine that the corporation uses nanobots and that's why you can create so many things things and it's really those nanobots that need trace elements to actually make anything. This would explain a great deal and also explain why certain asteriods are always dropped on you from use of certain rockets.

[cigaremoods]

Hello,
All the argued scientific remarks are very relevant, especially if we were on experimental terraforming simulation software developed by very serious researchers.
But we are dealing here with a fantasy fiction game, the rules of application of terraforming on this planet are those of the game established by the creators of the game. For my part it does not matter (and even so much better) than the real scientific rules of our world are not those applied in the world of planet crafter.
And then we can always extrapolate, the latest advances in research in quantum mechanics are developing new theories such as that of the strings (although not yet proven) which advocates the hypothesis of the existence of parallel worlds with multiple dimensions in which all the rules applicable in our known universe may be different "elsewhere!".
Cordially

[Cottage Cheese]

Originally posted by EmilyHunter:

Bloody hell... I take a wild guess here - you're a chemist? 🤣

Some of these things do sound logical and implementable, but since there are already many issues with the physics side of the game which aren't taken care of (the devs even said not to expect realistic physics, I suppose same goes for chemistry), I highly doubt there will be changes in that regard.

For now let's just pretend that this isn't our universe and things in this universe work differently 🤷‍♀️
(Full disclosure: Chemistry was my worst subject in school 😅)

Merry Christmas 🎄😉

Admittedly yes. Maybe that's why the chemistry problems stuck out to me more than the bio problems. I failed biology in school. :P

[Cottage Cheese]

Originally posted by mezmeriza:

I had to admit i did chuckle about the compounds when i first played the game. The use of things out of common sense made me squirm but the game itself is ok. The abuse of biology is another thing entirely, how is a flower easier to grow than algae? The other part is the varying temperatures at which the Ice melts? I know an impurity can effect the melting point of ice but within a tiny scope. The other annoying part is the ease the sky turns blue and yet does not affect the meteors, even though an atmosphere dense enough to support O3 will actually reject all but the most direct strikes surely reducing the meteor issue. One would say the result would be to END with a blue sky and pass through other stages, from a none atmospheric to a nitrogen/ O2 dominant, from red, yellow, green and finally blue. Not accurate but at the least would make sense.

Good points. I'll add to your critique that moving between regions probably shouldn't affect the sky color. Not to mention, the idea of selectively attracting uranium-containing meteors to my planet by shooting off a cobalt rocket was a face-palm discovery. Likely an overly-contrived band-aid to fix the mid-game uranium shortage? There are probably more palatable ways to accomplish this (e.g. wreckage containing de-constructable nuclear reactors). Anyway, thank you for posting.

[Cottage Cheese]

Originally posted by cigaremoods:

Hello,
All the argued scientific remarks are very relevant, especially if we were on experimental terraforming simulation software developed by very serious researchers.
But we are dealing here with a fantasy fiction game, the rules of application of terraforming on this planet are those of the game established by the creators of the game. For my part it does not matter (and even so much better) than the real scientific rules of our world are not those applied in the world of planet crafter.
And then we can always extrapolate, the latest advances in research in quantum mechanics are developing new theories such as that of the strings (although not yet proven) which advocates the hypothesis of the existence of parallel worlds with multiple dimensions in which all the rules applicable in our known universe may be different "elsewhere!".
Cordially

Maybe you're correct - I was going in expecting "The Martian" in video-game form, and then was disappointed when the science didn't even rise to the level of conservation of mass. There seems to be a dichotomy in the gameplay, where the mood meanders between science (the terraforming element trackers) and cartoon (e.g. glowing green mineral = uranium). The recommendation to pick the more realistic, science-simulator lane is a personal preference.

[kekkomartin]

Originally posted by Cottage Cheese:

I love this game concept! However, the chemistry slightly sucks. While I recognize the need to keep the ingredient pool simple in order to make the game accessible to a general audience, some of the current chemistries are unrealistic enough to pull me out of the game for a face-palm. I have a few suggestions below; some may be more implementable than others.

