The Reed Fiber Bottleneck

[WanderingKid]

16 hours ago, Dracian said:

So I'm just considering to abandon the base and start a new one or to go play another game. At cycle 812, it really makes me angry, but knowing I'll have to wait more than 100 cycles to complete my LOX setup is just killing me... Not to mention I'll have to wait another 100 cycles to complete my LH² setup.

Insulation is rarely needed, if ever.  Vacuum sealing in the LOX/LH chambers gives you equivalent results for a ton less work, and is amazingly efficient if you do it next to space, where you usually need LOX/LH for your rockets. 

14 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

You're clearly not running that late into the game if you're giving advice like this. The true late game is when you've used every bit of naturally occurring polluted water on the map, and you've completely dug out all the finite resources like slime and fossils.

I disagree. Petrogens + oil geysers provide me power and manufactured slush geysers.  Coupled with a few random water geysers of whatever form and you've got plenty to work with, usually.

6 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Oh,  yeah, that would be bad. I've never gone the radiant pipe in vacuum route because I don't like stuff breaking. My immediate thought would be that it would break several times before reaching temperature, but I've no direct experience with it.

[snip]

It's possible I'm overusing ceramic. I tend to use it any place where the temperature differential is significant. For example, my oil boiler was completely enclosed by ceramic insulation. The internal bits were igneous, but between the 400 C petroleum and my base I wanted the best insulation I could get.

I typically build igneous for my LOX/LH systems near the surface and use vacuum seals.  Same with the petro boiler.  If I need to build an equivalent system somewhere deeper in the base that will eventually be permanently sealed, a handful of pumps and a liquid lock can do.  The only time I personally bother with Ceramic or Insulation is when I want dupes to get in and out (thus, not sealed) and don't want to have to deal with a serious airlock system.

Similar to @Neotuck, I rarely have issues with my pipes.  I have, however, started simply using insulated 'anything' (usually granite) pipes and using a flow to return it to the basin when the fueling is complete.  Just put an element sensor after the fuel line and shut off the circuit with a reset once the tanks are full, and let it flow back to the basin.

3 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

Has everyone forgot that normal drecko sheer fiber?  You can get a lot of it completely free from wild ones. 

Maybe your room design didn't have them stay in hydrogen long enough.  I have to redesign this since now it has to be a valid stable but I had quite a lot of fiber.

Just use a smaller room with glum if you're only after the reeds.  20% food consumption, maximum fiber gain.  2.5 drecko/plant!  Works wonderfully, if a bit evil.

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

I disagree. Petrogens + oil geysers provide me power and manufactured slush geysers.  Coupled with a few random water geysers of whatever form and you've got plenty to work with, usually.

And that is just the thing. This is not a simulator for building your designs exactly as you want them. If you want that, use sandbox or debug mode as an approximation. If you play the game, you are playing a survival challenge and you are rightfully expected to work with what you get and that means working around shortages and restrictions, some of them unexpected. You can soften the impact of that in numerous ways. For example I now (for the first time) am using a known seed.

But people, please stop asking for things to be exactly as you want them to be in the proper game, you misunderstand what this thing is about.

[suicide commando]

I find Ceramics to work just fine all my needs. The only time I would use insulation is on the piping from the storage of my liquid O2 and H2 to the rocket. for storage I simply use a vacuum to insulate the storage area. Along with a timing system so I don't put more fuel in the pipe than the rocket needs, which means that the pipes will be empty when the rocket is ready to go.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

I agree with @suicide commando.  I only really need a small amount of perfect insulator.  Ceramic works splendidly for just about everything.   I only really use reed fibers for carpet and paintings.  I usually have fibers coming out my ears.

[IlIlIlIlIlIlI]

What about half of the wild growth rate, if planted in a box, but the additional requirements for tame growth aren't met?

[Neotuck]

23 minutes ago, IlIlIlIlIlIlI said:

What about half of the wild growth rate, if planted in a box, but the additional requirements for tame growth aren't met?

They get stiffled and stop growing.

