Perhaps objects should just get turned into something else rather than being destroyed. Say, for example, you had to keep all the dirt/ore that you dug up in an inventory. If you wanted to get rid of your dirt, you could chuck it into lava, where it would return later through earthquakes/eruptions that send new minerals/dirt back up to the surface.
Only problem with this is that people wouldn't have as much freedom to build whatever they'd like, cause it'd be broken every so often.

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Original post by Butabee Yeah, that's a problem I've heard mentioned before, that the game will eventually end up as a wasteland, and I don't know of a good solution yet. One I heard was to put everything on a restoration timer where everything will revert back to it's original form after awhile, but that kinda defeats the purpose of having a deformable game world. I guess one solution would be to make it easier to build than it is to destroy. Like make everything overly durable.

I thought of that years ago. The world clean itself up gradually and heals all the things you change (or mutate them naturally into a stable state).

You burn down a tree theres a stump and later branches start growing out of it.
You wait long enough the tree is back. Bushes love to grow in a space made by other plants burned away.

You collapse a wall of bricks and they gradually settle til they are a stable heap (angle of repose...). People come and steal the bricks to use to make other buildings.

Piles of junk created by a collision are eventually carted away for scrap recycling and any useful bits get used again. Often stuff in a crash catch file and a smouldering heap of ashes or slag is all that left.


You kill someone their corpse moulders, is eaten away by scavengers and the skeleton is scattered and sinks slow into the soil.

Many game you arent around long enough to see these things happen.


As for 'deformable' there are usually too many ways for things to come apart (and with only a few simulated it gets repetative). Even more complicated is when thing comeapart near each other and their are intreractions.
Physics can do some of this but that would deal with only the position (maybe fluid simulations can intermix decomposition parts but only if they interact simply).

Even the initial interactions (the initial crash or kaboom) can interact in complicated ways which would have to be handled ( a combinatoric set of different processes) which adds a lot of work to create even a partially realistic simulation.

They will do it, but incrementally (game companies will recycle their effects over time) and we now at least have enough computing power available to do the detail work.