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Getting power from ethanol actually does not worth it and my feedback on it


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2 hours ago, Xuhybrid said:

How do you all have so much energy to type 20+ paragraphs about this XD. Without an in-depth analysis it's obviously resource positive, but the scale to which you need to set it up exceeds reasonable expectations. Consider that half of your power is consumed creating the fuel itself. That would be enough to prove my statement. It depends on how much you value every other byproduct.

Fertilizer synth was pretty broken. You should at least require a multi step process like ethanol or sour gas. Perhaps it's not ethanol that's weak, but that petroleum and natural gas are strong. Would be nice to find a good middle ground.

 Eh, it's one part nerd, one part physicist/mathematician, and another part I recently changed ADHD meds, so I expect the hyperfocus to last another week or so :p  Beyond that?  I have a penchant for argument and I enjoy teaching/sharing information, so this hits multiple circles on the venn diagram.

 And... thanks to your comment I went and extended my spreadsheet... and you can, in fact, make Ethanol water positive... technically.  You just need more than 27.48 slicksters.at full output.  And with the proper layout to minimize the number of new pumps... by the time it came to equilibrium, if you can use one pump or less you also gain power output,too. *rimshot* 
 

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2 hours ago, Xuhybrid said:

You should at least require a multi step process like ethanol or sour gas.

Speaking of sour gas, perhaps, ethanol would be more interesting if it had similar steps to optimize it like crude oil does...

Like, when I think about crude oil: oil well -> oil refinery -> petro gen = straight up bad deal for me.
The deal is not that terrible when you remove the "oil well" step and process the oil you have, which is quite abundant on some maps.
The deal becomes more interesting when you look for ways to make petroleum without oil refinery, such as volcano.
And than even more interesting when you get access to late game resources such as super coolant and use it to make natural gas out of oil.
Than there is a large room to play around with different designs.

Ethanol on the other hand seems to be stuck at the level of oil well -> oil refinery -> petro gen.  (arbor trees -> ethanol distillery -> petro gen)

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14 minutes ago, storm6436 said:

 Eh, it's one part nerd, one part physicist/mathematician, and another part I recently changed ADHD meds, so I expect the hyperfocus to last another week or so :p  Beyond that?  I have a penchant for argument and I enjoy teaching/sharing information, so this hits multiple circles on the venn diagram.

 And... thanks to your comment I went and extended my spreadsheet... and you can, in fact, make Ethanol water positive... technically.  You just need more than 27.48 slicksters.at full output.  And with the proper layout to minimize the number of new pumps... by the time it came to equilibrium, if you can use one pump or less you also gain power output,too. *rimshot* 
 

Fair play. Do you spend any time watching Brothgar?

4 minutes ago, DarkMoge said:

Speaking of sour gas, perhaps, ethanol would be more interesting if it had similar steps to optimize it like crude oil does...

Like, when I think about crude oil: oil well -> oil refinery -> petro gen = straight up bad deal for me.
The deal is not that terrible when you remove the "oil well" step and process the oil you have, which is quite abundant on some maps.
The deal becomes more interesting when you look for ways to make petroleum without oil refinery, such as volcano.
And than even more interesting when you get access to late game resources such as super coolant and use it to make natural gas out of oil.
Than there is a large room to play around with different designs.

Ethanol on the other hand seems to be stuck at the level of oil well -> oil refinery -> petro gen.  (arbor trees -> ethanol distillery -> petro gen)

I'd say that's one of the better uses for the volcano because once you've done the state change you can still use the heat for a steam turbine. I agree that it's a similar tech level/process to ethanol when you're just doing petroleum.

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1 minute ago, Xuhybrid said:

Fair play. Do you spend any time watching Brothgar?

