Personal Balancing issues with Prehistoric planet pack

[Omegapoptart]

To start things off, so far I am enjoying the Prehistoric planet pack DLC as it is a fun challenge and a change of pace from the usual set up of my base, however after looking through and using various recipes it has become more and more apparent to me that many of the item chains feel very lackluster compared to the vanilla counterparts to them. Perhaps this is a personal issue but if its not I just wanted to go over what I have seen and have issues with to see if this is a larger issue.
 

1. Jawbos are nearly entirely useless:
   From what I can tell, the only reason you would ever use Jawbos is if you want specifically Rust and/or the bi-products of rust, and even then the output per Jawbo is very lackluster.
   
   A domesticated Jawbo will require 1 Pacu as food per cycle and makes a total of 60kg of Rust per cycle as well as a Jawbo egg every 6 cycles, which will then drop 12000kcal of jawbo meat when it dies, giving a total of 2000kcal of meat per cycle assuming perfect uptime, this can then be smoked to increase its value to ~3700kcal per cycle/per pacu of a +3 food. This is fairly okay until a few caveats come in:
   First of all the jawbo meat CANNOT be used in any additional advanced recipes, making it a dead end.
   
   Secondly as a food source Jawbo are wholly worse than Pacu in nearly every way. If you want to go into the route of turning all excess pacu into egg/egg based food, each pacu egg will give 3200kcal of raw egg, which can then be cooked into omelettes(5600kcal per pacu) or pancakes (7200kcal per pacu), this is not even mentioning the additional option to turn omelettes into mushroom quiches (12800kcal per pacu). Non egg cracked pacu fillets then have 3 things they can be made into, fish tacos (4200kcal per pacu), smoked fish(~1800kcal per pacu), or cooked seafood(1600kcal per pacu) which can then be made into surf and turf (6000 kcal per pacu).
   
   In a situation like this, it feels pointless to set up additional farms/setups for the sake of ranching jawbos when it would likely be easier to just skip them entirely and stick with omlettes until a reliable mushroom/waterweed setup is made for quiches. As such I think that either the amounts need to be tweaked to buff their rust drops to make them a more item focused ranching mob, reduce their pacu consumption, or expand the chain of food they can make.
    
2. Lura plants do not make a comparable amount of amber
   From what I can tell, the primary purpose of Lura plants as well as gnits, is to make amber, which is then turned into resin, and finally into plastic. Assuming you only do the most optimal conversion of amber to resin by cooking it to 95C, as well as having each lura plant have a 100% uptime of eating a gnit and always having the farmers touch bonus, it will make 44kg amber per cycle, which would then turn into 35.2kg of resin per cycle and finally into 21.12kg plastic per cycle in exchange for 1 gnit every 6 cycles for a ratio of 126kg of plastic per gnit. Once again on the surface this seems fairly good, but Given the amount of work in set up this all takes, I cant help but feel that just digging all the way down to the oil biome and tapping into an oil well would be a MUCH more simple as well as more profitable solution to getting plastic as a single oil well, which makes ~2000kg oil per cycle -> 1000kg petroleum per cycle(without a boiler system) -> 600 kg plastic per cycle. Honestly I need to experiment more to feel out a better setup/solution for amber to fully know what feels right as a proper lura plant setup, and as such this is possibly just user error as I may not be satisfied so far with my own work, but considering that all the calculations are made as optimally as possible in favor of the lura plant and its still takes 28 of them just to match 1 oil well, it feels like (56 if not farmers touched, likely closer to 60 from delays in dupe labor) it feels a bit lackluster considering the amount of infrastructure work and space needed.
   
   Ultimately I dont think this is too much of an issue and I actually like it more than the frozen planet pack where nectar was used, (and I ultimately just started draining wild trees from the asteroid surface) but it becomes a more glaring and annoying part of the DLC when combined with some of the later issues revolving more around the oil/petroleum alternatives in the DLC
   
   As an addendum however, I do find it nice that this is a water positive way to get plastic, given that this is potentially a very neat chain to go through if your base is low on water supplies.
    
3. Bio Diesel kinda sucks compared to oil/petroleum
   In Oxygen not included in my opinion Oil/petroleum is one of the biggest jumps in technology that really lets you expand your mid game options in the game, from plastic, to fuel, to various recipes that then need it. and finally as a high heat metal refinery coolant, its fairly versatile as well as fairly simple to get. In comparison, Bio Diesel is much harder to get as well as has fewer actual uses.
   
   In my assumption I am going to be using mostly the items/plants/critters available on the new asteroid provided in the DLC.
   For every 100kg of bio diesel you need 80kg of phyto oil(60kg of water and 20kg seakomb(20kg polluted dirt)), and 20kg of bleachstone(Bleachstone is not too much of an issue thanks to the rhex/dartle/dewdripper chain, so not too much issue in this department)
   
   Compared to petroleum every 100kg of petroleum would from a well would only need 60kg of water assuming you use the less efficient oil refinery, while also making useful natural gas outputs in the process.
   
