Post Philosopher Stone Discoveries

[mathmanican]

The most recent build included the following message:

Fix bug where gasses could merge and convert types if two gasses tried moving into a vacuum cell on the same tick. 

This bug had it's fingers in many places, and so any changes to the code could have far reaching implications. I assume the  emoji means the devs are "indifferent or neutral" to this change, so let's help them know if we like it or not. I decided to start testing various issues to see what the changes have done to the code. 

Philosopher Stone 

Result - Dead. Does not function at all. Great move, but at what cost?

Cool Steam Geysers

Result - Potentially disastrous (worse than what we had before)

The steam geyser output used to convert steam to whatever heavier gas was in the room. This had a side effect of often creating a constant gas conflict that would enable the geyser to achieve full output. I ported in the following POI (which I assume we are all familiar with). 

The oxygen content starts at 1kg per tile (so 64kg).  Through several cycles, the oxygen content did not change (so no matter conversion). However, I noticed that the water content was going up very slowly.  So I mopped up all the water to measure.  The output should be about 990kg of water each active period. I let it run through one cycle and two things happened.  First, the oxygen content dropped to 63.1. Second, the total output was only 484.6.  Ouch!  Half the water was gone.  I let it run a second cycle, and the oxygen content rose back up to 64kg (odd), and only 474.4 kg extra water was added. I think the output gets worse and worse as time goes on. This is a disastrous consequence, but I think it stems from the fact that with the oxygen in the room, the steam content around the geyser reaches above 5kg in each of the 5 output ports, thus blocking more steam from being created. A tempshift plate to speed up heat transfer between oxygen and steam can probably offset some of this. 

I then got rid of all oxygen, and let the geyser run.  The steam rapidly expands, and solidifies on contact with the surrounding surfaces. Under these circumstances, I was able to get the full 990kg of water for two cycles in a row. It's more important now to make sure your geyser rooms are vacuumed out. Matter conversion may have lost you some steam, but not anywhere near what we loose now (I'm going to verify this at some point by reverting to QOL3).

Hasty First Conclusion: For the sake of our water alone, if our options are to revert to the gas computations before, or keep the new changes, I would rather revert back and just deal with matter conversion. 

Slime Off-Gassing in Chlorine

Result: Odd, unpredictable behavior. 

It has never 100% been confirmed that gaseous matter conversion is the reason chlorine disappears when in a room with off-gassing slime. My best guess is that this was the reason.  So I decided to do "some" tests. 

Each cell contains 1000g chlorine in 8 tiles, and 3kg slime in 8 tiles.  I dug out the slime, leaving 1.5kg slime to off gas. After digging them all out (they were all equal to start with), I let the game engine run.  The resulting contents after all slime has off-gassed are quite interesting. The total CL/PO2 should be 192/288. The total actual counts are 189.4/289.  First, there is mass loss (overall), and it appears matter conversion may still be an issue.  The issue is no longer coming from vacuum tiles, as the entire room is void of vacuum now once the first few ticks go by (and during that time, the totals remain even). Here are the counts in each cell - it's interesting that chlorine only ever goes down, while PO2 sometimes goes down, and sometimes goes up..

Spoiler

 

Chlorine (8)	PO2 (12)
8	12
7.9	12.1
8	12.2
8	12.1
7.6	11.6	149.2g slime remain
8	12.2
7.8	11.9
8	12.2
8	12.2
7.9	12.1
8	12.2
7.8	11.8
7.9	12.2
8	12.2
7.6	11.9
8	12.1
8	12.1
8	12.1
8	12.2
7.9	12
7.9	12.1
7.9	12.1
7.8	11.8
I missed one

Conclusion:  I'm indifferent/neutral on this one. It would be nice if masses were preserved, but I don't care on this topic.  New players get frustrated by the loss of their chlorine quite often. I tried some other experiments with this, where I placed large amounts of slime in room. Any mass loss of chlorine seemed to stabilize (so I think those players won't get frustrated with this new system), but I didn't do long enough tests to guarantee this. 

Deodorizors and Carbon Dioxide

In the past you could build deodorizors at the bottom of your base, dump your pee water under them, and let matter conversion gobble up all your CO2 (no need for carbon skimming).  Some people thought that their algae terrariums were doing this for them, but they were tricked by matter conversion (all those beautiful terrarium builds - they didn't even think about the fact that the building was bugged and not consuming CO2, rather their deodorizers were gobbling it up).  I'd love to have someone who uses terrariums to comment on the changes they see. Also, I know a few of you abuse matter conversion with deodorizors to contain your CO2. 

