Oxyfern vs Electolyzer

[fiziologus]

Little thoughts about game balance in beta.

Domestic (wild lot worse) oxyfern produce 31.2 g/s O2 and consume about 31.2 g/s water, electrolyzer – each work cycle comsume 1000 g water and produce 888 g O2.

Some math:

• 3 dups or 300 g/s O2. Oxyfern: 300/31.2=9.6 => 10 or 190 kg/cycle water. Electrolizer: 300*600/888=202.7 => 203 work cycles or 203 kg water. Delta: -13 kg (or about 7% compare with plant), plant win.
• 5 dups or 500 g/s. Oxyfern: 500/31.2~16 (, no matter only pure science), OK, 17 or 304-323 kg/cycle water. Electrolyzer: 500*600/888=337.8 => 338 work cycles or 338 kg water. Delta: -34/-15 kg (11%/4.6%), plant win.
• 8 dups or 800g/s. Oxyfern: 800/31.2=25.6 => 26 or 494 kg/cycle water. Electrolyzer: 800*600/888=540.5 => 541 work cycles. Delta: -47 kg (9.5%).
• in the cause of science, 10 and 12 dups. Oxyfern: 32-33 (hm, for each 5 dups need 16 plants?) and 39 plants or 608-627 and 741 kg water. Imaginary electrolyzer: 676 and 811 kg water. Delta: 68-49 (11% and 7.8%) and 70 (~9.5%).

Plant better, but no very big, max 11%. And for 11% need rummage all forest, manual deliver (while not hydroponic tiles and sweeper) water and dirt and supply CO2. May more better quick research electrolizer and build primitive (lizer only) O2 module and get O2 with (later) power? Anyway forest without external water supply is dead end.

[Darkin Coaled]

Thanks. Spares me the trouble of calculating this sometime later.

I will just add:

plant: -13kg or so of dirt per cycle per duplicant.

electrolyzer: +200/300W of spare power after you burn the hydrogen (assuming running near full capacity).

[Promethien]

The plants dispose of CO2 as well but you'll need more than them for any amount of dupe beyond the starter 3. Also they are gas neutral with dupes breathing so you need to produce more gas to maintain air pressure as you expand. Basically get electrolyzers early and use both.

[fiziologus]

27 minutes ago, Promethien said:

The plants dispose of CO2 as well but you'll need more than them for any amount of dupe beyond the starter 3. Also they are gas neutral with dupes breathing so you need to produce more gas to maintain air pressure as you expand. Basically get electrolyzers early and use both.

Scimmer remove CO2 more effective and without water consumption (Scimmer-Sieve enclose cycle).

Plant very good idea. But low effectiveness and high consumption (algae terrarium produce 40g/s (in darkness), waste only 10 g/s water and less burdensome to maintain) ruin all. Now its suitable (more or less) for pure green industry only.

[Nightinggale]

One benefit of OxyFerns is that they are free oxygen if they are wild. The problem with that approach is that you will need 4 times as many as mentioned in OP, or around 13 for each dupe. Ignoring the size issue, just getting enough seeds for a decent sized base (say 5 dupes) would be a problem.

Another problem is that it doesn't produce oxygen out of nothing. Dupes breath out CO2, which then turns back to oxygen, then CO2 etc. This means they will maintain the pressure, but not increase it. As a result, when you dig and your oxygen spread across more cells, your pressure will drop and the OxyFerns won't compensate.

(Wild) OxyFerns can be used to reduce the need for an other oxygen sources and as such stretch how long you can run on algae or similar, but right now I find it a little hard to view them as any viable primary source of oxygen regardless of how extreme people will grow them.

[Coolthulhu]

Don't forget fern's output temperature.

Also, your math assumes all electrolyzer or all fern. This is not optimal. Assuming we can continuously subdivide production and consumption:

• Electrolyzer wastes 11% of input water on hydrogen (let's assume it only compensates for energy cost here)
• Assuming we have enough domestic ferns to produce O2 for one dupe, we can wildplant them for 1/4 of a dupe (25 g/s) instead
• We feed electrolyzer 112.5 water g/s, get 100 oxygen g/s + from ferns, 25 oxygen g/s

So in total, we get 12.5 oxygen "for free", above "all domestic fern" option. The optimal option is therefore to always wildplant all your ferns, then make up the missing oxygen from optimal non-fern sources.

[Yunru]

Now how do they compare to a MOGOM and their 90% conversion rate?

[CannedSmeef]

I really appreciate Klei's addition of new oxygen sources.  Like I was in shock looking at the Rust Deoxydizer, "The heck is--oh.  OH!"  It's so cool to have something other than just crunch algae or water.

My only problem now is that the algae terrarium is completely irrelevant.  Yeah, forest starts don't have algae anyway.  But why would I consume all that algae + hassle of water consumption/filtration/heat generation/extra labor (although this shouldn't be a big deal anymore with sieve changes) when I can just cultivate the plants like a crop?  It's essentially just a worse version of the deoxydizer.  It's more efficient for algae but they're a complete pain.  In my opinion in exchange for the hassle they should just convert the terrarium into an algae generator.  Requires like 200kg algae to build and will continuously produce algae and circulate air (consume CO2/release O2) as long as it is pampered with fresh water and light (and maybe some extra ingredient for balance).  It wouldn't do a whole lot of either of these but hey, we'd have a semi-renewable source of algae.

[bobucles]

3 minutes ago, CannedSmeef said:

My only problem now is that the algae terrarium is completely irrelevant

The terrarium isn't valuable for its oxygen generation, it's valuable for generating a ridiculous number of huge polluted water bottles. Huge pwater bottles will decay into large amounts of pO2, effectively creating a second oxygen source. It's also a nice way to build up ceramic clay for the mid game, but the trick is to leave the water bottles alone.

The terrarium also seems to destroy far more carbon dioxide than the numbers suggest. I think some mass conversion is happening, where a random CO2 tile transmutes into oxygen which accelerates the process. Otherwise the 0.3g/s (1/6 of a duplicant's output) wouldn't put a dent in CO2.

 

[Nightinggale]

If you want to produce oxygen from algae, then algae terrariums will look attractive. Using an oxygen diffuser as baseline, algae terrarium will produce 47% more oxygen per kg algae used. Add light and it becomes 61% more.

There are threads on how to feed them water without dupe interaction and you can feed them with a transfer arm. This means dupe interaction is reduced to once every 1240 seconds, or once every 2 cycles providing they run continuously. If you convert slime to algae on an industrial scale and have a lot of slime, then this is a viable option.

The piped algae terrarium mod allows a completely dupe free operation, but even without mods it shouldn't be hard to find use for algae terrariums.... on some maps. They are kind of like the dust approach in the sense that they aren't well suited for all maps.

[Coolthulhu]

36 minutes ago, CannedSmeef said:

My only problem now is that the algae terrarium is completely irrelevant.

It was completely irrelevant as main oxygen source and CO2 remover for months if not years, the new update changed almost nothing.

They're useful as an one-shot source of oxygen in distant area. You build one terrarium, load it, disable delivery, then dupes sniff it when their job is interrupted by lack of breath.

They could use a massive buff, but so could domestic oxyferns and rust deoxydizers.

[fiziologus]

On 7/8/2019 at 11:34 PM, Coolthulhu said:

It was completely irrelevant as main oxygen source

What?

In no forest world (enough algae and slime) one full-load module may support 7-8 dups with almost full automation (manual only piping and empty bottles). Terrariums is good O2 source for living space of base (30C output temperature very easy cool).