Nerf Abyssalite

[TrustyFish]

First off, I like the idea of there being fictional materials in ONI. I think that abyssalite existing as the best available insulating building material is cool. But it shouldn't be 200,000 times better than the next best mineral. (If that is not accurate please correct me)

The existence of abyssalite essentially makes all of the insulated block and pipes worse than useless. Even with the 20-fold insulation bonus that using the insulated tiles gives you, an ordinary abyssalite tile conducts heat 10,000 times slower than an insulated tile made from another material. Because not many of us play 1,000 cycle, let alone 20,000 cycle bases, there is no incentive to use insulated abyssalite tile either. This is especially true early on in the game when acquiring the resource can be quite tedious.

Because of how vastly superior an option it is, I feel it reduces the decision making available to the player, eliminating some of the tools provided by the game as reasonable considerations.

But more importantly, as a new player, who isn't paying attention to the nitty-gritty material properties and heat exchange mechanics of the game, it is also incredibly misleading. You come into the game, see you've unlocked the ability to make insulated tiles, and think, OK I get it, this is how I'm supposed to control heat, when it's really just obfuscating the fact that the type of tile you build isn't nearly as important as the material you build it out of. This is exacerbated by the way it spawns. It doesn't spawn as pockets of a rare and useful resource, it spawns as a delineation between biomes. Combined with the text "nearly impenetrable" it can lead players to the conclusion that this is similar to the bedrock in minecraft (at this point shouldn't have encountered neutronium). And think they're supposed to go around it. 

Again, I think its very reasonable for abyssalite to remain the best insulating option, but I suggest it's thermal conductivity be a bit less absurd. Perhaps only 10 times as good as other minerals rather than 200,000. In this case it would be more reasonable for players to use other insulation options before they have a good supply of abyssalite, and a noticeable reason to use insulated abyssalite tiles or pipes.

P.S. - Frankly I'd be happy to also see the abyssalite mining perk moved to seasoned miner, so that this exotic and very useful material was something we needed to work towards, and to give more incentive for players to use the higher end jobs, but that is starting to enter into a discussion of the jobs system (which in general I quite like) and is a smaller tweak to the place of the material in the game.

[ImpalerWrG]

Personally I wish we had a better solution to keeping biomes from thermalizing (exchanging and reaching equal temperature) with each other.  A super insulating material which is capable of performing this job ends up being overkill and out of place in the rest of the game.

The simplest solution is to just destroy absysolite when you mine it (or drop other normal rocks), no issue with it as a building material anymore with no changes to maps.

A more complex solution might be to try to use vacuum voids (maybe many small checkerboard pattered ones) as insulation, basically a physical arrangement of rocks/vacuum to create a meta-material that is maximally insulative.

Lastly a map structure which segregates and layers all biomes in such a way that hot and cold ones won't be next too each other.  Their has been some hint that the map will eventually be surrounded by a vacuum as you reach the surface of the asteroid.  Maybe one side of the asteroid is in shadow and is the frozen side and the other is a molten inferno equivalent to the 'bottom' of the map now.  Or maybe the ice biomes are all separate 'satellite' asteroids floating in space nearby and you have to actually build out towards them across a gap that acts as a perfect insulator.  This option could be really interesting or really lame depending on how it's implemented as you want to keep the map interesting to explore.

[Kasuha]

I made a little experiment and right at the moment, insulated tiles seem to be pretty much as good as abyssalite. Even in direct contact with magma at 1600 C, they don't change temperature at all.

Spoiler

This is an experiment I made, building a standard tile and insulated tile chamber inside magma vein. All walls are made of obsidian with thermal conductivity 2 (but higher melting point than the temperature of magma). Then I set temperatures of both chambers to 200 K using paint tool. Temperature of the insulated wall did not even budge yet, although the other chamber is pretty much at temperature of the magma already.

So - using insulated tiles is not wrong or bad decision. It works as well as abyssalite, only eating more material (of which there is plenty around).

I didn't test insulated pipes but I think it may be the same case.

If devs did this intentionally, then abyssalite is no longer such ultimate material. It's there just to insulate individual biomes from each other.

The abyssalite digging perk is set fine in my opinion. Highly trained duplicants have certain decor and food quality requirements and while decor is easy to meet at the moment, food would be a problem without ability to dig abyssalite and get inside other biomes.

[ImpalerWrG]

Lets see the comparison with Abysalite used in place of obsidian in both regular and insulated tile.  If it really is equivalent then just dropping normal rocks from mining it would be fine and it would preserve the existence of abysalite as a super hard material (which I have no problem with).  That said I don't find that skills of my miners really slows me down from Biomes I want to get into.  I can always get to Slime and Caustic Biomes without going through any Abysalite.  Ice is the only thing I might want early that I need to break through too.