Please post how the new changes affect your builds, and share your opinions on whether to keep the change, or go back. Have the devs ever included an indifferent/neutral   in an update before?

I'm tired (spent way too long on this).  If the choice to keep the new stuff means that geyser outputs are halved, then please revert back to the old code.

Edit: No post apocalyptic issues have been reported because of the change. Yes, there may be some pressure issues occurring in places where high pressure tiles refuse to separate, but nothing too concerning.  Overall, the change is great. 

[avc15]

Regarding this one

Quote

Cool Steam Geysers

Result - Potentially disastrous (worse than what we had before)

I've been using a build like the following one for a pretty long time:

Previously, if I didn't want my steam to convert into CO2/Chlorine/O2/PO2 (whatever was in the room with the geyser) I had to pump it completely to a vacuum, which always proved to be a huge annoyance at low tech / when I'm short on water to begin with and can't really afford to spend all that time on making a "perfect" condenser.

With the current change getting pressure in the room to <100g or so during a single inactive period should do to prevent mass loss, for a few thousand cycles until I come back to make it "perfect".

 

[Lilalaunekuh]

32 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I'd love to have someone who uses terrariums to comment on the changes they see. Also, I know a few of you abuse matter conversion with deodorizors to contain your CO2. 

To provide an example:

I got 12 duplicants (one with the mothbreather trait).

=> 26g/s of CO2 should be released inside my base.

Playing on ravanging hunger my oven is working ~50% of the cycle.

=> 12,5g/s of CO2

 

I did deal with all CO2 using 2 algae terrariums and 4 deodorizers (one on each side of a terrarium).

[Without building a bottle emptier set to polluted water to keep my bottles between the deodorizers.]

=> This setup should only consume up to 0,66666g/s of CO2, but used up all available CO2.

 

 

Most of the time if you hover over an algae terrarium you will notice that it stops to consume CO2 entirely, which makes the effect of the matter conversion even more visible. (An old bug ...)

 

[abud]

32 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

If the choice to keep the new stuff means that geyser outputs are halved, then please revert back to the old code.

Geyser outputs are halved because over-pressurized quickly (you said so). meaning there still the possibility to make it condense fast enough.

 

Anyway, thanks for the reports. Good job as always.

[mathmanican]

16 minutes ago, avc15 said:

With the current change getting pressure in the room to <100g or so during a single inactive period should do to prevent mass loss, for a few thousand cycles until I come back to make it "perfect".

I'm most worried about the new players, and if they don't realize the HAVE to pump to vacuum, or near vacuum, the consequences could be disastrous. 

By the way, I checked your build, or something similar. 

You got a full load of liquid with vacuum in the room. With 15g in each cell of O2, you also get a full load. Add 2kg/cell of O2, and your build gets about 80-90% of the desired liquid. It's not as bad as I've feared, and I still have to open it in QOL3. 

[nakomaru]

Well, I've never wanted this fixed, but dare not go against the mob. I find many of these weird physics charming.

As long as you can engineer an instant condenser or heater to enable full output for steam geysers this is not an issue. Whether it's poor output now or poor understanding of gas rules before, new players can encounter issues when facing the steam, and solutions abound.

[Lifegrow]

Might be wise to vacuum the geyser out, slap in a bit of radiant piping and condense all the steam to check your figures.

It's always been the case that if a geyser outputs too rapidly (or rather the steam isn't condensed quickly enough) then it'll over-pressurise and stop outputting.

However that being said, I'm really not sure if the emotes might have been directed at the wording of the bug fix - it's a little vague as to what it'll actually do.

58 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

Fix bug where gasses could merge and convert types if two gasses tried moving into a vacuum cell on the same tick.

I know for a fact that there are still strange element battles happening - i.e. a standard gas vent outputting gas (A) into a room filled with gas (A) will still delete any other gasses that come into contact with the vent.

Spoiler

I know it's somewhat unrelated, but i'm wondering if some of these "bug fixes" are a stretch at *trying* to iron out some of these strange behaviours without maybe understanding what/how they do the things they do (or rather, what the knock on effects can be).

tl;dr - I reckon the smilies were because Klei are as clueless as we are about that particular patch note  

[mathmanican]

I opened an old build world, and found that the two geysers I checked both had under 5kg/s outputs of steam, whereas the launch upgrade turbine had 10kg/s outputs for shorter bursts. I got about 90% output from both without changing anything, though the O2 content goes up and will eventually stop all production.

2 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

I reckon the smilies were because Klei are as clueless as we are about that particular patch note

So "confused" might be the right interpretation.  To bad there are three different interpretations for that emoji.  Great to see you back. You've been missed. 

