Unify resources in Mechaenetia

[Cadde]

In Gregtech 6 you have all these ore blocks/crushed/purified/refined/dusts and you have 1/72nd, tiny, small, chunk, unit and blocks of the stuff as items.

I am looking forward to the day when you DON’T have all those things.

Unification model
Instead of having distinct items of varying quality. Could you perhaps have piles of resources?

So a 0.25m² cube of stuff will hold percentages of various elements. You can combined more cubes together and get say a 0.5 x 0.25 x 0.25 cube with some percentage of various elements.
Thus, combining three cubes of pure copper with one cube of pure tin you get 4 cubes of bronze blend.

Each cube has a “composition” modifier. Such as “mineral bond”, “fine dust”, “chunks” etc.
If you melt 3 pure copper and 1 pure tin you get bronze. If you only melt 1 copper and one tin you get a “bastardization” cube that is mostly copper and some small pockets of bronze. Percentages so to speak.

This would simplify storage and processing. To separate the elements all you have to worry about is the composition of the cube. You can’t separate copper and tin without melting them first for example.
Or, if your cube holds some amounts of stone (ore) you have to crush the cube into finer and finer elements before it’s deemed pure.

Melting an impure cube would mean the resulting metal either gets brittle or caked with the garbage material within it. It would still have similar properties to the material you are looking for but it wouldn’t be pure.
You can melt copper ore in a crucible and remove the slag (separate the elements) but even then it wouldn’t be completely pure and you would have to keep doing this to increase the purity (raise the percentage of copper in the cube) until you have what you are looking for.

Placing various cubes together in the same storage means it grows into a larger cube that has various percentages of the materials within. You can STACK them all you want but you have to separate them again.

This is of course contained in the composition data about the cubes.
Say you place 3 cubes of pure and solidified copper and one cube of pure solidified tin together. You get a cube that’s 0.5m² that is 75% solidified copper “ingots” and 25% solidified tin “ingots”. The cube is marked as “not a unified” so simply splitting the cube up will give you the copper and tin “ingots” back.

This way, it’s entirely up to the user on how to store materials. If i pour ALL my dusts into a chest they are going to blend and one would have to separate them again.

If i mine a bunch of copper ore and then throw in some copper dust in a chest, the copper percentage will increase in the cube that the chest holds and throwing that into a crucible would mean it conducts the heat better, making the removal of stone (slag) faster than if i were to throw in a 5% copper 95% stone blend for example.

… Either way, i am tired of dealing with “tiny piles of purified ore” having to combine them into units of the same for purposes of storage. I would rather just throw all elements of the ores purified or not into one chest and the combined contents define the purity. I can then crush the contents in the chest to loosen up the material and then wash it to separate stone dust from the heavier copper. Then as i throw it in a crucible i can once again scoop out the lighter stone (slag) and keep that slag for later batches.

EDIT: Oh by the way, “air” is a valid element. A 0.25m² cube of 10% copper and 90% “air” is a valid cube. This way you don’t need “tiny” dusts to denote 1/9th contents etc.
Adding two cubes together where one has 20% copper and 80% air and the other has 14% copper and 86% air in them means you get one cube of 34% copper and 66% air as the air has “escaped” the cube.

Thanks for your time reading my random ramblings on the subject.
Please don’t make items in Mechaenetia stack into piles of 64 each where one has to manually combine them into larger items.

[Gregorius (Gregorius Techneticies)]

Instead of having distinct items of varying quality. Could you perhaps have piles of resources?

Yeah I hated having distinct Items for that Stuff, that is why certain Items will group together to the point of mixing, like having a big pile of Rubble that happens to contain Iron but you need to process it first to see how much Iron it actually has. If you are not knowledgeable enough you might not even notice it contains Iron simply because of the Stone being so prevalent in the pile of Rubble. The Rubble Pile would only show up in one “Slot” of your GUI (Inventory still needs slots for display, but the carrying capacity is not limited to slots, except for the equipables like clothes and rings and such).

