Corrundum – Planet Introduction

Currently in 1.0.0 Looking to balance recipe speeds, balance progression, and quash major bugs.

A hostile world blanketed in CO2. Dense clouds build up enormous electric potentials, leading to hazardous lightning storms. The pressure here is enormous – so great that petroleum gas is forced into a liquid state, forming golden lakes. Solar power on this world is pipe dream – but we can generate power by burning petroleum gas and converting it to hot CO2 gas. By using a temperature gradient over an array of thermos-couples, we can generate a voltage with the hot gas. The new red-boiler and red-thermocouple engine are great for getting power started here. While rocks scattered around the surface contain stone, iron, copper, and solid fuel, most of these metals are locked in chalcopyrite.

Chalcopyrite is a beautiful blue mineral. Initial processing steps involve heating it intensely with concentrated sulfuric acid, producing a mixed sulfate solution which is eventually processed into copper and iron ores. This is easier said than done – while sulfur-ore is abundant, there is no water to be found.

The resources found here are sulfur, chalcopyrite, platinum, and calcite. Platinum is used to make the new catalytic chemical plant, and new electrochemical science. As always, the goal is to use the planet’s resources to figure out how to get blue circuits, low density structures, rocket fuel, concrete, and power. The new crafting chains involve many redox reactions with sulfur, and alkylation reactions to make light oil and above.

A new laboratory is available – it has half science drain percentage like another special lab, and a fast research speed. The catch? Normal quality science packs while the new lab is active are consumed without producing value – every 0.75 seconds.

Carbon dioxide can be cooled and compressed into dry ice. Throw dry ice in the new ice box to keep bioflux, agricultural science, and eggs up to 50% freshness!

Design goals

1. Make a planet that provides a good “new planet experience” figuring out how to build a factory with what we have available to get off said planet. Central to this is how crafting chains are introduced and used to transform materials. I tried to stagger new recipes with triggered research to teach players how build on this planet.
2. Planet must have technologies that don’t break other planets or surfaces, but support factories there. Space platforms have a new way to turn thruster fluids into power. Icebox helps with spoilable goods but it doesn’t replace fresh items. New stone recipe should really help on gleba. New plastic recipes should work on fulgora, and steps of chalcopyrite processing lend well to quality rolling. Calcium sulfate can be used to super charge nutrient production.
3. Give players a reason to produce quality science without making the biolab obsolete. This should also give players a reason to make science on every planet.

About the ice-box.
Pseudo code steps:

For each surface, find each ice-box.
For each icebox get its inventory contents.
For each inventory – count the items we care about.
Calculate number of stacks of each item.
Check if we have cooling power.
Use find_item_stack to find the item. Note we have to consider about quality too.
Find_item_stack is the only method that gives the item in the inventory with spoilage values. We go through each item stack, handle it, and remove it from the inventory.
Then we rebuild the inventory with adjusted spoilage.

Originally, I wanted to only offset the spoilage tick by the functions delta tick, but we have to correctly calculate a spoilage percent. We can only insert items by defining them in a table (couldn’t get changing the returned value from find_item_stack to work), and spoil_tick is not an option to define an item insertion. There isn’t a way around calculating spoilage percent. I tried to do so but couldn’t get the math to work. So slowly subtracting a number from the known spoilage percentage and using that to ensure the new spoil percentage doesn’t decrease was my only option.

Clunky, but it works.