First, I suspect it's highly unusual to find both water/ice and metals (as opposed to metal oxides) in the same natural environment. The two probably would have long ago reacted until only the more abundant species remained. For example, on Mars the surface iron is present as iron(III) oxide, rather than as metallic iron. Exceptions to the rule would be the noble metals (Ru, Rh, Pd, Os, Ir, Pt, and Au) and elemental carbon, which don't react at ambient temperature with typical oxidants. Terraforming a planet where oxidants are in the minority w.r.t. reductants (metals) would be impossible, as the produced oxygen gas would be immediately consumed. Solution: replace in-game "iron" with "iron ore," and similarly for the other base metals. Removing oxygen from the metal oxides would be readily achievable by using a player-built electrolyzer (requiring nickel, iron, salt, and water to build the electrolyzer), and would consume electricity while generating oxygen gas as the byproduct. Incidentally, this is a far more realistic process for acquiring oxygen than converting two equivalents of cobalt. Alternatively, the metal can be forged by reaction of the ore with carbon or other reductants, though this doesn't give you oxygen as a byproduct.

Second, given that you're having to short-list the periodic table into just a few essential elements/compounds for simplicity's sake, it's odd that nickel, copper, carbon, tungsten, chromium/tin, and platinum/gold are not present. Meanwhile cobalt, magnesium, titanium, iridium, osmium, zeolite, and "pulsar quartz" are of questionable grand-scheme relevance. There is also a naturally occurring "salt" class of compounds that is missing, but would make a lot of sense in several existing formulations (e.g. explosive powder, fertilizer T2, biology lab, incubator, bacteria sample, etc.). The introduction of "pulsar quartz" is a little bit insulting to the player - I'd strongly suggest replacing with lithium, as some of the more feasible aneutronic fusion reactions involve combinations of lithium with different hydrogen and helium nuclei. The crafting requirements could then involve lithium and water/ice, plus "superalloy" or tungsten to hold it all together.

Third, some of the crafting recipes seem a bit off to me (maybe a result of game-balancing?). A few suggestions: explosive powder should probably have ingredients resembling either those of black powder (carbon, salt, and sulfur) or thermite (aluminum and iron oxide), NOT iridium. Solar panels should involve a majority silicon, with some copper and other metals to frame it, rather than cobalt. Glass windows should be predominantly silicon oxide, rather than the strange existing recipe. Alternatively, a polycarbonate window could be made from majority bioplastic. Heaters relying on iridium would make more sense if relying on tungsten or carbon (as heating elements). Any recipes with significant electronic components should probably involve copper, silver, or gold (gold if corrosion-resistance is needed). The lake water collector should likely be a lot simpler to build than the existing recipe requires, as well as much faster to collect water than the atmospheric collection towers, otherwise why bother, just remove it. The ingredients of the rocket engine (iridium rod, uranium, super alloy) are quite strange - would suggest significantly lighter metals, or even carbon as the minority component, plus whatever fuel as the majority (maybe salt + some kind of organic/foodstuff). Similar comment for jetpacks, though admittedly since they are fully hypothetical there's more wiggle room. Zeolite could be made craftable from the combination of silicon, aluminum, and water.

Fourth, it seems inconsistent to me that my backpack can hold ~10x more air (in the form of bottles) than my T5 oxygen tank can hold. Can we either significantly nerf the replenishment from using a bottle, or somehow incorporate the bottles as part of the tank? For example, perhaps the tank has its own inventory, which can be filled with up to x number of air bottles, but they no longer replenish automatically when I enter my dwelling. (Side note: if you choose to retain the current bottles of air, as well as inventory food/water, can I ask for an unlockable microchip that automatically refills each from my inventory when they hit a critical level?)

Feel free to take/leave/embellish the suggestions, or correct/add. Thank you very much!

Hi
Also a chemist. *waves*
I had no issues applying my suspension of disbelief for this game. I also have a background in coding. Once you believe that you're rearranging matter with a staple gun, the rest sort of falls into place.
However. To your first point, this would require that your base lander would always be of high value and you'd be kind of locked to it for a great deal of the early game as it would contain your forge/smelter to obtain the raw metals. Midgame you might get blueprints for a portable one, or to make a new one at your base. I don't want that added level of complexity. However I recognize there are those who would welcome it.
To your second point, and this is where my coding background pops up. Right now the gatherable inventory list is fairly small and easy to manipulable. You want to more than double the amount of items, and increase the complexity of the crafting processes. The game already has performance issues at the high end, your suggestions would greatly increase those issues. And as far as your claim that Pulse crystal is insulting to the player, are you seriously saying that all the minerals everywhere exist on earth? You don't know what type of minerals with what type of properties might form in alien environments. Do you complain that dilithium is insulting to the view when watching Star Trek? I find dilithium much more unlikely than pulse crystals.