[suicide commando]

1 hour ago, IlIlIlIlIlIlI said:

What about half of the wild growth rate, if planted in a box, but the additional requirements for tame growth aren't met?

As @Neotuck said. Either you have wild growth, leave them where you find them and collect every 8 cycles, or you put them in a hydroponics, feed them a slew of pH2O and get fibres every 2 cycles.

 

[Dracian]

I've read all your comments and while I can agree I've made some mistakes in the conception of my O² and H² cooling chambers (30 tiles away from my rockets), the general idea I'm reading is nonetheless that Insulation is indeed too expensive... Which is why you prefer using Ceramic or Vacuum.

I'll maintain that 5 Reed Fibers for 100 Insulation is way too much. With that ratio, you need 20 Fibers to build a single Insulated Tile or Insulated Pipe... 200 Fibers for a 10-tiles pipe (approx, the minimal lenght to link your cooling chamber to your rocket liquid tank). An 8*2 box would require 320 (the size of a cooling chamber, without the corners). 520 fibers for a single LO²/LH² cooling system, 1040 for both and without counting what you would need to link your LH² cooling system to a second or a third liquid tank and what you would perhaps need for your Super Coolant pipes.

Provided you have access to a PH²O volcano with an average output of 3.2kg/s, you'll have just enough PH²O to feed 20 Thimble Reed. You would then need 104 cycles to build your setup. Even if you manage to have enough regular Dreckos or wild Thimble Reeds to divide by 2 the amount of time needed, it would still be way too long... And this is not to mention possible mistakes in the conception and/or use of Canvas and/or Carpeted Tiles in your base which would increase the global cost in Fibers

Insulation is supposed to be a no-brainer material since it is a perfect isolant. The fact that a lot of people prefer workarounds with Ceramic and/or Vacuum is indeed indicative that something's not right. In my case, the fact that Reed Fibers are more difficult to obtain than Isoresin (supposedly a Rare Ressource) is another indication that there might be adjustments to do.

 

[For those interested, I kept playing. It took me ~100 cycles to link my O² cooling chamber to my Rocket's Tank, after sacrificing all the paintings in my base and draining 10 PH²O lakes in my swamp biomes since I don't have a PH²O volcano (I have 15 domestic Thimble Reeds). Shearing Dreckos helped a bit, and probably reduced the time needed by 15 or 20 cycles (I don't have that much). The 13 wild Thimble Reeds whose growth isn't halted because of temperature helped also a little bit (I don't think I have ever uprooted one in that game). During that time, I mostly read a book while waiting for things to be done... I keep reading while linking my LH² chamber to my rocket's Tank]

[chemie]

3 minutes ago, Dracian said:

I've read all your comments and while I can agree I've made some mistakes in the conception of my O² and H² cooling chambers (30 tiles away from my rockets), the general idea I'm reading is nonetheless that Insulation is indeed too expensive... Which is why you prefer using Ceramic or Vacuum.

I'll maintain that 5 Reed Fibers for 100 Insulation is way too much. With that ratio, you need 20 Fibers to build a single Insulated Tile or Insulated Pipe... 200 Fibers for a 10-tiles pipe (approx, the minimal lenght to link your cooling chamber to your rocket liquid tank). An 8*2 box would require 320 (the size of a cooling chamber, without the corners). 520 fibers for a single LO²/LH² cooling system, 1040 for both and without counting what you would need to link your LH² cooling system to a second or a third liquid tank and what you would perhaps need for your Super Coolant pipes.

