7th of August, 2014: Blog of Dev

Oil is often used to temper steel, so it's not completely random.
I get what you mean, though.

 

Pfft, titanium is easy to distinguish; it has a slight purple tint. The real problem is silver/platinum, the only difference being that silver ore has a grey border and platinum ore has a brownish border.

Iron + Coal is an *extremely* simplified explanation for how steel is made.
Also, alloys made with radioactive elements aren't always radioactive. c:

I highly doubt that they've removed the precious metals from the game. That would be silly! They've probably either not finished their new sprites yet, or they've omitted them from the graph because they aren't one of the gear tiers.

 

Doesn't making steel require carbon?

It doesn't make sense to use OIL if coal is already almost 100% carbon.

 

I Like the reduction in the total number of ores, cause I felt as though I was going from one to another to another and it never felt like a substantial upgrade just a lot of small tedious ones.

I still feel that Iron ore and Coal ore are a bit too similar looking - I would suggest making coal more of a flat black, with less sheen,
or with the iron either add more rust(oxidization like in naturally found iron, which would be more believable IMO, especially since Copper is out the orange won't be confusing!) or simply Make the coal a bit shiner since natural coal is rather shiny

Coal Iron

 

so much cool new stuff to see in your posts, but no updates for months.

 

Gotta get on the nightly train yo!

 

Nightly is good but quite buggy (as advertised)

 

Prisilium is found only on desert worlds, right?

(ok,yeah that was kinda obscure, but I'm going with it anyway)

 

yep it changes around each update for whats bugging in Nightly, I had matter manipulator not working yesterday but today it's working but now the game crashes if i go any where bellow the lvl the acid pool in starting dungeon is at.

 

Going to be honest here, I don't understand why everyone confuses these two. Never had a problem with them. Silver is a darker grey than platinum, and has a dark outline. Platinum is closer to a white color.

I personally think we should use diamonds.
What? They're carbon...
Of course, that's ignoring the problem of them being blue diamonds, which means they have hydrogen in them. Damnit, why can't any games have proper diamonds?!
I totally agree. Steel armor should require diamond instead!
(Also, oil does have a high carbon content.)

No. None of that.

 

Me likey!

 

I like these new changes especially the fact that you dont just use coal to upgrade the metals, but something that i would like to note is that i am red-green deficient (a form of colour blindness), i kinda wanted to touch on this subject earlier but there wasnt anything to post on, anyways. I just wanted to say that i, and other people with red-green blindness, cant really see the difference between steel and titanium. this problem isnt huge but its just kinda hard sorting out your inventory when you try and stack two different metals for 2 minutes .

Love the game and its development, Love you too Chucklefish

p.s. can we have starter pets soon?

 

Heh, err, ahem.... Just a few friendly suggestions...

As someone who's always loved Blacksmithy....

1. Well I hope that Iron + Oil = Steel is a new 'recipe' and not a replacement.... Coal and Wood are the logical choices because they are realistic. That's how they did it back in the day. Oil would require it's own processing in order to become coke (purified coal) that you could use to create steel. While Coal and Wood also benefit from being converted into coke, technically you could create some steel without converting it first.
So at face-value this combination is nonsensical.... Put oil in a blast furnace and I'm pretty sure the only thing it's gonna do is explode.

2. Titanium kinda gets me.... Technically if you want to be realistic, the ingots or refined form should be very, very white with dark contrasting shadows. (While Silver looks similar, both very white metals, it has a much more metallic look and gives much less contrast). Meanwhile the ore itself should be dark blue (or black, but blue is obviously easier to see.)
Perhaps having the ore and ingots be the same color makes sense for user-friendliness... but beware that this is not how metals work in reality.
I kinda get the current look, you've got the white-ish color of the ingots and the blue-ish color of the ore combined to make it consistent. I can only assume this is for user-friendliness and to partially maintain a reference to reality.

... And that brings up another note. If you want to be realistic you don't need your refined elements to match color to their ores.... Ores are almost always alloys. And alloys almost always have a different color. The entire point of refining them is to remove those alloys. So in-game are we just burning off some dirt, or what? The only times you seem to diverge from this are for the 'combined' elements, like Cerulium and Durasteel.

