Obsidian is GLASS

I understand that Minecraft has popularized the idea that obsidian is some super hard stone, but Minecraft is wrong.

Obsidian is just volcanic glass, and is about as hard to brake as window glass of the same thickness.

I'm not saying you can't have really hard to brake blocks once you get deep enough, but naming that block obsidian as an insult to geology.

 

Sure, but no one knows what "diorite" or "gabbro" are.

 

People who play Dwarf Fortress do.

 

I'm starting to become convinced that DF is the real world and we're actually the simulation, looking into a magic mirror to see the real world which we are interpreting as a simulation...

 

Preposterous. Alcoholism isn't common enough here.

 

It does bug me that obsidian is always hard in games.

 

We are playing a game where you can use gold as a material to build pickaxes and drill. Lava has no convection heat. Oil cannot catch fire. There are only 2 dimensions...
Idk, but I have a feeling that there are certain rules of realities that doesn't apply here.

 

It's only a game.

Also this:

"..well-crafted obsidian blades have a cutting edge many times sharper than high-quality steel surgical scalpels"
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian

and original source:

1. Buck, BA (March 1982). "Ancient Technology in Contemporary Surgery". The Western journal of medicine 136 (3): 265–269.PMC 1273673. PMID 7046256.

On the Mohs scale Obsidian is rated at 5-6 which is harder than steel. Steel is less brittle, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility that we might in the future find something we can add to obsidian to make it less brittle, a coating compound perhaps. Seems logical to me.

Moral of the story: Check your assumptions.

 

Isss dragonglasss though.

 

It's obsidian from another planets, it isn't earth obsidian.

 

I feel the need to explain to you that obsidian is made under certain physical conditions and is composed of specific minerals and therefore is the same wherever you go.

that being said. obsidian is brittle due to it's crystalline structure. if there were an instance where obsidian was produced without faults in it's crystalline structure, it would result in a relatively none brittle material. so, just assume for the sake of continuity, that obsidian produced in high pressure conditions and devoid of oxygen would end up being able to make better bonds between the crystals. there you go, hard obsidian is a sciencey thing now. because really, what makes rocks and minerals break isn't much other than a tearing at a fault in it's bond. take diamonds for instance, they're the hardest known substance, yet we shape them. this shaping process is done by taking away layers where there are faults and cracks.

 

As Dust said, it's brittle, but it's still extremely hard. A diamond is brittle, but you wouldn't have an easy time breaking it either.

Obsidian being as hard to break as it is makes sense, it being in such large deposits inside a planet? Not so much, but it looks cool.

 

What makes me mad is that Obsidian still has materialHueShift variations even though all that affects now is a tiny part of the shine on the new texture for the material.

It's like the cobblestone thing, but even more obvious.

 

Of course it is a glass.

But not all glass is the same. In the case of obsidian, it is very hard and brittle. Which makes it break with very sharp edges, but also very hard to mine.

Have you ever tried to break a 10 cm thick glass panel? Much harder than a thing layer glass window.

What doesn't make sense is having obsidian bricks. Since mining it would just chip away parts of it, and you'll end up with obsidian slivers and shards, never bricks...

...unless you had some sort of matter manipulator able to take pieces of it without slivering it.

No.

Obsidian is glass made naturally from a volcanic process. Its composition is often varies. Although most of it is silica, then some magnsium or iron, not all obsidian has the same composition because of different combinations of materials in the mix. A different planet on our universe would likely have similar compositions to earth, because they would be made by the same stuff that came from a star. But that is not the case in Starbound, where some planets have stuff other planets do not have. But even on earth, different deposits have different compositions.

And obsidian isn't a mineral. It's a glass. Some would call it "mineraloid". Since it's not a mineral, it doesn't have a crystalline structure. Only minerals have crystalline structures.


But all of that doesn't matter. What matter is that obsidian is indeed hard... just not as hard of other stuff like, let's say Quartz, or man-made glass. Much even less the hardest stuff like diamonds.

 

Geology is a big boy now. If it feels insulted, it will get over it pretty quickly.

 

I already knew that, having obsidian in my possession, but yeah, just another fact most people don't know. Being educated sucks, because you'll find allot of those things.

 

To be fair though, I have tried making a circle out of obsidian and lighting it on fire to make a portal to hell, but I only made it as far as purgatory.

 

Minecraft blocks are exactly one meter cubed. Glass one meter thick is going to be hard to break, especially since most of it is going to ablate and re-direct force.


A one meter thick pane of glass would be both extremely heavy, and hard to break.

 

So you ended up in New Jersey?