Provided you have access to a PH²O volcano with an average output of 3.2kg/s, you'll have just enough PH²O to feed 20 Thimble Reed. You would then need 104 cycles to build your setup. Even if you manage to have enough regular Dreckos or wild Thimble Reeds to divide by 2 the amount of time needed, it would still be way too long... And this is not to mention possible mistakes in the conception and/or use of Canvas and/or Carpeted Tiles in your base which would increase the global cost in Fibers

Insulation is supposed to be a no-brainer material since it is a perfect isolant. The fact that a lot of people prefer workarounds with Ceramic and/or Vacuum is indeed indicative that something's not right. In my case, the fact that Reed Fibers are more difficult to obtain than Isoresin (supposedly a Rare Ressource) is another indication that there might be adjustments ...

sounds like you would enjoy the mod that makes 5x insulation for a given reed fiber amount

[Lilalaunekuh]

13 minutes ago, Dracian said:

I'll maintain that 5 Reed Fibers for 100 Insulation is way too much. With that ratio, you need 20 Fibers to build a single Insulated Tile or Insulated Pipe... 200 Fibers for a 10-tiles pipe (approx, the minimal lenght to link your cooling chamber to your rocket liquid tank). An 8*2 box would require 320 (the size of a cooling chamber, without the corners). 520 fibers for a single LO²/LH² cooling system, 1040 for both and without counting what you would need to link your LH² cooling system to a second or a third liquid tank and what you would perhaps need for your Super Coolant pipes.

IMHO: If you just leave (most) wild reed fibers grow and maybe even turn autoharvest on, you will have enough reed fibers to build a hydrogen rocket fuelling system.

Spoiler

I assume you have an vacuume insulated production close to your rocket silo.

To fill 3 fuel and 1 oxidizer tank you can do it with as less as 5 insulated insulation pipes each.

=> 20 pipe segements for a total of 400 reed fibers are required.

 

If I leave just 10 wild reed fibers, it takes 320 cycles till I would have enough insulation.

But there are far more wild reed fibers and we completly ignored dreckos ...

=> If you don´t destroy all wild reed fibers, you will be able to use insulation when you "need to"

 

[mathmanican]

9 hours ago, Dracian said:

In my case, the fact that Reed Fibers are more difficult to obtain than Isoresin (supposedly a Rare Ressource) is another indication that there might be adjustments to do.

Well put.

[Lilalaunekuh]

43 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

9 hours ago, Dracian said:

In my case, the fact that Reed Fibers are more difficult to obtain than Isoresin (supposedly a Rare Ressource) is another indication that there might be adjustments to do.

Well put.

In my case isoresin stays the bottle neck like it should be

[suicide commando]

I really can't see how you can bottleneck reed fibers. Sure, they take a lot of pH2O, but they grow very rapidly requiring only 2 cycles for a plant to mature. There is tons of pH2O out on the map, which you can use for this, a single plant only needs 640 kg of the stuff, so a little more than half a tile. then there's CO2 scrubbing, which can turn your water into pH2O, so you can make more quite easily if you run coal, petrol or ng generators. Petrol and NG also produce extra pH2O to boot.

A single slush or pWater vent will normally supply enough for continuous growth of 4 plants, which means 2 fibers PER CYCLE!

Now if your map is low on pH2O due to lack of slime biomes, and you don't have any vents, you can set up some drecko's. Build a ranch with some pincha peppers in hydrogen, or if you want to be really cheap, balm lilies in chlorine combined with a top layer of hydrogen for scale growth. Each drecko will give you 2 fibers every 8 cycles, so even if you use peppers, that's 35 * 8 / 2 = 140 kg of pH2O per cycle that you need.
 

[Nitroturtle]

On 4/23/2019 at 10:47 AM, Dracian said:

I'll maintain that 5 Reed Fibers for 100 Insulation is way too much. With that ratio, you need 20 Fibers to build a single Insulated Tile or Insulated Pipe...

 

3 hours ago, suicide commando said:

A single slush or pWater vent will normally supply enough for continuous growth of 4 plants, which means 2 fibers PER CYCLE!

Water cost aside, 10 cycles to build a single piece of insulated pipe seems a bit off to me.  I can't see how anyone can argue that this is properly balanced currently.  I've had several 1000+ cycle bases since insulation was introduced and I've basically given up on using insulation for anything (that and I hardly have enough to build even a single room out of it).

[Lilalaunekuh]

1 hour ago, Nitroturtle said:

Water cost aside, 10 cycles to build a single piece of insulated pipe seems a bit off to me.  I can't see how anyone can argue that this is properly balanced currently.  I've had several 1000+ cycle bases since insulation was introduced and I've basically given up on using insulation for anything (that and I hardly have enough to build even a single room out of it).

