Element change should not cause damage if the phase doesn't change

[Kasuha]

Ice, water, and steam are all different elements within the game's engine. At present, pipes are implemented in a way that if an element change occurs within a pipe, the pipe breaks and the new element spills. That makes sense if the new element has a different phase (freezing solid, condensing to liquid, etc) but it stops making sense in context where the element phase does not change.

We can currently 'legally' reach element changes where phase does not change. We can build obsidian pipes through magma and draw crude oil through them, changing it into petroleum. And we can heat up bath of crude oil above 125 C using aquatuners and then draw fertilizer through it on conveyor rails, changing it to dirt or even sand.

I would like to suggest that when the element changes but its phase doesn't (i.e. it stays solid or liquid), the change is 'quiet', i.e. without the pipe breaking, or without the load falling off the conveyor or storage compactor.

[BlueLance]

This makes the most sense, I never have done this but I can understand the reason!

[yoakenashi]

Great idea! I didn’t even know the crude>petrol change broke pipes, I will keep this in mind in case the deva don’t implement your idea. And I just implemented this last week:

2 hours ago, Kasuha said:

we can heat up bath of crude oil above 125 C using aquatuners and then draw fertilizer through it on conveyor rails, changing it to dirt or even sand.

 

Not to get too far off topic, but in the case of fertilizer>dirt via conveyor rail in hot crude, I noticed sometimes it dropped the dirt while other times it created a tile of dirt. Do you have any insight as to why the game chooses one or the other? Dropping the dirt of course is much better as it does require duplicants to dig the dirt tile first. Thanks!

[Kasuha]

Just now, yoakenashi said:

Not to get too far off topic, but in the case of fertilizer>dirt via conveyor rail in hot crude, I noticed sometimes it dropped the dirt while other times it created a tile of dirt. Do you have any insight as to why the game chooses one or the other? Dropping the dirt of course is much better as it does require duplicants to dig the dirt tile first. Thanks!

I don't know, but these are my ideas:

• It may depend on converted mass. Perhaps when the cage doesn't contain full 20 kg, it converts to item?
• It may be created on save/load. I had cases when supercooled gaseous CO2 turned to solid tiles on load.
• Sufficient pressure of the crude may destroy the generated tile, turning it into an item. When the tile is created, the crude is pushed out of the way and that creates momentary overpressure in surrounding tiles even if the pool is not very deep.