Those extra printables...

[GuyPerfect]

I will admit that I'm not super-big-brain knowledgeable about all the intricate nuances of the Bionic Duplicants, but there's something that has been nagging at me, and I feel like time is of the essence to say something about it before it's really super set in stone. It's about those freebies that come out of the Printing Pod every time you print a Bionic Duplicant:

• 5× Metal Power Bank
• 1× Gear Balm

This feels bad to me. I don't think having them come out of the Printing Pod for each and every Bionic Duplicant is the right answer to the problem. However, I do have an answer to the problem that I would like to suggest instead.

First, consider the problem that this is addressing. Foundationally, Power Banks and lubrication are equivalent to food for Bionic Duplicants, from a game mechanics point of view. They're not grown and harvested, nor reared and slaughtered, nor dug up and cooked: they are manufactured. For standard Duplicants, there are Nutrient Bars (or Pemmicans) provided at the outset and every starting biome has non-perishable, non-renewable plants laying around waiting to be collected. None of this helps Bionic Duplicants since they don't eat food, however, so something is needed to help them get up and running. This is, I expect, the motivation behind printing some Metal Power Banks and Gear Balm alongside every Bionic Duplicant.

When starting a game with one or more Bionic Duplicants, the player is granted free access to Crafting Table without researching it. This is a necessity for keeping Bionic Duplicants operational, considering the other, more research-intensive ways to power them. Given the time-sensitive nature of Power Bank production, I think it's totally reasonable to give immediate access to the building. It could be stated that every Bionic Duplicant is printed with built-in knowledge for building Crafting Table, as a design consideration.

Frosty Planet Pack has some parallels here. Each game that starts on one of the Cereses comes with a free Wood Pile building that spawns full of logs, and a nearby research care package that can be activated to gain access to Ice Liquifier among other things. These are both rather niche and situational, but the situation is niche and calls for it. I think these are serviceable answers to the temperature problem. Ice Liquifier could perhaps have been arranged into the research tree in a way that doesn't require Super Computer use, but I think the research care package is a nice touch. Ceres starts place an emphasis on Wood as a critical resource in much the same way that Bionic Duplicant starts rely on Power Banks, so starting with a free pile to get you up and running is appropriate. The main difference, of course, is that eventually you no longer need to use Wood, yet Power Banks are forever going to matter.

So here's what I propose could be done about it:

• Ration Box - When starting with standard Duplicants, a Ration Box (Sedimentary Rock) is provided containing 16,000 kcal of Nutrient Bars (or Pemmicans on Ceres), just to get you going. You don't usually need to eat the Nutrient Bars, since there tend to be plentiful Muckroots, Hexalent Fruits, Swamp Chard Hearts and Sherberries to be found. It's a welcome courtesy that allows the player to take some time and decide what they want to do first, so that you don't always have to make a mad dash for farm infrastructure before anything else. When starting with (exclusively) Bionic Duplicants, on the other hand, Nutrient Bar is pointless. I would change the setup so the number of calories in the Ration Box scales with the number of starting standard Duplicants: 5,333 kcal (=16,000/3 kcal) per each standard Duplicant in the starting lineup. If there are no standard Duplicants, the Ration Box is absent entirely.
• Storage Bin - In contrast to the Ration Box, I would spawn in a Storage Bin (Iron Ore) when starting Bionic Duplicants are in play. The contents would likewise scale with the number of Bionic Duplicants: 5 Metal Power Banks and 1 Gear Balm per Bionic Duplicant in the starting lineup.
• Printing Pod - With the introduction of the starting Storage Bin, I would no longer print Metal Power Banks or Gear Balm with each printed Bionic Duplicant. Only the starting contents of the Storage Bin would be made available for free.
• Muckroot et. al. - The dig-up-able free food items will continue to exist in the world whether or not any standard Duplicants are present to eat them. I think it makes sense for Bionic Duplicants to be able to make use of them, through a sort of biological Power Bank. It wouldn't provide a full 120 kJ, but a Muckroot Bank, Swamp Chard Bank, etc. would be a meaningful way for Bionic Duplicants to dig up supplementary power exactly the way standard Duplciants can dig up supplementary food. This makes it so Bionic Duplicants don't have to make a mad rush for Metal Power Bank infrastructure before anything else.

Somethin' like this: