achievement How do you think about burning wood ?

[Lilalaunekuh]

It´s really bugging me to see burning wood not counted a sustainable energy source.

 

Why is burning hydrogen ok, but burning wood not?

 

 

[beowulf2010]

I think the main issue is some people refuse to ranch which then limits the availability of phosphorite for domesticated trees. 

[BaloneyOs]

It has the lowest mass to energy efficiency of any power source that burns solids. Early game it's a strain on labor and gas pressure if used long term. Once you can efficiently run on ethanol power wood burning becomes mostly obsoleted.

I'm not sure what its niche is either because it doesn't seem to be very good at any stage of the game. Maybe if you have an oil biome immediately beneath your forest start  which might be possible with irregular oil or miscalculated pod location. Even then you'd eventually want to switch to ethanol power.

 

EDIT: I retract the ethanol part because it's really not that simple. It's possible to imagine situations where burning wood or using both burner and ethanol is more ideal.

[beowulf2010]

1 minute ago, BaloneyOs said:

It has the lowest mass to energy efficiency of any power source that burns solids. Early game it's a strain on labor and gas pressure if used long term. Once you can efficiently run on ethanol power wood burning becomes mostly obsoleted.

It's still less labor than manual generators so it has a similar niche as coal in the early game. Mid-game? You're exactly right. You need to transition to ethanol I do this around the same time I start with sweepers and conveyors. 

[Lilalaunekuh]

29 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

I think the main issue is some people refuse to ranch which then limits the availability of phosphorite for domesticated trees. 

Sorry, but I don´t get your point here regarding the renewability of wood. (Considering you can still grow wild trees.)

But my thread seems to evolve more in a discussion about the use(fullness) of burning wood.

 

 

Just now, beowulf2010 said:

It's still less labor than manual generators so it has a similar niche as coal in the early game. Mid-game?

Playing on rime, I really fell in love with the wood generator (not really with the current ethanol production like most of us here did.)

(Artificially-)wild trees in a row are a real work efficient way to generate power.

Didn´t test it, but do trees auto-harvest after the usual 4 cycles?

(I am thinking of a fully automated farm/generator setup without duplicant access.)

[BaloneyOs]

13 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

It's still less labor than manual generators so it has a similar niche as coal in the early game. Mid-game? You're exactly right. You need to transition to ethanol I do this around the same time I start with sweepers and conveyors. 

You more or less have to run carbon skimmers with them early game though. One skimmer supports something like 1.7 wood burners so I think you need about 70W of skimmer power per wood burner not to mention you would be planning around polluting more water as well.

After considering some things I retract my statement about ethanol making wood burning obsolete. Not gonna math this out too hard but 4 ethanol distillers cost 960W and 18k DTU/s while how you dispose of the CO2 is a greater variable at that stage of the game. Also depending on map generation, burning wood could become a better choice for many reasons. Also if you have a trackstar bodybuiler dupe they can offset much the mass to energy inefficiency.

 

8 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Didn´t test it, but do trees auto-harvest after the usual 4 cycles?

Feels like now trees auto harvest at a pace much slower than in 4 cycles. The nerf is real but seems ok for a powerful multipurpose plant.

[Lilalaunekuh]

7 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

You more or less have to run carbon skimmers with them early game though. One skimmer supports something like 1.7 wood burners so I think you need about 70W of skimmer power per wood burner not to mention you would be planning around polluting more water as well.

My last tests were mostly done on rime with the at least 40°C outputting watersieve.

=> Both the carbon skimmer and the water sieve were reheating the water, so it was an awesome heating method.

 

Right now, there is less to gain from running a carbon skimmer, since there is less need to kick start an early dirt production considering (artificially-)wild plants.

=> Is his enough to make slickster farming become the new meta again ?^^

 

13 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

Feels like now trees auto harvest at a pace much slower than in 4 cycles.

Do trees maybe auto-harvest like "normal" plants 4 cycles after beeing fully grown ?

(Would take longer till all branches are considered fully grown ...)

But the duration isn´t really important if trees auto-harvest they are an awesome way to generate power in the midgame when you got access to auto-sweepers and conveyor systems.

[suicide commando]

Personally, the only use I can see for the wood burner is to supply slicksters with CO2. As a power source it's less effective than a manual generator in terms of power output, and in the early game where the reduction in labor from using a wood burner vs manual generator would come in handy, the CO2 production is just too much to properly deal with. And any automation and machinery used to deal with something like that would require more power than the measily 300W those things put out.

 

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Sorry, but I don´t get your point here regarding the renewability of wood. (Considering you can still grow wild trees.)

Didn´t test it, but do trees auto-harvest after the usual 4 cycles?

