Explain how to use ethanol to a complete noob

[minespatch]

I'm not exactly sure what to use ethanol for but the sides of Verdante have untouched ethanol. Is there a way to use it up?

[nakomaru]

Pump it into a petroleum generator!

[minespatch]

Just now, nakomaru said:

Pump it into a petroleum generator!

Thanks man. Will do that when I get back into the game and mop up ethanol on the sides,.

[hypoeffort]

If you can cool it its also used to grow nosh beans!

[minespatch]

1 minute ago, Shocker said:

If you can cool it its also used to grow nosh beans!

Oh sweet, I can make nosh beans with limber.

How do I cool it down?

[hypoeffort]

Aquatuner.   Have the aquatuner in some liquid in a hotzone and insulate all the pipe.  I've stuck mine right in the CoolSteamVent before.   Other people like to use petrol.

Only set it up if you got time cause i believe domesticated beans are still 24 cycles.  Maybe 12 with fertilizer.

[Tonyroid]

It's a trap. You use half of the power from it just to produce the ethanol, and the rest of it to skim the CO2, cool all the heat it produces, and operate a pump for the polluted water (from the petroleum generator). In fact, it tends to cost more power than it makes, and even then you can only pull it off by using a rather extensive set of equipment, including a steam turbine (so, you'll need plastic).

It's power positive if you don't do one of those things for some reason, like if you WANT a bunch of CO2 or polluted water or heat, or if you don't need to cool anything because you live in an ice block. Even so, the power benefit tends to be marginal. I think that's what ethanol is "for", and using it to generate power is a red herring distraction to make the game tricky.

Edit: Oh... but if an asteroid has ethanol just lying around, then that can definitely work. That could work very well for power.

[Nebbie]

2 hours ago, Tonyroid said:

It's a trap. You use half of the power from it just to produce the ethanol, and the rest of it to skim the CO2, cool all the heat it produces, and operate a pump for the polluted water (from the petroleum generator). In fact, it tends to cost more power than it makes, and even then you can only pull it off by using a rather extensive set of equipment, including a steam turbine (so, you'll need plastic).

It's power positive if you don't do one of those things for some reason, like if you WANT a bunch of CO2 or polluted water or heat, or if you don't need to cool anything because you live in an ice block. Even so, the power benefit tends to be marginal. I think that's what ethanol is "for", and using it to generate power is a red herring distraction to make the game tricky.

Edit: Oh... but if an asteroid has ethanol just lying around, then that can definitely work. That could work very well for power.

It's not a trap, it just appears that way without considering the full effects of it. Basically, the name of the game in ONI is to get water to electrolyze in SPOMs, because they turn hot water into cool oxygen (massive heat deletion from the electrolysis plus hydrogen generator) and power (hydrogen generators create more power than everything else needed to run them uses). In forest starts, water is unusually scarce, which throws a wrench into this.

Now consider that the ethanol power system's big byproduct is water... merge it and a SPOM together with an aquatuner that just keeps things at the minimum output temp of the petroleum generator for water and the SPOM's heat deletion actually overpowers the heat creation, while it all increases the amount of power produced.

Oh, and the system also produces polluted dirt, which can be turned into sand by pokeshells to prevent running out of filtration medium it needs, and composted into dirt to feed your mealwoods to feed your colony or dreckos. Did I mention it's overall power-positive and heat-negative while producing oxygen? Basically, ethanol power with wild trees is actually crazy if you can scale it up, Every 4kg/s of lumber (36 wild trees) you can generate represents the oxygen, food, cooling, and power to keep 6 dupes surviving very comfortably.

As for actually using a steam turbine, it's way overkill to cool the ethanol-related equipment. Yes, if you run an aquatuner full-time, then the steam turbine will only refund enough to get you into "this coal generator powers my heat deletion" territory, but the cooling potential is about equivalent to 50 domestic wheezeworts in hydrogen. That's probably enough to both cool your base and an iron volcano too (don't actually do this, you can set up a passive cooling system with iron volcanoes so they generate power pretty easily).

[Gus Smedstad]

1 hour ago, Tonyroid said:

It's a trap. You use half of the power from it just to produce the ethanol, and the rest of it to skim the CO2, cool all the heat it produces, and operate a pump for the polluted water (from the petroleum generator).

So, like real life then.

(Not knocking the original intent of ethanol additives in gasoline, just pointing out that it requires more energy to make the stuff that you get from burning it.)

I've yet to try an Arboria asteroid, so I don't know the balance first hand yet, but I concur that water is at the root of pretty much everything you need for long-term sustainability, and anything that produces lots of water as a byproduct is worthwhile unless you've uncovered several geyser sources (of whatever flavor, steam, slush, etc.).

Also agree that Steam Turbines are extremely effective at cooling. Once you've progressed past the requirements (steel and plastic mostly) heat removal should always be manageable at a relatively low energy cost.

[minespatch]

I might just go back to Terra and wait to did pip and tree farming with care packages. Seems a bit much for ethanol usage.

[Gus Smedstad]

I gather the idea is to force you to explore alternate solutions to food / power / oxygen production on Arborial asteroids, since the tried-and-true solutions from Terra-type asteroids don't work so well. Which sounds interesting to me. I fully intend to tackle these alternate economies at some point.

[Nebbie]

4 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I gather the idea is to force you to explore alternate solutions to food / power / oxygen production on Arborial asteroids, since the tried-and-true solutions from Terra-type asteroids don't work so well. Which sounds interesting to me. I fully intend to tackle these alternate economies at some point.

Sort of. Ultimately, oxyferns suck, rust deoxidization is interesting but not great (and you run out of rust eventually so your saltvines are screwed unless you rolled a chlorine geyser), and the heat deletion of the SPOM is the best early way to deal with the ethanol power heat on top of being the only oxygen-generation system that's power-positive instead of neutral or negative, so it's just the same Terra solutions but with this huge complicated core system added. Said core system is actually really cool if you can spam arbor trees, though, and really pushes the game towards plant-and-critter-based sustainability, as opposed to sucking up all the natural water until you can tame a geyser.

[wd_]

5 hours ago, Tonyroid said:

It's a trap. You use half of the power from it just to produce the ethanol, and the rest of it to skim the CO2, cool all the heat it produces, and operate a pump for the polluted water (from the petroleum generator). In fact, it tends to cost more power than it makes, and even then you can only pull it off by using a rather extensive set of equipment, including a steam turbine (so, you'll need plastic).

It's power positive if you don't do one of those things for some reason, like if you WANT a bunch of CO2 or polluted water or heat, or if you don't need to cool anything because you live in an ice block. Even so, the power benefit tends to be marginal. I think that's what ethanol is "for", and using it to generate power is a red herring distraction to make the game tricky.

Edit: Oh... but if an asteroid has ethanol just lying around, then that can definitely work. That could work very well for power.

I honestly don't understand why people think it's a trap. I love ethanol-based power. I have a bunch of wild Arbor trees which produce free lumber. If I need more - I can use water from the generator and dirt from distillers to irrigate and fertilize planted trees. For 1 generator you need 4 distillers which take 960W of power, and exactly 1 liquid pump can manage output from 13 generators, which is nothing power-wise. That means that adding 1 new generator gives me a little more than 1kW of power.

Why do people feel like they HAVE to skim CO2? Just throw it into space. It's free. Easy come easy go. PWater is not so hot, I actually use it to cool down the (aluminum/iron) generators. Lots of hot polluted dirt is not a problem, in most situations you can just ignore it for thousands of cycles.

I'm currently on cycle 280 with ethanol as the main source of power throughout the game and for me, it's my primary source of free water, power, and dirt (I use 4 generators right now).

[SamuraiJones]

I crunched the number a while back. Haven't reviewed em lately, but the infrastructure to support an ethanol generator was like 1400ish watts. So you are using more than 1/2 your power to process lumber and co2 and stuff, but you're getting a positive net power. And lots of good side products (assuming you're harvesting wild arbor).

 

Also, you can only hook the support infrastructure up and only have it run when you've a power surplus. I had that on my old base, and it just ran when the solar panels had everything powered. So you can look at it as a way to store power if you want.

[DemainaNyx]

3 hours ago, wd_ said:

Why do people feel like they HAVE to skim CO2? Just throw it into space. It's free.

An alternative to this, slicksters.  They don't need to be tamed, just existing.  I got a ton of eggs from the printer and had maybe 20 just sitting in the bottom of my base.  I got a lucky molten spawn and suddenly all that extra Co2 now became even more power without me doing anything.  I was happy with free crude oil but now I have free petrol as well.  Yeah, it's not a ton, but if I decide to ranch them I can get even more power out of this system to help build up for my petrol rocket or for more power.

[minespatch]

21 minutes ago, DemainaNyx said:

An alternative to this, slicksters.  They don't need to be tamed, just existing.  I got a ton of eggs from the printer and had maybe 20 just sitting in the bottom of my base.  I got a lucky molten spawn and suddenly all that extra Co2 now became even more power without me doing anything.  I was happy with free crude oil but now I have free petrol as well.  Yeah, it's not a ton, but if I decide to ranch them I can get even more power out of this system to help build up for my petrol rocket or for more power.

Oh boy, I shouldn't have cracked those slickster eggs on Verdante then.

[wd_]

7 hours ago, SamuraiJones said:

I crunched the number a while back. Haven't reviewed em lately, but the infrastructure to support an ethanol generator was like 1400ish watts.

 

Can you please elaborate what do you spend the power on if you're just venting your CO2 to space? As I see it, for 1 generator you need 960W for distillers, 18W for a pwater pump, and if you want to automate lumber shipping - some power for sweepers and loaders, which I will calculate more precisely later, but don't think will add up to more than 20-40W. So it's ~1000W for automated or 1022W for manual labor net power, which is more than nat gas or steam without even counting the infrastructure.

 

7 hours ago, SamuraiJones said:

Also, you can only hook the support infrastructure up and only have it run when you've a power surplus.

1

Again, on my current base, I went from 2 manual generators straight to my first ethanol gen, even before I had electrolyzer with some of its extra hydrogen power. My ethanol generators ARE my power surplus.

[blash365]

17 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Every 4kg/s of lumber (36 wild trees) you can generate represents the oxygen, food, cooling, and power to keep 6 dupes surviving very comfortably.

Could you please elaborate on these numbers?

In my book one domestic tree produces 300 lumber every 4,5 cycles. That would add up to 0,11111 kg/s per tree (300 lumber / 4,5 cycles / 600 seconds per cycle), but also require dirt and pW for fertilization which you did not account for.

36 wild trees would merely allow you to harvest 0,0277777 kg/s (300 lumber / 18 cycles / 600 seconds per cycle). Out of which you could hardly produce any resources for 6 dupes to comfortably live on.

 

Did you simply mix up your numbers or is there some magic trick to your arbor tree lifecycle?

Do i need to multiply the 300 lumber harvest with the number of branches (5/7?)?

 

 

My point is that i would really like to set up a nosh bean farm, but i dont see it work without adding an external power source.

I have tried powering my liquid generator with ethanol from two destillers. But apparently the generator is barely capable of powering the two destillers (there should be 50% net power gain) and the air pump. And since the nosh beans need to be cooled, i also need to power up an aquatuner and some sensors/shutdown vents.

In the end i am basically pumping all my ethanol into my generator, leaving me without ethanol to feed my plants. And i am burning to my massive lumber resources within seconds (already down 10k after just around 10-20 cycles).

 

Does anybody have a working nosh bean farm that he can share?

 

[Mongera]

1) Build a petroleum generator (unlocked by "fossil fuels" research)

2) build a pump submerged in the ethanol pool (don't forget to connect power wires)

3) build a pipe connecting the pump and the generator

4) enjoy a massive energy source.

[Promethien]

27 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Could you please elaborate on these numbers?

In my book one domestic tree produces 300 lumber every 4,5 cycles. That would add up to 0,11111 kg/s per tree (300 lumber / 4,5 cycles / 600 seconds per cycle), but also require dirt and pW for fertilization which you did not account for.

36 wild trees would merely allow you to harvest 0,0277777 kg/s (300 lumber / 18 cycles / 600 seconds per cycle). Out of which you could hardly produce any resources for 6 dupes to comfortably live on.

 

Did you simply mix up your numbers or is there some magic trick to your arbor tree lifecycle?

Do i need to multiply the 300 lumber harvest with the number of branches (5/7?)?

 

 

My point is that i would really like to set up a nosh bean farm, but i dont see it work without adding an external power source.

