Should abyssalite be destroyed when mined?

[goboking]

Abyssalite is a fantastic insulator.  It has to be to maintain disparate temperatures in various biomes.  But as a building material it's perhaps too good.  In most cases you can skip insulated tiles and pipes and just use regular versions made from abyssalite instead.  Abyssalite also diminishes the utility of ceramic.  Why go through the effort of setting up a ceramic production chain if abyssalite does everything ceramic does, only better?

What if digging out a tile of abyssalite completely destroyed 100% of the material?  How much would it change the way you play the game?  And do you think the change would be for the better?

[MorsDux]

it would make things more realistic. Nightmare of the minmaxer though.

[AzeTheGreat]

1 minute ago, MorsDux said:

it would make things more realistic. Nightmare of the minmaxer though.

Perfect insulation is rarely needed, and in cases it is, vacuum insulation would still work.  That being said, I don't see it providing much benefit - it'd just make insulation more tedious.

[martosss]

As a fairly new player, abyssalite feels like a glitchy material exactly because of these super isolation qualities. Up to now I'm dying from heat and that isolation actually helps me stay alive longer, so it definitely feels good, but it also feels wrong. Here's an easy solution - dig it out and don't gather it and don't use it for building - tadaaa! You just implemented your suggestion. How much would it change - I'll melt even faster than now, and now I'm melting pretty fast.

Then again, can you ask the same question about

• wheezies
• water sieve with constant output temperature(that is used to cool down liquids)
• doors creating vacuum and deleting matter without any energy consumption or heat dissipation?

I agree with you - if you want reality you have to forget about using those things since they're "too good to be true".

For now I'll keep the abyssalite and try to survive, later I might try without it if I get bored, I suspect you can use worse materials to achieve a similar effect.

[Lilalaunekuh]

Ok we all always forget that even if a tile and a insulated tile made of different materials would have the same conductivity and capacity the insulated tile would in 99% of the cases be far superior

=> Insulated tiles/pipes use the MINIMUM of the conductivities to transfer heat (Everything else uses an average)

 

When that change was implemented everyone was complaining here on this forum about the now conducting abyssalite and heating up coold biomes ...

=> Normal abyssalite tiles are not 100% insulated anymore and there are even cases where you can heat up insulated abyssalite tiles

 

But the main question here is: Should there be a way to reach 100% insulation ?

- I would say definitely yes, at least you can achiev it using a vacuume

- So why not implement a way to create the same effect without making every build huge and just 3 times more time consuming to build

So how would removing a way to reach a most of the time perfect insulation make the game better / more fun to play?

 

(I would ask the same questions for wheezeworts. So I don´t use wheezeworts, but that there are wheezeworts gives so much opportunities for cool builds. )

[AzeTheGreat]

29 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

and there are even cases where you can heat up insulated abyssalite tiles

Can you show me this?  They don't heat up even if you try to temp shift volcanoes into them.  I don't think there's a single survival situation that will cause even a tiny change in temperature.

[Lilalaunekuh]

Ok it´s something I saw a while ago (Some of my insulated tiles were 20,3°C and I thought my pipes inside did the job)

=> There may be some bug involved or just it´s just the are multiplier for liquids.

 

My setup was one insulated abyssalite tile at 3600K surrounded by 293,15K diamond tempshift plates and a gold pipe inside with a flow water at 290K:

 

=> After the water covered the tempshift plates the insulated abyssalite started changing temperature really really fast. (Look at the clock in the upper left and compare how fast^^)

 

PS: The temperature transfer seems to stopped when the insulated abyssalite tile reached 98,7°C

[goboking]

4 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

So how would removing a way to reach a most of the time perfect insulation make the game better / more fun to play?

I would posit it does so the same way the nerf to sleet wheat back in the day or the more recent removal of drip cooling made the game better: by incentivizing players to utilize more of what the game has to offer.  If the path of least resistance to an end also happens to be the best solution to a problem by a significant margin then aspects of the game are rendered obsolete.  Entire elements of the game being useless isn't good design, in my humble opinion.

[Lilalaunekuh]

36 minutes ago, goboking said:

the nerf to sleet wheat back in the day

Nerfing something is a way to give something a new place in a ingame meta

=> The intended use for sleet wheat was and is still the same. (food)

 

38 minutes ago, goboking said:

the more recent removal of drip cooling made the game better

It was an unintended effect of the way the calculation was done (comparing temperature vs comparing thermal energy)

=> Removing it was something really good for gameplaywise

 

40 minutes ago, goboking said:

If the path of least resistance to an end also happens to be the best solution to a problem by a significant margin then aspects of the game are rendered obsolete.  Entire elements of the game being useless isn't good design, in my humble opinion.

Not just your opinion

It´s not my point to proof abyssalite is in a perfect spot right now, but it´s no where close to a perfect insulator if you play with tempshift plates and liquids  ( just 80K temperature difference were needed to achiev a temperature exchange with insulated abyssalite tiles in not even the worst case scenario (oil/petroleum are 3 times more conductive than the water I used for my tests^^) ).

But I think it´s good that we have a possibility to build a 100% insulated tile (or let´s call it 100% insulation with minor design restrictions^^). So I am all in to make this perfect insulating tile more high tech or harder to produce ....

 

TLDR:

-Having a tile provide 100% insulation is a good gameplay mechanic and makes many builds just more compact/easy to understand.

-Just using 400Kg of abyssalite seems just to easy for such end game solution

-Normal abyssalite is in a good spot right now