 Nah, I spend what little free time I have arguing with people on the internet or alternating between ONI, Factorio, or KSP. :D   That's actually closer to true than I want it to be.  I generally don't watch a lot of youtube vids other than music I let roll in the background when I'm writing.  If I'm looking up game vids it's because either I'm getting my butt kicked by a Dark Souls / Sekiro boss, or I'm otherwise completely out of ideas on how to do something in a game.  BTW, if you hate yourself, I highly recommend Sekiro.  It's the most fun you'll ever inflict on yourself. :p

 Also, those numbers weren't quite correct.  One of the hooks in my spreadsheet wasn't pointed where I thought it was, so the scrubber/sieve usage didn't update correctly... so, no, the pump count isn't 1 or less, it's 3.  Well, 3.74 anyway.. :P.

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I think Ethanol is on point power-wise, especially considering how simple of a production chain we are talking about here.

However it could be interesting if there was an alternative way of producing ethanol more efficiently but also more complex.

Like with oil. You got the easy inefficient way with machinery and the efficient but complex way by boiling it...

Since production of ethanol is based on a fermentation process and distillation one fun way could be to let the microbes in ONI pay a role for more effective distillation.

What if you let the germs in ONI (the ones from rotting food) be able to interact with lumber. You could have a process where you transport lumber to an area with super high concentration of germs for fermentation (converting in biomass) and then transport the biomass to to another area where you heat the biomass converting it into ethanol gas and co2 but at a far more effective rate than using distillers.

As a mechanic i think it would be fun to use the germs for something productive....

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On 23/08/2019 at 11:22 AM, Gus Smedstad said:

All this arguing about ethanol makes me want to start a new Arboria colony, just so I'm forced to explore ethanol. I'm 90% sure that the people complaining about it are Doing It Wrong, and undervaluing the byproducts, but I have no direct experience yet.

Foolish me, I decided to run a Terra colony as my first post-Launch colony. Just so I'd be able to deal with changes in a somewhat familiar environment. And there have been some meaningful ones, like not being able to use the water sieve to dump heat from a metal refinery early.

I'm compulsive enough that I feel the need to run this first colony all the way to the end game before starting a new one, but I keep being tempted by these talks of other environments.

Arboria and rime where the places i had the most fun also oasis but the sand biome becomes tedious as hell evetually.

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On 25/08/2019 at 8:39 AM, ruhrohraggy said:

Appreciate the detailed reply btw...

I think the bold parts mean the most.

The map type *should* dictate your strategy. But the argument didn't seem to reflect that to me. It's blasting a part of the game generally, not specifically. At least imo. *shrug*

As far as getting pure power from ethanol. I feel that would be correct. The surplus power isn't great. Afaik, it's the one good way to generate dirt and high morale food. I remember struggling with dirt prior to the launch upgrade for sure.

I also want to note, that I do not employ linear thinking with regards to strategy. I do not re-roll maps if I can't find a ph2O geyser for example. However, I WILL make use of a ph2O geyser if I find one....And launching a giant ethanol chain off of one has been quite fun.

With regards to seeking immediate use for resources...I'm...not sure that's planning ahead? I plan ahead by having the materials I need already on hand for when I get to whatever it is that needs them. In this case, I'll have a hefty supply of petroleum for when I hit petrol rockets. I don't have to wait on manufacturing it once I get to them. I simply pump it into the rocket and off they go. Now that I have petrol pretty much sorted, I'll be working on stockpiling o2 and hydrogen for hydrogen rockets.

The slickster farm took ~ 50 cycles to really get going. I started with 2 normal slicksters as well, because that's all my oil biome had for some reason...

Slicksters poop out eggs really fast. So if you either incubate them, or sweep the eggs out of the room immediately, you can get a giant slickster farm going rather quickly.

Also, if I decided to later on, I can setup the 24 domestic Arbor trees I currently have into farmed rooms, and double my production to 24 distillers...I probably wont...but I could.

 

Also could have saved you a bit of math on the p-dirt / oxygen part...That's 10 containers @ 16t each.

  Hide contents

image.thumb.png.14c4d325a3b1859efff427c10cc754a9.png

 

And yeah, we play differently. Might not be worth it to you...I'm currently having fun with it, and it's giving me things that I want.

It's just like solar. Lotta people don't think solar is worth it. I personally find solar awesome.

There's only one thing in this game that I feel truly has no point, and that's the ore scrubber, and I'm sure there's someone out there that can make an argument for even that.

 

I find solar so absurdly strong that i even stoped using it oo.

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On 8/25/2019 at 6:39 AM, ruhrohraggy said:

It's just like solar. Lotta people don't think solar is worth it. I personally find solar awesome.

There's only one thing in this game that I feel truly has no point, and that's the ore scrubber, and I'm sure there's someone out there that can make an argument for even that.

  Yeah, taken on its face solar is ridiculously good.  I think about the only hang-up folks could legitimately point to is the amount of mental effort, time, and materials involved in creating the proper configuration that ensures maximum sun exposure and sufficient battery buffering.  Between the miners (thermal issues mostly), and the automation, that's a fair amount for a first-timer to chew on. But... like ethanol and a few other systems, the bulk of that is perceived cost and a lot of folks don't seem to realize that you only pay that cost the first time.  Once you've figured it out, every map after that, you already know a solution so you can just hop right to it. 

A friend of mine asked how the math behind Quantum Mechanics actually worked, so after a short explanation on what I was writing out (Dirac notation doesn't look like math to 99% of people), I stepped through it to show the output.  Thing is, Dirac notation's entire purpose is to compact/hide the math so when you look at an equation, you can see what's going on without drowning in the machinery of the process... so knowing he'd had linear algebra, I then unpacked the Dirac notation into the matrices it represents and he was all, "Waaait a minute.  Even I can do that.  That's easy!"
 My response: "Everything's trivial if you already know how to do it." :D

So... it makes sense that folks might not value solar as highly if they don't realize such a big chunk of solar is a one-time cost... Seeing as  most people are just bad at economics, it's equally unsurprising.  Similarly, they might not enjoy the challenge of making an implementation that works and/or optimizing it afterwards nearly as much as I do... which is equally unsurprising.  I'm evidently a bit weird like that.

 As for the ore scrubber?  Want a laugh?  I actually do use them.  Insane right? I won't even disagree. 

I know I've pointed it out elsewhere, but I choose to artificially make things harder on myself when it comes to dealing with slimelung.  I know it's stupid/not-quite-rational, but it bugs me that Klei nerfed slimelung to irrelevancy.  I miss the panic I used to have if I spotted a cluster of green death floating anywhere outside my containment zones.  And even if slimelung was still full-lethal, using the scrubbers wasn't strictly necessary even then... but it was an option... and an option is not invalidated by the presence of other options. 

So, keeping in mind that I get more enjoyment out of pretending slimelung is still Green Death than the inconvenience I perceive doing so presents, the decision tree on scrubber usage has always come down to 2 considerations: time and resources.  The primary consideration has always been "Can I afford to wait?"  Using slush geyser output to systematically purge a swamp biome is almost entirely risk free.  Almost entirely because mistakes can be made.  Even then, the cold purge just requires patience and time. Barring a slush geyser, wheezeworts in H2 accomplishes the same thing, it just takes longer.  If I can afford to wait, then why waste the chlorine?  

Up until they added Frost Burgers, I didn't care if I wasted it or not.  I always had tons of it sitting around doing basically nothing but filling a gas reservoir and the amount I was using for actual useful stuff?  A minuscule fraction of the total amount on hand.   Even then, eh, Frost Burgers are mostly optional. I eventually hit a point where adding skills to my dupes doesn't make things any more efficient and I almost always have a few points of morale left over even then.

 So, I guess one could say that the ore scrubber's primary utility for me is personal amusement.  Not something I think anyone would rationally expect.

 Side note:  Am I the only person deeply satisfied by the mental image of atmo suit wearing dupes wading into the swamp biome with flamethrowers to cauterize the place of slimelung?  I mean, just the idea of dupes with flamethrowers makes me giggle, especially because you *KNOW* someone is going to set somebody else on fire accidentally sooner or later and God forbid somehow there's a pocket of NG you missed, presuming that flamethrowers -> implementation of fire/explosions.  

Actually, now that I think of it, implementing fire/explosions would also probably involve understanding that auto-ignition temperatures (ie. you don't need a spark or external fire, it just goes off) are based on pressure, which is precisely how the diesel engine does it's thing...best not overpressure your NG!

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 Uh, random question to anyone who has made it this far in the thread.  With a bit of work, I could potentially make the spreadsheet I'm using to track things a smidge more complete and user-friendly.  ATM, it's mostly useful for estimating total inputs and outputs for a given configuration, but it's not feature complete yet.  I'm planning on adding: the ability to specify dupe skill levels and have that effect tasks and a cooling loop estimator/calculator that allows you to specify your cooling medium, working fluid, target fluid, and figure out how much cooling you need to apply per cycle, and therefore how many tuners/regulators/kg from slush geysers... or if you specify how much cooling you have, it'll tell you how many radiant pipes you need to satisfy that cooling source. 

Specifically, "I'm using petrol through 12 conductive gold pipes to cool PH2O.  I expect the PH2O to start at temp X and the petrol to be at temp Y when I start this.  How many tuners do I need?" or "I'm cooling room temperature oxygen with hydrogen to create LOX using X regulators.  How much radiant duct work do I need for maximum efficiency on initial start?"

 I'm also thinking I might add a bit where you can figure out how many wheezeworts handle a given thermal load, so if you were wanting to build that LOX loop, it'd spit out how many WW you'd need to stick in with the regulators to ensure they don't overheat.

 Does this sound like something useful anyone else would want a copy of?

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1 hour ago, storm6436 said:

Actually, now that I think of it, implementing fire/explosions would also probably involve understanding that auto-ignition temperatures (ie. you don't need a spark or external fire, it just goes off) are based on pressure, which is precisely how the diesel engine does it's thing...best not overpressure your NG!

I believe that at some point, klei wanted to make explosions a things... at least, at some point in game, you could through some weird shenanigans cause an explosion that would kill dupes. It felt either like a bug or like unfinished feature that got scrapped... You just needed CO2 at high pressure + battery + dupe and than, by some weird magic, dupe would die, batery gone and all CO2 transformed into steam.

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Just now, DarkMoge said:

I believe that at some point, klei wanted to make explosions a things... at least, at some point in game, you could through some weird shenanigans cause an explosion that would kill dupes. It felt either like a bug or like unfinished feature that got scrapped... You just needed CO2 at high pressure + battery + dupe and than, by some weird magic, dupe would die, batery gone and all CO2 transformed into steam.

 Yeah, I had that happen to me a time or three.  Was actually lucky enough to have it happen on-screen once instead of finding out about it via notification.   Sat there blinking a few seconds going "WTF?!" and since it happened about 20 seconds into the cycle, I reloaded to see if it'd happen again so I could figure out what was actually causing it.   I'm not sure what in the buried calculations was the root cause other than I think something in the pressure or temp calculations spiked to infinity (or close enough as far as the calcs cared)   Also not sure it was entirely intentional, as when Klei really started in on gas system bugfixing, it stopped happening to me.

 You're right though.  Bug or not, the effects certainly would be useful as a guide on how to do explosions. :)

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On 8/30/2019 at 1:50 PM, storm6436 said:

8 trees
Input: 560 kg PH2O, 80 kg dirt, 120 d-s labor (3 d-s per branch * 5 branch/tree*8 trees)

Also, this is pretty much a dead discussion at this point. I did some testing for branch gathering speed... It seems like with 0 agriculture it takes 10 seconds to pick up 1 branch, walking from tree to tree adds about 5 more sec even though they are packed together. So, dupe, even with a maxed agriculture does not achieve numbers that low. At the range from 0 agri to 33 agri:
0 agri: 10*5*8+5*8=440 d-s labor.
15 agri: (10/(1+0.05*15)*5*8+5*8=268 d-s labor.
20 agri: (10/(1+0.05*20)*5*8+5*8=240 d-s labor.
33 agri: (10/(1+0.05*33)*5*8+5*8=191 d-s labor.

And yes, I did multiply 5 by 8, not by 7, because the dupe tends to move around the first and last tree.

I believe, in range 15-20 agri is the most likely skill level when you are starting the production.

