Fertilizer synthesizers and natural gas

[Michi01]

So fertilizer synthesizer power plants, or at least the way they currently work, have bothered me for some time now. I've seen people bring this up before, but I don't think anyone has made a thread about it yet.
I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows about them by now, but for anyone who is unaware, fertilizer makers produce natural gas and they produce so much natural gas that a generator powered by them generates more power than they consume. To get rid of the CO2 from the generators (at least before the Oil Upgrade), you need to use a carbon skimmer which produces yet more polluted water and with that even more natural gas etc.
Due to this, I usually find myself able to power my entire base just off of the polluted water from my bathrooms.
This whole mechanic turns polluted water into a valuable resource. Don't get me wrong, players should be rewarded for properly handling their base's waste, but a waste product should have more of a downside and not be this valuable.
I think it'd be good if players had to go out and explore for things to power their base with such as natural gas geysers, oil reservoirs and possibly more in the future (for example setting up solar panels on the surface of the asteroid), but the way it currently works just requires building a bunch of fertilizer makers and getting them started with polluted water without ever leaving the starting area.
Getting back to what I was saying about polluted water being a valuable resource, I think this is part of the reason why polluted water with food poisoning germs is a bit easier to deal with than it should be and it's definitely the reason why (along with geysers) purifying water is not worth it at all, since you're using resources to get rid of a valuable power source.
I'm not sure if this is the right way to solve it, but perhaps fertilizer makers should just produce a lot less natural gas? So much that they don't produce more power than they consume. I guess that'd make their natural gas production kind of similar to hydrogen from electrolyzers. It's a waste product that you need to deal with, but you are rewarded with a little bit of power for doing so.
That way players would have to go out and explore to gain access to efficient power sources while still having a good way to get rid of polluted water and they'd still be rewarded with fertilizer while not getting ridiculous amounts of it (I hope it will play a more important role again in future updates and even now you can feed it to hatches). With the Oil Upgrade this change also adds less difficulty than it would have before, since there's now an easy late game alternative to carbon skimmers.
An alternative way to rebalance fertilizer synthesizers could be to change carbon skimmers. It has always bothered me a bit that the waste product from filtering CO2 out of the air can be used to make natural gas and fertilizer, though I don't know how to change them and I think reducing the amount of natural gas produced by fertilizer synthesizers would be enough.
I'm curious what the opinion of the majority of players is on fertilizer power plants so I'm adding a poll to this thread.
Also to clarify, I  don't necessarily think that fertilizer synthesizer power plants are too easy to set up, I like the layer of complexity they add, but I don't think they are how it should be implemented.
Also one last thing, I noticed that the oil refinery is actually affected by ambient pressure, but fertilizer synthesizers are not. I wonder if this is an oversight or intended.

[Profit]

https://www.clarke-energy.com/sewage-gas/

And scrubbers should make carbonated water not polluted water. 

[Saturnus]

The problem with fertilizer makers could be solved very simply by having fertilizer use the same mechanics as sand in that it would ball up and entomb the machine if the fertilizer is not cleared away once in a while. 

[Reaniel]

I doubt it's going to be changed, and I'm personally against "nerfing" it.

Not to mention depending on your play style, polluted water is already extremely "valuable" for some (such as myself).  I use PH2O mainly as a source of oxygen because it gives a better conversion rate than electrolyzer.  Nerfing it on the fertilizer maker part isn't going to make it "less valuable" to me, but only cutting off a gameplay choice for players.

Not to mention as stated by the Devs in the road map, part of the direction the game is going is for players to figure out a way to utilize the outputs of various machines and creatures, and design a system to their advantage.  

On 8/31/2017 at 7:17 PM, Bigfoot said:

Deeper Tech Tree
If the variety in the world creates the ingredients, then the tech tree is the way players can manipulate it. We will continue to advance the tech tree to allow greater use of the materials and systems in the world. This includes advanced refinement techniques, building protective suits for Duplicants, better resource extraction, improved logistics to increase efficiency, and so on.

One of the core principles of the game is that everything you do creates externalities. Want to breathe some oxygen? It produces CO2. Want to electrolyze the water to create O2? It also creates Hydrogen. Want to go to the toilet? Better have a place to put the waste product. 

The tech tree will continue to push players to manipulate the systems to handle these externalities, and even use them to your advantage. 

