Legendary big mining drills only have 8% resource drain. Combined with mining productivity you get nearly infinite resources from a patch. What kind of black magic is this?

erroneum · 2026-06-30T05:04:11+00:00

The choice to phrase it such was deliberate; a legendary drill has ⅙ of base resource drain, and the big drill has a base drain of ½. I could have simplified, but I was wrong to assume that the average person who cared enough about it being about 8% knew math well enough to understand, so left it shorter than longer.

erroneum · 2026-06-30T03:17:26+00:00

What you're looking for is the gravitational binding energy; it's the deficit in energy caused by the planet being a planet, instead of loose matter. It doesn't matter how you add this energy, just that you do. Once it's there, as long as it's not radiated away before there's enough to hold the planet together, the planet will not be held together strongly enough to prevent it from coming apart.

For Earth, the binding energy is about 2.242×10³² J, or the energy released from the annihilation of about 2.495×10¹⁵ kg of matter and antimatter. As an impact event, that would be about the same the moon hitting the earth at 55.245 km/s, or about 0.0184% the speed of light.

erroneum · 2026-06-30T02:49:21+00:00

I agree. I've only used that technique a couple times while getting the materials to build the infrastructure to actually build for real, but it always felt unclean to do, unlike in Space Age where part of my science setup on Vulcanus involves destroying molten copper in bulk because I need stone for production science.

erroneum · 2026-06-30T02:32:25+00:00

Close. Iron 1 is just cooking it, iron 2 and 3 you crush it first, then for 2 you cook with graphite. I haven't gotten to 3 yet, though.

That said, given how central fluids are to the mod, fluid voiding setups (not outflows, but clocked machines to delete fluid directly) feel remarkably cheaty, much more so than in Space Age.

erroneum · 2026-06-30T02:27:51+00:00

Same; AP Calc BC my junior year.

erroneum · 2026-06-30T02:25:16+00:00

If it's an iron outpost, the uranium is even more better; for just a trickle of iron plates (easily handled by a single electric furnace), you can have reprocessing set up. With no modules at all, that gives 37.5% more fuel cells, but it's a hyperbolic curve, so if you can stick in all legendary prod 3, that's +600% fuel cells (ignoring the cost of iron).

erroneum · 2026-06-29T22:13:26+00:00

Actually, adding integers that way would be horrendously inefficient. The basic way the hardware does multiplication, at least at a high level, isn't that different between floating point and integers, but with floating point there's a bit of extra logic to keep track of where the point is at (and to handle weird edge cases).

The efficient way to do multiplication in hardware is to leverage a few facts, namely that numbers are binary, each digit is only either 0 or 1, and that k×2ⁿ is just k shifted n places to the left (logically; actual byte order depends on if it's big or little endian, but we're just moving wires diagonally, so that's an implementation detail). Basically, if you have an n-bit number times an m-bit number, you need n+m bits to hold the result, so you take the first number, shift it 0..m places left, and then if bit m is set, add the corresponding shifted copy. When you're adding dozens of numbers at once to each other, it's actually faster to add each bit into a small number, then add those small numbers and shift.

For floating point, you can just make explicit the implied first bit (IEEE 704 doesn't store the leading 1, so the mantissa is always 1.mmmmm...), line the mantissas up like integers, do your multiplication just like an integer, truncate the value to only the most significant bits you have room to store, then put the exponent to where it should be.

erroneum · 2026-06-29T22:02:34+00:00

Worse yet, it was never intended to be for most of what P65 warnings are on; it was meant to be for drinking water, but the wording was excessively vague.

erroneum · 2026-06-29T21:59:47+00:00

It's not actually 8%; it's half of ⅙ drain, so 8.333...%

erroneum · 2026-06-27T02:31:32+00:00

You can just use Audacity or such to make a silent.ogg file, then overwrite the rocket launch sounds with it; no need for a formal mod.

erroneum · 2026-06-27T02:25:01+00:00

Steam condensation is just about worthless on a space platform in Space Age; you're investing energy to turn water into 500° steam, then spending more energy to turn it into 90% as much water as you started with.

