Is it just me or are bonbon trees crap?

[psusi]

960 watts to give them the 10,000 lux they need, and that only lets you ranch 2 spigot seals to produce 80 kg/cycle of ethanol?  While you burn 600 kg/cycle of ethanol to generate that much power?

 

[Tigin]

As space trees that can survive in vacuum, it should be clear where they were intended to grow. Nonetheless, using ceiling lights instead gives you optimal lux for only about 100W 

[Gurgel]

I have done them once with an overload of conventional lights packed into several layers on glass tiles. That does work. I also habe done nectar farms on the surface and planting via meteor. Takes a long time to get a well placed tree population, not worth it IMO.

As some other advanced things, this needs a bit of finesse. I get 2 trees at 100% on all branches for 138W, but not counting snow production. This can probably still be improved. Snow production is around 100W for two trees on top of that, so roughly 240W for two trees or 120W for one. Not really worth it for burning that ethanol, except maybe to catch peak-loads. But you also get tallow and seeds.

 

 

Edited April 22, 2025 by Gurgel

[Charletrom]

Nectar has other uses, for example as a source of sucrose. I’d imagine that it’s power-positive when turned into plastic and used in a sour gas boiler.

[Gurgel]

Nectar is also useful as an earlier game cooling fluid. Almost the same SHC as water, but much larger temperature range, in particular negative. 

[6Havok9]

Wild bonbon trees are pretty strong. I wild planted a ton of them on the superconductive asteroid, which has very strong light. Radiant gas pipes run inside the natural tiles. This allows to cool the tiles, thus the trees, to -74 °C. They will then produce Nectar at their body temperature.

That's very strong and free cooling for the entire asteroid, and once the coolant has done its job, water and sucrose.

If you use glass tiles you can plant multiple rows of them: natural glass tiles block artificial light, but let the majority of sunlight through.

[psusi]

16 hours ago, Tigin said:

As space trees that can survive in vacuum, it should be clear where they were intended to grow. Nonetheless, using ceiling lights instead gives you optimal lux for only about 100W 

The sun only shines on the surface part of the time, and ceiling lights can't generate 10,000 lux.

15 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I have done them once with an overload of conventional lights packed into several layers on glass tiles.

Ahh, I did not think of layers.

15 hours ago, Charletrom said:

Nectar has other uses, for example as a source of sucrose. I’d imagine that it’s power-positive when turned into plastic and used in a sour gas boiler.

I have never found sucrose to be useful.  96 kg per cycle of plastic ( from two bonbon trees ) is too little to bother with a sour gas boiler.  If you did, you'd only produce 64 kg per cycle of natural gas, or enough to run one natgas gen.

 

[Charletrom]

2 maximally producing trees can produce 160kg/cycle of nectar, which yield 123kg/cycle of sucrose. This is enough for 4 grubgrubs, which can tend quite a lot of plants and yield a fair bit of meat. On top of that you’ll get 120kg/cycle of mud, which yields enough dirt for ~10 sleet wheat plants. Sucrose can be really strong! Now we just need some recipes that use it

[NNOUS]

You can stack 2 tree with diamond tiles under 1 mercury light and use timmer sensor on 5s / 4.8s to make the mercury lamp to use less resources.

Doing this you reduced to 1/2 x 2 tree

Which you would 1.1 consistent lighten up mercury lamp for 4 tree. For Which you can sustain 8 seal, so it's 320kg /cycle ethanal for only ≈ 70w

Edited May 9, 2025 by NNOUS

[psusi]

On 5/9/2025 at 7:40 AM, NNOUS said:

You can stack 2 tree with diamond tiles under 1 mercury light and use timmer sensor on 5s / 4.8s to make the mercury lamp to use less resources.

Doing this you reduced to 1/2 x 2 tree

Which you would 1.1 consistent lighten up mercury lamp for 4 tree. For Which you can sustain 8 seal, so it's 320kg /cycle ethanal for only ≈ 70w

I discounted the mercury light at first because who would want to refine metal to waste on that, and it isn't going to last forever.  But now that I've made it to the surface of Ceres, I see that there is tons of already refined natural mercury tiles up there, and I forgot that the surface is not nearly as hostile as it was before spaced out, so the trees grow naturally up there just fine and can be harvested pretty easily with an oxygen mask.

[mitboy]

I feel like domesticated bonbon trees are bad because wild trees are too strong. 