   With needing to have various ranches/farms, setups to deliver/crush the seakomb into phyto oil, and needing to manually have duplicates emulsify the final product to be usable, biodiesel cant help but seem like a poor alternative that is only used if you have absolutely no other choice, rather than a potential other viable path.
   
   However more than anything else, my biggest issue and reason I cant feel any reason to just NOT skip bio diesel and go for oil/petroleum is that biodiesel's stats as a liquid just dont work for the mid-game metal refinery setup i need. I almost always go for a mid-game metal refinery + steam turbine/aqua-tuner setup as a centralized metal processing unit, and petroleum is the perfect liquid for it. From what I have looked through in the game, the only other liquid I could see that would work would be gunk from bionic duplicants that has the proper heat range as well as SHC for producing metal, which seems a bit like a bad solution to need to rely on a separate DLC to solve the issue.
   
   As such I cant really see a reason not to just utterly skip biodiesel and just go straight for petroleum which would also skip the Lura plant as well as a byproduct.
    
4. Most food in the dlc is a dead end at +3 max
   This is the list of all new ingredients/food from the DLC that I know of and what they can actually make:
   snac fruit: Raw only -1 (this is fine as the default starting food source to scavage for)
   Mimillet: Toasted Mimillet +1 (dead end 1 step cooking and probably more useful to use as pacu food without cooking it)
   Tough Meat: Tender Brisket +3 (dead end 1 step cooking)
   Jawbo fillet: Smoked Fish +3 (dead end 1 step cooking)
   Sweatcorn: Veggie popper +2 (dead end 1 step cooking)
   Ovagro fig: Mixed berry pie +5 (Better than others, still only 1 stage/option cooking)
   Megafond grain: Anything that the sleet wheat could be used in(I have no issues with the megafond usages, though maybe some unique ones could be nice)
   
   I strongly feel there needs to be additional later game food items that can use the prior level of ingredients, as many of the new DLC foods feel like they utterly fail in comparison to the vanilla game foods. Perhaps a prehistoric surf and turf to use both the brisket and the jawbo fillet, or a full dinner plater to combine the corn and the meat into something more. It just feels quite lacking.
    
5. (Minor) A bleach stone sublimator would be nice
   This is much less of an issue, but in the past there was not too much of a need to get large amounts of chlorine as usually the issue was getting bleach stone, but with megafronds needing 54kg of chlorine per cycle, having a way to more easily force sublimation of bleach stone would be nice to have
   
    

In summary, I still am enjoying my time, and I like many of the additions that I did not mention here, but the issues are enough that I feel its important to mention them. I dont know if others share these issues, but I hope I properly explained some of the things I view as shortcomings well enough. I did my best to try and be accurate with my numbers but I may have made a mistake here or there, and in addition this is mostly my early/mid impressions of it all.

[Mementh]

2 hours ago, Omegapoptart said:

This is much less of an issue, but in the past there was not too much of a need to get large amounts of chlorine as usually the issue was getting bleach stone, but with megafronds needing 54kg of chlorine per cycle, having a way to more easily force sublimation of bleach stone would be nice to have

does the slightly covered trick like with polluted water work? or is that not going to work for this?

[Omegapoptart]

9 hours ago, Mementh said:

does the slightly covered trick like with polluted water work? or is that not going to work for this?

While it kinda works, the issue is that the rate of bleach stone to chlorine is very slow, and given that it seems the sublimation rate per kg of bleachstone gets worse the larger the stack(a stack of 5 tons off gas ~8.4kg per cycle, while a stack of 10 tons off gas ~12kg per cycle), you would need an annoyingly large amount of bleachstone initially to get enough chlorine per cycle considering each of the megafronds needs 54 kg per cycle.

[Mementh]

1 hour ago, Omegapoptart said:

While it kinda works, the issue is that the rate of bleach stone to chlorine is very slow, and given that it seems the sublimation rate per kg of bleachstone gets worse the larger the stack(a stack of 5 tons off gas ~8.4kg per cycle, while a stack of 10 tons off gas ~12kg per cycle), you would need an annoyingly large amount of bleachstone initially to get enough chlorine per cycle considering each of the megafronds needs 54 kg per cycle.

so lots of smaller deals with pressure plates and dropping conveyor belts with constantly rotating bleachstone? 

[Omegapoptart]

As an addendum as I have interacted more with the mechanics listed in game and feel I need to update:
I was mostly wrong with the need for a chlorine sublimator. Most of my thoughts on that was based on the farming of megafronds and using dartles for chlorine, I didn't realize until ranching them more(and also looking in their wiki) that they ALSO make gaseous chlorine as well, so my issue with that is gone.

Biodiesel isn't as bad as I thought. Its still more work/resources/effort than petroleum is, but after doing some rounds of destroying demolier with only biodiesel, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be(Though it still seems mostly like a poor workaround in comparison to actual petroleum, and it still feels bad to not have a high heat liquid for my metal refinery until I dig all the way down for petroleum later)