So I've been playing with the powder toy on and off for a few years now. I originally started playing with a mod that simulated particle physics, it inspired within me a deep appreciation for science that persists with me today.
I don't recall the name of the mod, but it tried to simulate anti matter. The game would always crash upon an anti particle and regular particle meeting though, and it frustrated me. At that time, not understanding code, I figured it to be a physical ordeal that required me to sustain it, and it lead to many hours of good fun and expirmenting.
Subsequently I gravitated towards Firefreak11's many mods throughout the last couple of years, more becuase of his overly optimistic view on what sort of systems he could simulate. His idea's always kept me coming back to TPT to see if he worked something new out, or released a new mod. Not to take away from the base game in any capacity, but I would like to see the same depth applied if applicable. (regarding incorparating and demonstarting new systems, albeit even on a simple scale. There's something to be said about designing physics expirements to ascertain some hidden modeled truth of our existence in TPT)
Given that his mods were always WIP, it gave me the sense of a "new frontier" in TPT. Undocumented exploration and experimentation, something that has always kept me coming back

I'm quite dissapointed in Firefreak's decision to depart, but obviously there's a time and place for everything. That said, I've come here to petition on behalf of a Science Toy revival and possible incorporation of the idea into the base game. I would love to see Jacob1's technicaly expertise applied to Firefreak's ideas. Particularly, I enjoyed experimenting with the concept of quarks and the gluon field. I was able to devise a few methods to stabilize the quarks and create pseduo "anti" particles. Heavy, low energy electrons, and light, high energy protons. These would vary in color according to starting condition and reactions, producing a bunch of novel particles. Furthermore, I was able to combine the pseduo anti particles to create extremely unstable hydrogen with a ridiculously high bonding potential. In some instances I achieved pseduo cold fusion through the sheer volalitlity of the hydrogen that was created.
Similarily the organic chemistry set was equally thrilling to experiment with, although I've run into game breaking bugs in both instances and no one to report them to.

I eagerly anticipated the completion of The Science Toy. The planned scope was just exciting to put it bluntly. Even conceptually implemented it could offer a lot to the base game. Concepts like organic chemistry, self aggregating compounds like DNA, complex compounds with novel reaction capaibilites, exploring a more nuanced nuclear energy system. These are going to bring in a more general player base I think, especially if it was implemented in such a way, maybe through procedurally generated code, that you could discover things for yourself to some degree.

At the very least, returning to the base game, I generally like to play with some of the scripts that offer new chemical reactions via the Script Server + Manager. If at all possible, could somone make available some assests from the science toy? Or possibly merge the existing scripts to create a single one with balanced reactions? I would be extremely grateful.

All in all, I'm sad to see Firefreak left, but I'm greatful TPT is still being developed. I'm looking forward to what comes next and I hope this spurs discussion that gives way to improvements and inspiration. Thankyou for taking the time to read this.

edit:spelling and grammar

@DanielGalrito (View Post)
DanielGalrito:

Pseudo cold fusion? That sounds interesting, can you explain how you did it? and the pseudo anti-plarticles and all that xD

Basically the quarks flavor is determined by its starting life, most decay in less than a second. Thoes that have a reasonable life of a few seconds have the possibility of interacting, given the right circumstances. They combine to form protons and neutrons generally, and extremley rarely electrons(I've observed this, but was only able to reproduce it via the console.)

From recollection, the quarks will combine to form these elementary particles most readily in the absence of gravity inside a gluon field. Something to facililtate collisions like accelerate, pipes, or walls is a good idea too. They can undergo weak interactions, and strong interactions. It's also possible to get the quarks to interact in extreme gravity and pressure, although your reaction products will burn up.

Once some of the quarks stabilize you'll notice some funky elementary particles floating around. They vary in color, energy, and mass. At this stage it gets buggy and I've ran into a lot of crashes trying to react these particles in more basic systems. Generally speaking though, just provding a source of electrons for the protons to bind to will yield hydrogen with a high bonding potential. Bonding potential of hydrogen is a sperate mechanism inside the science toy different than TPT, I'm not certain if the reactions themselves are directly responsible for the high number, or just through chance I'm engaging the hydrogen in such a manner as to reproduce a result that looks that way. I have generated regular hydrogen from quarks, but most of it seems to be what I like to think of as "heavy" hydrogen. It readily fuses to other potentiated hydrogen without extreme pressure and heat. It seems to be correlated to electrical current some way, some hydrogen I created became trapped in the uranium alloy casing I held the reaction in(the quarks almost appear to quantum tunnel, but more likely they're just updated a few pixels away each time,) some tunneled ontop of eachother to produce a single hydrogen atom stuck in an electrical field, these single atoms actually produced a GUI glitch over the number because of how high their potential was.

I recommend using the velocity or pressure viewer too. The gluon field and some of the protons are black and you might not seem them.

The organic chemistry is even more flexible in terms of reaction potential, I've produced literal unamed compounds with literal novel reaction mechanism(usually resulting in a crash).

@zaccybot2 (View Post)

 I can't wait to check it out (: