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Various Balance Issues/Concerns


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Ethanol

So here is the current math on Ethanol: It takes 4 Distillers to run 1 Petrol Generator.

This means 1 Petrol Generator consumes 3kg/s of Lumber to run, and 960W of Distillers. In addition, between the Distillers and the Petrol Gen itself, you generate about 748g/s of CO2, and about 740g/s of Polluted Dirt (which can be converted into Dirt via Compost or fed to crabs for Sand), and 750g/s of Polluted Water as well from the generator. Even if you simply Carbon Skim the CO2, that only consumes about an extra 360W total (for the Skimmers + Sieve filtering their output), giving you a net gain of 680W before any tuneups, which would make it 1680W if you tuned up the generator. 

So how hard is it to get 3kg/s of Lumber? A tree has up to 7 branches with enough space around it, and 300kg per harvest, 4.5 cycles planted, 18 cycles wild. So a single irrigated tree produces 466kg of Lumber per cycle, or 777g/s of Lumber. So you need about 4 irrigated trees to support this whole setup. Which costs a mere 233g/s of water, so you still end up with a net gain of slightly over 500g/s of polluted water. The small amount of phoshorite can easily be made for 'free' with Balm Lily fed Dreckos (along with giving extra Eggs/Reed Fiber). Alternatively you could just plant 16 wild trees, although this does limit how many of these setups you can do because currently the only way to get more tree seeds is the printing pod, which is a very slow method. If you wild plant this is basically just making free water/dirt/power out of thin air, with the option of making oil/food via slicksters too.

Now I'll talk about wild farming more later, because it affects more then trees, but I think you can see the problem. Power wise, the ethanol refining process is pretty mediocre without tune-ups, considering you need a decent amount of dupe labour to constantly harvest tree branches (you can deliver everything via Sweepers, which you can setup pretty early so the rest of the labour involved is minimal), but it basically creates a ton of free water and dirt (well the dirt to be fair requires extra labour since you have to flip Composts). It's not uncommon to have 16-20 tree seeds if you start in the forest biome, and if you planted them all you could generate over 2kg/s of free 'temperate-cold' water at the cost of a moderate amount of labour (which would be more then worth it). This pretty much breaks the entire water economy in the game as it's almost like a homemade slush geyser (which are widely considered overpowered on their own) On top of this you would have more dirt then you could ever really use (honestly you would just lock up the ethanol distillers in a sealed room and only ship out however much polluted dirt you were actually using with sweepers to save dupe time).

However this doesn't even touch on the most broken part of ethanol distillation: the fact that the Ethanol comes out at 9C. Considering it has an SHC of 2.46, it makes a pretty decent coolant. All the heat created by the distillers and the Petrol generator can easily be nullified by this output with just a few tiles of radiant pipe, so the water coming out of the generator ends up around 10-15C, so it will be cold water as well, and also could be used as coolant. But even if you ignore that, the Ethanol can be heated up to about 70C safety without boiling, so you could use it as coolant for things like Aquatuners. A single 4 Distiller 1 Petrol Gen setup can generate 300KW of cooling via Ethanol alone. The generator and distillers themselves only generate 38KW total for their constant operation. And if you count the generator output water as coolant (ie keep the generator fairly cold), and heated it up to about 115C from 15C, that is another 313KW of cooling, If you then sieved that water, that would be even more cooling, but I think you get the idea at this stage. For reference, a fertilised Wheezewort is 12KW of cooling in hydrogen, an AETN is 80KW, and an Aquatuner with water going through it is 585KW (although in the last case, it just moves, not deletes the heat, but that is where things like Ethanol coolant comes in).

Note that it's possible to get a basic setup going by cycle 30, so this isn't some late game thing, it's quite practical in the early game.

I'm not even going to touch on actually using the CO2 produced to feed Slicksters for free eggs/meat/lime/oil, because frankly just the stuff already described is pretty broken and this would just be icing on the cake.

Edit: Okay I will briefly do the math for Slicksters too. Basically from a single 4 Distiller > 1 Gen loop you would get about 374g/s of free oil, and feed 22 ranched Slicksters. You would need to put in the dupe labour to groom them, but if you did, you would get 3.66 eggs per cycle on average, which is about 10000 calories, so enough to feed 10 dupes on normal difficulty, and also a free 3.66kg of lime per cycle as well. Considering this would feed 10 dupes, you could just add extra dupes to the colony to offset the labour required to groom. And this is just from a single such 'loop'. Even if you pumped all the produced CO2 with pumps to the Slicksters, instead of Carbon Skimming it, you would still end up with about the same total power consumed too, so it's not like the Slicksters would cost you any power.

So basically there are a few seperate issues at work here. The problem isn't really the power output (it's actually fairly reasonable, although still pretty good on it's own if you tune up, and makes up for the lack of coal in the forest biome as wood generators are terrible in comparison), it's the amount of 'free water' generated and the amount of free coolant in general, on top of pretty much infinite Dirt as well. Now it's pretty obvious the irrigation/fertilization requirements of trees are a placeholder, as they are just copy pasted from the Peppernut plant. But even if those were to significantly go up, you could just plant wild trees and still generate a (lesser but still very significant) amount of free coolant/water.

My (very general and off the cuff) suggestions would be:

-Change/Increase irrigation/fertilisation requirements of trees

-Address wild farming somehow (this is a pretty complicated one and I'll talk about it a bit more later)

-Make Ethanol come out at a much higher temperature (like 60C) so that it isn't nearly as effective as a coolant and using it to cool the generators becomes more complicated (forcing you to use Aquatuners, which would cost power and add complexity, or otherwise accept having the generator water come out fairly hot therefore at least removing the ability to use that as coolant as well)

Note before anyone comments about it: you cannot currently use Ethanol Gas for Gas generators. If you could, this would allow basically infinite power generation.

And yes I'm glossing over a bunch of stuff on how to set this up in the most optimal way, but I assume the reader has familiarity with how to do coolant piping or use Aquatuners as this post is already long. And even a naive setup is extremely effective.

 

Wild Farming

I am fully aware re-adding wild farming is an intended change, but I feel like it should be reconsidered. Even the previous section already has one example of how wild farming can be pretty broken, as in that case it lets you generate free water for nothing but a small amount of dupe labour.

But frankly, with just a bit of dropping small chunks of algae (or putting them on a conveyor) and cooking it into dirt tiles with steam, you can easily make large amounts of natural tiles in any formation you like. And then you can farm things with basically no cost, at any amount. While you need a lot of seeds for wild farms, plants like Sleet Wheat drop 18 seeds per harvest, so it's pretty easy to set up a massive wild Sleet Wheat farm without having to wait hundreds of cycles for enough seeds. And cooling a wild farm is very simple, because without any inputs, heat isn't added constantly to the system. You could seal (and insulate) the entire wild farm in with some sweepers (plants auto harvest themselves 4 cycles after fully growing, and with for example wild Sleet Wheat going from 72 cycles to harvest to 76 makes little difference) and have the sweepers just handle everything, with zero dupe labour involved, and no inputs. The only cooling you would have to do is a tiny amount to cover the heat generated by the sweepers, once you initially cooled the farm down to the desired temperature. On top of that, the obvious complete lack of required inputs makes the whole thing a no brainer and begs the question of why you would ever set up a 'normal' farm considering all the input and cooling requirements for it, since the only limit on scaling wild farms is seeds, and crops like Nosh Bean/Sleet Wheat drop large amounts of seeds on harvest.

Frankly this just breaks any sort of farming/ranching economy. Why bother ranching anything when you can just grow wild Sleet Wheat/Peppernut (you can plant wild peppernuts with Pips, and you can print pip eggs, so any map can get some). Why bother actually using water for crops when you could get them for free? Why bother cooling things like Wheat farms when you could just.... not. It cuts out major portions of the game. Sure you have to survive a while off other food sources until you get to the point of being able to set up your wild mega-farm, but this can be done quicker then I think most players expect if you actually make it a goal, and you could easily survive on nothing but Mealwood until then (there is enough dirt, esp if you do the Ethanol loop described above), so you could entirely skip actually having to set up any 'real' farms or consume any precious resources like water.

I get that wild farming was added back for the sake of Nature Preserves, and to make Pips more useful, but I feel like only Decor plants should be able to be wild planted. All other plants just break the game when they can be wild planted.

 

Between Wild Farming and the Ethanol loop, food production/cooling/water are more or less trivialised in the current version (well, you do need Forest Biomes for the Ethanol loop, so that applies to only half the maps, but still). Obviously the game is in preview and 'not done', but I feel it is important to draw attention to these issues as early as possible, in hopes that these things are addressed before launch.

 

Various Minor Issues (I am sure some of these are just as a result of placeholder numbers/unfinished and would have been fixed anyways, but I mention them for completeness)

-If you don't roll Geodes, maps without a slime biome have no Gold Amalgam. While for the purposes of overheat temps, you can substitute by making some early Steel, the problem is more with the late game, as both Super Coolant production and the Oxylite Refinery require Refined Gold. Dense Pufts are a very poor alternative to the Oxylite refinery at current tuning due to all the headaches of the way Puft Breeding works and how many you actually end up needing, and there isn't any alternative at all for Super Coolant production. The printing pod will not print Gold Amalgam either until you actually have some AFAIK and ruins don't contain any that I have ever seen. To be fair, changes to Dense Pufts and the Super Coolant recipe would probably be sufficient, but this is still something that should be looked at.

-Similarly, while it is possible to use Dreckos for Reed Fiber production on maps with no Slime Biomes, this is painfully slow. Would be nice if you could at least print Reed Fiber seeds at the pod, because currently it is one of the few seeds/critters you can't print or acquire in any way on a map without the native biome (you can print stuff like Oxyfern/Trees/Blossom/Mushroom seeds that don't exist on your map so there is precedent here). I will however admit this is not something that is 'needed' just would be nice/would be consistent with other similar things.

-The lack of any sort of free food like Muckroot in the new forest biome makes it extremely difficult on maximum food difficulty compared to the other starter biome, with no real alternative options (On maximum food, no matter how hard you rush farming you still need to survive until the first mealwood harvest, and you also need 10 mealwood plants per dupe, so it takes a few cycles to get a mealwood farm of sufficient size up even with the ability to dig seeds now). Mushbars would be one, but this biome also seems to have very little starting water unless you get lucky. You are pretty much reliant partly on printing food from the printing pod and not taking any dupes for a while, which is heavily contrasted with the old start biome where even on maximum food difficulty it was quite possible to print extra dupes early and expand rapidly in general if you knew what you were doing. And if the new biome is intended to be way harder (I mention this more for the sake of people who are likely to comment on this), then why do the 'hardest' planets use the old one?

-Lettuce currently has no required inputs. Should probably require salt or salt water for fertiliser/irrigation to fill a niche as a midgame plant similar to Mushrooms. While the existence of wild farming makes this relatively less broken, it still is kind of silly. But I suspect this is one of those 'haven't gotten around to actually balancing yet' type of things and would have changed anyways. Also of note, there are a LOT of buried lettuce seeds in the tidal pools biome, so it's quite easy to get a large farm up rapidly. So wild farming them actually is a pretty easy thing to setup as well, even if they did add required inputs.

-Nosh Beans are just a bad version of Sleet Wheat atm if you break down their stats and what they are used for. Should either have lower requirements, or some other change to make them actually useful.

-The new Gas Stove seems like someone added an extra zero or two to the gas requirement, as the thing currently consumes an effective 4444W of power if you were to burn the gas in a generator instead, making it the most expensive building in the game to run. Not to mention the only way of actually making that much gas is basically Sour Gas boiling which is pretty endgame (other sources of gas will never keep up with how much cooking you would have to do).

 

I am sorry that the post is very rambling, and in some cases lacks detail, but I felt it was important to start the conversation sooner rather then later.

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The lack of muckroot in the forest biome made it an interesting race to get mealwood up and going on normal hunger. It has to be awful on max hunger.

I agree that it'd be nice to have a reed fiber option that isn't drecko farming.

I can't really comment on the ethanol situation as I have not done anything with it, but it does sound like tweaks are required.

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Good post, I also built the ethanol loop device and posted on the suggestion forum for changes to bits and pieces of it to get it balanced. Although you've dug deeper into the device and howmuch extra you can get out of it with the ethanol cooling and such. The other points are all also very valid and things I've been meaning to post about.

The best way I think to balance lettuce is to change it from a food source to an ingredient, so you can't eat it raw. The only recipes that require it are in the gas oven, so even if the lettuce is free, you will need to the gas and other resources to make something edible with it.

The oven should get rid of one of the 0s at 50g/s it still costs quite a bit of gas, but not insane amounts, so making high end food isn't easy but not impossible.

As for the fiber problem, maybe add reed fibre seeds to one of the planets ( organic mass springs to mind ), so in lategame you can get it and ramp up your production.

The Gold isn't really an issue I think, as long as there's it's possible to get gold from space. It's annoying, but not too terrible. A little tweak to the amount needed might be in order though.
 

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3 hours ago, Troxism said:

The new Gas Stove seems like someone added an extra zero or two to the gas requirement

I kind of suspect it had numbers added as placeholders and then they forgot about it. Luckily it's really easy to mod and I already did so. All it takes is this:

        [HarmonyPatch(typeof(GourmetCookingStationConfig))]
        [HarmonyPatch("ConfigureBuildingTemplate")]
        public static class GeneratedBuildings_LoadGeneratedBuildings_Patch
        {
            public static void Postfix(GameObject go)
            {
                ElementConverter elementConverter = go.AddOrGet<ElementConverter>();
                elementConverter.consumedElements[0].massConsumptionRate = 0.03f;
                elementConverter.outputElements[0].massGenerationRate = 0.0075f;
            }
        }

I wish the other issues were equally easy to fix, but sadly it takes more work than just looking up specific numbers and replace them with something more reasonable. I might as well add the mod here as well. Just remove it once Klei actually fixes the problem.... or don't if you want my modded numbers (which was just made up). It will replace Klei's numbers regardless of which numbers they use.

GourmetCookingStationHotfix2.zip

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28 minutes ago, nonoxyl said:

Sounds like many of the arguments that came out against supercoollant when it was introduced. It's always possible to just choose to not use wild farms and ethanol. I am just ignoring ethanol production and trying to make irregular oil work for me.

I wouldn't really say this is an accurate equivalence. First of all, one of the major reasons Supercoolant was added to the game was because in the patch it was added, hydrogen rockets were added, with the requirement of Liquid Hydrogen. Without Supercoolant, the only other way to make Liquid Hydrogen would be to abuse the '1/10th packets don't break pipes on state change' bug, which is both very slow and really really counter intuitive/arguably pretty cheesy.

Second of all, Supercoolant makes a lot of stuff easier, but requires effort to acquire. And it doesn't remove the need for cooling systems, just makes them about twice as efficient as water based ones. It doesn't completely remove all heating/cooling gameplay. Ethanol/Wild farming is relatively far far easier to set up then it is to get Supercoolant, and pretty much remove all aspects of water management, trivialise heating far more then Supercoolant in some ways (at least at 'common temp ranges', obviously Supercoolant is super powerful for making things like Sour Gas boiling much simpler while Ethanol isn't going to be much help there) and make food a non issue. 

