New Building Idea: Incinerator

[goboking]

I'm proposing a new building, a Furnace/Incinerator, be added to the game to help us with storage management.  I think such a building would be a wonderful addition to the game.

 

What is an Incinerator?

Well, it's exactly what it sounds like...it's a furnace that incinerates unwanted materials.

 

How does the Incinerator work?

The way I envision the Incinerator working is similar to the Storage Compactor in that it uses priority settings and a list of boxes we can check for each material.  Any material selected will be fed to the Incinerator unless it is also designated for a Storage Compactor with sufficient available space.  The priority setting would work like it it does for any other building, determining when your dupes operate it.

The Incinerator would be fueled by Coal, meaning it should be unlocked when Combustion is researched.  It would destroy whatever is placed within and produce Ash.  Ash, in turn, can serve as a filtration material, giving us a long-term solution to the problem of finite Sand.  It could also produce Carbon Dioxide if the developers deem it appropriate.

 

What benefits does the Incinerator offer?

In addition to providing a renewable filtration material, the Incinerator gives players another option of disposing of unwanted material.  This means we have the option of getting rid of unwanted clutter without spamming dozens of Storage Compactors or relying on Hatches.  Ridding our base of unwanted clutter not only impacts stress management and improves aesthetics for those of us who care about such things, but it also improves game performance.

 

What are the drawbacks of the Incinerator?

The Incinerator should have a massive negative decor penalty and should produce lots and lots of heat, making Heat Exhaustion and Scalding very real risks if proper steps aren't taken to ensure operator safety.  Heat management, as many of us know, is vital to the long-term survival of a colony and so seems an appropriate byproduct for such a useful building.  The Incinerator could also produce Polluted Oxygen when organic materials and dupe corpses are burned.

 

So that's my proposed solution to long-term waste disposal and storage management.  Tell me what you think.

[Darkarma]

55 minutes ago, gobokin said:

It could also produce Carbon Dioxide if the developers deem it appropriate.

Items that contain water should probably release some steam as well but I like this idea.

[Ciderblock]

I think balancing it to be useful and yet not totally the new meta might be tricky, but overall I like this idea. However, I think the game could use a little bit more in the way of "analog" ways to do things. Maybe instead of an actual incinerator building we could just have a way to make fire, and thus have "open air" incinerators that function similar to what you're describing here.

[Botaxalim]

smelther maybe, for advance metal ore refinery
 

17 hours ago, gobokin said:

... Incinerator gives players another option of disposing of unwanted material.  ....

i dont agree for "deleting" some resource, because the map size and how much resource we can dig
where ONI point is about convert resource to another different shape resource
Now the game is very heavy on most people computer CPU/RAM where you have dozen+ dupe and most map excavated where we run 500+ cycles
deleting some resource maybe viable idea now, where we have material A too much & material B too low
but not in the future, as klei will optimize the game and balancing resource in different variety biome they added

[dosman22l]

i think its a bit useless, why u will prefer delete a resource that may u will need it after a few cycles... we need try to convert materials in others, i think that

[Sevio]

I'd rather see a bigger storage building instead of resource destruction, so we don't have to keep storing our stuff in lots of small buildings. It would even help reduce CPU load for the dupes when they try to find a resource to build with!

[Chris_Hoefler]

In the first place this really doesn't sound that bad but burning coal (which is imo definitely more rare and valuable than sand) to get filtration medium isn't a good trade at all

[brummbar7]

I'm pretty sure I've seen some people state that having tons of storage lockers with materials in them is one of the things that contributes to lag in very large bases - due to all the temperature exchange calculations.  I don't know if that's true or not, but if so it might be a worthwhile mechanic if for no other reason than to reduce the lag.   Another method, assuming we eventually have access to the surface, would be to let the player make rockets they can fill with junk and just shoot off into space.  The rocket could cost metal, so you'd permanently lose a little metal, as well as fuel presumably.

[goboking]

On 9/6/2017 at 8:25 AM, Darkarma said:

Items that contain water should probably release some steam as well but I like this idea.

I hadn't thought of that.  Good idea.

 

22 hours ago, Ciderblock said:

I think balancing it to be useful and yet not totally the new meta might be tricky, but overall I like this idea. However, I think the game could use a little bit more in the way of "analog" ways to do things. Maybe instead of an actual incinerator building we could just have a way to make fire, and thus have "open air" incinerators that function similar to what you're describing here.

They actually touched on the idea of player-built systems vs actual buildings during last week's steam.  They said that they love all the things players come up with, but they're hesitant to leave it up to us to come up with in-game solutions for complex problems because less resourceful players tend not to think outside the box.  I hadn't thought of things along that line before, but I can see where leaving things for us to engineer on our own might hurt accessibility for more casual players.

 

6 hours ago, dosman22l said:

i think its a bit useless, why u will prefer delete a resource that may u will need it after a few cycles... we need try to convert materials in others, i think that

After I've mined enough granite and abyssalite I will never, ever have a use for sandstone.  If I could turn this sandstone into a useful resource (filtration material) instead of storing it in dozens upon dozens of Storage Compactors, so much the better.

 

3 hours ago, Chris_Hoefler said:

In the first place this really doesn't sound that bad but burning coal (which is imo definitely more rare and valuable than sand) to get filtration medium isn't a good trade at all

I'm the kind of guy who abandons Coal Generators as soon as I've tapped Natural Gas Geysers, but fully understand that that's a YMMV situation.