3. Finally, "Ferozium" is just BEGGING me to believe I need to find this on frozen planets, not refine it with plutonium.... Can you please make this happen instead? lol

4. I completely agree with one of the other users above.... You need Unobtainium..... (On an unrelated note... I was the first person to ever make a mod that added the element 'Unobtainium' in Minecraft... )

 

i'd imagine copper, silver, gold, and platinum would still be foundational for armor. but inclusion of a diamond armor would be pretty sweet

 

Indeed, it is! If you look at the chemistry and science, the steel-making process is more complex than most realise.

Those facts do not necessarily make an iron + oil process feasible, let alone practical.

Smelting iron to make steel requires tremendous heat. By the time the molten iron is hot enough, the oil would have long since burned or evaporated away. Coke (a form of coal), on the other hand, would behave differently.

Tempering steel with oil is entirely different. You're comparing apples with oranges. BTW: More commonly, water is used to temper steel. Does this mean that we could use water to turn iron into steel?

Maybe? But do you realize the melting point of diamond? It's pretty high. And why burn up diamonds for steel when coal does it very, very effectively? It makes no sense.

Myself, I can imagine the thinking in this chart probably went something like this:

"We need to make the ores, metals, and alloys more interesting. Also, we have to apply progression to them - make them more tiered."
"Oh, look here: Iron + Coal gives us Steel. Why don't we require higher-tiered fuels for making Duranium, Cerulium, Ferozium and Impervium?"
"Well, presently, higher tiered fuels would mean using Uranium, Plutonium, and/or Solarium."
"Okay, let's do that! Well use Uranium to make Duranium (hey, it even sounds right). And well have the rest of the alloys require Plutonium. After all, players should have accumulated enough of that stuff by then."
"Ah... but coal is so, so commonplace! To make things interesting and more balanced, we should have the Steel-making process require Oil instead of coal."
"Sounds good to me."
"Agreed."
"Okay, so if where done here, let's break for lunch. I'm hungry!"

But I, for one, do not see this as a good balance between game balance and realism. It seems almost silly to me.

Really? Can you give specific examples of this?

I'll give you one:
On this wikipedia page on magnesium alloys, under the aluminum alloys with magnesium subheading, it mentions:

Just 2% and it becomes a hazardous material! I'd be extremely surprised if a similar situation did not hold for most alloys containing a highly radioactive element. If you mix more than a small percentage into an alloy, that alloy is going to be too radioactive to handle, let alone wear on your body 24/7 as armor or wield as a tool or weapon. (Consider how some vintage watches used radioactive luminous paint on the dials, but that was banned a long time ago.)

Perhaps you're thinking of how alloys can be used to contain radioactive wastes for disposal? But the result of such is still highly radioactive and must be disposed of. They can treat or coat waste with a chemically resistant alloy to make it more suitable for long-term disposal - to "immobilize" it, making it safer to handle and able to be buried/disposed of with cheaper methods with less likelihood of leaching of the radioactive materials.

But all that does is allow the waste to be disposed of in a shallow land burial instead of a much more expensive deep geological vault.

There's also "low-activation" or "reduced-activation" alloys they use in the construction of certain nuclear reactors. But all those terms mean is that they won't become highly radioactive when exposed to the intense radiation in a nuclear reactor (i.e., being bombarded by a lot of neutrons). That, or they'll "quickly" loose their radiation.

 

What the heck is prisilium?

 

A new material they're implementing.

 

Thundercraft gives us some excellent examples of real world smithing and refining. I like it

With the new chart, it does say it isn't final and may be looking for input. (I know it says "visual distinction" but it is all still Beta) The new 'Durasteel' recipe may become a different alloy in the future

With the iron + oil = steel, this could be an alternative recipe, not a replacement. Plus they just introduced oil so they're probably inserting it where they can to see where it works through trial and error

 

Sounds prettysillyum if you ask me.