[Nebbie]

That is rather concerning on steam geysers. I can definitely say vacuuming out areas isn't terribly intuitive, as I forgot about waterlocks yesterday and after several cycles of messing around with pumps and doors, I finally got a dupe in with the material to finish the last insulated tile on a vacuum chamber for some aquatuner+turbine action...and then the exact moment he finished construction, he farted and ruined it; it was rather hair-pulling.

Ultimately I would love it if gases were permitted to mix within a tile. Sure, it'd take a huge rework of the game's engine, but I feel that at least for gases, it wouldn't really create any issues, and would in general make gameplay better (none of this nonsense where a dupe's rogue fart makes 1 of your food crops always non-growing, and of course steam would work sanely).

I'll try out some terraria soon. I normally build them as a supplementary oxygen source that keeps CO2 down, maybe with a skimmer nearby, and they've always worked pretty well. Lately, I've been trying out oxyferns on Verdante and it's been a constant struggle with CO2 flooding.

[mathmanican]

Considering  and  both give the same face, though have different commands, I have given up trying to decipher what the emoji means.  

I am interested to see what people have to say about the new changes. Since matter is not conserved, I'm guessing in the next few weeks we'll find out exactly what it takes to change matter, and then new crazy contraptions will ensue. 

[SakuraKoi]

Well, at least the steam vents (which should be the only kind of vent effected due to their much bigger possible output) can be fixed by increasing the allowed pressure.

But well, either having matter duplication or deletion is a terrible choice to have, it's like ya want to vote "Neither!" during certain elections.

The only fix I can imagine in this case is to have gases, no matter how minor during their creation, push the tile away and have it merge with suitable adjacent tiles of the same kind or push away yet another tile. If there is no space, every tile is already different, then one might as well have the game crash...

and that's why I gave up upon programming. "if I do something, I do it perfectly". There is so much to consider (including performance) and my habitual tunnel vision ain't helping.

[mathmanican]

5 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

then one might as well have the game crash...

Haha.  We'd all get through about 4 seconds before our games crash.

5 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

The only fix I can imagine in this case is to have gases, no matter how minor during their creation, push the tile away and have it merge with suitable adjacent tiles of the same kind or push away yet another tile.

Would be nice, but unfortunately not possible without potentially running into infinite recursive loops (just imagine a one gap tall room, with 5 different gasses in a row and a wall on one end - you might want to push stuff one direction, but hit a wall, then have to go back the other direction, and so on...)

7 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

if I do something, I do it perfectly

And luckily we have both types of people, those with your ideals, and those who know that something has to be produced, even if it has flaws.  

8 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

it's like ya want to vote "Neither!"

I'm with ya.  I'm interested to see what happens with the hydrogen modified spoms, and how people deal with less hydrogen, and also possible mass loss. Should be a fun few days with high emotions as SPOMS fall apart. 

57 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Might be wise to vacuum the geyser out, slap in a bit of radiant piping and condense all the steam to check your figures.

My figures were taken after waiting till all steam was gone. The picture wasn't, take that way, but the figures were. 

I'm guessing the issues with my original post was the fact that the steam geyser had a 10kg/s output in short bursts. The geyer gets overpressurized at 5kg/ so unless there is lots of space to let the steam expand rapidly and quickly liquify, then overpressurizing will happen in either setup.  This could all be related to the rebalanced geysers, rather than be related to the matter conversion fix. 

Time will tell as people start complaining (or not) about how things that used to work no longer work.  

[PhailRaptor]

5 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I'm with ya.  I'm interested to see what happens with the hydrogen modified spoms, and how people deal with less hydrogen, and also possible mass loss. Should be a fun few days with high emotions as SPOMS fall apart. 

SPOMs were already deleting Hydrogen, though.  Except for the psuedo-flooded ones, but those should not work in the first place.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, PhailRaptor said:

SPOMs were already deleting Hydrogen

Most spom designs that claimed to delete hydrogen, after about Sept/Oct last year, were actually just converting the hydrogen to extra oxygen (matter conversion).  Posts prior to that time have documented matter loss. Post then, I haven't seen any (or just dismissed them as poor statistical data collection design...).  I decided to test it myself in QOL3 - one test found deletion. 

Correction: I have seen designs that purposefully delete ALL the output of one gas. But if both gasses are being made, matter preservation seemed to be there. 

