Unify resources in Mechaenetia

[Gregorius (Gregorius Techneticies)]

@Cadde

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.

@Cadde

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.

@Cadde

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.

@Cadde

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

@Cadde

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.

@Cadde

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.

@Cadde

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.