Slimelung in rock tiles

[Crai-Crai]

This is the first time I've seen slimelung in a sedimentary rock tile.

The amount ticks down as if it's dying, but then ticks up suddenly by 3000. It ranges between 462k and 459k but doesn't go away. This seems like odd behaviour. I'll try to kill it the same way I would with a slime tile. Just wondering if others encounter this.

[Gurgel]

Looks like bug to me, perhaps an off-by-one check in the placement of the Slimelung. 

 

[sakura_sk]

I saw that happening at world generation but usually there are no more germs by the time I get to dig that tile/tiles of non-slime containing germs

[mathmanican]

It's been happening since I started playing.  The rock is always next to a slime tile, that passes a specific threshhold for germs.  These tiles infect their neighbor.  It's not a bug. 

[Crai-Crai]

I looked around, and there are a few metal and mineral tiles with slimelung that are all next to at least 2 slime tiles. So it looks like they are getting the overflow from the slime. The slimelung starts to die but then they get another overflow hit so it never goes down.

 

[mathmanican]

You can corner build the slime tile that touches it, and the growth will stop. It takes a long time for the slime to die on the rock all by itself, but it will eventually all disappear. For me, these "super spreader" slime tiles were the cause of way too many slimelung outbreaks. Either the slimetiles infect a neighbor algae tile, or a dupe picks up the infected rocks and then gets EVERY ladder covered in slimelung.  It's not long before someone walks over the ladder with algae, and then your early game oxygen supply is infected.  I started to care about this back when slimelung literally killed your dupes if not treated (many years ago). 

[Le0n1des]

There's a simple solution to this problem. Build a tempshift plate out of ice or polluted ice at the contaminated zone, repeat as needed to get the temperature low enough to kill off all slime lung, even on the slime

[Crai-Crai]

13 minutes ago, Le0n1des said:

There's a simple solution to this problem. Build a tempshift plate out of ice or polluted ice at the contaminated zone, repeat as needed to get the temperature low enough to kill off all slime lung, even on the slime

Oh, I didn't think of that. I was thinking of freezing or heating it somehow but didn't think of the shift plates.

[mathmanican]

To use the tempshift plate option, you'll need to remove the liquid first (drain it somewhere else, if you can). 

I wanted to show you some things about this issue, as I've never seen anyone else talk about it.  So I loaded up 2 spaced out worlds, and 2 regular worlds, all without mods. I searched both worlds for the issue, and didn't find it.  This makes me wonder if it's a mod, or a problem with slow computers. The computer I played on was an older laptop, and I almost always play on 10x speed with a mod.  My new computer is much faster, 4 times the ram, and doesn't seem to have any issues.  

• Do you use mods? If so, which?
• What speed do you play on? 
• Would you call your computer fast or slow (no specifics needed). 
• Is your world fairly new, or is it a year old and you've been working on it for a while (maybe they updated something recently that fixed this). 

It may be a bug, or it may be just that I got unlucky and in 4 new worlds didn't find the issue.

The main thing that I always look for on just about every world I played (haven't played for a year) is if the Gold Amalgam has slimelung in it (from neighboring superspreader slime blocks). I can't recall a world I played where this was not an issue (spaced out and vanilla). Hence I'm surprised that the 4 worlds I loaded did not have this issue. And maybe the issue is that I didn't play the worlds long enough, but I let 2 days pass in each after revealing things via Sandbox. Maybe there is a weird interaction that occurs in fog of war that causes this to occur when dupes slowly reveal territory, instead of me almost instantly revealing the territory.  Right now I'm grasping at straws. Sounds like either a bug, or a "rare" interaction that I somehow always got in my previous worlds. I do know that not every slime biome had the offending tiles, so it could just be random chance that I didn't find any. 

[sakura_sk]

6 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Is your world fairly new, or is it a year old and you've been working on it for a while (maybe they updated something recently that fixed this).

Checking the specific seed of @Crai-Crai 's initial world, would reveal if it happens in world generation or later on. I remember an issue of random igneous rock (yes, jungle biome) tiles having slimelung which I'm sure it was a bug. On my recent playthroughs I haven't encountered any sedimentary rock tiles with slimelung although I remember that happening in base game previously but I haven't been playing the long hours I used to or care too much about slimelung anymore so maybe I missed seeing them?

[Crai-Crai]

Thank you @mathmanican and @sakura_sk for the replies.

I use no mods, and have not yet installed Spaced Out. So, just the base game.

I play on Normal speed and pause a lot. (I like to micromanage and I'm still studying the mechanics of the game.)

My computer is fast. I upgraded it a few weeks ago.

I started the world a few weeks ago and it's around cycle 100.

I don't know how to find the exact seed number but it's the Terra map so it has lots of slime.

I do tend to slowly reveal territory. I tend to build as I go and not dig out more than I need, to keep oxygen pressure high.

[sakura_sk]

55 minutes ago, Crai-Crai said:

I don't know how to find the exact seed number

Bottom of the exit menu while you have opened a save

And if you hover over it, there is a tip how to read it (which part refers to what)

[mathmanican]

Found it.  