To put it another way, you still used other coolants before Supercoolant for various things. With something like wild farming, there is no reason to use any of the other alternatives for things like getting food, you just go straight from mealwood to it and skip every other source of food because they are all inferior in comparison. There are some very specific examples of previously existing strategies that were 'similar' to wild farming before that are basically made irrelevant in every single way by wild farming I might go into detail about later.

Edit: To be clear, I do somewhat agree with some of the complaints about Supercoolant, but I don't think it's anywhere near 'as bad' as some of these. A big difference is Ethanol/Wild Farming are just SO MUCH EASIER to pull off for ridiculous results. Most players never legitimately make Supercoolant, but this can be done very early in the game, and is better then alternative 'newbie friendly' strategies.

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35 minutes ago, suicide commando said:

The Gold isn't really an issue I think, as long as there's it's possible to get gold from space.
 

Except if it has changed since this pre-launch, in Qol3 we weren't able to get gold from space.

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4 minutes ago, Troxism said:

Ethanol/Wild farming is relatively far far easier to set up then it is to get Supercoolant, and pretty much remove all aspects of water management, trivialise heating far more then Supercoolant in some ways

Yep. I had a functional lumber ethanol petroleum generator loop set up before cycle 40, started it with just scrap lumber laying around and had flooded the entire dug out map (including my base) with CO2 by cycle 90. It's that powerful and even easier than the old nat gas/fertilizer infinite power loop. 

And I didn't even use the cooling potential of the fresh ethanol. :D

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5 hours ago, ordith said:

The lack of muckroot in the forest biome made it an interesting race to get mealwood up and going on normal hunger. It has to be awful on max hunger.

 

I generally play with all of the settings ticked up one level.  I failed the first few games I tried on the forest biome maps because of this.  Eventually I got stabilized one game by killing all of the pips on the map for food, it gave me just enough time to get mealwood stabilized.  I don't see how you can do it on the max hunger setting unless you are lucky enough to have a bunch of lettuce close.

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6 minutes ago, EnderCN said:

by killing all of the pips on the map for food

I'm sure this was the intended playstyle - kill all the kitties for food just to make it through the first few cycles. You can print more later. :)  Just don't name them before you kill them. 

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28 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I'm sure this was the intended playstyle - kill all the kitties for food just to make it through the first few cycles. You can print more later. :)  Just don't name them before you kill them. 

Why are we calling the beaver terriers kitties? :p

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I agree about reed fiber, gold amalgam and the gas range.

I think nosh beans might be fine as Worse Wheat, considering many maps don't have wheat. But if they could stand out that'd be neat too.

Making a productive ethanol power plant seems like ordinary, fun ONI. You don't need to spend dupe labor in fact, just let them self harvest if you like.

I love domesticated wild plants. Previously I would leave every plant as it is and build around it. Domestication means I can build farms of my own.

There's been free food for a long time. Extending it to farms means we don't only have to use pacus or remote wild farms now.

Irregular oil should be much more powerful than wood. I've seen irregular oil maps with around 8 to 10 oil reservoirs on them. Talk about free power/water/CO2/cooling.

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The general concept of the ethanol chains is 'regular ONI', true, but it's just too simple and too productive for what it offers. I don't think it should be outright removed, but I do feel some of the benefits need significant toning down to account for how simple it is.

Wild plants have always been a thing, but playing on max difficulty with larger dupe counts made them more of a bonus then something you could rely almost exclusively on, which felt WAY more balanced. It is true you could feed smaller colonies, or ones on normal difficulty with them, but I don't agree with extending that to effectively infinity. And simply being able to plant them in an 'orderly' fashion is already a huge buff, since you can set up sweepers and automate the whole process, even if you were still limited to a certain amount of plants like before.