Since you wont need huge amounts of Ore, you will typically only need one or two 0.25³ Blocks of Iron Rubble to make yourself all your first Tools, and you can already leave your Mine.

So a 0.25m² cube of stuff will hold percentages of various elements. You can combined more cubes together and get say a 0.5 x 0.25 x 0.25 cube with some percentage of various elements.
Thus, combining three cubes of pure copper with one cube of pure tin you get 4 cubes of bronze blend.

It will not tell you it is bronze blend, it will just tell you its a pile of dust. You need to figure out yourself which one is the Bronze Pile (sometimes dust color gives away the answer ofcourse)

Resources in general dont show up in Block form in your Inventory, especially stuff like Cobblestone, Dirt and harvested Ores will show up as a pile of Rubble or a pile of Dirt when harvested, you can still place them in the world just fine in various shapes like Slopes (which will use up less Resources ofcourse). Often you will only get “Pile of Dirt” and a rough estimate on the weight/volume of it.

This would simplify storage and processing. To separate the elements all you have to worry about is the composition of the cube. You can’t separate copper and tin without melting them first for example.
Or, if your cube holds some amounts of stone (ore) you have to crush the cube into finer and finer elements before it’s deemed pure.

Yep, you basically have the Rubble Item with certain percentages of Resources. Well not really percentages more like “pixel counts” which add up to 512. Some of which are easier to acquire than others, even if they are the same Iron.

Placing various cubes together in the same storage means it grows into a larger cube that has various percentages of the materials within. You can STACK them all you want but you have to separate them again.

If you stack them together they will merge, you can separate them in some ways before storing them to prevent mixing. A real mathematical issue would be if you can half the stack again, which percentage goes where? Because if you make the stack small enough you have single pixels which then are easy to separate. So there needs to be a point at which separation doesn’t change the stack, like picking a single piece of Rubble. I definitely need to make sure cheesing the System doesn’t happen. XD

This is of course contained in the composition data about the cubes.
Say you place 3 cubes of pure and solidified copper and one cube of pure solidified tin together. You get a cube that’s 0.5m² that is 75% solidified copper “ingots” and 25% solidified tin “ingots”. The cube is marked as “not a unified” so simply splitting the cube up will give you the copper and tin “ingots” back.

Once you get pure Cubes they wont stack together, you could hand sort them apart easily if needed, so no point in doing percentages.

This way, it’s entirely up to the user on how to store materials. If i pour ALL my dusts into a chest they are going to blend and one would have to separate them again.

Yeah if someone is dumb enough to do that, good luck for that poor bastard. XD

Some Stuff will mix, some other Stuff will definitely not mix.

EDIT: Oh by the way, “air” is a valid element. A 0.25m² cube of 10% copper and 90% “air” is a valid cube. This way you don’t need “tiny” dusts to denote 1/9th contents etc.
Adding two cubes together where one has 20% copper and 80% air and the other has 14% copper and 86% air in them means you get one cube of 34% copper and 66% air as the air has “escaped” the cube.

Thanks for your time reading my random ramblings on the subject.
Please don’t make items in Mechaenetia stack into piles of 64 each where one has to manually combine them into larger items.

lol Air is really a finicky thing to deal with, I will probably make it simple at first where every Block will just turn into Air when harvested like in Minecraft, but I might do a System for Vacuum or polluted Air too.

And yeah, no Slot based Stacksize garbage, everything is based on Volume and Weight, and ofcourse on how strong your selected body is.

[Cadde]

All cool then. And yes, if i ever made a game like this i would make it all visual. No free information given, one would have to figure out themselves if there happens to be a needle in that haystack.

One thing concerns me though, you say you only really need one block of iron for all your tools.
Does this mean that once you mine an iron ore you are essentially given 0.25m³ of pure iron amongst many blocks of stone?

Because again, my idea here was that you don’t really know how much is stone and how much is iron in a cube. You collect the cube and analyze it or simply melt it to see just how much iron seeps out of the ore.

