What would break if mass/energy were conserved?

[ConfinedManiac]

Given the many discussions of heat deletion...

What would happen if mass and energy were actually conserved for most of the game? Would it still be fun? E.g. what if the energy used by the sieve was expressed as heat on the unit and put into the outputs ? This would only be a modest amount...

What if you didn't destroy mass by using generators? What if duplicants couldn't excrete more than they consume? 

Obviously you would need some actual energy sinks given the presence of volcanos... (Hello space radiators) 

Why is a standard of mass/energy conservation not good for the game? 

[pacovf]

I don't think mass and energy conservation would necessarily break the game. However, it would require a massive rebalancing of the whole game, and we aren't going to get that from Klei. It would make for a very ambitious mod, though.

[chemie]

you would break oxygen production vs energy generation

[Coolthulhu]

You'd be forced to vent hot gas to space. This would be the only reliable, sustainable, scaling method of cooling.

[Guest]

my processor

 

[Dosephshih]

First I can think is garbage, u need to have incinarator to burn it, the output CO2 by dupes will be more, all plant will emit gas as it absorb water, etc. 

[Gurgel]

My fun of the game would break. ONI is using alternate science, and a large part of my fun is to find out how it works and use it creatively. The very simple model used is at the core of things.

[Giltirn]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

My fun of the game would break. ONI is using alternate science, and a large part of my fun is to find out how it works and use it creatively. The very simple model used is at the core of things.

The real world has much more interesting physics, I assure you, so figuring out how it works and using it creatively would not just be fun but would gain you very practical knowledge.

[Gurgel]

12 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

The real world has much more interesting physics, I assure you, so figuring out how it works and using it creatively would not just be fun but would gain you very practical knowledge.

I am really sick and tired of that bogus argument. 

[Nebbie]

If virtually everything but dupes conserved mass, there would be serious issues with how dupes change mass in their digestive systems. If dupes conserved mass, however, there would be a lot more waste to deal with from them. However, I think this would lead to not losing dirt with mealwood, which would actually kind of improve resource balance.

Power generation and gases would have some issues, as right now, generators tend to destroy mass, but especially the hydrogen generator, whose sole function is destroying hydrogen. Proper conservation of mass would mean a complete rework of it and minor reworks of other generators.

Now, as for energy (which requires conservation of mass to truly work), that's a fun one because over time your base would warm up from entropy, as all your energy sources (which would ultimately only be geysers, solar panels, and rocket missions, as everything else would just convert energy on the map) would slowly drown you with unusable heat energy. Your dupes would no longer be able to just run on hamster wheels without consuming a bunch of food that you used that very power to cook. This is where the challenge would come in. And cooling would solely be in the form of venting to space...

Overall, it would probably be a bit harder, especially in the midgame, and everything would be a rush to space to access its free solar energy and capability to eat up waste heat shoved into waste material. The earlygame would probably be a bit less annoying cause a lot more things would be easily renewable (dirt, algae, oxygen), although the new forest starting biome actually does a lot of this with trees (and the uses for lumber) and oxyferns.

[Kerd]

You really couldn't go anywhere.  It'd take a absurd amount of energy to compress 1t block of sandstone into a block small enough to walk over, and the heat released by doing so may well sterilize the entire asteroid.

[nakomaru]

To be fair, you don't have to implement density to conserve energy, but I take the intent.

[Kerd]

9 hours ago, nakomaru said:

To be fair, you don't have to implement density to conserve energy, but I take the intent.

Density is just a stable balance of numerous energies

[pacovf]

9 hours ago, nakomaru said:

To be fair, you don't have to implement density to conserve energy, but I take the intent.

I was going to write a longer, more pedantic post to say a similar thing. Guess you saved me from doing that

[Sasza22]

The entire food balance system would break. Food uses tons of water and dirt and changes it into kilograms of food. Preserving the mass on those would create tons of waste mass that had to be dealt with.

[Lilalaunekuh]

1 minute ago, Sasza22 said:

The entire food balance system would break. Food uses tons of water and dirt and changes it into kilograms of food. Preserving the mass on those would create tons of waste mass that had to be dealt with.

Just emit a certain amount of polluted dirt with every food item. (Or something similar, in my eyes the power generators would be the bigger problem.)

 

=> A nice idea and could become a fun mod, but it´s a bit to late to rebalance every aspect of the game. [Like adding mulitplayer ^^]

[pacovf]

I would add a new material called organic waste (created both by plants and as a portion of the mass of dead critters), and let you compost that to make fertiliser. Or you could feed it to sage hatches for coal.

...now that I think of it, that’s exactly what polluted dirt does, huh. I guess I would just rename polluted dirt to “organic waste” instead.