Biodiesel - are we supposed to use it?

[imazined]

Looking at the newest update and I'm more confused than ever about the intentions behind biodiesel.

The first iteration was still far from the work efficiency of the petroleum refinery but had cheaper inputs and might have been an alternative liveblood for remote colonies by burning it for water. (Work efficiency per 100kg 2 x 40s + plant harvest + dartle ranching vs 50s refinery wheel spinning)

The second iteration was a big nerf that didn't change the direct work amount but required 10x more plants and increased the costs further the line.

Now the third iteration takes more refinement work and additional water which makes it kind of useless for many applications outside of creating blast shots.

The whole biodiesel system feels really contrived and like something we're not supposed to play with except for it's not obviously stated use case.

[PHG]

Biodiesel seems to be primarily for ASAP Intracosmic Blastshot & perhaps Tallow foods, but with the first of these reasons being relegated completely to Relica...yeah, this guy is severely starved of uses

Ethanol was cool to be expanded upon in FPP because it was an already existing element, but adding an entirely new one just to shove it in the "Alternative Petroleum" corner seems disingenuous.

Perhaps a new building could just take excess food scraps and convert it to Biodiesel? Fits, but doesn't solve the issue of the lack of unique uses...hmm.

I've thought of buildings that usually use Petroleum burning Biodiesel would produce less byproduct, but in OnI nothing is, so...;-;

[speckle21]

Yeah, if the point of biodiesel was to gate the Blastshot behind a really steep barrier of busywork, then make the  intracosmic blastshot the one with the requirements. Like change the recipe to require a bunch of stuff. Bleach stone, Seakomb leaves, phyto oil, heck maybe some amber and peat just for more Relica flavor. We'll still have to put in the same work as making biodiesel, but it will make sense that we're just doing it for the blastshot.

Putting all this work for biodiesel and then making our infrastructure nearly useless afterward just feels like a tremendous waste.

[PatrykC159753]

Its combustable liquid i think it is not useless u fact that u can turn poluted dirt and a litle bit of bleachstone into power seems good to me. (i dont clame its great but it not useless)

Edited May 30, 2025 by PatrykC159753

[Paperbag]

22 minutes ago, PatrykC159753 said:

Its combustable liquid i think it is not useless u fact that u can turn poluted dirt and a litle bit of bleachstone intoo power seems good to me. (i dont clame its great but it not useless)

we all know it's combustible. No one's calling it useless because we don't know that, we're saying it because it's bad. It's high effort, low yield, and excessively hard to scale up. It especially feels bad because you'd usually have to make a ton of it to make Blastshots, and afterwards it's hard to sustain a significant amount of it long-term.

Edited May 30, 2025 by Paperbag

[imazined]

1 hour ago, PatrykC159753 said:

Its combustable liquid i think it is not useless u fact that u can turn poluted dirt and a litle bit of bleachstone into power seems good to me. (i dont clame its great but it not useless)

And a non trivial amount of water. 

[gigamoi]

The water cost isn't that surprising. Keep in mind that you are getting a lot back from the generator if you intend to use it for power. Unless you are running a petro-boiler, which is quite involved, the standard wheel spinning petro-loop nets you about 62.5% of your water back with just the petro-generators and about 67% if you take nat-gas into account. The new loop nets you 62.5% of your water back so it's about as competitive as the old loop in that regard.

It does, however indeed require much more dupe labor though. Compared to 1 dupe spinning the wheel , you need about 4.33 dupe's worth of work time just operating the emulsifier and plant pulverizer and there is no way around those steps. So yeah, it's rather not good in that regard.

 

I think it's a good thing for regular oil to remain noticeably on top as to keep the oil biome and oil reservoirs relevant, but biodiesel doesn't need to be as bad as it is now to achieve that.

The resource conversion rates are fine as they are IMO, but it requires way too much dupe time. Perhaps the amounts of resources processed by each duplicant operation should be scaled up for those recipes of the plant pulverizer and emulsifier.

Edited May 30, 2025 by gigamoi

[imazined]

Plus the time for sea weed harvest and eventually dartlet grooming. But the dartlet part can be completely passive for the cost of space if they have a critter condo istead of a grooming station.

But yeah, increasing the recipe size would make it sting less.

[gigamoi]

Yeah. I left dartlets out of the equasion because there are other means to sustainably get bleach-stone depending on what is available to the player, some of which require little to no dupe labor.

[Gurgel]

Definitely not for power, except for some potential later-game large installations. I guess most people have figured that out by now, even if some are very strong under a "It can be burnt for power - burn it for power!" compulsion. 

[Carib94]

Remember, what we playing now in the Beta is not final and can still change maybe their is more than meets the eye here who knows. As of right now I agree Biodiesel is in an awkward state, but for me imma still use it for tallow and gear oil for boops, It still can be a temporary or rather I like to call it Emergency Power LOL.