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Scale item contact area with volume


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Melting "itemized" ice from a compactor is near-impossible. You can literally drop it in magma and it will sit there and chill. It is possible to split it up manually, but it's too much work and I usually end up just feeding it to hatches (who manage to extract coal from it in some arcane metabolic process).

On the other hand, small pieces will melt in Dupes' hands as soon as they leave the freezing area.

It seems that each object has a contact area that is either constant (per item type?) or one that scales very weakly with some measure of "amount". Now, volume scaling sub-linearly with mass is perfectly realistic, but IRL a ball of ice does not have infinite thermal conductivity on the inside, but rather "sweats" if heated. And heavily compacted ice at near-freezing temperature would likely start melting too.

Bumping the item contact area by some "more linear" function of mass (or volume, as in mass divided by density) would fix balls of perma-ice that do not exchange heat with the environment and possibly prevent the annoying puddles from handfuls of snow.

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They're probably doing it correctly for a given shape and volume... surface area = volume ^ (2/3) * s ( where s = 6 for cubes, or 3 for spheres )  so that heat retention changes pretty fast as volume increases.

It might make sense to cap the surface area to volume ratio at the original block size (ie 1000 litres) but I guess that really depends on what kind of magic the compactors use to hyper-compress everything. :) 

 

edit: That said, I quite like it as it is now, I can drop impossibly dense chunks of ice into hot geyser water and they'll keep it cooler for a long time.

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1 hour ago, boggers said:

I can drop impossibly dense chunks of ice into hot geyser water and they'll keep it cooler for a long time.

You'd achieve more of an effect by changing one tile from abyssalite to granite than from dumping a piece of ice there.

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6 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

After tens (if not hundreds) of cycles - the ice can only melt completely or not at all.

Been there done that, a dumped an ice into a boiling hot geyser water, literally boiling hot at 95 degrees C. After 30 cycles that ice didn't even melt

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We have to keep in mind that this game is still in its early stages. We litterally JUST had the official early access release, so things are nowhere near finished. It is to assume that such things will be fixed throughout the game's development.

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