Why does digging up material delete half the mass?

[ZombieDupe]

It looks like a very intentional feature but for what reason? All it really accomplishes is making you think you have more materials available than you actually will get and any builds that involve a robo-miner less resourceful. I guess you can use that to your advantage to delete heat but given Aqua Tuner + Steam Turbine setup there's no need for it. Knowing that mechanic I'm sure plenty people have fallen into the boring trap of trying to melt materials to get more out of it creating a tedious battle to, say, get water from ice, I certainly did for a while. Was there some planned feature before where this would have been required to make it work?

[Alfons100]

It's probably just there so you won't need two million storage compactors when you've dug out a toilet, and makes sweeping not take as long. 

[Alex BNC]

I guess its kinda stimulation factor.

Imagine you have a frozen biome with lots and lots of ice. You can rush and dig it up, but you will lose half of it. Or you can build your heavy equipment around the ice to heat it up and melt it, saving all the precious water. That makes you be more tactical about it. What do i need more? Ice right now or more water later? Am I struggling for space to build or do i need cooling?(Twice the mass of ice - twice the cooling capacity).

I might be wrong, but I think this is intentional and for the same reasons that is making oil in this game to turn into petroleum 1 : 1 instead of 1 : 0.5 , if you heat it up enough instead of running it through Oil Refinery.

[RageLeague]

I heard a theory that it is for balance reasons. Many buildings are balanced around digging is only 50% efficient, like everything that requires algae, and it's too late to change that.

The reason that may be true is that most, if not all, things yields 100% mass, like deconstruction, repairs, melting, solidifying, etc. Except digging.

[martosss]

I read somewhere in the past that it was done to slow down heat dissipation, although I'm not sure if that's the actual reason for it. The idea being - when you start the game heat takes more time to reach you if it has to heat up all those x2 mass tiles. However, when you dig them you delete 1/2 of the heat and the material, effectively deleting a bit of heat.

In the end, regardless of why it was done, it's there, so we have to deal with it. What I do like about it is that it gives you options, like others said - rush and get 1/2 of the materials or work hard and get x2 rewards.

However, it's a bit surprising for new players(hey, where did all my precious dug out stuff disappear?).

@RageLeague Things yield 100% mass? Digging is a dupe activity and 100% mass retention isn't quite true when you look at dupes/animals - an animal that's 100kg dies and you get 2kg meat... where're the other 98kg? ... a dupe uses the toilet or pisses oneself and you get a bunch of extra water(have you seen the piss/puke-based builds on youtube?). Given that digging is also a dupe-activity, I could see how that might be balancing, and yet it feels pretty unreal deleting a bunch of mass to create kcal and then creating a bunch of mass when using those kcal. And don't even think about the heat - where did the heat from that deleted mass go, or how heated the magically created puke/piss is.

[2tallyGr8]

3 minutes ago, martosss said:

Digging is a dupe activity and 100% mass retention isn't quite true when you look at dupes/animals - an animal that's 100kg dies and you get 2kg meat... where're the other 98kg?

Nobody tell this guy about shove vole starvation ranches

[RageLeague]

I said "most things". Things that don't follow conservation of mass seems to mostly involve living creatures, like killing critters or breathing, or buildings that converts resources like carbon skimmers, hydrogen generators, those things. Things that doesn't convert resources are all 100% mass efficient except digging things up.

[Gurgel]

There may also be an idea of progression: At the start, dig, but lose 50%. Later, melt it and get 100%. That works best for ice and it may have started there. For consistency, it then had to be made general. 

It obviously works and there are quite a few people that feel inspired to melt things to get the 100%, so it was a good decision. 

[babba]

15 hours ago, martosss said:

 

@RageLeagueThings yield 100% mass? Digging is a dupe activity and 100% mass retention isn't quite true when you look at dupes/animals - an animal that's 100kg dies and you get 2kg meat... where're the other 98kg?

Ordered a family pizza. 4 little zombies ate the pizza in no time. I said "You could have waited and left a bit of pizza for me". I then had a look at each one of the little munchers, but I couldn't see a difference. "Where is the 2 kg of pizza now?".

Imagine if a creature dies and then spews out the tons of all the energy it had consumed during its life time, as a kind of endgame total bonus output ! That would be mega amounts of cheesecake and chilly cheese nuggets 

[Sasza22]

Iirc oxylite is the one exception that saves 100% of the mass when dug out. It was changed to allow to dig out a base early wthout crippling yourself by removing oxygen. Maybe some of the rare valuable minerals could behave the same.

[Khullag]

well, seems like initially it was planned to have better digging tools or skills for duplicants which would allow them to dig more (start at 50%, next skill/tool 75% and final 100%). because argument about melting and being so strategic doesn't apply to all other resources like granite/abyssalite/metal. by the time you CAN melt them, you've already dug them out to gain space for such crazy builds which will give you power and ability to melt the resource

[degr]

20 hours ago, martosss said:

Digging is a dupe activity and 100% mass retention isn't quite true when you look at dupes/animals - an animal that's 100kg dies and you get 2kg meat... where're the other 98kg?

Hatch eat 140 kg of sand per cycle, and it weight is 100 kg. So, I suppose there are around 80 kg of sand inside. Also I'm not so familiar with alien creatures anatomy, especially with creatures who eat sand and produce coal. I suppose, a lot if it mass inside of teeth and bones, and I may suppose that some organs not very delicious, because they contain a lot of coal. So, it possible that there is only lungs or something similar is consumable for dupes, which weight is around 2 kg for adult and child hatch.

[Occam Blazer]

6 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Iirc oxylite is the one exception that saves 100% of the mass when dug out. It was changed to allow to dig out a base early wthout crippling yourself by removing oxygen. Maybe some of the rare valuable minerals could behave the same.

It still halves the mass, but will still produce the same amount of oxygen. Probably doubles the gas volume produced by mined oxylite.

[Slvrsrfr]

i still think it is a lost opportunity to leave out the ability to improve to mass/volume return on mining/extraction. Seeing it mentioned above reminds me of bringing it up years ago. Still a hill I will camp. It opens up a interesting new vector for tinkering(not the skill).

[mathmanican]

This entire thread makes me think of the description of why time works the way it does in Doctor Who.

"People assume that mining is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, mine-y, whimey stuff."

That should fully explain it. 

Spoiler

 

 

[Emeal]

What if Higher Tier Digging skills allowed dupes to keep more materials when mining...

[Sasza22]

16 hours ago, Emeal said:

What if Higher Tier Digging skills allowed dupes to keep more materials when mining...

Would be cool but a nightmare to manage mutiple dupes with different mining skills. You`d have to either have max skill on every dupe or disable mining/access for dupes without the skills if you want max efficiency.

[2tallyGr8]

2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Would be cool but a nightmare to manage mutiple dupes with different mining skills. You`d have to either have max skill on every dupe or disable mining/access for dupes without the skills if you want max efficiency.

I already do that with my decorators, it isn't too bad.

[Slvrsrfr]

if i needed them for specialized excavation. like i want to make sure the cobalt ore I mine is closer to undisturbed mass.Or incremental improvements to existing building(s).

[babba]

A Bulldozer, running with Diesel, would be great for mining.

6 tiles wide, 4 tiles tall. The side of it could be labelled with "super power".