Mass deletion with steam and vent

[JRup]

Hi!

I believe a variant of this has been posted some time ago, but here's my close encounter of the deletey type.

Let's showcase a little mishap I came across while venting some steam into water (and naphta)

What's happening: venting steam into another liquid is deleting mass.

I'd first built a high pressure gas vent with some naptha on the same tile to be able to vent steam into a polluted water pool. The result was that the naptha was mercilessly destroyed by the steam. Mutual annihilation was ever present and the polluted water rested easy.

Then I looked around the pool, and found a cutesy little water puddle... So what if we vent there? Long story short, water increases by an amount of the steam that comes in and gets deleted by the same amount next packet (just using one gas pump). So here are some nice screenshots, I even managed to capture the moment it switched into a gaseous spot...

So yeah, gotta handle that steam somehow...

[TheMule]

It's quite normal. You need to give a tile where something can move to (merge in) when you're displacing it with something else. In this case I guess would be that you had only one drop of naphta. And the same applies to water and steam. 

[JRup]

Ok, so no bug. Just don't build that way is the moral of the story. I'll adjust the tags.

Or do that to delete stuff if that's your fancy... I draw the line there... I use mods and game quirks to my favor, but draw the line on deleting mass on purpose.

[TheMule]

Another even more striking example.

The top is sealed by a single tile of CO2, so the liquid can't push up. Both the displacing and the displaced liquids are deleted, since, at different times, they have nowhere else to go.

If you enlarge the pool and make it 2x1, you give room for the liquids to move to.

 

[JRup]

I'll just go ahead and make the conceptual leap that this is a game mechanic and that patching it would destroy escher waterfalls amongst other useful builds.

[Cybeon]

On 9/20/2020 at 5:24 PM, JRup said:

Ok, so no bug. Just don't build that way is the moral of the story. I'll adjust the tags.

Or do that to delete stuff if that's your fancy... I draw the line there... I use mods and game quirks to my favor, but draw the line on deleting mass on purpose.

Why deleting mass on purpose is a bad thing? This game LOVES deleting mass. Deleting mass is everywhere.

Critters, Plants, Carbon skimmers, Tile mining, Many refinements buildings and it's just what comes into mind.

So why using some less obvious game mechanics to do the same thing is bad?

[ghkbrew]

It's my understanding that this mechanic was intentionally added at some point in the past (before I started playing).

Previously one non-displacable tile would delete all the liquid dripped onto it. This way if you have a continuous waterfall onto a non-displacable tile it will eventually be deleted entirely and your waterfall will start accumulating.

[JRup]

6 hours ago, Cybeon said:

Why deleting mass on purpose is a bad thing?

It's not necessarily bad, but I like to make the most out of all materials. (Just challenging myself here...)