So... A dedicated farmer can handle 90 domestic trees or iff we go wild trees... about 360 trees. With 600s work time... 3/4 of that with 450s.

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44 minutes ago, DarkMoge said:

Also, this is pretty much a dead discussion at this point. I did some testing for branch gathering speed... It seems like with 0 agriculture it takes 10 seconds to pick up 1 branch, walking from tree to tree adds about 5 more sec even though they are packed together. So, dupe, even with a maxed agriculture does not achieve numbers that low. At the range from 0 agri to 33 agri:
0 agri: 10*5*8+5*8=440 d-s labor.
15 agri: (10/(1+0.05*15)*5*8+5*8=268 d-s labor.
20 agri: (10/(1+0.05*20)*5*8+5*8=240 d-s labor.
33 agri: (10/(1+0.05*33)*5*8+5*8=191 d-s labor.

And yes, I did multiply 5 by 8, not by 7, because the dupe tends to move around the first and last tree.

I believe, in range 15-20 agri is the most likely skill level when you are starting the production.

So... A dedicated farmer can handle 90 domestic trees or iff we go wild trees... about 360 trees. With 600s work time... 3/4 of that with 450s.

Ah crap, you know what I did?  I had the game running on 3x the whole time and it skipped my mind. *triple facepalm* :p  That would explain why my labor estimations were all consistently off by a factor of 3.  Le *sigh*  So, 3 observed seconds * 9 actual.  My bad. :D  That moment when you're so used to playing on 3x that you subconsciously register it as "Normal speed" :D

Eh, at least I own up to my stupidity I guess.  I'll have to go update yon spreadsheet :p

 

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This was a very interesting read.  My first reaction was also that a net loss of water for some power and a ton of dirt seemed like crap, and then after reading this thread, my conclusion was that domestic arbor trees are balanced to be about the same as the water -> oil well -> refinery -> generator path, but you aren't limited by only having one or two oil wells on the map.  The sour gas route of course, makes the oil path a water positive feedback loop and totally awesome, but is much harder to set up than some wild arbor trees, which is also totally awesome because you get a ton of water and power for very little labor.

 

Two things I just realized that you guys didn't consider.  First, when comparing to a dupe running on a treadmill, I'm pretty sure that if you keep them in a room with low oxygen levels, they will gain some stress, but reduce oxygen consumption to only 33g/s.  And more importantly, you know all of that polluted dirt you get out of ethanol you were thinking of just feeding to sage hatches to get coal for some more power?  Just let it sublimate into oxygen instead.  Then even growing them domesticated, it costs you 72 kg water/cycle net, but gets you nearly 720 kg of oxygen!  Or about a dupes daily water requirement to provide enough oxygen for 12!  I'd much rather have that than 720 watts of extra coal power.  I have to get one of these things built ASAP.  Got one seed so far from the printer, so now I need the darn thing to offer me another pip ( turned the last one down since I wasn't sure I even wanted to do the trees and wasn't nearly ready to start ).

 

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3 hours ago, Carl_Jackson said:

tl;dr:

this ***** sucks, use the lumber gen, it may not be as efficient, but its cheap and gets the job done.

A lumber generator is completely impractical.  It produces far too much CO2, so you should never use lumber to make power directly.

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I use 4 automated ethanol distiller as an simple idle occupation.

The distiller have an endless tank + Petro Gen automated by 10 Smart batterys (1 min 5 max)

The wheels are set to Prio 1 and 99% Battery Charge. 

 

Whenever my dupes have nothing else to do they run to the wheels -> charge the battery and provide me with nice "free" energy. (Or an longterm Energy storage in form of Ethanol, based on your view point) , Wood is provided with wild Trees. P. Dirt feed to our Crab Friends (wild), sand is feed to hatches (wild), Co2 should be feed to slickster but im procrastinating on that point. (Reached 237 kg per tile in my distiler room *cough*). Heat could be recycled with an Steam generator but if you route the ethanol through the room it cools them enough (if the wood is "cool")

Ethanol is maybe not the best energy cycle but it is an nice way to save energy overproduction without idle lose.

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