My points always are:

• There is NO need for insulation except making things simplifying already possible builds.
• When you have retrieved your first Isoresion, you should be >84 cycles in the game. (So wild reed would be enough for a simple rocket fuelling system.)

=> If Insulation would be easy to make, it would IMHO reduce the amount of "clever" designs, like precise fuelling or some temperature controlled loops. My question would be:

Does having an abundance of insulation make the game more fun for you to play?

Spoiler

For me it´s having just a little insulation to work with is far more interesting.

 

[Neotuck]

13 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

My points always are:

• There is NO need for insulation except making things simplifying already possible builds.
• When you have retrieved your first Isoresion, you should be >84 cycles in the game. (So wild reed would be enough for a simple rocket fuelling system.)

=> If Insulation would be easy to make, it would IMHO reduce the amount of "clever" designs, like precise fuelling or some temperature controlled loops. My question would be:

Does having an abundance of insulation make the game more fun for you to play?

  Hide contents

For me it´s having just a little insulation to work with is far more interesting.

 

AGREE!!!

Having over powered resources limited challenges me to find ways of using them sparingly 

this is the same reason I'm glad tungsten volcanoes were never added 

[Dracian]

The question is not about having abundance of Insulation, but being able to build a decent amount in order to focus on other things than controling the temperature of every single hot or cold stuff you use at any second of the game. You know, taking away a problem to focus on another one...

You don't like Insulation because of its perfectness ? You like challenges ? You like being limited ? Fine, don't use Insulation. Nothing complies you to build anything with it, the same way nobody complies anyone to play with the hardest settings.

[Lilalaunekuh]

11 minutes ago, Dracian said:

You don't like Insulation because of its perfectness ? You like challenges ? You like being limited ? Fine, don't use Insulation. Nothing complies you to build anything with it, the same way nobody complies anyone to play with the hardest settings.

Don´t get me wrong, it´s a survival game.

So it should have a learning curve in how to approach certain things.

If you keep wild reeds and maybe even farm them you willl have enough for a rocket fuelling system.

Or just shear (wild) dreckos. It takes some time but if you start early (cycle 30-80) you will have a good amount of reed fibers to make isoresin the bottle neck for quite some time.

 

It´s more about how many reed fibers can you gather till your able to retrieve Isoresion.

=> So speaking would you be happy to build with plain abyssalite again ?

Spoiler

I always argued to have an perfect insulator in the game and I was (ab)using abyssalite when we had the chance.^^

=> I would love a change made to the recipe to produce 400kg insulation at once with the same isoresion and reed costs.

[That would consume more abyssalite and nobody needs less than 400kg of insulation for something except melting, but if you attempt that it would imply you have enough insulation in the first place.]

 

[suicide commando]

Sorry, but that's just a matter of planning ahead. Don't complain about not having any reed fiber when you've had hundreds of cycles to build a reed fiber farm and start growing them. Alternatively, you by now should have a large storage tank full of pH2O, so you can easily set up 20-30 farm plots and start growing the stuff. You will need to wait to get the isoresin first anyway, which will take several cycles for your rocket to go and get just a small bit, enough for a few bits of isolation, so that time can also be utilised for your farmers and/or ranchers to get the reed fibers.
 

[Nitroturtle]

Okay so you all are saying, the player should just plan ahead and start saving all reed fiber from cycle 1 and then they should be fine to build a very limited quantity of the end game building material once they reach the end game.

I swear some people just like to argue.  Currently abyssalite is pretty much a junk material and insulation serves little to no purpose in the game.  Sure, you can find workarounds or specific ways to look at things to justify the current state.  But it feels pretty out of whack, similar to how lime bottlenecked steel production before fossil was added.

[suicide commando]

What I'm saying is that reed fiber can easily be mass produced if you want, as you should have large quantities of pH2O at your disposal. My current base I am producing 8 fibers per cycle, which is more than enough at the moment, to organise carpeting and painting projects between the various expansion projects I'm running.

