The Underwell: Ductile Metals Booster

December 17, 2020

Henlo agen, your friendly neighbourhood blog writer here! Today we are going to take the Examine option to the first booster one of our game designers came up with: Ductile Metals. 

 

You know extruders? The painful device that works far too slowly? It is one of my peeves in the game. We have the synthesizer: at 30m/s, it is hardly a bottleneck in any build. Heaters, presses and cutters all work in a perfect unison. But we need to make wire. Suddenly we have to split a production line three ways, and there just is no way to do it perfectly. Damn extruders and their perfect imperfectness! If only we had a way to change it…

 

What’s that? Oh, are we the developers of the game? And it allows us to create new things to fix the imperfections? Oh my! Maybe that’s why we made Ductile Metals too!

Ductile Metals makes this happen:

 

 

That’s right! 1 press, 1 cutter, 1 extruder, perfect output. This setup is perfectly efficient and it takes up less space! We like efficiency. It is satisfying to be able to use 100% of the input a device is giving you. Obviously this is not a big difference, but it is fun to optimize. Obviously not everyone cares about perfect efficiency and having no bottlenecks, which is why this is not a Legendary tier booster. If it was up to me, it would be, but we have to think about the whole playerbase.