[Snotfroth]

I'm not worried about the geysers because if noobs were (in the past) expected to figure out the water sieve was perhaps the most powerful cooling device, or how to construct an actual airlock using either machine parts or quirky surface tension fluid physics, then I think they can figure out how to get the most of their geysers by removing extraneous gasses. At least it makes sense within the logic of the game reality -- a clean geyser is an efficient geyser.

mathmanican I just learned that chlorine can disappear in the presence of slime, thank you. I've stubbornly pumped chlorine into slime biomes to attack the germs, then wondered if I'm going insane because most of it seems to vanish over time. The amount of mass per square just didn't add up. I guess it makes sense that I should clean up the floor before adding chlorine, but why? I wanted to pump high-pressure polluted oxygen out through the chlorine layer, but what happened to it? Was it used up in a chemical reaction with germs? Was it absorbed by something? These are the issues that need more polish I think.

[mathmanican]

29 minutes ago, Snotfroth said:

mathmanican I just learned that chlorine can disappear in the presence of slime, thank you. I've stubbornly pumped chlorine into slime biomes to attack the germs, then wondered if I'm going insane because most of it seems to vanish over time.

Glad it helped.  If you get the chlorine pressure above 1800, and keep it there, before you introduce slime, then everything is great.  If you try to drop chlorine down to po2, not so great. 

I just ran some similar test on the slime/chlorine issue in QOL3.  Similar results.  This suggests that gaseous matter conversion is NOT responsible for missing chlorine.  What's causing the missing chlorine is an entirely different question.  Maybe it needs its own bug report.  

[Gurgel]

I don't think this influences me significantly. For example, with the cooling nerf, I have stopped using cold steam geysers entirely. Far too much effort now for oxygen generation and not needed for the bathroom loop. I usually just wall them in now. A pity.

[badgamer123]

3 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Well, I've never wanted this fixed, but dare not go against the mob. I find many of these weird physics charming.

As long as you can engineer an instant condenser or heater to enable full output for steam geysers this is not an issue. Whether it's poor output now or poor understanding of gas rules before, new players can encounter issues when facing the steam, and solutions abound.

+1 to strange physics,as long as it not completely outside realistic and break game play too much

[tseitsei]

Oh such a good change.

1. Got better since before you needed absolute vacuum (or absolutely only steam) for steam vent to erupt properly but now you only need "low enough" pressure of other gases in there. Makes things less tedious to set up AND removes matter conversion (good since that is not how physics should work).

2. Dont know how this used to work or how it works now (I usually store all my slime underwater so no opinion.

3. Dont knoe if this works now but it certainly didnt work as intended before so good thing is they got this fixed also

[miauly]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

the devs are "indifferent or neutral" to this change

When I saw this in the patch notes I thought that it's quite possible that notes are collected automatically from merged commits, and then polished a bit to go together before posting. That would also explain why they sometimes do and sometimes don't contain numbers.

Going with this assumption, I'd say the smileys are likely to be a sign of frustration. It's quite possible that this bug was tough to hunt down in the code, and tough to fix, so it might take hours and hours of mind-breaking digging. It also might be that the developer was not sure if the fix is actually going to cover all the cases. Or maybe it took long hours to discover some silly typo which can also be very frustrating. In any case, I doubt that anyone of developers will be "indifferent" to something that caused so many people on forums to be upset, let alone to something that breaks the game.

As for geysers output, I think overpressure is perfectly fine. The starting open water geyser being one of the most finicky of them may not be that fine, but overpressure per se is.

[OxCD]

I really love this change about gases conversion. I personnaly don't mind if I have to learn again how to deal with X or Y, as long as glitches are removed.

By the way, for Cool Steam Geyser, since the nerf of WW, I used to empty the steam chamber and an AETN or more often a turbine take care of the fast liquefaction using radiant pipes.

[mathmanican]

Here's some comments from the update thread. I'll put links here to gather all the comments in one place (and update this section as more appear).

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Lutzkhie]

I know its dead, but what is exactly this philosophers stone?

[PhailRaptor]

18 minutes ago, Lutzkhie said:

I know its dead, but what is exactly this philosophers stone?

The conflict of multiple types of gases attempting to fill the same tile, especially a tile of vacuum, would result in the heavier gas(es) being converted into the lighter gas.  The most easily observed examples were the gradual disappearance of CO2 in closed areas of the base there Oxygen was being produced.

[bobucles]

9 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

The conflict of multiple types of gases attempting to fill the same tile, especially a tile of vacuum, would result in the heavier gas(es) being converted into the lighter gas.  The most easily observed examples were the gradual disappearance of CO2 in closed areas of the base there Oxygen was being produced.

Hmm. I guess algae terrariums lost 99.9% of their CO2 deletion potential.