Melted iron + refined carbon =??

[peachkillu]

Can you make steel by simply melting iron and adding refined carbon 

is it efficient to remove the refinery from the equation and just melt your iron gold copper ore into refined metal 

I know it wouldn’t be the easiest thing to build but is any of this possible 

[Glassyfo]

7 minutes ago, peachkillu said:

Can you make steel by simply melting iron and adding refined carbon 

is it efficient to remove the refinery from the equation and just melt your iron gold copper ore into refined metal 

I know it wouldn’t be the easiest thing to build but is any of this possible 

The recipe also uses lime.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

56 minutes ago, peachkillu said:

Can you make steel by simply melting iron and adding refined carbon 

Nop, even you add lime or whatever else.

[fredhp]

I think lime is too difficult to obtain, the fossil->lime conversion is ridiculous, and farming egg shells is too complicated and slow. I think fossil->lime should be more efficient, or simply remove lime requirement, or substitute it for something easy available but difficult to produce, like liquid oxygen or something like that.

[Yunru]

23 minutes ago, fredhp said:

farming egg shells is too complicated

Umm...

You might be in for a bad time then.

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Umm...

You might be in for a bad time then.

[lee1026]

Well, ranching does take a bit to learn. 

 

It it is unfortunate that the game is balanced to make ranching almost mandatory and doesn’t tell you that it is mandatory. 

[Hellshound38]

It is definitely not mandatory. You can get enough Steel to get a single working rocket silo from just Fossil. Then the rocket can eventually bring back all the steel you need.

[lee1026]

You actually need a lot of steel - you need to bunker door a fairly large area to be able to run a proper scanner network. You then need the gantries, the rocket itself, and you need some room for error because you will inevitably **** up and need to repair a lot of rocket related things.

 

Fossils give you about 40 tons of steel for the whole map. Bunker dooring the scanners and telescopes will cost you somewhere on the order of 20 tons. Autominers pretty much need to be steel to survive on the surface. You have enough for a rocket... barely. Hope you didn't decide to use any steel anywhere else.

 

If you don't ranch, you need to play the space game more or less perfectly.

[blash365]

You can print steel. You can print lime. You can print eggs.

Where is the problem?

[lee1026]

Compared to the tons that you need, the 100kg that you get every few hundred cycles you need from printing pod really don't add to much.

[blash365]

12 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

Compared to the tons that you need, the 100kg that you get every few hundred cycles you need from printing pod really don't add to much.

Combined it makes a difference.

 

If it's to slow for you, there is a sandbox mode at your disposal.

[lee1026]

The only thing that really allows for the player to build a good space program in a reasonable amount of time is ranching as the primary food source, preferably pacus; that will produce a decent amount of eggshells to permit steel production at a reasonable rate.

 

With the way that the game is balanced now, I would describe farming as a noob trap or at best an early game stepping stone until you can get a rancher. Of course,  the game don't tell you that, which is the real problem. Ranching almost always involves in consuming less important resources compared to water/dirt, produces higher quality food, and the temperature requirement of critters is much easier to work with then plants. 

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, lee1026 said:

Fossils give you about 40 tons of steel for the whole map. Bunker dooring the scanners and telescopes will cost you somewhere on the order of 20 tons. Autominers pretty much need to be steel to survive on the surface. You have enough for a rocket... barely. Hope you didn't decide to use any steel anywhere else.

The amount is based on the seed and might be much higher. For a telescope setup you need like 2 or 3 bunker doors. Actually you can run a telescope fully blocked from the top at like 45% efficiency. There is really no reason to build autominers before solar panels. Just put airlocks under your scanner and telescope that open to let regolith trough and just manually dig it up when too much accumulates.

A rocket needs 2 bunker doors and one working scanner to automate it aside of the rocket itself and the gantry. I think the whole setup could be doable in around 10t of steel with a minimalistic apporach without even using mesh tiles above the telescope. I`ll actually try a minimal steel working system apporach my next playthrough. I`ll post it when it`s done (it might take quite a while though, i play super slow).

[suicide commando]

Personally, I don't see much of an issue with the rarity of steel at the moment. Fossils will get you started very well, and setting up a ranch of any kind is easy enough. A hatch farm is dead easy, and other animals aren't that much harder to set up.

This will get you plenty of steel, you just have to have a little patience and plan ahead. Getting a hatch farm going will net you some extra coal for early game power if you really need it. ( I usually just rely on dupe wheels ), as well as meat for BBQ ( with wild pincha farming ) and start off building up your eggshell supply.

Just like everything else in this game, it's all about planning ahead. By the time I head up to the space biome, I will have several tons of steel ready, to immediately deploy bunker doors, with plenty of glass as well to ensure I can build my solar power plant, once solar power is up and running, my telescope will have looked at the local planets for a while and I can build and send out my first rockets.

 

[Gus Smedstad]

I have a hard time thinking of farming as being a “noob trap.” Bristle berries generate calories faster, using less space, than any ranch variety, and only consume water. Keeping them cool does require some effort, but it’s not prohibitive.

As a practical matter, only Pacu ranching generates significant lime for steel. Hatches and Dreckos are pretty important for other reasons, but Pacus generate eggs 5x faster than either of them. I do agree it’s not so clear that you should start ranching Pacus for egg shells until you start searching the internet for advice. Particularly since they consume algae, which is so vital for early game oxygen production. It’s easy to get into the mindset that algae is precious, even though it has no real value other than feeding Pacus once you’re fully sustainable on electrolyzers.

I will say that egg ranching, while important in the long run because it’s sustainable, feels dwarfed by the big bursts of lime you get when you first start mining fossils.

While I agree that planning ahead is helpful, I don’t think it’s required to survive. There’s a heck of a lot of stuff that I learned the hard way by running into crises that I could have averted with experience and foreknowledge, but my first colony has survived 1000 cycles without collapsing. 

[Oozinator]

32 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I have a hard time thinking of farming as being a “noob trap.” Bristle berries generate calories faster, using less space, than any ranch variety, and only consume water. Keeping them cool does require some effort, but it’s not prohibitive.

 

In 99,97% of my ONI games i use only 10 planter boxes for mushrooms and the better food i get from naturally grown food/ drops. No harvest enabled, enough for 10 dupes and 2 mio backup calories/similar..
No ranching/farming, because god of fps hates it..

[Gus Smedstad]

That your computer doesn't have beefy arms like Trogdor doesn't really bear on whether farming is a good source of calories.

I'm not fond of the travel time required for natural drops, or the requirement to leave biomes undestroyed. I think it mostly makes sense for sleet wheat, and then not for the obvious reason of cold requirements. I'm running 20 slot sleet wheat farm right now, kept chilly by two AETNs, but it's still struggling because of the dirt requirement.

I'm doing what I can to extract dirt from polluted water and Pacus, and to convert carbon dioxide from power plants to polluted water, but it's still not enough. Fortunately I never ripped up my bristle berry farm so food hasn't been a problem. It just dips in quality now and then when I can't make pepper bread or barbecue.

Anyway, that's secondary to the main point of the thread, which is lime production.