If you think about it, this game had been making sure EVERYTHING is useful if you try to use it, and arbitrarily saying PH2O is a waste that shouldn't be so "valuable" while accepting natural gas and hydrogen as resources is a bit of double-standard if you ask me.

Considering how the one true (or almost 100%) 'worthless" waste product, CO2, had been changed so that it's now worth like gold is a clear indication on what the Devs have in mind on the direction the game is taking.

[thewreckedangle]

not everybody plays it that way. if you think they are too powerful, just.. use less of them???

[Michi01]

23 minutes ago, Profit said:

https://www.clarke-energy.com/sewage-gas/

Good game balance > Complete realism.
And being able to power your entire industrial infrastructure from your toilet waste is not realistic.

23 minutes ago, Profit said:

And scrubbers should make carbonated water not polluted water.

I had that thought too, but what are you supposed to do with the carbonated water?

20 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

The problem with fertilizer makers could be solved very simply by having fertilizer use the same mechanics as sand in that it would ball up and entomb the machine if the fertilizer is not cleared away once in a while.

I'm not sure if this would properly balance them, I have a feeling that it would just get annoying.

11 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

I use PH2O mainly as a source of oxygen because it gives a better conversion rate than electrolyzer.

I don't think being able to use it to generate oxygen should be possible either, it should just pollute existing oxygen.

11 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

Not to mention as stated by the Devs in the road map, part of the direction the game is going is for players to figure out a way to utilize the outputs of various machines and creatures, and design a system to their advantage.

You can still use it to your advantage by having it produce fertilizer (which will hopefully be useful again). I just think being able to power your entire base off of your duplicants' waste shouldn't be possible.

11 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

If you think about it, this game had been making sure EVERYTHING is useful if you try to use it, and arbitrarily saying PH2O is a waste that shouldn't be so "valuable" while accepting natural gas and hydrogen as resources is a bit of double-standard if you ask me.

Polluted water is something that your colony generates as a waste product while you need to actively work to get natural gas and hydrogen.

11 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

Considering how the one true (or almost 100%) 'worthless" waste product, CO2, had been changed so that it's now worth like gold is a clear indication on what the Devs have in mind on the direction the game is taking.

That's actually not true, CO2 was valuable before because you could turn it into polluted water.
 

[Michi01]

4 minutes ago, thewreckedangle said:

not everybody plays it that way. if you think they are too powerful, just.. use less of them???

I don't think "don't use it" should be used as an argument for these kind of things, by that logic almost all criticism towards game mechanics and balance is invalid. Natural gas generators needed oxygen when they were still in beta. Let's add that back. If you think they are too weak, don't use them! Not everybody plays it that way!

[Saturnus]

10 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

I'm not sure if this would properly balance them, but it would certainly get very annoying.

And that's the whole point. I don't think fertilizer makers needs nerfing in any way. The only gripe I have with it is the fact that it puts out a solid material, that you really don't need, so you can just entomb them and never have to worry about them or power ever again. Having the material ball up and entomb the machine if not cleared away on a regular basis is an excellent way of handling the problem without changing the fertilizer itself in any way.

Naturally, people would eventually just build animal traps and relocate their hatches to their fertilizer farms to eat the fertilizer but that's a brilliant use of in game mechanics, and extends the usefulness of hatches after you've switched to lavatories.

[Reaniel]

19 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

 

That's actually not true, CO2 was valuable before because you could turn it into polluted water.
 

Not really.  It's used to turn water into polluted water 1:1.  You don't get extra polluted water out of it.

[Michi01]

6 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

Not really.  It's used to turn water into polluted water 1:1.  You don't get extra polluted water out of it.

Yes, but it allows you to turn excess water into power, which makes it useful.

[Reaniel]

1 minute ago, Michi01 said:

Yes, but it allows you to turn excess water into power, which makes it useful.

Except that most people don't have excess fresh water.  Especially in long games and you want some food other than mealwood and mushrooms.  

Not to mention your own post contradicted what you're saying here:

21 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

Polluted water is something that your colony generates as a waste product while you need to actively work to get natural gas and hydrogen.

 

Also, read what I've quoted and you'll see that the Devs disagree with you.

Everything is a "waste" until you use it.  What I'm saying is who are you to say that polluted water is a waste that should be nerfed because you happen to think it's too powerful while hydrogen and natural gas shouldn't be considered so by your standard.