[Slvrsrfr]

could nectar be used as a fluid barrier?

On 4/23/2025 at 3:24 AM, 6Havok9 said:

Wild bonbon trees are pretty strong. I wild planted a ton of them on the superconductive asteroid, which has very strong light. Radiant gas pipes run inside the natural tiles. This allows to cool the tiles, thus the trees, to -74 °C. They will then produce Nectar at their body temperature.

That's very strong and free cooling for the entire asteroid, and once the coolant has done its job, water and sucrose.

If you use glass tiles you can plant multiple rows of them: natural glass tiles block artificial light, but let the majority of sunlight through.

i really love that idea. Couldn't you extend like granite tiles as radiators? Like wiring I suppose, or would tempshift tiles do a better job of transporting the cooling effect. If it ended in touching some hunk of metal, It could then cool. Or put a tendril into a water/fluid tank.

Edited June 5, 2025 by Slvrsrfr

[Gurgel]

On 6/5/2025 at 8:52 PM, Slvrsrfr said:

could nectar be used as a fluid barrier?

Should not be a problem. 

[psusi]

On 5/28/2025 at 10:38 AM, mitboy said:

I feel like domesticated bonbon trees are bad because wild trees are too strong. 

I have been surprised at how effective just letting the wild ones grow on the surface is, though I still planted two domesticated ones just to speed things along a bit since there is so much snow available on this ice berg.  The one thing that still annoys me is that domestic ones don't hold more nectar; they still have to be emptied every 20 kg, but they get full fast.  They take a LOT of dup labor.

[Tigin]

15 minutes ago, psusi said:

I have been surprised at how effective just letting the wild ones grow on the surface is, though I still planted two domesticated ones just to speed things along a bit since there is so much snow available on this ice berg.  The one thing that still annoys me is that domestic ones don't hold more nectar; they still have to be emptied every 20 kg, but they get full fast.  They take a LOT of dup labor.

are you aware they have a Pipe Output to automagically drain them of their nectar?

[Bzhydack]

On 4/23/2025 at 12:24 PM, 6Havok9 said:

Wild bonbon trees are pretty strong. I wild planted a ton of them on the superconductive asteroid, which has very strong light. Radiant gas pipes run inside the natural tiles. This allows to cool the tiles, thus the trees, to -74 °C. They will then produce Nectar at their body temperature.

That's very strong and free cooling for the entire asteroid, and once the coolant has done its job, water and sucrose.

If you use glass tiles you can plant multiple rows of them: natural glass tiles block artificial light, but let the majority of sunlight through.

Thats what I used as well, except I did this on Ceres. And I foolishly destroyed pipes inside glass tiles, so I needet to run pipes, radiators and liquid drops on tiles to cool them  Once they are cooled then is possible to just mop liquid and cut off heat transfer, so you can simply stop thinking about all setup.

[psusi]

On 6/17/2025 at 6:18 PM, Tigin said:

are you aware they have a Pipe Output to automagically drain them of their nectar?

A *plant* has a pipe output?  OMFG.  I even built a bottle emptier to have dupes put it in the pipe and never noticed the output icon on the tree.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 6/5/2025 at 12:52 PM, Slvrsrfr said:

could nectar be used as a fluid barrier?

Nectar is a great fluid barrier, and a great coolant until you get super-coolant.

On 5/9/2025 at 5:40 AM, NNOUS said:

Which you would 1.1 consistent lighten up mercury lamp for 4 tree. For Which you can sustain 8 seal, so it's 320kg /cycle ethanal for only ≈ 70w

I don't really use them for ethanol production.  IMHO Ethanol is a waste product that I'll happily use, but it isn't ever a goal for power production.  If I need to farm a couple of bonbons for seals, I'll use those nice li'l light crystals to grow them.  Throw in a couple of ceiling lights and you're at about 80% growth rate, which is just fine for the seals. 

On 6/17/2025 at 4:18 PM, Tigin said:

I have been surprised at how effective just letting the wild ones grow on the surface is,

Yes, this.  Breach the surface quickly-ish, then level out the terrain as asteroids come in, until trees get planted.  Then hook 'em all up to a pipe and you've got nectar for coolant and plastics.

[Slvrsrfr]

getting or 'netting' a -70degree material is definitely a bonus! just dropping one tile or rock of it into a small mid temp pool or tank. I shiver...