Third point is more of the same, adding more ingredients, more complexity, more lag

The 4th, as a chemist actually makes my jaw drop. Are you serious?
Obviously the tank is lower pressure (like maybe 50 psi) to minimize the effects of it getting pierced and thus they empty quickly and the bottles are high pressure storage (a full O2 bottle in commercial use is 2000 - 3000 psi, but with the size of these bottles, lets go with 1000 psi)

[mezmeriza]

Originally posted by Cottage Cheese:

Originally posted by mezmeriza:

I had to admit i did chuckle about the compounds when i first played the game. The use of things out of common sense made me squirm but the game itself is ok. The abuse of biology is another thing entirely, how is a flower easier to grow than algae? The other part is the varying temperatures at which the Ice melts? I know an impurity can effect the melting point of ice but within a tiny scope. The other annoying part is the ease the sky turns blue and yet does not affect the meteors, even though an atmosphere dense enough to support O3 will actually reject all but the most direct strikes surely reducing the meteor issue. One would say the result would be to END with a blue sky and pass through other stages, from a none atmospheric to a nitrogen/ O2 dominant, from red, yellow, green and finally blue. Not accurate but at the least would make sense.

Good points. I'll add to your critique that moving between regions probably shouldn't affect the sky colour. Not to mention, the idea of selectively attracting uranium-containing meteors to my planet by shooting off a cobalt rocket was a face-palm discovery. Likely an overly-contrived band-aid to fix the mid-game uranium shortage? There are probably more palatable ways to accomplish this (e.g. wreckage containing de-constructable nuclear reactors). Anyway, thank you for posting.

The sky colour in different regions is one of my biggest hates. It's a damn planet able to sustain a gravity that keep me well pined down "flat-earth tin foil hat preparation" but has a variable atmosphere/star-shot within walking distance?
The fact that launching a rocket breaks the entire story-line apart is still a bit of a puzzle to me. I would have introduced an automated drone from an airfield that allows "crop dusting" to spread plants given the atmosphere reaches a sufficient pressure to sustain flight and simply do away with rockets to fit the story "if anything tries to leave orbit, it will be shot down" rhetoric. The whole launch into orbit to "attract" resources hurts the senses. I like your idea of hunting the wrecks for uranium until the T2 drill arrives. The iridium rocket is daft since a T1 drill allows extraction.

[CrazedBumblebee]

Originally posted by Cottage Cheese:

Solution: replace in-game "iron" with "iron ore," and similarly for the other base metals.

Everything you find is an "Ore". It's Iron Ore, Titanium Ore, Silicon Ore etc... This is fairly clear from the icons/models, and the fact that you use an "Ore Extractor" to extract them from the planet.

They don't specify "Ore" in their name likely for localization and simplification purposes. Keeping the names short is easier to manage and "Ore" might not make sense in some localizations, or may be confusing.

Originally posted by Cottage Cheese:

Removing oxygen from the metal oxides would be readily achievable by using a player-built electrolyzer (requiring nickel, iron, salt, and water to build the electrolyzer), and would consume electricity while generating oxygen gas as the byproduct. Incidentally, this is a far more realistic process for acquiring oxygen than converting two equivalents of cobalt. Alternatively, the metal can be forged by reaction of the ore with carbon or other reductants, though this doesn't give you oxygen as a byproduct.

I do actually like this idea, it would be good if one of the first things you could build was an Oxygen Extractor/Heat Pump/Power Generator combination of some kind, that produces 1 Oxygen canister every 3-5 minutes or so. This would likely be a lot more effort than slapping 1 Iron in your backpack and building it though, as this kind of thing only appears much later on in progression, which would result in no access to oxygen canisters early in game, which could result in a lot of deaths.

Most of the rest of I pretty much agree with, however, as it's been pointed out the game was not designed to be realistic at all. It's just designed for casual play without much thinking, and the way things currently work follow that quite well.

Redoing everything as you suggested would probably be quite a lot of work, it would impact the starting elements, how you process/refine elements (new structures), how many different elements there are, how extractors work, how much space is available in the backpack and lockers, how many materials are needed for each craft...

The knock-on effect would be fairly massive, and it would make the game take a lot longer to progress probably (although this is not a bad thing).

So I don't see any of this happening, except perhaps just adding the word "Ore" to all of the ores that you pick up.

I do think there's merit in the o2 tank change you suggested, and I don't think that would be too difficult to implement, there may be a need for a new structure or device that you can use to fill up the tank without having to open it and replace the canister etc...