Even if a rocket would take 3 cycles to launch and return with isoresin, that's 24 fibers. last time I checked you come back with enough resin for 4 batches or so of isolation, so 20 fibers. And this is just a single tiny 16 plot farm. I could easily set up another 20-40 plots worth of farming if I wanted to.

 

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, Nitroturtle said:

Okay so you all are saying, the player should just plan ahead and start saving all reed fiber from cycle 1 and then they should be fine to build a very limited quantity of the end game building material once they reach the end game.

Nobody says you can`t use the fiber. I remember before the paintings costed fiber i would set up a farm or a drecko ranch for my exosuits and just leave it and end up having 800+ banked reeds towards the end game. No need to farm thimbe reed when you can just set up a drecko ranch for meat (or even repurpose a balm lilly farm when you stockpile enough flowers) then just set and forget. Let the reed fiber accumulate over time and once you reach the stars you should have enough to buld a fair bit of insulation.

[Lilalaunekuh]

3 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

Okay so you all are saying, the player should just plan ahead and start saving all reed fiber from cycle 1 and then they should be fine to build a very limited quantity of the end game building material once they reach the end game.

It less what a player should do, it´s about "learning something".

=> If you just leave wild reeds (and maybe even actively keep them at the right temperature) you will be able to build a (very) limited quantity of the eng ame building material once you reach the end game.

 

Spoiler

2 hours ago, suicide commando said:

What I'm saying is that reed fiber can easily be mass produced if you want.

And I still stand behind my concern, that more insulation wouldn´t make the game for fun to play.

 

PS: Don´t mix the lime bottleneck of the steel production with the insulation production.

Lime is necessary to progress and insulation is not necessary for anything, except simplifying already possible builds.

 

[Dracian]

2 hours ago, suicide commando said:

What I'm saying is that reed fiber can easily be mass produced if you want, as you should have large quantities of pH2O at your disposal.

When you are unlucky enough not to have a single PH²O volcano on your map, I can assure you you don't. You just drain every single lake in the swamps, and to be sure those are not drained too fast, you set up an Algae Terrarium farm to convert H²O to PH²O. You can't imagine the amount of manpower it requires.

 

2 hours ago, suicide commando said:

Even if a rocket would take 3 cycles to launch and return with isoresin, that's 24 fibers. last time I checked you come back with enough resin for 4 batches or so of isolation, so 20 fibers.

In my case, a double-cargo rocket propelled with Petroleum and LOX brings me 192kg of Isoresin every 3 cycles, so that's 12 batches of isolation, thus 60 Fibers required to catch up... 20 per cycle, 40 domesticated Thimble Reeds required. Impossible to build unless you have access to at the very least one PH²O volcano (2 removes the need to drain pools and/or to convert H²O with Algae Terrariums)

 

2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Nobody says you can`t use the fiber. I remember before the paintings costed fiber i would set up a farm or a drecko ranch for my exosuits and just leave it and end up having 800+ banked reeds towards the end game.

So to say, 20 Insulated Tiles or Pipes. I'll just quote Nitroturtle on that as what they said perfectly sums up my mind :

3 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

Okay so you all are saying, the player should just plan ahead and start saving all reed fiber from cycle 1 and then they should be fine to build a very limited quantity of the end game building material once they reach the end game.

 

I'll stand by what I already said. In the current state of the game, Insulation costs too much Fibers and not enough Abyssalite and/or Isoresin. And it's not about what is necessary or not, it's about the frustration you feel when you discover after hundreds of hours and multiple retries that the super endgame material you want for your build is not available because a supposedly common ressource is not.

[Nitroturtle]

32 minutes ago, Dracian said:

I'll stand by what I already said. In the current state of the game, Insulation costs too much Fibers and not enough Abyssalite and/or Isoresin. And it's not about what is necessary or not, it's about the frustration you feel when you discover after hundreds of hours and multiple retries that the super endgame material you want for your build is not available because a supposedly common ressource is not.

I completely agree with you, and I'm just confused by why anyone feels the need to argue with this point.