Should all microbes be "bad"?

[Slightquills]

Between compost bins, the "microbe" masher (are there even any microbes in a mushbar?), and the ore washer there could be opportunities to create a new system using these pre-existing buildings along with some new ones for the harvest of food spoilage germs, floral scent, slimelung, and zombie spores. Perhaps each of these could have different functions in an industrial process such as food or fertilizer production, or extracting small amounts of metal from dirt, mud, polluted water, and polluted dirt.


Even the humble algae becomes useless late game and it would be cool to have a higher level building that produces it and uses CO2 like those acrylics cylinders used for CO2 sponges on building roofs, or even have it create another industrial process.

[Sasza22]

On 9/17/2022 at 7:37 PM, Slightquills said:

are there even any microbes in a mushbar

Iirc the mushbars are produced with a set amount of food poisoning. It`s removed though if you make mush fries out of it.

I`m not sure what your suggestion is. You want to be able to harvest germs to use them for something? It can work probably. Maybe some sort of slime growing reactor that needs slimelung germs or food poisoning making compost more efficient. But how would we harvest those?

[degr]

It would be interesting feature if food poisoning germs with amount more then 1.000.000 will transform polluted water into clean water and dirt slime tiles

[Slightquills]

On 9/18/2022 at 6:35 PM, Sasza22 said:

Iirc the mushbars are produced with a set amount of food poisoning. It`s removed though if you make mush fries out of it.

I`m not sure what your suggestion is. You want to be able to harvest germs to use them for something? It can work probably. Maybe some sort of slime growing reactor that needs slimelung germs or food poisoning making compost more efficient. But how would we harvest those?

Perhaps there would be several ways of "harvesting" microbes. Perhaps dupes could gather them in petri dishes, but potentially also use them in the open environment in some cases. The ore washer could possibly be used to collect microbes, and once they are gathered perhaps they can be cultivated like any other crop. (Like in a lab using a scientist / lab technician dupe.)

Also, in game, germs are most likely microbes anyway (but the game also uses "germs" when referring to allergens as well as pathogens) The germ (microbe) overlay could be used to identify beneficial as well as harmful microbes for the use of the earlier mentioned processes, but by giving the microbes an industrial use would get more people interacting with the mechanic.

I don't feel like that means changing the compost pile, algae distiller, or ethenol distiller.

So, all the parts are there, and because most players tend to ignore the germ layer anyway it might be worth changing the mechanic slightly.

Once harvested they could be fed directly to sanishells.

Rather then dirt mush bars could be made of microbes or maybe the microbe masher could require the additional input of microbes.
-Nutritional yeast would be an example.

Microbes could be harvested for use in making medicines.
(Several people suggested making germs more dangerous, but would end player's games if the cures weren't easy to produce instead of being locked behind their own tech tree with unique buildings, and none of that effort contributes to the advancement of the colony AT ALL.)

Microbes could process radioactivity.
-Going back to radiotropic fungi on this one. Not sure what the end product would be on this one. Maybe slime?

Microbes could be cultivated for industrial purposes.
-Recently microbes are being bred to recover metals from e-waste (irl) for instance, but they could also be used to produce alcohol (also ethenol distiller kind of does this), and bioplastic.
-Also biogas digesters (but that has already been suggested so moving on.)

It's kind of a lot, but to scale with early to late game perhaps the more useful microbes for industry might be the more dangerous ones. This might encourage the attempt at engaging with the microbe layer by cultivating a sporchid farm, for instance, to harvest the zombie spores in the late game.
This would also make the microbe / medicine research useful enough at advancing the colony that players would be encouraged to engage with those mechanics.