“Is the engine consolidating potatoes below the surface?” he asks. “Did the player bulk up the pile with sacks or something so they didn't need quite so many potatoes? We need an investigation.”
I don't think so. I could believe that they're consolidating things from a physics standpoint if they have some way of computing that they aren't gonna be individually moving -- that'd be clever -- but I don't see any reason to make that extend to rendering polygons to represent that.