Salt
Salt is a white powder that behaves like sand until water touches it, and then slowly disappears.
- Movement
- Powder — falls and piles up
- Weight
- 5 / 9 (heavier sinks through lighter)
- Lifetime
- Permanent
- Glow
- None
Salt moves exactly like sand: weight 5, straight or diagonal falls, cone-shaped heaps. In a dry scene the two are interchangeable apart from colour.
Water is what separates them. When a salt cell touches water, the salt vanishes on 8 percent of checks, leaving an empty cell, while the water cell is unchanged. Since the water is never consumed, one puddle can dissolve an unlimited amount of salt if you give it time.
Weight decides the shape of the erosion. Salt is heavier than water, so a heap dropped into a pool sinks to the floor and the water reaches it from above and from the sides. The mound shrinks from its outer surface inward, and water slumps into each gap as it opens. A dry heap standing next to a pool erodes only along the face where the water can reach it.
Real salt dissolves into brine, which is denser than fresh water and can crystallise again when the water evaporates. Sandlab deletes the salt outright. There is no brine, no saturation limit and no way to recover salt from the water later.
Try it yourself
- A dam that gives way. Flood the left half of a walled box and separate it from the empty right half with a column of salt. The water eats into the column from its side and top until a breach opens, and then it pours into the dry half.
- The shrinking mound. Pour a heap of salt into the middle of a deep pool. It drops to the bottom as a white mound that wears away while you watch. As it goes, the waterline sinks a little, because the salt had been taking up room in the pool.
- Salt beside sand. Lay two identical piles in the same pool, one of salt and one of sand. The sand pile never changes shape; the salt pile dwindles until nothing is left.
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 salt touches something
- Touching Water: dissolves away. (slow, 8% per contact check) →
Tip
Salt makes a barrier with a built-in expiry. Only the wet face erodes, so a thick wall of salt that meets the water on one narrow side lasts much longer than a low mound with water lying over its whole top.