Ethanol Economy

[oosyrag]

Experimenting with ethanol and it seems to be quite powerful.

Self planting (free) arbor trees give infinite wood for 4 ethanol distillers, which generate enough ethanol to feed one petroleum generator for a net of about 1000kW. By products include CO2, which can be fed to ferns for O2, polluted dirt, and polluted H2O, which can be deodorized for more O2, or fed to pokeshells for sand to use in the deodorizers and/or sieve for the polluted H2O. The ethanol comes out quite cool (is this based on building temperature, input wood temperature,  or fixed?) so the entire thing is self cooling, and outputs cool PH2O for use. Since petroleum generators delete heat, the supply ethanol can be used as coolant in addition to the output PH2O that can be sieved for more heat deletion. Excess carbon can be slickstered into oil. Basically all of this is accessible way before oil, with even more benefits of normally running a chilled petroleum generator, without having to break into the oil biome. (Edit: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/108250-various-balance-issuesconcerns/)

 

 

Some issues I ran into:

Ethanol distillers output a strange 502.something g/s. The output pipe will get blocked by any amount of ethanol already in the pipe even though a pipe can hold 10kg. When merging pipes, this will cause the distiller to stutter on and off even though there is plenty of room in the pipes. Bridges seem to alleviate this.

The distillers drop polluted dirt constantly rather than in batches, which results in endless running back and forth for dupes if you have a compost, or 100% utilization of sweeper. (Edit: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/klei-bug-tracker/oni/ethanol-distiller-drops-tiny-packets-of-polluted-dirt-r20117/)

 

My critter drop offs don't seem to work with wrangled pokeshells for some reason. Although I feel like they had before... any ideas? I was trying to get a bunch into my distillery to eat the polluted dirt so I can just seal off the room and not have to worry about the endless delivery errand

[PhailRaptor]

40 minutes ago, oosyrag said:

so I can just seal off the room and not have to worry about the endless delivery errands.

Use the clock sensor door dropping method?  Build the floor out of doors, and have them controlled by a clock sensor that opens for just a few seconds once a day.  All the Polluted Dirt will drop into whatever room you have below (Pokeshell stable?).  Just pressurize the area above 2 kg of gas to prevent off-gassing.  The Pokeshells will be in at least a skin of water, so the Polluted Dirt won't offgas there once it lands (might a touch while falling).

[oosyrag]

Actually the off gassing is a nice bonus, since there is no slimelung on arboreal and dirt is plentiful. Deodorizers are also the only source of clay for ceramic.

The non stop delivery tasks are the main problem, so I'll definitely need to make the dirt inaccessible by dropping through doors or blocking off the distillery room. Supplying wood can probably be done with auto sweepers from above.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, oosyrag said:

Experimenting with ethanol and it seems to be quite powerful.

Ethanol distillers output a strange 502.something g/s. The output pipe will get blocked by any amount of ethanol already in the pipe even though a pipe can hold 10kg. When merging pipes, this will cause the distiller to stutter on and off even though there is plenty of room in the pipes. Bridges seem to alleviate this.

Just get in the habit of using bridges anyway. They smooth out so many little piping issues that can crop up. 

[Deustodo]

you could also add a pressure plate under the distiller so that a sweeper takes the polluted dirt in batches, granted if you want the dupes to stop going back and forth you would need to make sure only the sweeper can get the dirt.

[SakuraKoi]

Let's get some concise math/numbers, shall we? Mind you, the numbers due to rounding ain't that precise but still quite close.

One domestic tree produces 2100kg wood per 4.5 cycles that is 770g/s (rounded down by 1%=27s) due to harvesting time but we will go with wild ones I suppose since 2100kg cost 4500g Phosphorite and 157.5kg Polluted Water.

192.5g/s Wood it is

A Wood Burner requires 1714.29g/s, that's nearly 9 wild trees.

Lumber to CO2 with that is 1:10, 10% i.e 19.25g/s per wild tree and +33.32 Watt per.

Wild Oxyfern take 156.3mg/s of CO2 and turn it into 7.8g/s O2. That's times 50.

So a single tree could create 962.5g/s of O2 with that if there are 126 wild Oxyfern-

 

But Ethanol is more important:

750g Wood become 502.5g Ethanol per second plus 185.63g Polluted Dirt and 61.88g CO2

Factor of 0.67 (67%) for Ethanol, 0.2475  (24.75%) for Polluted Dirt and 0.0825 (8.25%) for CO2.

To supply one Distiller, you need only 4 wild trees and one tree will produce 128.975g/s Ethanol, 46.40g/s Polluted Dirt and 15.89g CO2 in the first step and needs 11 Watt.

 

Like also said, you need only 4 Distillers to run one fuel generator

Basically, you need 3000g/s of wood to get another 500g/s of CO2 (1/6th) and 750g/s Polluted Water (1/4th) plus 2000 Watt

That's 16 wild trees.

As such, 16 wild trees generate 750g/s of Polluted Water, 680g/s Polluted Dirt and 727g/s CO2 plus 2000 Watt.

Making each generate 6.8g/s Polluted Water, 46.40s Polluted Dirt, 47.14g/s CO2 and +127.26W

Domestic trees by the by take 47.6g/s of Polluted Water, making you lose 10g/s per tree or 40g/s per Fuel Generator. Oh and 45g/s of Phosphorite.

 

Still, you get lots of polluted dirt and CO2. Though don't ask me where to get 4651 Oxyfern... and where to place them.

Those would also cost 7.75 KG of Dirt PER SECOND if you go domestic, also 36.82 kg of water, also per second

 

Conclusion:

3 hours ago, oosyrag said:

it seems to be quite powerful

Although one needs a lumberjack and anyway one who operates the fuel generator.

Oh and one has to flip like 7 compost bins.

[oosyrag]

6 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

One domestic tree produces 300kg wood per 4.5 cycles that is 110g/s

I haven't checked but that's per branch right? So *7 per tree. So 16 wild trees/4 domestic? And I believe you only need to feed the base, so you can divide your polluted water requirement by 7 as well for domestic. Sorry if I'm wrong ahead of time, not in game at the moment.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, oosyrag said:

The distillers drop polluted dirt constantly rather than in batches, which results in endless running back and forth for dupes if you have a compost, or 100% utilization of sweeper.

Timers on sweepers. 2% per day should be enough to get a single sweep.

[Xuhybrid]

1 minute ago, Coolthulhu said:

Timers on sweepers. 2% per day should be enough to get a single sweep.

That's not a meaningful gameplay effect and the bug should be fixed imo.

[oosyrag]

This post has better math in it.

[beowulf2010]

11 minutes ago, oosyrag said:

I haven't checked but that's per branch right? So *7 per tree. So 16 wild trees/4 domestic? And I believe you only need to feed the base, so you can divide your polluted water requirement by 7 as well for domestic. Sorry if I'm wrong ahead of time, not in game at the moment.

Yes. 300kg per branch so 2,100kg per plant per 4.5 cycles. 

Note, it seems that the occasional branch fails to drop the lumber though I haven't seen it in the newest patch. I also haven't looked for it so... 

4 domesticated trees feed 4 ethanol distillers feed one petroleum generator which feeds more than 4 trees. Infinite power! 

[SakuraKoi]

4 minutes ago, oosyrag said:

This post has better math in it.

Though it ain't concise. Now I became a tree watcher and while I can confirm that lumber mysteriously disappears, my math has been correct (since it basically was per branch, primarily affecting space requirement and net loss).