Debris merging with collapsing blocks: unfortunate consequences

[Derringer]

This is mostly an issue with sand in the base game, but applies to any collapsing block. Mining out a block deletes half its mass, but this isn't reversed when another block collapses onto the debris and merges with it. The result is that when you mine out an arbitrarily tall column of collapsing blocks from below, you get 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 1 full block's worth of mass, or 2 blocks' worth after controlling for mining losses, because every merge-and-mine cycle deletes half of the remaining mass.

I'm not sure if there's a fix for this that isn't going to be somehow exploitable, but it's really irritating in hot sandstone and swampy start biomes. My guess would be that collapsing blocks shouldn't merge with debris and instead turn the debris into a buried object to prevent iterative halving.

[Tranoze]

Wut, so we have been mining sand the wrong way all this time? No wonder i always run out of sand...

[Derringer]

2 hours ago, Tranoze said:

Wut, so we have been mining sand the wrong way all this time? No wonder i always run out of sand...

The swampy start biome in the DLC is even worse. There's relatively little dirt to work with, but craploads of polluted dirt, mud (dirt/water sludge, collapsing), and polluted mud (pdirt/pwater sludge, collapsing). This means polluted oxygen 'til the gassy moos come home, and turning absolutely ridiculous amounts of sand into clay. Ceramic isn't much of a problem with all that clay at least, but the sand sink is nonstop if you don't want your base filled with polluted oxygen.

[blakemw]

On 6/6/2021 at 6:27 AM, Derringer said:

The swampy start biome in the DLC is even worse. There's relatively little dirt to work with, but craploads of polluted dirt, mud (dirt/water sludge, collapsing), and polluted mud (pdirt/pwater sludge, collapsing). This means polluted oxygen 'til the gassy moos come home, and turning absolutely ridiculous amounts of sand into clay. Ceramic isn't much of a problem with all that clay at least, but the sand sink is nonstop if you don't want your base filled with polluted oxygen.

Yeah the sand crunch in DLC is real, now that there is no regolith falling from the sky to substitute for sand.

For the swamp asteroid it's best resolved by sealing off everything and producing clean oxygen rather than burning sand on purifying poxygen: using Water Sieve -> Electrolyzer is about 5x more sand-efficient than getting clean oxygen via Deodorizer, if the asteroid has a Salt Slush Geyser than using the Desalinator preferentially eliminates sand requirements. In one swamp asteroid I made an aquatuner based polluted water boiler to get around the sand requirements for water sieve.

With poxygen it would be worth considering purifying poxygen into oxygen using the cryogenic method. In sandbox I have a fairly compact single-sublimator design generating 660 g/s of clean oxygen and pulling about 400 watts using hydrogen Regulators. Would be easily increased to 1000 g/s. 

I'm guessing the devs might add easier sustainable filtration medium, though having to make vaporizer or condensor builds as late game substitutes for filtration or delivery of filtration from distant asteroids would be fun.