I am starting this topic to keep track of ingame mechanics we are not allowed to use as they are considered exploits and not working as intended. This is mainly to prevent a situation which I experienced a month ago and one which has seemingly repeated again very recently. It helps nobody to have unwritten rules. Just to make it clear, this is not about game crashes, code injections and the like, only about regular game mechanics that when used in certain situations become a problem for administration.
To start off, lets go with gas temperature interaction with solid objects as it’s a hot topic right now.
It’s well known that fire does not interact with surrounding tiles, only with the tile it exists on. Every current map is designed with this behavior in mind. This mechanic is what makes atmospheric holographic barriers work. It also allows atmospheric foam to work. Both of these objects are extremely fragile and can be destroyed with minimal force. This mechanic also allows regular glass directional windows to perform the same function, just as the myriad of exterior station full tile windows behave - they are not damaged by any fires that are near them.
Now one of the above is considered an exploit. My problem is that before being expressly told by an admin, a player has no way of knowing which of them is an exploit and which is not.
I would request admins to contribute to this topic and post such mechanics that they consider exploits, so players may refrain from using them ingame and so they will not be punished for breaking rules they had no way of reading. I know it will not be an exhaustive list and new exploits can be found, but surely players can at least be informed of the ones that are already known.
Some other mechanics that I personally know about but are forbidden by administration:
-TEG powered by heaters/coolers, it’s not realistic because you cannot create energy out of nothing in real life, easily confused with regular space cell chargers and space chemistry and practically every other machine that creates matter
-Glass panes to hold off fire, can be encountered all over station and easily confused with a legitimate mechanic
-Putting things under SM, cargo can order mobile SM where this could still come into play
Until the bloons report i had no clue that the glass window trick was considered an exploit. It’s been a staple of basically any and all fusions ever since the nerf to canister fusion and i genuinely thought that was the intended process.
In fact the only one I would actually consider an exploit is the SM one since its obviously not intentional. The TEG one is just someone who is bad at maths and the glass one is just how glass works
TEG powered by heaters/coolers, it’s not realistic because you cannot create energy out of nothing in real life, easily confused with regular space cell chargers and space chemistry and practically every other machine that creates matter
Haven’t seen this forbidden.
There was a pretty good point brought up by another admin which was that the very existence of the TeG is basically an exploit because the way it works is downright insane. Along with how freezers and heaters ignore thermodynamics. It’s all functioning basically as intended. If it’s really a problem someone would be better off just submitting a PR to delete the TeG and drastically increasing the power consumption of coolers. It still fucks thermodynamics hard because your heat isn’t going anywhere but hey at least it’s something. I don’t personally think it’s a good idea because extra power generation is still pointless but if a rework is ever added to balance power then Something would have to be done to the TeG.
I think the glass window thing doesn’t work on /tg/ anymore because of their atmos changes. Fusion won’t outright destroy a normal glass window but it will conduct heat through the window basically rendering atmos unsurvivable if you do use normal glass. Not that it’s something we can just port because we use monstermos but it’d be nice in the future since I like the idea of fusion having to utilize semi-robust designs. I haven’t read the report people mentioned so maybe there’s more in there, I’m just dropping my opinion.
The one listed there I think is comfortably an exploit is placing stuff under the SM, as there’s been code attempts to prevent it IIRC. And it most definitely results in completely sidestepping any intentional mechanics around the SM and trashes any meta.
Also I would include dropping a whole RCD’s worth of shit next to the SM to generate radiation from. But deleting those and asking the one who put them there to not do it again is easily justified because they also lag the server, IIRC.
There’s my opinion on those 3 things you gave. Edit: Wanted to add that this isn’t intended to override anyone else.
Can you explain what you mean by that? There is nothing that can cause a TEG to spontaneously explode by itself except an admin punishing the player by making it explode using their administrative out of character powers.
This is the kind of attitude I was hoping to prevent in the future as being on the receiving end is a mixed feeling of hopelessness and abuse, I’m sure you don’t intend to abuse players for your entertainment.
some admins like finding reasons to adminbus, you’re not going to get away from it by asking them what their buttons are on a forum post, they’ll just find new reasons to fuck with you
What i mean by that is there is a good chance things that should not work will be made to not work by subtle gamemastering.
At no point should a player have their round ruined without warning or reason, obviously.
The heater freeezer TEG violates the conservation of enegry, for instance so there might be a CC anouncement about how a local instablity in the laws of physics had been detected and urgeing the crew to correct this.
If nothing is done about it, there verry well might be an (admin caused) explosion destroying the machine.