I hate when I don't notice this, because one dupe will collect this one tile, and then the entire gold amalgam supply is contaminated. It does happen.  If you build a regular tile, or insulated tile, next to these superspreader slime blocks, it will contaminate the tile too (so even player built tiles are not safe). 

I'm guessing it doesn't have anything to do with computer speed, mods, etc.  It's just a regular mechanic that's been in the game for as long as I can remember. 

[Gurgel]

17 hours ago, Crai-Crai said:

Oh, I didn't think of that. I was thinking of freezing or heating it somehow but didn't think of the shift plates.

I usually use uranium doors as radiation source to kill it these days.

[Orzelek]

3 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I usually use uranium doors as radiation source to kill it these days.

I was using rad lamps but this is much simplier. How did I miss this

[blakemw]

On 7/13/2023 at 6:28 PM, mathmanican said:

It may be a bug, or it may be just that I got unlucky and in 4 new worlds didn't find the issue.

After investigating, it seems that for slimelung in solid tiles, the "spillover threshold", where the population becomes big enough to spill into another solid tile, is exactly 1,000,000 germs. A slime tile has to be somewhere around 230 kg in order to be large enough to reach a population of 1,000,000 germs, because if it's too small the slmelung starts dying of overpopulation before reaching 1,000,000. Incidentally I'm familiar with the spillover threshold from Zombie Spores, for instance in carbon dioxide gas Zombie Spores have a spillover threshold of 5000, at that or lower the germs just happily hang out in the co2 tile never spreading into other tiles, and because zombie spores dont breed or die in co2 they hang out happily forever and unchanging at that threshold.

But back to the slime, my working hypothesis is that normal slime biome always has slime tiles that are too small, normally 180-200 kg or smaller. So in order to get superspreader slime tiles its necessary that worldgen create a slime tile of about 230 kg or larger, and that also has slimelung germs, something many POI slime tiles do not. Supporting evidence: I scoured a classic map (so a big map) for a slime lung above this threshold: finally found one at a POI, though it didn't start with enough slimelung and would take several cycles to breed up enough to start spilling over.

 

Since everything should be weaponized I was wondering if super-spreader slime tiles (which should be easily made using the Dispenser) could be used to make a "Strength gym" via disinfect, but sadly dupes don't seem to care about germs on constructed tiles, farms, airlocks. Also TIL if an airlock with germs on its tiles opens the germs are deleted off the tiles the moment the airlock starts to open, before the tiles are removed, which is rather odd.

[mathmanican]

36 minutes ago, blakemw said:

dupes don't seem to care about germs on constructed tiles

I believe there is another threshold after which they do care.  I sometimes played the game on 0 germ mode (set disinfect to 0), and found my dupes occasionally would go after these tiles, but not until they hit a threshold. Don't remember the threshold (again another detail that experimentation should be able to find).  

I'm glad a thread finally appeared about this topic. 

[sakura_sk]

 

Well.. Damn! You found the culprit @blakemw 

But this seems like "unintended behavior" to me

 

The slime tile reaches 1mil germs and gives 6k to adjacent tiles every time that happens. The picture above were on world generation. The gold amalgam on the right didn't have any germs. After recording the video, it got some

Or... is it actually a proper mechanic of the game?

Hmm.. but it doesn't seem you can spawn these tiles. If you use sandbox to make a tile above 230kg with 1mil slimelung germs in it, germs die normally. So what make these particular tiles that are produced in worldgen make germs increasing instead of decreasing?

Never mind.. Temperature is also a factor it seems.

So a Slime natural tile:

• contaminated with slimelung germs
• >223kg
• >21° C

can make germs increase on the tile leading to a 1mil threshold where it spreads 6k germs to adjacent tiles and drops to 982k germs. But...

When did Klei disable disinfecting tiles? I remember at one point that dupes went out of their way to disinfect the tiles of some random POI in the slime biome. Or is the germ overlay's "Disinfect at: x germ count" just broken? Dupes seem to ignore the disinfect threshold put there for tiles but they will gladly disinfect toilets until there are 0 germs

[blakemw]

3 hours ago, sakura_sk said:

 

Or... is it actually a proper mechanic of the game?

Well germs spilling over and having a spillover threshold is a proper and clearly intended mechanic of the game, and the only question is whether worldgen producing slime tiles above the spillover threshold for slimelung is intended/approved behavior, it seems in general that it isn't meant to, but wouldn't put it past the devs to let something like this slip through as a sneaky little gotcha, like even if it wasn't originally intended it's not doing serious amounts of harm and causes a random mystery for players to try and solve (I've certainly seen the "how did slimelung get on this gold amalgam debris, I've been super careful" before).

[blakemw]

On 7/14/2023 at 12:57 PM, mathmanican said:

I believe there is another threshold after which they do care.  I sometimes played the game on 0 germ mode (set disinfect to 0), and found my dupes occasionally would go after these tiles, but not until they hit a threshold.

I think I figured it out: it depends on reloading the game! Tiles are only disinfected after going through the save/load process.

[Crai-Crai]

Thank you everyone for helping me figure this out