Limit Theory Forums

Honestly, I think the best part of resource collecting is the idea of being able to play with the chemistry of the universe on a larger-than-life scale.
When I saw gameplay footage of no man's sky when it came out, I thought it had something like this. It was overwhelmingly disappointing to see it was just more flavour.

I'm still trying to figure out how this would work, but I think the idea of it is you play around with particle physics for research points and chemical components for materials or weapons or something cool.

One particular way I'm looking to do this is to use learning AI to help me code; after loading all the variables, like how many neutrons does a helium have, how many more does it take before it gets unstable, and so on until I could find a way to implement this in a game, so players can play with particle physics to their hearts content and have one heck of a time throwing strange quarks into a sodium particle until they discover zero-point energy and the sodium particle becomes a quantum mess of zoo particles.

Or you know, I could take it No Man's Sky way, have naturally occurring plutonium to fuel my spacecraft, and so on.

The main reason this topic is here is so I can pool ideas from the smarter members of this community who might have interesting ideas on how to turn playing around with chemistry and particles could help enjoy their gameplay experience.

Wow, that'd be one heck of a mod. I'm honestly not sure that the LT engine would be able to do this. I mean, maybe it could happen if you knew how to write the algorithms necessary for procedurally generating the results. Which I suppose is possible since chemistry does abide by mathematical laws.

i have no idea how that could work with anything approaching realistic behaviour.

particle physics is a field that has many people and huge machines for a reason.

if you would make up some game appropriate particle physics maybe, but using that thing as a simulation?
not on something that would fit into a common household, physically or budgetary.

Hmm. I don't know about the physics part ("Cooking with Quarks!").

But we've batted around some ideas for applying chemistry to a refining process as part of a production chain:

• Explore space to discover good locations to mine ore
• Refine the ore to extract its valuable elements
• Combine those elements with additional materials to form basic components, and combine components into complex products
• Sell those products via marketing
• Distribute those products via manufacturing and distribution pipelines
• Profit!

The "chemistry" part would happen mostly in the ore refining stage. I put together some notes on what the chemistry of mined ores might look like in this post in particular. And in the starting post for the Mining Gameplay Ideas Refined thread I suggested a template for how refining processes could be managed and applied to the basic chemical structures of raw ores (minerals) to produce useful elemental materials.

Anything in these threads work for you?