Table salt conversion is ridiculous

[SharraShimada]

In a rock crusher it needs 100 kilo  of raw salt to make 5g of table salt? Where are the 99,95 kilos go? Vanish into oblivion? I wondered where are my vast amounts of salt gone, and checked. And then i realized, it was converted to tiny, tiny, TINY amounts of table salt. 

Guys, there is some change needed badly.

[Alfons100]

Needed badly? You cant compare this game to real life, it does sometimes have realistic conversions of mass, other times not for the sake of balance.

[RonEmpire]

yea-  there needs to be better balance for Salt    Saltvine and table salt.
producing salt is just not worth the trouble.   the chlorine drain is just way too much. even with a geyser.  at most you can probably farm salt with 1 or 2 vines. 
 

[SharraShimada]

Its not the salt production i have a problem currently. Raw salt i can produce in tons over tons. But if dupes convert it to tiny amounts of table salt, getting rid of tons over tons, it makes no sense at all. 

@Alfons100 i dont compare it to real life. I just say, its a bad conversion rate. I dont mind if in real life i can eat salt fresh from the ocean or out of the mountain. Its a game after all. But 100kg to 5g is a really bad design choice. 

[Coolthulhu]

It disappears into game mechanic simplification heaven.

The ground there is made from the 50% of material that disappears when you dig out any tiles, air is mostly CO2 that dupes don't breathe out (they only produce like 2g, out of 100g oxygen) with some hydrogen that is deleted by hydrogen generators, and it has freshwater oceans made of all the water that went into irrigating domestic plants and making mush bars.

Or if it acted bad in life, it reincarnated as regolith comet instead.

[Sasza22]

Ok lets start with saying that food items don`t obey mass conservation. Most food types use water, dirt or slime and are balanced by the amount of it per calorie (that`s why mush bars cost so much water).

Instead of talking about how much mass is wasted lets compare how much table salt is used per meal (i think it was 1g but i could be wrong) to how hard it is to get that amount. Given that we got entire biomes consisting of tons of solid salt as well as salt water that can be desalinated and saltvine on top of that with a 1:1 conversion we would never ever run out.

The main reason it converts so weird is so that dupes don`t use 10kg of salt per meal which would be kinda weird.

[SharraShimada]

Sure, we have tons of salt in some biomes. But thats finite. When there is no geyser you run into a problem at some point. 

[Coolthulhu]

24 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

Sure, we have tons of salt in some biomes. But thats finite. When there is no geyser you run into a problem at some point. 

You don't, because salt is near-useless and the morale bonus from salted food isn't really worth the time spent processing the salt.

[lunazone]

8 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

salt is near-useless

It's pretty useful for the early game oxygen machine

[LordHalo]

14 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Sure, we have tons of salt in some biomes. But thats finite. When there is no geyser you run into a problem at some point. 

There is salt water you can process which there is a geyser for.

[SharraShimada]

1 hour ago, LordHalo said:

There is salt water you can process which there is a geyser for.

Is there a saltwater geyser on every map for sure?

[LordHalo]

8 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Is there a saltwater geyser on every map for sure?

maybe, I don't know how geysers generate and what is guaranteed but yes you can make "infinite" salt using a geyser.

[DarkMaster13]

10 hours ago, LordHalo said:

maybe, I don't know how geysers generate and what is guaranteed but yes you can make "infinite" salt using a geyser.

The salt water geyser is not guaranteed.  There's up to three guaranteed geysers, a natural gas geyser and two cool steam vents.  However, if the map does not have swamp biomes (Arboria and The Badlands), that's one less cool steam vent.

On the thread subject, even if the current conversion rate must stay we should at least get some byproduct like we do when refining lime.  I'd argue that the amount of labor needed for just 5 charges of table salt is probably too much as is.  Maybe it should be 10 and consume somewhat less salt?  You can also refer to salt in terms of uses/salted meals rather than grams to make things clearer for the player.

As for realism, that's been thrown out the window into the next country.  I looked it up, real world raw salt tends to be 50-80% NaCl, which is table salt in its pure form.

[Nebbie]

1. Heat up giant bag of dirty salt rock hot enough to melt lead
2. Tell dupe to select only the best grains, REST OF MINED SALT MUST NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN
3. ???
4. Dupe comes back with spoonful of hot salt, a very uncomfortable look on the face, and a funny walk
5. Base cooled

[SpydrXIII]

if they change the conversion so making table salt is worth it they could just reduce the amount of raw salt that spawns in to we aren't getting too much.

[cpy]

I thought rust deoxidizer would produce 50% oxygen mass and 50% iron ore mass.

[DarkMaster13]

8 hours ago, cpy said:

I thought rust deoxidizer would produce 50% oxygen mass and 50% iron ore mass.

Chemistry fact: If the deoxidizer were to be splitting iron oxide into it's constituant atoms based on mass, like how the electrolizer does, then you'd end up with ~70% iron and ~30% oxygen.

Spoiler

 

Atomic mass of Iron: 55.845
Atomic mass of Oxygen: 15.999

Iron oxide chemical formula: Fe2O3

Mass of two Iron atoms: 111.69 (69.94%)
Mass of three Oxygen atoms: 47.997 (30.06%)

Total mass of Iron Oxide compound: 159.687

 

 

[badgamer123]

could we super heat the salt and turn it into pure salt?