what rule does solidifing liquids work by?

[meepmoop]

I noticed that liquid elements sometimes turn to tiles when they solidify (magma into rock, water into ice), and some turn to dropables.

What makes them go one way over another?

 

And follow up question, when building magma-based boilers, how do you deal with the magma turning into rock tiles?

[caffeinated21]

It’s based on mass, but I don’t know the exact cutoff. 
 

I use molten lead as a heat transfer medium for my volcano boiler. I only let in enough magma to keep the hot chamber ~550 C (depends on thermal resistance to your boiler). 

When the magma drops in it turns to debris. Downside there is heat transfer to debris is atrocious, so I have a big rail-based heat exchanger that the debris runs through to extract heat.

[nakomaru]

If it's more than 80% of the natural spawn mass, it will become a tile. The spawn mass is what the element spawns in at when you place a tile in debug without setting the mass. You can take a look at @Tonyroid's regolith melter to learn one way to be careful about debris vs tiles.

[meepmoop]

3 hours ago, nakomaru said:

If it's more than 80% of the natural spawn mass, it will become a tile. The spawn mass is what the element spawns in at when you place a tile in debug without setting the mass. You can take a look at @Tonyroid's regolith melter to learn one way to be careful about debris vs tiles.

so every time you cool magma it will always form a tile? how do you deal with that in boilers then, robo miners?

[Prince Mandor]

1 hour ago, meepmoop said:

so every time you cool magma it will always form a tile? how do you deal with that in boilers then, robo miners?

Robo miners is a one way. Another way is let magma to solidify inside of mesh tile. As liquid, magma can be inside such tile, but cannot create tile inside tile, so it solidify as debrices and this debrices will be pushed away from mesh. Also, by putting other tiles around, you can force debrices to be pushed away to the cell you want them to be

[BT_20]

15 minutes ago, Prince Mandor said:

Robo miners is a one way. Another way is let magma to solidify inside of mesh tile. As liquid, magma can be inside such tile, but cannot create tile inside tile, so it solidify as debrices and this debrices will be pushed away from mesh. Also, by putting other tiles around, you can force debrices to be pushed away to the cell you want them to be

Mesh tiles don’t stop tiles from forming

each element forms a tile at a unique mass and above.

Mesh tiles are used to force the debris from the liquid to spawn in a different tile.

[caffeinated21]

Boiler has been running for hundreds of cycles with magma dropping into molten lead with no tiles formed 

[nakomaru]

9 hours ago, nakomaru said:

If it's more than 80% of the natural spawn mass, it will become a tile.

5 hours ago, meepmoop said:

so every time you cool magma it will always form a tile?

No. Only if the mass is more than 80% of the spawn mass.