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!

[Cottage Cheese]

Originally posted by quaixor:

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.

Are you sure? Seems like metallic iron, cobalt, or especially aluminum would eventually corrode in the presence of H2O and absence of strong reductant, irreversibly releasing H2 into the upper atmosphere. Either way, it would be nice to see a straightforward accounting of oxygen in-game (rather than 2Co --> O2).

[󠀡󠀡]

Originally posted by Cottage Cheese:

Originally posted by quaixor:

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.

Are you sure? Seems like metallic iron, cobalt, or especially aluminum would eventually corrode in the presence of H2O and absence of strong reductant, irreversibly releasing H2 into the upper atmosphere. Either way, it would be nice to see a straightforward accounting of oxygen in-game (rather than 2Co --> O2).

Read up on the "great oxygen catastrophe" that happened here on Earth about 2.4 billion years ago. Prior to it the atmosphere had no oxygen. As more and more bacteria started to produce oxygen, the O2 in the atmosphere would react with metals. This process took a long, long time, until all the free metals (at least the ones that could rust, like iron) turned into metal oxides and only then the oxygen started to build up. Prior to that those metals existed in their unoxidized form.
Really interesting stuff. If not for the evolution of oxygen breathers, life on Earth could have made its own environment so inhospitable so as to die out.

[MrGrudge]

And then there's Subnautica: my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when I first encountered big crystals of salt and pure lithium just sitting there under water.

[Caver451]

It's funny the hills us nerds decide to die on, eh?

To prove the futility of trying to make sense of any of this game, from a scientific point of view, I did some calculations based on the T1 Heaters requiring 1KW to raise the temperature of the planet by 0.3pK. Best case scenario, ignoring a ton of sources of loss, and using the specific heat of granite, our planet is 79.15 meters in diameter. I showed my math. I was being very optimistic.

But my biggest pet peeve is liquid water at temperatures so low they can only be achieved in a lab, and at pressures which would be considered lower than "high vacuum".

The terraforming numbers make absolutely zero sense. And that's ok.

It's just a game. Don't think. Just play. ;-)