Some suggestions for forest biome starts

[dfountain62]

There are two main suggestions I want to make here: 

1. Wood burners need to produce 400W as they are currently not worth the CO2 byproduct, heat, and wood gathering time. Taking into account the ~80W needed for supporting infrastructure this is approx a 50% increase. I get that the wood is free and literally infinite so one must be careful when balancing this. However the need for ~9 undomesticated arbor trees, limited water for sieving CO2-skimmer output, and temperature fundamentally caps wood-burners ability to scale. Even setting up a dedicated farm, it takes huge amounts of land to generate even ~650W (around 25 trees). Most importantly the opportunity cost of those trees (ethanol production) will eventually exceed a wood burner's power even at 400W (net power of 960W but uncontrolled heat).
2. Sage hatches should be the default hatch type in forest biome starts and there should be more than 1. The arbor tree petroleum systems (ATP systems; 4 ethanol distillers + petrol + carbon skimmers + water sieve) since the recent version (LU-355817) produce about 1300 net power with engies tune up and a self-cooling loop. However the amount of polluted dirt an ATP system produces is obscene at around 1.4kg/s for a single ATP system at full capacity. Given the oxygen limits on forest maps and the random nature of generating new hatch types having sage hatches by default would be a great help with reducing the grind for setting up this system. This also gives players an alternative to wood burning should they choose to ranch hatches instead of farming arbor trees.

Overall these changes are meant to improve the power production available in forest biome starts. Forest starts tend to be naturally constrained in terms of oxygen (via oxyfern, limited fresh water, and difficult to obtain algae) and thus max dupes so to be constrained in power as well is annoying. It might just be me but as it is now I feel like forest biome starts end up having the simultaneous problem of needing more energy from the manual generator (because wood burners suck) and having less dupes because oxyfern is so limited. Increasing power production should alleviate this a bit in the early game and at least allow for building some extra O2 production buildings like an algae distiller + oxygen diffuser or desalinator + rust deoxydizer without needing a dupe to run on a generator every waking minute. 

[Sasza22]

I don`t think hatches should be a part of the forest biome at all. Instead there should be a small copper biome spawning with some hatches or a PoI with hatches inside. Then it would be more reasonable for sage hatches to eat lumber.

Wood burners could be buffed. Being worse than a manual generator shouldn`t be a thing even if it`s main purpose is CO2 generation.

[Nebbie]

On 7/29/2019 at 10:28 AM, Sasza22 said:

I don`t think hatches should be a part of the forest biome at all. Instead there should be a small copper biome spawning with some hatches or a PoI with hatches inside. Then it would be more reasonable for sage hatches to eat lumber.

Wood burners could be buffed. Being worse than a manual generator shouldn`t be a thing even if it`s main purpose is CO2 generation.

Sage hatch ranching is a pretty big deal for the midgame when power starts to become more of a problem. A small sandstone biome would just mess with the maps.