Another example I haven't brought up as to why wild farming isn't a great thing: Reed Fiber. There is just no reason to grow it normally anymore, it's not difficult to get a lot of seeds on slime biome maps (and on others you don't have any seeds anyways so it's a moot point) and it grows like a weed even wild. Why even have the irrigated version at all when it uses an absurd amount of water and you could easily grow it for free? I talked about setting up huge farms with algae > dirt cooking, but really you could just not strip mine the whole map and plan ahead and set a lot of this stuff up reasonably early.

There are some other sources of resource light food, it is true, but wild pacu farming specifically has been a thing I have always greatly disliked (it's pretty exploity and breaks game balance in a very similar way). Just didn't mention it because it's not new. Ultimately if multiple broken things exist, they should all be fixed, not used to justify each other in some kind of weird circle-jerk (and then make all the other non broken things completely pointless).

It's true irregular oil is pretty OP if combined with Sour Gas boiling (allows you to make 650g/s of net gain water per well, or 250g/s if you just petroleum boil), and I do think the amount of oil wells in Irregular Oil should be reduced, but I considered it less of a serious issue because

A: it's only on some maps, you have to actually roll the trait, and frankly there are maps with 13kg/s+ of water geysers too so you can always find some ridiculous map seed for anything you want

B: If you had for example 10 oil wells, actually boiling 33kg/s of Sour Gas or even Petrol is actually quite involved and complex to setup (and requires some serious heat even with efficient heat exchangers for petrol), to the point where I think it's fine if you get a bunch of free water if you are willing to literally build 330+ Nat Gas gens and such (space would be a real issue at that point with all the heat exchangers and generators, plus all the metal for radiant pipes ect). Power was already infinite with Sour Gas boiling, so no difference there. Again it's not just not the same thing. Trying to sustainably make 30kg/s of Sour Gas > Nat Gas is actually insanely complex and would be a very impressive build in survival. On the other hand the Ethanol loop is very simple and only requires the most basic knowledge of cooling/industrial systems for very high returns, and can be built cheaply and early in the game and doesn't even take that much space. It's just not even on the same order of magnitude in terms of complexity + effort + resources/space invested to reward ratio

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8 hours ago, mathmanican said:

kill all the kitties for food just to make it through the first few cycles. You can print more later. :)  Just don't name them before you kill them. 

They are small creatures, crawling around everywhere, steal your stuff and mess up your food production line by moving seeds to somewhere you planned to be free of that type of plants.

Why don't you call them by the proper name: gremlins.

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You make a lot of great points. Wild plants do make farm plots useless, but I've always seen them as useless due to how the game actually is/was.

If they are still useless, maybe they are the things that should be rebalanced. Reeds using that much polluted water has always been a fool's trap. I would solve the problem from the other end.

I like your mention of a limited supply of wild plants. Maybe that would be a good compromise - you can only have as many wild plants as you can find or print, and putting them in farm plots converts them, just like ranching. This places a cap on their production, and leaves farm plots for massive or high difficulty colonies. (Simple to implement: only farm plot plants produce seeds, and those don't replant).

I've never bothered with nat gas because petrol is so good already. The petrol loop is both better and harder than the ethanol loop, that's exactly why I figure ethanol is fine where it is. Maybe just change the ethanol output temp?

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Tried yesterday Ethanol setup.

Seems pretty useless to me. You generate only 2k of energy and consume half of it for ethanol generation. wouldn't be bad, but you also need to get rid of tons of polluted dirt with delivery tasks (or automate it which requires another 300+- watt), and CO2 as well, which will take another 360 watt

there are many ways to optimize it, but I don't find it usefull w/o using game abusing methods

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Quote

 

Tried yesterday Ethanol setup.

Seems pretty useless to me. You generate only 2k of energy and consume half of it for ethanol generation. wouldn't be bad, but you also need to get rid of tons of polluted dirt with delivery tasks (or automate it which requires another 300+- watt), and CO2 as well, which will take another 360 watt

there are many ways to optimize it, but I don't find it usefull w/o using game abusing methods

 

Don't let the sweepers run 24/7 with timers or things like sensors to detect lack of ethanol in the output pipe (buffer with thanks to avoid stoppages). Or you can get even more clever with splitting in the input and output sweeper via spacing methods instead of using a single one for both. Also the reason they do 'run 24/7' is because polluted dirt for ethanol is kinda buggy and just constantly spits it out instead of waiting for a certain amount of accumulate like basically every other machine in the game (see things like fert synths), which is almost certainly going to be changed as it's inconsistent and annoying for precisely this reason of making sweepers work 24/7. Hardly requires any game abusing methods and the issue is due to an inconsistency in mechanics.

Speaking of shipping btw, lumber itself is also 'output' at 20C, so you can use your lumber shipping lines for coolant as well, and it's actually quite a lot due to all the mass and because genetic ooze has 3.470 SHC. And genetic ooze never really melts, so you could use this for some really high temp cooling of things that run very hot, although tbh at that stage typically you handle this via steam turbines anyways so it's mostly irrelevant. Also if you did this you would need to get clever with the cooling for the distiller room since you would have to keep that pretty hot too to avoid the lumber just giving off all the heat there. So this is more of a theoretical thing then really all that practical in most cases as it's fairly annoying to 'balance'.

Also I've already explained exactly how it's not about power. The amount of power is more or less in line with other methods of similar complexity, or even worse in some cases, it's all the other 'free' stuff produced combined.

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When looking at joules/kg wood, the ethanol approach is close to twice as efficient as wood burning generators even if you take the 240 W for ethanol production into account (I didn't save the numbers, but I did the calculations a few days ago). The problem is the chores. We need to figure out how to make the process running with minimal dupe interaction as well as not wasting power on transfer arms running all the time. Part of the problem is the small amount of polluted dirt, which the dupes picks up tiny amounts of all the time. Coal generators will (unmodded) not request less than 500 kg of coal, which presumably is to avoid dupes running with small amounts all the time. If the ethanol production did something similar, then the dupe time requirements would be more sane.

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3 hours ago, rafker said:

Tried yesterday Ethanol setup.

Seems pretty useless to me. You generate only 2k of energy and consume half of it for ethanol generation. wouldn't be bad, but you also need to get rid of tons of polluted dirt with delivery tasks (or automate it which requires another 300+- watt), and CO2 as well, which will take another 360 watt

there are many ways to optimize it, but I don't find it usefull w/o using game abusing methods

Dude, anything that creates free energy and surplus material is hardly useless. 

The 4 domesticated trees use less than half the polluted water the petroleum generator puts out. The ethanol distillers use less than half the power output and less than the full tree output. The petroleum generators use less than the full production of the 4 ethanol distillers. The ethanol is cold. And then there's the 500g/s of CO2. 

So, free power, free polluted water, free polluted dirt, and free CO2. Yeah, hardly useless. 

Polluted dirt an issue? Use horizontal airlock doors on a timer to drop it down to feed Pokeshells. 

Too much CO2 or not enough slicksters? Sieve the excess polluted water with the Pokeshell sand then run it through a carbon skinmer. 

Too much polluted water? No such thing. 

Frankly? I'm going to abuse the crap out of this infinite energy loop until they fix it. :D

To quote Scooter in Borderlands 2, this "thing is broke as hell."

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28 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

When looking at joules/kg wood, the ethanol approach is close to twice as efficient as wood burning generators even if you take the 240 W for ethanol production into account (I didn't save the numbers, but I did the calculations a few days ago). The problem is the chores. We need to figure out how to make the process running with minimal dupe interaction as well as not wasting power on transfer arms running all the time. Part of the problem is the small amount of polluted dirt, which the dupes picks up tiny amounts of all the time. Coal generators will (unmodded) not request less than 500 kg of coal, which presumably is to avoid dupes running with small amounts all the time. If the ethanol production did something similar, then the dupe time requirements would be more sane.

locked doors on timer or timers on sweepers solves the polluted dirt issue easy peesy

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