Mercury seems to suck, replace it with Gallium

[Shame]

Why bother supercooling the areas to keep the metal functioning as a solid as opposed to just getting rid of it and using something more suitable like refined iron? If we instead had gallium (melts at 30C), that would be more interesting and I could see it being worth using, at least I could keep an area cold as opposed to room temperature and there it could be used, but instead the moment an area starts to tick over -50C I'm gonna have to worry about buildings melting, and that also happens in the open environment where the metal spawns as well, resulting in it melting and solidifying, which I absolutely hate, it's annoying and ridiculous!

The idea of worrying about supercooling everything as opposed to a select few things (like the plants and areas for critters) just makes this a AT + ST dependent setup yet again, just that the temperature ranges have changed. And as a liquid this metal serves no good purpose at least so far, though I guess that's one easy way to vent it to space if it ends up staying this worthless.

Right now I'm just digging all of out and throwing the metal in a deep, cold pit, never to see the light of day. It's not even renewable, so it's just lead but worse in every way.

[Clonefarmer]

It's useful in the power control station. Build the power control station in the mercury biome. Build an unconnected generator to create the power plant room so that the power control station works, but no heat is added. That way the dupes can make chips without the mercury melting. Then the dupes can transport the chips from there to any working power plants around the map.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

The only issue I have with mercury is that you'll run out of real metal and the game will swap you to it.

[Shame]

Originally posted by POWER WITHIN USER:

The only issue I have with mercury is that you'll run out of real metal and the game will swap you to it.

I play counter to this, I will run out of mercury or possible places to use it and swap to taming a metal volcano (I have a copper one) and any other refined metals. So far it seems there is tons of iron ore around, and the limited ability to make steel means I'll just use iron and copper for everything. Still haven't switched to using conductive wire for the most part, but it wouldn't be difficult in the next 50 or so cycles.

[Shame]

Feel disappointed no changes were made. This really is the most useless metal by far and so much hassle if you want to use it for anything, there are better alternatives, as liquid or solid, for pretty much anything, and it's hardly even renewable. Suppose I can still stick to making semi-reliable liquid locks with these.

[Astasia]

Use it for chips, feeding plug slugs, or fueling mercury lamps. There's enough spawning on the map that you aren't realistically going to run out of it when used for those purposes. It's also useful in liquid form for various things. The fact the biome is set to just slightly below melting point also seems to be an intentional environmental hazard, similar to slime, giving you something to consider when expanding near it, especially since it always spawns above you and the risk is flooding your base with liquid mercury. It's neat.

If it melted at 30C then it would trivialize multiple elements of base progression. It takes almost no effort to keep things around -20C, and buildings that don't really heat up like auto-sweepers and conveyor loaders could be spammed using mercury with no real risk. When half your base is made of snow and all your crops die above -14C, your transportation system managing those farms starting to melt at 30C wouldn't matter.