[danloveschrista]

Originally posted by dollars202:

Way i view it is there is tech there that isn't being explained to us, one of them is you can build rockets but for some reason you can't leave on those rockets. I'd imagine that someone is actually monitoring your progress and is in a station or ship that randomly comes around and tractors asteriods into the world and make even use that tractor to open a hole that allows them to come through it. I'd imagine that the corporation uses nanobots and that's why you can create so many things things and it's really those nanobots that need trace elements to actually make anything. This would explain a great deal and also explain why certain asteriods are always dropped on you from use of certain rockets.

I agree with this theory. From the lore we have in-game, the player character is a prisoner of some sort of space corporation, and the beings that formerly inhabited the planet were trying to keep humans away, until they were wiped out by a giant meteor.

I think the rocket launching is basically sending proof of progress to the company in exchange for rewards, likewise the periodic "meteors" are supply drops from the company. This is based on the messages from the company saying your progress is being monitored, and they will take action if you stop progressing.

[trygve]

No, no, no...
The Wardens tech disrupts Earth's advanced 'Zero Point energy' generators.
The small rockets you can craft ony uses simpler nuclear power, so they aren't affected.
They're also not strong enough to lift you into space...

The monitoring can mostly be done using a regular weather satellite.
IR camera gets you surface temperatures, Radar gets you atmospheric density and possibly even water levels.
Oxygen can be measured using spectrographs. And methane and other 'biologically created' gasses can also be detected this way.

It all makes sense when you think about it...

[Cottage Cheese]

Originally posted by kekkomartin:

The 4th, as a chemist actually makes my jaw drop. Are you serious?
Obviously the tank is lower pressure (like maybe 50 psi) to minimize the effects of it getting pierced and thus they empty quickly and the bottles are high pressure storage (a full O2 bottle in commercial use is 2000 - 3000 psi, but with the size of these bottles, lets go with 1000 psi)

Listen, my spacesuit pockets are bulging in all the wrong places from carrying around these loose 1000 psi canisters that you're so pleased with. I'm a simple guy with simple needs: I make my oxygen two-cobalts-at-a-time, just like everyone else. All I ask is that the jackasses in the Space-Prison Engineering Design group familiarize themselves with basic gas manifolds before they come out with their next generation of breathing system, so that I don't have to suffocate every 5 minutes "for safety." On a personal note, I am shocked that my submission to space-jail's complaint box resulted in ridicule.

Keep your dilithium and insults. Give me some flex tubing, an in-line regulator, a flow restrictor, and some duct tape, and we'll have this terrible T-0.5 tank design updated in no time. I can turn two nubbins of ambiguous cobalt mineral into a pressurized tank of oxygen using a 3D printer that I hand-molded from crumbs of rust that I found in a space-ditch. I'm Doogie Howser in god-form, but gas plumbing eludes me.


P.S. Point of interest - Google tells me astronauts have ~16 hour breathable windows, from spacesuits that are at 5 psi, fed by 900 psi built-in tanks. I'm not really sure how to translate this into game mechanics, as time seems to be on a different scale (e.g. dying from thirst in 10 minutes).

[Cottage Cheese]

Originally posted by mezmeriza:

The sky colour in different regions is one of my biggest hates. It's a damn planet able to sustain a gravity that keep me well pined down "flat-earth tin foil hat preparation" but has a variable atmosphere/star-shot within walking distance?
The fact that launching a rocket breaks the entire story-line apart is still a bit of a puzzle to me. I would have introduced an automated drone from an airfield that allows "crop dusting" to spread plants given the atmosphere reaches a sufficient pressure to sustain flight and simply do away with rockets to fit the story "if anything tries to leave orbit, it will be shot down" rhetoric. The whole launch into orbit to "attract" resources hurts the senses. I like your idea of hunting the wrecks for uranium until the T2 drill arrives. The iridium rocket is daft since a T1 drill allows extraction.

Couldn't agree more, and I like drone suggestion.

[󠀡󠀡]

First, I suspect it's highly unusual to find both water/ice and metals (as opposed to metal oxides) in the same natural environment. The two probably would have long ago reacted until only the more abundant species remained.

That's actually not the case, and you need to go as far (or as close) as our own planet for an example. Before the great oxygen catastrophe we had both water and unoxidized metals. Only when life started making oxygen in large quantities did the free oxygen in the atmosphere bind to metals turning theme into oxides.