Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jimmy]

For aesthetic reasons I'm going to be building a pump stack that will be completely submerged in magma, effectively making an artificial magma tube.

I wanted to know if my stack will melt if I construct it from clear glass. According to the list of magma-safe items on the wiki, if the walkable tile of a pump is submerged in magma it risks being melted.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Magma_safe

However I haven't seen this tested and the wiki has verify tags on this item. Has this been tested or will I need to do my own science on this one to be sure I can't use glass?

[Garath]

Glass behaves somewhat oddly with magma, despite being strictly magma-safe (with a melting point of 13,600°U) - glass objects dropped into magma tend to disappear instantly (a property seemingly shared by every organic material), but built glass furniture will survive indefinitely when covered with magma.

so loose objects will melt, but once assembled, no problem it appears

unless you are referring to something else

[Merendel]

I've never tried makeing an open walled pumpstack to be honest.  Never saw a good reason to let water/magma flow around back to the input side.   However I've made pumpstacks out of green glass before so I'd asume it would work just fine.   Easy enough to test just build a pump in a small room and flood it with magma, if it dont melt your golden.

[Jimmy]

so loose objects will melt, but once assembled, no problem it appears

unless you are referring to something else

Yeah, that's the trouble. The wiki seems to conflict on this point. The quote you have posted is from the glass page, but if you look at the one I linked you get this:

A pump made with pipes and screws that are glass or any type of metal^[Verify], and blocks that are glass, or any type of metal^[Verify], is safe as long as no magma ever occupies the passable tile of the pump.

This seems to indicate they'll melt if completely submerged, even if constructed entirely from glass. Guess I'll have to test this with a pocket fort on a volcano to be certain since it's not 100% clear.

[Jimmy]

Right, testing complete. Built a 2 z level high stack of green glass and let it run submerged for three months. No sign of any decay, so guess we can call this one confirmed safe.

[Triaxx2]

Yes, as far as I can tell, individually the pieces will melt, but as one pump they're sufficiently large to survive.

[Quietust]

Glass items in magma will not melt - they will vanish into thin air because the game seemingly makes assumptions about what will happen to items made from certain classes of materials so it can skip unnecessary processing and make the game run faster.

Back in 40d, if you dropped a raw skin into magma it'd heat up and burst into flames, but if you dropped the same creature's corpse (or it bones) into magma it'd instantly vanish. I don't recall how much I tested this sort of thing in 0.31 and later, but I do know that I checked it with glass and metal and they did not behave the same.