I have tried powering my liquid generator with ethanol from two destillers. But apparently the generator is barely capable of powering the two destillers (there should be 50% net power gain) and the air pump. And since the nosh beans need to be cooled, i also need to power up an aquatuner and some sensors/shutdown vents.

In the end i am basically pumping all my ethanol into my generator, leaving me without ethanol to feed my plants. And i am burning to my massive lumber resources within seconds (already down 10k after just around 10-20 cycles).

 

Does anybody have a working nosh bean farm that he can share?

 

The tree's output is multiplied by 5 because it grows 5 branches at once. 

[blash365]

3 hours ago, Promethien said:

The tree's output is multiplied by 5 because it grows 5 branches at once. 

That's a good info. But even then, i will not be able to self-sufficiently run 4 eth destillers.

I can either use 4 destillers/1 gen + 6 domestic trees, which will leave me -400kg lumber/cycle short.

Or i can use 8 trees, leaving me short on 110kg/cycle polluted water.

Is there something else to fill this gap?

[wd_]

5 hours ago, blash365 said:

Does anybody have a working nosh bean farm that he can share?

In my current base, I have 4 generators (ethanol is my main power source) and a farm of 26 nosh bean plants (18 distillers total), all cooled down and infinitely sustainable (not quite there yet though, need to plant like 7 more trees). It's also my only source of oxygen (through electrolyzer) and 70% of my water income.

For that setup I need 32 domestic trees. To make it self-sustainable, I can use 16 wild and 28 domestic trees (that makes my base produce more water than it uses).

I have all the math in a spreadsheet which I'm planning to post a bit later as I see a lot of confusion around ethanol power efficiency.

[SamuraiJones]

9 hours ago, wd_ said:

Can you please elaborate what do you spend the power on if you're just venting your CO2 to space?

This was a while ago, I don't have the numbers still. It wasn't vented to space, so some air pumps to move the co2 to the slicksters was in there, and it might've included an gas filter to separate the po2 from the dirt. 960W for 4 distillers sounds right though, which was the bulk of it. Then there was a little draw for sweepers and conveyors for the polluted dirt and pump/sieve for the pwater from the gen. It had all the little details included, and was more of a "worst case" scenario for the setup than an optimized solution.

But yes, a 2000W generator, with 1400W of parasitics (worst case scenario) is still a surplus.

[blash365]

46 minutes ago, wd_ said:

For that setup I need 32 domestic trees. To make it self-sustainable, I can use 16 wild and 28 domestic trees (that makes my base produce more water than it uses).

I put those numbers in my sheet and i end up with -160 kg/c pW and -133 kg/c lumber.

So it doesnt add up for me.:/

My calculation ends up with 25 domestic and 30 wild trees for your setup.

 

I am calculating with 333,33 kg/c lumber per domesticated tree (300*5/4,5)

[Nebbie]

7 hours ago, blash365 said:

Could you please elaborate on these numbers?

In my book one domestic tree produces 300 lumber every 4,5 cycles. That would add up to 0,11111 kg/s per tree (300 lumber / 4,5 cycles / 600 seconds per cycle), but also require dirt and pW for fertilization which you did not account for.

36 wild trees would merely allow you to harvest 0,0277777 kg/s (300 lumber / 18 cycles / 600 seconds per cycle). Out of which you could hardly produce any resources for 6 dupes to comfortably live on.

 

Did you simply mix up your numbers or is there some magic trick to your arbor tree lifecycle?

Do i need to multiply the 300 lumber harvest with the number of branches (5/7?)?

...

 

Hmm, I got mixed up in two ways looking at ONI DB (number of branches, wild vs. domestic), but the two actually counteract in such a way it should be less than 36 trees.

300kg every 10,800s from each wild branch, and 5 branches grow at once, thus 1500kg every 10,800s. This is 138.8̅g/s lumber. We need 4000g/s, thus we need about 29 wild trees (there'll be a slight extra at 29), which is some less than 36. Of course, you want extra for the pips to eat, since you need pips to plant wild trees, so it's quite possible you end up somewhere in the 30+ range anyways.

If using domestic trees, then it's 1500kg every 2700s, or 555.5̅g/s lumber, so we would need just over 7 trees. 8 would work with a rather large surplus, and probably satisfy pips too.