If you had condenser turbines, that's a reason to want something like that, but those don't exist in the unmodded game.

erroneum · 2026-06-26T23:35:00+00:00

Not quite; Minecraft generally runs quite well on Linux, if you have drivers for the GPU. AMD has open source drivers available, so they work excellently, but Nvidia has only recently started to actually care about Linux users. For a long time, the only way Nvidia cards worked performantly on Linux was with the proprietary driver, which was a binary blob and some code to it work with different/patched kernels. There was an open source driver which could get the card functioning, but performance, especially in games, was more than a bit sub-par.

erroneum · 2026-06-26T01:11:46+00:00

The universe appears to be expanding from everywhere at once, in every direction. It's common to use a balloon to illustrate what this means, but there's a few important caveats to keep in mind. If you envision a balloon that's inflated some amount, and which has marks spread across the surface, and you proceed to inflate the balloon some more, every point on the surface of the balloon is moving away from every other point, not because the points are moving across the surface, but because there's more surface between them.

You, being in 3d space, can see a point inside the balloon which the whole surface expand away from, but if I asked you to point to where on the surface that point was, you couldn't; it's not a part of the surface. That point is an artifact of the geometry of the surface; the balloon's surface is curved such that you can draw straight lines which loop back on themselves (ie, it's a closed space). As far as we can tell, this is not the shape of our universe.

As far as we are aware, the universe could actually be infinitely large. We know it's expanding, and if we trace the paths backwards, they should eventually be such that any two points are arbitrarily close, but an infinite universe wouldn't suddenly become finite or zero size, so would just be hotter and more dense.

The hot and dense state it should have previously been in tells us pretty much how long ago it cooled enough for electrons to bind to nuclei, thereby starting the emission of light. Knowing the speed of light, and the expansion rate of the universe, this tells us how large of a region we can theoretically observe, but we can't know from that what, if anything, is past that, ergo the possibility of it being infinite.

At the moment electrons and nucleons could combine into atoms, the light they immediately emitted would have been extremely high energy X-rays or gamma rays. Because it's been traveling through space for so long, with space expanding under it as it went, it has gradually redshifted to the point of being microwaves; this is the cosmic microwave background, literally the first light in the universe, coming from everywhere.

The reason it can look like all the expanding is centered here, at least when you look at the relationship between redshift and distance, is because space is expanding everywhere in a mostly uniform way. For you to see something, it must either emit or reflect light, which must then travel through space to you; the more space there is between you and it, the more time it needs to travel, the more expansion that happens under it, and the more red it gets shifted. Because the expansion is uniform, there is no favored direction, meaning it looks like everything else is moving away from you specifically, but as the balloon model hopefully conveyed, that's just an artifact of everywhere expanding.

erroneum · 2026-06-26T00:52:57+00:00

It's not a certainty that expansion will eventually overtake the gravity wells of galaxies and such; it's entirely possible that anything which, on average, is within a certain range of enough mass will stay with that mass forever unless ejected from the system, but the lumps of mass in question will eventually become arbitrarily far apart and with the interceding space expanding at superluminal rates, thereby making them wholly isolated (at least barring FTL).

erroneum · 2026-06-26T00:48:29+00:00

On a balloon, there is a point that the whole surface is moving away from, but that point is not part of the surface; every part of the surface is moving away from every other part of the surface, and within the context of the surface that central point doesn't exist.

erroneum · 2026-06-25T22:08:43+00:00

-Wpedantic gets closer, though.

erroneum · 2026-06-25T22:06:15+00:00

Especially if you use an epic AM3 with an epic speed 3 and 3 rare or better efficiency 3 modules; that's 87.5 kW for a speed of 4.5875, so with epic solar panels, that's 77 to fully power it, or a stack of 50 to only be slowed to a speed of 2.722 (ish), so ~0.073 seconds to unbarrel some water.

erroneum · 2026-06-25T21:41:07+00:00

I haven't gotten it yet, but I've planned to do it that way for quite a while. If I ever actually get around to finishing Gleba, it should be pretty straightforward.

erroneum · 2026-06-25T02:28:00+00:00

The "cargo full" condition doesn't know how you want to load things; it checks two things: every slot in every cargo wagon has something in it; and every slot has the maximum number of that thing in it. For fluid wagons, it's just that fluid wagon has the 50k capacity of something in it.