What im saying is - it should all feel in character. “Haha, toolbox fly at glass” is stinky for obvious reasons.
the IDEAL solution would be to just fix the exploits/issues via code, obviously
The chemistry dispenser and all its derivative machines violate this law too. So does the autolathe, protolathe, botanical seeds and trays, cell chargers, heaters/freezers themselves, the gas turbine and so on. You can violate conservation of energy with an igniter applied to a beaker. SM, singularity and tesla are all based on the very violation.
Can you explain why you consider TEG an exception or is this your personal belief?
Most of these can be explained away by some makebelive, while the heater/freezer TEG is an obvious
perpetual motion machine.
The Lathes all use resources mined by miners piped into them via ore silo or even manualy inserted
The gas turbine burns fuel in the form of gasses
Botany trays are litteraly just planting pots, though a point could be made about the Bio Gen.
Cell chargers are litteraly just … well, battery chargers. They draw on the local APCs power which is fed by engines.
Igniters can be imagined to have in internal battery - but yes, technicaly there is a violation there since they are infinite.
Singulo/Tesla/SM though… you win on those - on paper they of course violate physics as well since you you have a net positve of energy “out of nowhere”.
a freezer and a heater somehow producing free energy is, in opinion, verry much more obviously “wrong” then the magic space crystal making free energy.
If you cant see that - we’re at an impasse, im afraid to say.
Gas turbine does not burn fuel. You can build a gas turbine in middle of main hallway and it will produce stable power.
Cell chargers charge batteries for more power than they drain, you can power a station with perpetually charging batteries and replacing the ones in SMES.
A freezer and heater even without a TEG fail to conserve any energy, they consume negligible amounts of power and can magically suck energy away or create it in form of temperature changes.
In my opinion, you’re selectively trying to impose real life physics into a game that takes a wide step around anything resembling real life physics.
The TEG is just a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. But why are we discussing the laws of thermodynamics when Bluespace breaks every god damn law under the sun.
obviously, the TEG uses metamaterials that, in addition to using heat flux to generate power, also uses the heat to burn an internalized fuel source while applying the cold as coolant to remain stable.
literally all the power generation methods with the exclusion of solars do not follow realistic standards whatsoever and there is no difference between generating a whole-ass blackhole which SOMEHOW doesn’t crush everyone instantaneously and a thermodynamics-violating TEG, it’s just one you’ve gotten used to more than the other
Singulo can be explained roughly by the station constructing a “Penrose Sphere” where the black hole imparts its rotational energy onto the particles from the accelerator in exchange for consuming some of the energy of the particles, drawing energy from the black hole
Tesla doesn’t have a real counterpart so I can’t explain that one
As for the SM, I recall reading in a lore draft on the TG forums that supermatter crystals are extracted from the core of hyper-dense planets (that NT blows up to get to the SM, of course), so I suppose it could be an extremely dense metamaterial held stable by a “Causality Stabilisation Field” (mentioned at the start of the 30 second countdown for delam) which we chip bits off of, and that decay into plasma oxygen and radiation. The SM is so dense that the timespan it would take to consume it completely is so stupidly long humans probably won’t exist when the first supermatters begin to decay, and the only problems come when the stabilisers begin to fail. If they fail without other incident, the energy is released in an explosion and the gases are vented to space, with a localised reality distortion due to so much energy being released. If the gas in the chamber is too dense, the released gas cannot push out and collapses into a singularity. And I don’t have an explaination for tesla delam because tesla is dumb.
TEG is also dumb
But everyone is just ignoring the reality bending slimes producing literally infinite matter and energy from fucking jello over here.
singulo makes no sense no matter how you justify power generation. the fact is, a black hole of even microscopic size should release enough radiation to boil the station, as well as the gravitational force to crush the vapors.
Ok so i was gonna give it a rest, but if we want to lets talk black holes.
Black holes give of more radiation the smaller they are. I tiny one will indeed give of the enough radiation to instanly cook you.
The larger it is, the slower the rads are released, leading to small black holes evaporateing faster then big ones.
The issue is not realy in the radiation - its in the fact this can be sustained without fuel.
If you turn the PA off, itll get smaller and smaller, makes sense.
But keeping the PA on, it can be kept at the same size while still produceing a net positive of energy - when it would realisticaly take the same energy going in as going out, produceing a net neutral at best.
The spinn thing is a fun enough idea, but even then the rotational energy would be depleted eventualy
penrose spheres are like a real scientific concept though
granted the idea used mirrors but it’s actually pretty close
also black holes have like a fuckton of energy, so keyword eventually