What’s the point of the digging mass reduction?

[caffeinated21]

When you dig a tile you lose half it’s mass. Does anyone see any good reason for this?

[beowulf2010]

So at some point you can give dedicated miners skills and/or equipment that will lessen the 50% penalty? 

Dunno. That's all I can think of... 

[psusi]

Well for one it makes it a good idea to not just dig out the entire starting biome before you need the space since the higher mass of the cool rock will absorb more heat.  Of course that doesn't seem to be a great feature.

 

[martosss]

5 minutes ago, psusi said:

Well for one it makes it a good idea to not just dig out the entire starting biome before you need the space since the higher mass of the cool rock will absorb more heat.  Of course that doesn't seem to be a great feature.

 

As far as I've read, that's is the reason they have it - slow natural heat transfer between biomes. You can exploit that fact by melting ice biomes instead of digging them - 100% water returns! Some people even discussed melting slime/Algae into Dirt(at 125°), but AFAIR they said you need to melt it further to Sand, otherwise you'll have to dig out the dirt => still 50% return. To me it seems that melting polluted ice/ice is the easiest way to benefit from this quirk.

[Sasza22]

For me it kinda makes sense. You take a solid cubic meter of rock and change it into debris. It should have less mass or it would tke the same amount of space. If it was the same mass then the mining gun would have to be a shrink gun. Maybe they plan (or did at some point) to make debris form a solid tile if they exceed a certain mass so the mass loss on digging is there to prevent that from happening too often.

[psusi]

3 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

For me it kinda makes sense. You take a solid cubic meter of rock and change it into debris. It should have less mass or it would tke the same amount of space. If it was the same mass then the mining gun would have to be a shrink gun. Maybe they plan (or did at some point) to make debris form a solid tile if they exceed a certain mass so the mass loss on digging is there to prevent that from happening too often.

Umm, no... then you would only need to store two mined blocks in a storage compactor before it turned back into a full block.

 

[he77789]

Except compactors.

[Christophlette]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

For me it kinda makes sense. You take a solid cubic meter of rock and change it into debris. It should have less mass or it would tke the same amount of space.

I don't think it should work like that... In reality when you crush a solid cubic meter of rock, it is still the same mass. Because it doesn't disappear out of nowhere. And it should take more space in fact, because there is air between the debris and the rock was a full solid cubic meter and not hollow.

But yes, as he77789 stated, there are compactors and we are in a game. So it's just a law we must play with. Something weird but it leads to complex and funny solution to get the full amount of resources sometimes ^^

[Hellshound38]

I always assumed it was because removing impurities.

 

[Oozinator]

Explanation is very easy. Because you are on an asteroid!
When mass is reduced (by digging), gravitational force of the asteroid is reduced and it's only looking, like half of the mass is pooped away.
When the asteroid has <2 moons, this theory is 98,7% true!

[he77789]

This photo again???