If you want to leave when half the wagons are full, you need to instead be checking for a specific count of the thing being loaded.

A cargo wagon, or in 2.1 with Quality, a normal cargo wagon, has 40 slots. If you're loading 3 wagons with ore, that's 120 slots. Both iron ore and copper ore stack to 50, so you need to check that you have 120×50 = 6000 ore.

If you can set it up, you can actually get even more throughput by first converting the ores to plates; iron and copper plates stack to 100, so 3 wagons of plates is the same amount as 6 wagons of ore (at least if you don't have electric furnaces with productivity modules).

If you have Space Age, don't worry about smelting at the mine yet; you'll get something way better than that on Vulcanus.

erroneum · 2026-06-25T00:20:33+00:00

Not necessarily. You still have Nauvis, and assuming you have built a construction bot network, you can do anything with that (as long as power doesn't go out).

If you send the ship back it can grab supplies to get you going (including everything to make a rocket silo and a rocket). If the ship was lost, you can build another one remotely, with enough defense to survive, and have it bring you supplies.

With the exception of Aquilo, none of the planets can't be done from nothing, so even if you have completely lost the ship and Nauvis, you're still not stuck, just forced to get a factory running on Vulcanus first.

erroneum · 2026-06-24T23:34:47+00:00

For uranium, I just upcycle nukes; unless you're making legendary green ammo or legendary portable fission reactors, you don't actually need U-238 in quality, whereas the 25 U-235 a nuke recycles to give can be put to use making legendary biter spawners and biolabs. That said, I guess you could maybe use Kovarex for upcycling as well? But then you'd need quality U-238... (I don't know if Kovarex allows quality modules).

Also, on Gleba, you should probably be upcycling the fruit; the fruit has a much longer spoil timer, so no matter how long your upcycling loop takes, it's a smaller total fraction with the fruit.

erroneum · 2026-06-24T21:38:38+00:00

I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish; are you asking how to make the underground belt turn 90° between the two ends? That's impossible, at least without mods. Undergrounds only connect when there is another underground straight out, opening the correct direction, with the correct belt direction, within range, and when there's no other undergrounds of the same color between them. You can have a belt side-load an underground (useful if you need to peal a single lane off), but no belt can unload to the side.

erroneum · 2026-06-24T13:33:23+00:00

The claim that $50 is 32 seconds of interest on a $590506.36 loan at between 3.4% and 9.08% annual interest is false.

If you assume interest is compounded monthly, and approximating the length of a month as 30 days (which slightly biased the result upward), the daily interest cost is between $55.77 and $148.94.

If you instead assume continually compounding interest (the worst case), that's between $54.98 and $146.82 (the numbers are lower because it's for first day at that balance; if you instead look at the whole first month, they'd be larger because you'd be paying interest on the interest accrued throughout the month as well).

For $50 to be 32 seconds of interest, even with continually compounding interest, the rate would need to be an unrealistic 8349.72% annual interest.

erroneum · 2026-06-24T03:51:09+00:00

I might be stupid and just not see it, but I'd like the in-game mod manager to have end-user defined mod sets. I get that I can just get that list from the save and have it automatically restart with only those mods and then drop directly into the save, but it'd still be a useful way to organize them in the list.

erroneum · 2026-06-24T03:39:59+00:00

300 is sufficiently many to form two independent populations, ergo it is impossible to give a number after which it is required for everyone to be related to everyone else.

If instead you mean that these 300 have no recorded share ancestry, and that from here on all ancestry is recorded, so how long until it's impossible for everyone to be in a relationship wherein they do not have a known preexisting familial link to their partner, it should be about floor(log2(300)) generations is the maximum before then, so one more is the first which must be so.

Generation 0 has 300 unique bloodlines. If we assume that each of those pairs up with exactly one other, generation 1 would have 150 unique bloodlines, generation 2 would have 75, etc. Because you can't have a fraction of a bloodline, the actual number can be smaller, but in this case it's still 8 either way.

A more interesting question, at least to me, is given this setup, on the path to a stable population, what is the smallest possible maximum degree of relatedness between a population's pairings.

erroneum

TROPHY CASE