[Gregorius (Gregorius Techneticies)]

Go for real life with the Size standards, imagine a big hunk of rock that has like 50% Iron Ore in it, make it 25³cm³, kinda like a standard Ruler in size in all directions. If half of that Block was possible to be refined to Iron, you could make a handful of Tools with that easily. But if you were to make an Anvil out of it you would probably even run out when using just one Ore Block.

The point of this is that things like Nails and Barrels and all the convenient Stuff, needs to be cheap to produce when it comes to raw resources, so you can actually use them “wastefully”.

Nobody would want to craft a Crate if it costs an Iron Nugget worth of Screws, that would be a waste of Iron in MC, but in my Game I want it to just be a little bit of mining Effort and processing. Not to mention Armor is something that would consume a lot of Iron to be made, and things like Arrows would be consumables made of Iron Tips too.

The higher you go in Tech, the more Iron you consume, and the more mining needs to be done. And the first Iron Mine usually is not depleted until you reach a higher level.

You are not supposed to carry a shitload of Iron Ore on you after a big hour long Mining Session, like in Minecraft. You are supposed to find Iron, grab what you need and bring it back to base (or build a smelting base closeby), and you are set.

Also because of the other post with RNG Mobs, I will also do procedurally generated Ores in some way as an option, so you dont always have to deal with Iron and such. but every Place will have its own Earlygame, Midgame and Lategame Ores for sure, so you can start your Game anywhere without having to worry about being stuck in stone Age forever. (Said Materials will vary slightly in Abilities so it might be a good Idea to trade them, or even alloy them together to combine their Effects)

[Cadde]

Cool, i was just thinking you would have one 25cm³ block of iron in a “mine” somewhere that you grab and you are set.
My idea is that the block contains some trace amounts of iron in it. Some percentage.

So if you mined say ten cubic meters of the stuff you’d have a pile of stone with some iron in it.
You could visually sift through that pile to pick the “rocks” that looks to have the highest concentration of iron in them and smelt them, remove the slag and get pure iron.

But you would never be able to pick one 25cm³ block that is pure iron amongst many blocks that is just pure stone.
I really like the way you’ve done Marble, Basalt, Kimberlite etc in GT6. You can crush them, centrifuge them and get some trace amounts of valuable minerals out of them.

So that’s what i am thinking here, you don’t have iron ore blocks and regular stone blocks.
What you have is some stone which happens to have some iron in them. More or less so depending on the percentage i talked about earlier.

As a miner, you can opt to mine everything that has even the slightest hint of iron in it and “waste” a lot of energy on getting every bit of iron out of it. Or you can try and go for the richest core of the iron deposit and only process that.

There’s plenty of abandoned mines in the world where miners have gotten the best ore and processed it for profits. Leaving the less rich stuff because it would be economically unsound to process the less rich ore. Only for someone to come by later and pick up the less rich ore, using modern methods to extract the remaining metal in a profitable manner.

The core of the idea here is that no matter what the player looks at, it’s not defined as “iron ore” or “copper ore” but rather “something that is rich in iron”. Something worth throwing in a crucible so to speak.

There’s no in game categorization, you can do whatever with whatever. You can throw a pile of dead crows in your crucible and get out the surviving contents out of them.
Each cube knows what’s in it. If that cube happens to be a transformer for instance, it will contain some percentages of iron, copper, tin, resin, mineral oil, plastic etc. Melting it down would work like it does in GT6. You get varying layers of molten stuff with different melting temperatures.
But you don’t really know how much of that cube has what contents in it. You can look at the “iron ore” to see how much it might contain but there’s no indication that it’s actually iron ore aside from the visuals and its density.

[raymoo]

To be more realistic (and to require steps beyond just melting the slag, like how GT6 uses coal to reduce iron ore) shouldn’t you find iron oxides in your ore instead of pure iron? Or are the mixed piles going to represent this by having oxygen pixels or something in them? Also from the crucible discussion it sounds like you could just throw everything in and separate it by temperature, when in reality something like metal ores would have slag trapped between the metal (assuming the metal has a higher melting point). Not sure how you would simulate that, maybe material piles contain grains of material which would be made of pixels. Then grinding down your ore increases the fraction of slag that is free to melt off.