Water

Core reactions

Water is not just an input. It is the conversion layer between the first useful materials in a factory.

• Sand + Water → Wet Sand. One pixel of each becomes two pixels of Wet Sand.
• Seed + Water → Wet Seed. The water is consumed and the seed changes state.
• Water + Snow → Ice. Use this deliberately for crossings and cold storage.
• Water + Fire → Steam. Steam rises, so give it a clear route before heating a tank.

Containment rules

Liquids always seek lower space. A flat floor is not a guarantee: small droplets can skitter sideways until they find a depression, and they can slip through diagonal corner gaps.

Build tanks with fully sealed corners. Standard Filters pass water, while an Advanced Filter can be configured to block or pass it. Put the overflow route above the working volume so a full tank fails into a drain instead of into the belt bus.

A safe water line has three visible states: incoming, usable reserve, and overflow. If you cannot see all three, you will notice the problem too late.

Reliable sources

Early factories depend on surface pools, underground deposits, and melted Ice. Later, captured Lumlings can provide a renewable flow when kept above the water line. They slow or stop while submerged, so house them in a dry pen that drips into the reservoir.

Steam that reaches the sky can return as rain. Treat this as recovery rather than exact closed-loop accounting: evaporation timing and the rain buffer make it less predictable than a controlled Lumling source.

Failure modes

• Unsealed diagonal corners leak even when both adjacent walls look solid.
• A few water pixels may disappear against Snow instead of producing a stable Ice mass.
• Water exposed on a broad flat surface can evaporate before it finds a pool.
• Heating without a Steam outlet pressurises the layout spatially: gas fills every open pocket above the tank.