The Ungodly Power of the Humble Brick

How heavy do you think a brick is? A couple kill-a-grams? Maybe five? Six even? Seven, maybe, if you felt so inclined. You're wrong. Dead wrong.

Measurement Methods

Before I reveal exactly how heavy bricks are, I should probably keep you (the reader) on the edge of your seat for as long as possible.

The way I measured the weight (or the mass?) of the bricks was through a balance scale, specifically this one (shameless plug?).

If you see an image of this scale in this document, and unless expressly stated in bold text, that screenshot was taken when the scale was stationary, or as close to stationary as I could humanly (read: before I got bored) make it. Also, the motorised wheel that it uses as a fulcrum has the parking brakes disengaged and the motor off.

If you don't know what a balance scale is, it works by putting a known mass on one pan, and the thing you want to measure in the other.

These aren't super-precise, even in real life, but other scale mechanisms (at least the ones I know of) aren't sensitive enough to measure things lighter than about a tonne (1000 kg).

There was also more wobble than I'd like to admit. As you might imagine, stacking a whole bunch of bricks on a free-floating contraption gives the physics engine a decent case of the wibbles.

Flatland Math

Another unfortunate caveat is that density, if I can even call it that, works differently in People Playground than in real life. As I'm sure you know, we live in a three-dimensional world. If you ask a nerd, they might say three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, but that doesn't matter. What does matter is that the humans of People Playground live in a world that is not only fictional and horrific, but also two-dimensional.

I'm going to include a graphic of a three-dimensional world to insult your intelligence.


Anyway, one of the things about the real world is that we measure density in grams per cubic centimeter (or maybe grains per cubic inch if you're weird and/or American). The reason we use grams per cubic centimeter comes back to the fact that we have three dimensions to work in, and three dimensions for that one gram to fit into.

The poor, poor people living in this abomination of a game have only a measly two dimensions. That's just two dimensions for one gram to fit into.

That is all to say in an extremely roundabout and overcomplicated way, I'm measuring density in grams per centimeter squared instead of grams per centimeter cubed.

But Enceladus32, a.k.a. Smallter White (my, the author's, username on Steam), just HOW heavy is a brick in the popular computer game People Playground (on sale at the time of writing)?!

Weighing In

Ok, now with all that fluff out of the way, let's measure the brick.

I mean, I've already weighed it and done the math, otherwise I wouldn't be uploading this guide, but suspend your disbelief for a moment and pretend I'm doing this for the first time.

So the first thing I did was try to weigh a human, just for fun, and in the hopes that maybe something tragic and/or funny would happen to them. Big mistake.



The brick is heavier than a human being. Now, this is obviously not right, mentally. How can a singular brick, of the wall variety, weigh more than a living, breathing, human being? I'm sure you've all tried to pick up a brick before –well, this is an online document, so maybe I'm not that sure– and you'll know its not a back-breaking experience.

Don't get me wrong, the things aren't light. They weigh about as much as a similar sized stone. But they don't weigh more than a human!

Now, at this point, I could have started doing the math, using the average human as my "known mass" starting point, but I didn't do that for three, very important reasons:

1) Using "average whatever" as a starting point for a known mass is always shaky at best,

2) I didn't think of it at the time,

3) People Playground already has exactly one known mass...

Next time, on Dragon Ba–

Measure? I Hardly Know Her!

It's the 1 ton weight. I'm sorry if you didn't see that coming because you've never opened game, but the 1 ton weight is our known mass.

IN CASE you have doubts, or are wondering, "but Enceladus32, is that an African ton or a European ton?", behold.

It is stated in the item's description that it weighs EXACTLY 1000 kilograms. That is 1,000,000 grams, or 2204.62 Imperial pounds (I'm American so I'm using the period as a decimal point, just to clarify).

Sure they might have rounded, "1,000.201? Eh, just write 1,000", but given that we are working in a laboratory, I hardly think they would be so imprecise. Who's they? Excellent question for a future guide. Also, the 1 ton weight is leagues more accurate than any other item we could work from. You want to find statistics for boat anchors or wooden tables? Good luck.

So, let's compare the 1 ton weight (our known mass) to a bunch of bricks (thing we want to weigh).

Remember how I said that my scale was built for things lighter than a ton?

Surprise-surprise to absolutely no one but me, it just flung the bricks into the air as soon as I tried to weigh them.

So, right off the bat, we know that bricks weigh less than one ton.

Constraints Don't Have Mass, Right?

So, at this point, we now know two things: the 1000kg weight weighs 1000 kilograms, and we have to be careful loading the bricks onto the scale.

Since the 1 ton weight is so much heavier than the bricks, I decided to bundle them together in 9-brick blocks. I used the steel binding because that's my favourite constraint.

And then I just loaded these onto the scale until it stopped going, as the kids say, sicko's mode.

Since I've now run out of padding and filler, it would be at this point I'd like to include an advertisement break. However, since I use an adblocker, I can't do that. So, I'd like you all to sit very still in silent contempt staring at the screen, and occasionally looking away to check your phone and/or surroundings for about a minute.

...

Alright, now for the moment you've all been waiting for:

A grand total of twenty-five bricks weighs as much as the 1 ton weight. Now that the experimentation is over, we can get into the fun (read: yes actually fun, maybe you guys just didn't have good math teachers) part: Math.

BBC (Bricks Being Calculated)

Now that we're six chapters into this guide and 90% of the people who clicked on this have left, we can do the math regarding just how heavy bricks are.

So, if you'll bear with the high-level math for a moment, the equation looks something like this:




All we have to do now is divide both sides by 25 to get the weight of 1 brick, which is basically mental math:
Oh, the calculator in the lower left? Pay no mind, that's, uh, for... something else...

One brick, a singular brick, has a mass of 40 kg.

For comparison, the average American (who as we all know, represent every human on Earth) weighs a little over 80 kg. One American equals two bricks.

This is also weird since as we found earlier, the bricks are heavier than the in-game humans, which means they weigh less than 40 kg.

But we can do more. The area select tool shows you the exact width and height of the area in meters (when in detailed view), and we can easily measure a rectangular brick with this tool.
0.34 meters by 0.12 meters, or in terms that will be more convenient, 34 centimeters by 12 centimeters.

Osmium? I Hardly Know Her!

Since we're using two-dimensional density, we only need two dimensions, which is also all we have. How serendipitous.

Anyway, here's some more math.

Ninety-eight point zero-three grams per cubic centimeter, let's call it an even 93 since I can't pretend my scale and setup are that precise.

Now, once again, we are working in a feeble two-dimensional world, so any comparisons to our majestic three dimensions are ultimately meaningless. But, if we pretend that one gram per cubic centimeter is equal to one gram per square centimeter, we can get some comparisons that help put the ludicrous weight of a brick into perspective.

First off, water has a density of one gram per cubic centimeter. Hence, brick is 93 times as dense as water. Who cares.


Mercury, a metal well-known for being pretty dense, is checks Google 13.6 grams per cubic centimeter. One brick weighs almost 7 times as much as an equal volume of mercury.


Osmium, the densest metal (at standard temperature and pressure, don't "actually" me) is 22.57 grams per cubic centimeter, which isn't even a quarter as dense as brick.


I was going to pull some astronomical values up to look well-read, but the first one I came up with is actually more than the density of the brick, so I'm not going to do that.

The core of the Sun (the large glowing thing in the sky that hurts to look at) has a density of 150 grams per cubic centimeter, which is still only about 50% more than the mighty brick.

Conclusions, Grievances, and Merch Links

There aren't any merch links, I'm sorry.

What can we take from this document, to pay back the time it has taken from us? This long journey through barely-fact-checked research, sparsely-edited writing, and shaky math?

(That last bit was a joke, the math should be fairly robust for our purposes.)


Brick heavy.


Thanks for reading.

Post-script

-Screw around with the scale I made, or make one yourself and see what other silly inconsistencies there are in the game.

-If you feel like doing math, what is the density of the 1000kg weight?

-I thought I was going to have more to put here, but I guess I didn't.

-Did I mention that I made the scale? You should totally block me and thumbs-down the scale!

-Do I have enough space to make another hardly-know-her joke?

-What is the lore about the guy who drowned on the submarine please I want to know I know this game has lore what is it please help me who drowned on a submarine and what does it have to do with the game

EDIT 8/19/2021:
If you (for some reason) found this interesting, I'd recommend checking out this guide that lists the weight of every other object.

[RyloCat]

the suns core is %50 MORE then the brick @Derg

[Arcamity]

i think i would make straight A's if u were my teacher

[mattbook70]

bricks taste good

[kclong0305]

Sans
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░░░░░▄▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▄▄░░░░░ It's Sans, what did you expect.

[Derg]

OK so considering the brick is more dense than the CORE of the sun, does that in turn mean that it's basically a black hole if it wasn't for the fact it was virtual?

[hapiboi]

How did we go from bricks to Osmium I think I got a little lost

[jefferythee17]

i like eating bricks

[azuregamer2012]

did bro use ChatGPT?

[Big Train]

*throws brick at person while reciting this post*

[litos]

knowing this fact makes throwing bricks at children even better, thanks for the new information 🥰