Ice
Ice is a faintly glowing static solid that freezes neighbouring water and melts on contact with fire or lava.
- Movement
- Solid — stays where you paint it
- Weight
- 4 / 9 (heavier sinks through lighter)
- Lifetime
- Permanent
- Glow
- Faint
Ice is static, so a block painted in mid-air stays put, and its faint glow keeps it visible in dark scenes. It grows by freezing: each check on water touching ice turns it to ice 4 percent of the time. That is twice plant’s growth rate but still slow, so a block in a pool thickens gradually rather than locking the whole pool at once.
Fire melts it. When ice touches a flame, 60 percent of checks end with the ice becoming water and the flame becomes steam. Lava works faster still, at 90 percent: the ice turns to water and the lava cell turns to stone. Either way the ice is spent, but against lava it leaves a solid plug behind.
This is where the model parts company with reality. Real ice is less dense than liquid water, which is why icebergs float. Sandlab lists ice at weight 4 against water’s 3, but because ice is static that figure never comes into play: it does not float, sink or drift. It sits exactly where you painted it until something melts it.
Acid has no reaction with ice, and nothing besides fire and lava melts it, so a frozen block in a scene without a heat source is effectively permanent.
Try it yourself
- Freeze a pool solid. Fill a wall basin with water and paint a single column of ice down its middle. The column fattens sideways through the water, and given time the pool becomes one frozen sheet with a few pockets of liquid trapped inside.
- Melting from below. Paint a shelf of ice and place fire under it. Flames rise against the underside; each successful contact leaves a drop of water and a puff of steam, and the water then falls back onto the flames below and smothers some of them.
- Ice or water against lava. Pour one lava stream onto a block of ice and another onto a puddle of water. Both streams are capped with stone, but the ice seals its stream faster and stays where it was put, while the puddle spreads out and loses much of itself as steam.
Reactions
Odds are per contact check: each tick, touching cells inside the same two-by-two block are checked against the reaction table, so even a small chance happens soon after contact.
When ice touches something
- Touching Water: turns the Water into Ice. (slow, 4% per contact check) →
- Touching Fire: turns into Water, and the Fire turns into Steam. (fast, 60% per contact check) →
- Touching Lava: turns into Water, and the Lava turns into Stone. (almost instant, 90% per contact check) →
When something touches ice
- Touching Lava: the Lava turns into Stone, and this Ice turns into Water. (almost instant, 90% per contact check) →
Tip
Ice is the most reliable lava stopper in the table. It hardens lava into stone at the highest rate of any material, and unlike water it cannot run off the spot that needs sealing.