[Kasuha]

12 minutes ago, ImpalerWrG said:

Lets see the comparison with Abysalite used in place of obsidian in both regular and insulated tile. 

The point is, you don't need abyssalite to make ultimate heat insulation. That makes insulated tiles built of any material superior to standard tiles built of abyssalite because they're exactly as good and easily recognizable by eye.

If this holds for insulated pipes, too, then abyssalite is already nerfed. Because if you accidentally use abyssalite to build something that should be heat conducting, it will not be and it will not be easily recognizable.

[BlueLance]

I prefer the use of abyssalite, mainly because I hate the aesthetic of insulated tiles haha, but I never knew it was that good as an insulator

[Mojeho]

Hello,

As far as i've built bases, i don't see a problem with insulated tiles, as they have very good thermal insulation. No need to use abyssalite. 

Much bigger problem are insulated pipes - if you don't want to heat up inside of your base, than abyssalite is very handy in reducing structure complexity.

So yes, either nerf abyssalite - as making it drop normal rocks instead of abyssalite itself , or(and) improve insulated stuff. Even best realworld insulation aerogel has conductivity 0.03 W/(m·K), which still makes abyssalite 3000 times or so better insulator. 

Ability to make "something like insulation material" in middle-late game would be too much to ask i guess   Though it would make a nice sink for mined rocks and duplicant work.

Best Regards 

Mojeho

[Ambaire]

6 hours ago, ImpalerWrG said:

Lets see the comparison with Abysalite used in place of obsidian in both regular and insulated tile.

For practical purposes, there is no difference among the insulated tiles. There definitely is for regular tiles, though.

Regular and insulated tiles in sequence.

Insulated surrounding regular. The insulated are staying at 20C, although I only waited half a cycle.

 

Based on this, I can see a top early game priority will be to surround the starting biome in insulated sandstone tiles...

[TrustyFish]

Thanks for running these tests guys. It's quite possible that my evaluation of insulated tile is off. Between the wiki entries and my personal experience with them (which was during earlier builds of the game) I might have gotten some of my facts wrong.

I'd like to run a test over a longer period though, it seems possible that the 20x insulation bonus of insulated tile is making it difficult to notice the difference between materials.

[BlueLance]

I also thought that insulated tiles were not as good as they have been shown to be here.

[Ambaire]

18 minutes ago, TrustyFish said:

Thanks for running these tests guys. It's quite possible that my evaluation of insulated tile is off. Between the wiki entries and my personal experience with them (which was during earlier builds of the game) I might have gotten some of my facts wrong.

I'd like to run a test over a longer period though, it seems possible that the 20x insulation bonus of insulated tile is making it difficult to notice the difference between materials.

I also did a test using liquid tungsten at ~5000C, 4000kg and most of the insulated tiles heated right up although there were some strange inconsistencies. And the interior of the tiles remained at 20C.

[TrustyFish]

22 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

I also did a test using liquid tungsten at ~5000C, 4000kg and most of the insulated tiles heated right up although there were some strange inconsistencies. And the interior of the tiles remained at 20C.

I'm running similar tests, I think the inconsistencies are from the Specific Heat Capacity of the material. The non-abyssalite blocks are changing temperature, although it doesn't add up to very much until 20 cycles or so. I think the original numbers are correct.  Abyssalite insulation is probably overkill. But the disparity in effectiveness is still extreme.

[Ambaire]

I typically just use insulated igneous rock everywhere I need insulated stuff. I have used abyssalite for steam geyser containment but that's about it and probably unnecessary.

[Kasuha]

Okay, there's something ... different than I thought. So far I can see that insulated tiles exchange heat happily with gases but don't seem to exchange it with magma.

 

[Ch4050v3rl0rd]

Following the discussion, if I may insert a suggestion: how about if the Abyssalite veins drop "Abyssalite-Ore" that is (more or less) useless in this state, and has to be refined (even an ore-melter could give only 50% of the 100kg pile as pure abyssalite) to get the full insulation-ability.

i honestly have to say: i like abyssalite, my base that i'm playing actually (ranching beta) is the first that works really fine, thanks to the abyssalite tile

 

greetings

 

[Kasuha]

My experiment:

Materials in rows are:

oxygen-oxygen

oxygen-water

oxygen-granite

water-water

water-granite

granite-granite

The material on the left is cold, material on the right is hot.

Insulated walls in red rectangles are heating up, in blue rectangles are cooling down. The rest is not changing at all.

My conclusion is that insulated walls only exchange heat with gases. At least in horizontal direction.

[TrustyFish]

2 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

My conclusion is that insulated walls only exchange heat with gases. At least in horizontal direction.

It looks like the faster change in temperature of the gases is due to the lower mass and specific heat capacity of the material. That does help it put it into perspective though that with gases you're going to notice the lower insulation provided my non-abyssalite tiles much sooner.

[Kasuha]

1 minute ago, TrustyFish said:

It looks like the faster change in temperature of the gases is due to the lower mass and specific heat capacity of the material. That does help it put it into perspective though that with gases you're going to notice the lower insulation provided my non-abyssalite tiles much sooner.

There's 1000 kg/tile of either material. 1000 kg/tile of oxygen, 1000 kg/tile of water, 1000 kg/tile of granite. It only exchanges heat with oxygen.

A wall that has 1000 kg/tile of granite at 900 K on one side, and 1000 kg/tile of oxygen at 100 K at the other side and itself is at 200 K is cooling down.

And as a result of another experiment, double insulated wall counts as "perfect enough" insulation even separating two gas environments. There's certain, very, very small heat exchange between adjacent insulated tiles. Small enough to not have any practical impact.

[TrustyFish]

2 hours ago, Kasuha said:

There's 1000 kg/tile of either material. 1000 kg/tile of oxygen, 1000 kg/tile of water, 1000 kg/tile of granite. It only exchanges heat with oxygen.

A wall that has 1000 kg/tile of granite at 900 K on one side, and 1000 kg/tile of oxygen at 100 K at the other side and itself is at 200 K is cooling down.

And as a result of another experiment, double insulated wall counts as "perfect enough" insulation even separating two gas environments. There's certain, very, very small heat exchange between adjacent insulated tiles. Small enough to not have any practical impact.

Awesome! Seemed like it would be an easy thing to overlook. This looks like a well set up experiment. I'd love to see some developer insight into why this system is working in unintuitive ways and if any changes are coming.

[TrustyFish]

3 hours ago, Ch4050v3rl0rd said:

i honestly have to say: i like abyssalite, my base that i'm playing actually (ranching beta) is the first that works really fine, thanks to the abyssalite tile

I've had a very similar experience. Thats part of what makes it feel uncomfortable to me that sometimes it seems like you're forced to use this really unintuitive building strategy.

[llunak]

I think a big part of the problem is that it is possible to build non-insulating tiles/pipes from abyssalite and that those are very cheap. If it was possible to build only insulated tiles/pipes from abyssalite, that'd make abyssalite scarce. I play it that way and it feels much better, as I have to think where I use abyssalite and have to explicitly gather enough of it.

 

[Jigsawn]

This is quite eye opening. The forum had said how good abysallite was previously, and its main property in its description is insulation, so I've been making critical walls to block out heat, constructed with insulated tiles made from abysallite. Maybe that is overkill? I use standard materials like granite or indigenous rock for non-critical insulated tiles. I also agree they are ugly!

What I can't really figure out from the heat overlay is how much, if any, heat is bleeding into my base through its 1-thick perimeter wall of insulation tiles. Over a long period of time its almost impossible to tell if its truly insulated or not.

Has anyone tested this with insulated pipes? I made standard insulated pipes (no abysallite) running through my base filled with 40 degree water and I don't know if they are leaking heat. They don't seem to be, but maybe a few degrees?

Everyone goes on about constructing pipes etc from abysallite, it takes me ages to mine so I never have. Plus I have been trying to leave a 1 tile layer of each abysallite vein to keep heat from leaking between biomes. One thing that is kind of annoying about insulation in the game is you can't insulate your airlocks/doors, so I always get heat leaking into ice biomes and my base that way.

 

[Kasuha]

5 hours ago, Jigsawn said:

What I can't really figure out from the heat overlay is how much, if any, heat is bleeding into my base through its 1-thick perimeter wall of insulation tiles. Over a long period of time its almost impossible to tell if its truly insulated or not.

If you make it 2 tiles thick, it will be sufficient for any practical purposes. If it is 1 tile thick and there's liquid or solid material on the other side, it's still good enough (equal to abyssalite). It there's gas on both sides, it's probably leaking heat. Not much, but you may feel it over many cycles.

Also I still didn't make tests with horizontal walls. There are some peculiarities with heat conduction in vertical direction in ONI so there still might be surprises waiting,

[Gurgel]

There is a better insulator than Abyssalite: Vacuum. It is tedious though as you need 3 tiles thickness (2 walls 1 vacuum layer) and need to pump it out. Making the game more tedious is probably a bad idea.

[Flydo]

On 19/03/2018 at 5:20 AM, TrustyFish said:

First off, I like the idea of there being fictional materials in ONI. I think that abyssalite existing as the best available insulating building material is cool. But it shouldn't be 200,000 times better than the next best mineral. (If that is not accurate please correct me)

 

You never try to make vaccum inside two tile wall, is 100% to prevent heat transfer, lot of better than abysalitte.

 

I don't know how abysalitte work now but at the beginning, with insulated abyssalite tile i loose a lot of my "cold" (i know it's a non sense in science) when i work on liquid oxygen system