Lura Plants and Amber

[blakemw]

Lura seems to be surprisingly good, if niche, some observations and thoughts.

• They don't seem to gain any advantage from being Wild, as they have no fertilizer requirement being wild just makes them grow slower.
• They seem most easily fed with Mimika butterflies, which costs 50 kg dirt to make 264 kg amber. Gnits would be free, but the cost of butterflies is totally trivial, and also accelerate the growth via pollination buff.
• 264 amber turns into 211 Resin + 53 fossil via melting, or 132 resin + 66 fossil + 66 sand via pulverizing.
• If you want to go the melting route it's totally trivial to do manually as Amber can be used to make Tempshift Plates and so using a "hot ceiling" or "hot diagonal corner bracketed by insulated tiles", it's easy to have setups where the Tempshift plate thermally contacts with the hot tile and melts, but the resulting liquid isn't in thermal contact with the hot tiles and drips or flows away for collection, so for instance magma heat is perfectly usable but there are plenty of other options like heating a liquid to ~100 C with Tepidizer or Aquatuner.
• The resin seems to be mostly useful for making Plastic with the Polymer Press, and it's an extremely accessible route to plastic as it doesn't require accessing the oil biome, which often requires atmosuits.
• The only other use for Resin seems to be thermal decomposition into Coal and Steam. If I'm not mistaken this is the main way to get renewable coal in a "purist" Prehistoric map. Traditionally thermal decomposition of liquid is tricky to do without mass deletion, though if this bug still exists, valving to 1 kg/s and heating it in pipes should be lossless.
• You also get Fossil which may be further converted to sand and lime (fairly poor lime source, though at low cost).

Overall then, it seems to be mainly for getting quick plastic with low barriers to entry relative to accessing the oil biome, though also with the option of being a "water and sand out of thin air" resource fountain alternative to things like wild arbor trees. As they can produce both water and filtration medium they should be usable for self-contained "Duplicant Terrariums".

Edited May 29, 2025 by blakemw

[gigamoi]

11 hours ago, blakemw said:

As they can produce both water and filtration medium they should be usable for self-contained "Duplicant Terrariums".

In such a scenario, the duplicant can even serve as the nutrient source for the gnits, closing the loop. Neat!

 

Jokes aside, while abundantly generated on the map, I find dirt to not be that easy to produce in large quantity requiring a lot of space, dupe time or other resources (and I deem this to be a nice balancing point). I'd rather ranch shine bugs if I can. They really sip phosphorite and each breeder you ranch should yield you about 180kg/cycle worth of amber with current numbers.

[matteoj8]

I have been really struggling with creating melting automation for the amber and not heating it too much to where it creates steam...right now I'm using a conveyer loop that goes through some metal tiles, but my metal tiles are heated with crude oil pumped through a refinery, so can't really keep a consistent temp. Should I maybe focus on controlling the temperature of the liquid that is heating the metal tiles? Or scrap it and use a different design for heating the amber?

[CraziFuzzy]

2 hours ago, matteoj8 said:

I have been really struggling with creating melting automation for the amber and not heating it too much to where it creates steam...right now I'm using a conveyer loop that goes through some metal tiles, but my metal tiles are heated with crude oil pumped through a refinery, so can't really keep a consistent temp. Should I maybe focus on controlling the temperature of the liquid that is heating the metal tiles? Or scrap it and use a different design for heating the amber?

Absolutely control the heat source.  It's easy enough with a liquid reservoir, a pipe temp sensor, and a liquid shutoff, so that you can make sure the heat source liquid will absolutely never be hotter than what would cause the amber to boil, and be just below that temp, such that it still successfully melts it down as desired.

[blakemw]

3 hours ago, matteoj8 said:

I have been really struggling with creating melting automation for the amber and not heating it too much to where it creates steam...right now I'm using a conveyer loop that goes through some metal tiles, but my metal tiles are heated with crude oil pumped through a refinery, so can't really keep a consistent temp. Should I maybe focus on controlling the temperature of the liquid that is heating the metal tiles? Or scrap it and use a different design for heating the amber?

Personally I'd just use a tricked Tepidizer in a substantial body of liquid, as Resin only boils at 125 C. But using substantial liquid tiles (e.g. 1000 kg polluted water) would also regulate temperature very well for a Metal Refinery heat source.

[matteoj8]

2 hours ago, CraziFuzzy said:

Absolutely control the heat source.  It's easy enough with a liquid reservoir, a pipe temp sensor, and a liquid shutoff, so that you can make sure the heat source liquid will absolutely never be hotter than what would cause the amber to boil, and be just below that temp, such that it still successfully melts it down as desired.

I'm still pretty new, but if I was using a refinery with crude oil for coolant, what would be the easiest way to cool it down to the target temp? Just use a aquatuner with the oil?

[Farsight]

I would think that once it gets too hot, you use it.

Either add a tiny bit more heat to boil it into petroleum, or use the oil directly.

And replace it with new cool oil for the refinery.

[SkunkMaster]

Sadly they've changed Resin to now turn into refined carbon rather than coal, and there is as such no vanilla way to make coal on the dino planet anymore.

"Resin now transitions to steam + refined carbon instead of steam + coal."

[gigamoi]

Precise temperature control is better achieved by separating your heat source from your boiling room and using an unpowered mechanized airlock as a heat injector between the two. If the heat injector reaction time is insufficient, add heat mass to the boiling room as to give the injector more time. If that's not enough or not possible, give power to the mechanized airlock.

 

Be careful not to have the airlock close and open too often as they can glitch and create/delete heat.

See for more info on that glitch: 

 

[blakemw]

6 hours ago, gigamoi said:

Precise temperature control is better achieved by separating your heat source from your boiling room and using an unpowered mechanized airlock as a heat injector between the two.

Honestly this mechanical airlock sandwich is WAY overused.

If you already have your heat source in a liquid pipe or gas pipe, just regulate the flow of the fluid using either a Shutoff (less precise) or Meter Valve controlled via the reset port (more precise because you can set the amount to be smaller than a full packet), this will result in much more precise temperature control than a mechanical airlock sandwich and has fewer moving parts.

In fact I almost never use mechanical airlock sandwich, even when I want to use magma heat I usually use a gas loop for the much greater precision and distance invariance (fluid loop can transport heat over unlimited distance), unless I need more heat flux than a gas loop can deliver, but a gas loop is often plenty, for instance a 10 kg/s petroleum boiler requires something like 300 kDTU/s, and for a 1 kg/s hydrogen gas loop that would require a temperature delta of 125 C (e.g. the magma sea could be cooled down to something like 550 C before it can't provide enough heat over the gas loop to run a petroleum boiler at full throughput), but when the magma sea is still hot the hydrogen gas loop is delivering more like 1200 kDTU/s for a faster boot up of the petroleum boiler, the main thing a gas loop can't provide the heat flux for is running half a dozen Steam Turbines at full bore.

Edited May 31, 2025 by blakemw

[imazined]

Unpowered doors sometimes continue to transfer heat.