I only mentioned the phosphorite issue because I've seen people (mostly about Reed fiber but I have seen it about phosphorite too) want another option to get it but refuse to ranch dreckos thus rendering something unrenewable and/or limited in their mind. I generally skip wild trees since I know I'm going to be putting them in irrigation plots for the ethanol step anyway. 

As for trees auto harvesting, yes they do. But if I remember the patch notes from a couple patches back correctly, it takes longer and has a reduced mass. I'll edit this if I can find it on my phone. 

OK. I was wrong about the reduced mass. Here's the link to the update notes. Third bullet point. 

 

[Nightinggale]

49 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

After considering some things I retract my statement about ethanol making wood burning obsolete. Not gonna math this out too hard but 4 ethanol distillers cost 960W and 18k DTU/s while how you dispose of the CO2 is a greater variable at that stage of the game. Also depending on map generation, burning wood could become a better choice for many reasons. Also if you have a trackstar bodybuiler dupe they can offset much the mass to energy inefficiency.

Numbers for what is produced/consumed per second for producing 1 kW:

Wood burning: 5.7 kg wood, 573 g CO2 and 30 kDTUs

Ethanol: 2.9 kg wood and 417 g CO2 and 19 kDTUs

The ethanol approach is clear winner even before we add the polluted dirt.

[BaloneyOs]

8 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

Numbers for what is produced/consumed per second for producing 1 kW:

Wood burning: 5.7 kg wood, 573 g CO2 and 30 kDTUs

Ethanol: 2.9 kg wood and 417 g CO2 and 19 kDTUs

The ethanol approach is clear winner even before we add the polluted dirt.

PH2O from petrol gen to top it off. In this case the only universal advantage of wood is significantly lower tech requirements and setup.

Guess we'll want wood burning for that really cold and water rich map that has no coal . Only other advantage I can think of is that needing to growing 2x trees means more logs can be used as heatsinks in the late game comparison.

[Xuhybrid]

I found it a good replacement for manual generators, using wild trees. It helps free up dupes in the early game. You'd definitely want to switch it up to Ethanol later though and maybe even domestic plants.

[Nebbie]

5 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

I think the main issue is some people refuse to ranch which then limits the availability of phosphorite for domesticated trees. 

Part of why I think fertilization should be an optional extra step to reach current production levels, would help people ease into things. Although it would be really nice if the single-use traps weren't plastic...

[qda]

10 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

Numbers for what is produced/consumed per second for producing 1 kW:

Wood burning: 5.7 kg wood, 573 g CO2 and 30 kDTUs

Ethanol: 2.9 kg wood and 417 g CO2 and 19 kDTUs

OCD time : For producing 1kW kJ as well as kDTUs

Sorry !

[Nightinggale]

1 hour ago, qda said:

OCD time : For producing 1kW kJ as well as kDTUs

11 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

Numbers for what is produced/consumed per second for producing 1 kW:

The underlined text means each unit should add /s, hence kW is correct. My goal was to highlight the numbers and I viewed adding /s to each unit would add noise to hide the numbers, which is why I added /s as text in the "header".

1 hour ago, qda said:

Sorry !

You should be. You claimed flawless me to have written a flawed post

J/K. There are people who mix up kJ and kW and it's correct to call out the difference when it happens because they aren't the same. While I did it correctly, I might not have made that part very clear because focus was intentionally on the numbers, not the units. In fact the units could be anything as long as both lines used the same units.

[DreamApart]

I consider burning wood an efficient way to produce CO2.

[Lilalaunekuh]

5 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

J/K. There are people who mix up kJ and kW and it's correct to call out the difference when it happens because they aren't the same.

Just for some fun and to confuse even more:

Joule as a unit was patched out of the game xD

[Nightinggale]

3 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Joule as a unit was patched out of the game xD

Batteries still use kJ for displaying stored energy. Yes the thermal energy is now in DTU instead of joules, but that change was because one thermal joule is different from a battery joule, hence confusing. Since this is about power production, using joules is correct.

[fiziologus]

34 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

Batteries still use kJ for displaying stored energy. Yes the thermal energy is now in DTU instead of joules, but that change was because one thermal joule is different from a battery joule, hence confusing.

Well, not. Thermal and battery joules is same, but  some peoples (censure replace) didn't see the difference between heat and power, and mix one with other. Klei team chose easy way and begin measure heat in Dup Termal Units instead joules.

Little off-topic.

[qda]

1 hour ago, Nightinggale said:

The underlined text means each unit should add /s, hence kW is correct.

You are quite right sir !

[Lurve]

Wood and wood-derived ethanol should definitely qualify as sustainable.  It literally grows on trees.