 

[Saturnus]

Just now, Reaniel said:

Everything is a "waste" until you use it.  What I'm saying is who are you to say that polluted water is a waste that should be nerfed because you happen to think it's too powerful while hydrogen and natural gas shouldn't be considered so by your standard.

The problem is not in the fertilizer maker, or that it outputs natural gas. The problem is that the other output of the fertilizer maker, the fertilizer itself, is basically a true waste product unless you really really want to make life difficult for yourself, so it can be completely ignored. So as I suggest, just make fertilizer ball up like sand and snow, and that's the end of that problem. The mechanics is already in the game, and no rebalancing is required. 

[Ciderblock]

Broadly speaking I would like this game to be more difficult and/or have more room for creative sandbox play. Personally I lean more towards the difficulty side, simply because I'm not very creative in these kinds of games. This is why I don't just play Dwarf Fortress instead, despite knowing how to play it. I find these fertilizer synthesizer power plants pull things away from difficulty, by turning a waste product into something that is net positive. Being able to scavenge your waste product into a usable form again (instead of just throwing it in a hole) is fine, but it should come with a price, like how the water purifier takes power and sand.

Fertilizer synthesizer power plants don't really come with a cost other than the metal they're made of. Arguably they come with a cost of water input for the carbon skimmers, but IIRC they are still net positive in power without even running the carbon skimmers. So if you have a scarcity of water, you could just send the CO2 to a tank and remove it in some other way (condense it or make oil with it). So these seem to make the game easy for no good reason.

On the other hand, this game's systems are intertwined with one another. I assume the current state of food is not permanent, and even just changing that could dramatically alter the difficulty of the game as a whole.

[NurdRage]

While i'm in favor of nerfing the fertilizer synthesizers... i'm not going to vote because i first want to see what new machinery Klei will be rolling out. Right now, power is easy. You can generates HUGE amounts of power and Klei just keeps adding more options like the petroleum generator... why is that? And if you data mine the game files there is some implied future power plant using nuclear technology. Even they have to realize that the power system is broken...

...unless they're planning some ultra-heavy-drain devices. We're already seeing the beginnings with the aquatuner and now the plastics and oil refineries.

Next they might be rolling out something that needs 10kw or so.

At that point every watt of power becomes essential. 

The fertilizer maker, while EXTREMELY powerful, is not perpetual. If you build it big enough and run it hard enough you will run out of polluted water. If we have some giant power drainers in the future that need tens of kilowatts then it may turn out that even the fertilizer maker taxes our resources.

If the game was released as-is.... yeah, the fertilizer synthesis is badly broken to the max. But there is so much more stuff coming that i'm going to hold judgement for now. 

 

 

[Lifegrow]

Just so I understand - some people here are making the claim that anything that somebody considers a "waste product" because they themselves don't incorporate it into their builds, or they use it in a particular way should be nerfed, fixed or removed? 

I'm not sure what game you guys are playing, but I certainly don't have an excess of polluted water when I get into larger-base territory - especially in the experimental oil malarkey - so the choice to turn it into power is one I have to balance. I also don't waste my CO2 to create polluted water, so skimmers aren't an option. I also like to build sleet wheat farms when the mood takes me, so fertilizer is appreciated...

In fact the nearest thing I have to an excessive waste product would be coal, because clay/minerals currently have no real uses compared to how much you can obtain in the asteroid, so I feed it to my hatches. Should they be nerfed?

Point I'm making is this : We all play this game differently. Some people will be happy to play a few hundred cycles and inevitably die because their bases are highly inefficient - but that's how they like to play. Others will like to min-max, and survive forever with the least aesthetically pleasing bases ever witnessed by man - but that's how they like to play. Some like to build pretty. Some like to build Big. Some like to focus all their attentions on weird and wonderful ways to murder dupes.... Everyone plays differently, and the idea that something should be nerfed at this early juncture when we still don't have a definitive clue as to what direction this crazy game is moving towards, is honestly crazy.

This game has no end game (yet?) - it has no specific goals other than survive and conquer your personal goals. 

1 hour ago, Michi01 said:

Due to this, I usually find myself able to power my entire base just off of the polluted water from my bathrooms.

How many dupes, and what in the name of god are you feeding them? I'd need 1000's of dupes worth of pee and poop to power half of my base...

[eggsvbacon]

10 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

In fact the nearest thing I have to an excessive waste product would be coal, because clay/minerals currently have no real uses compared to how much you can obtain in the asteroid, so I feed it to my hatches.

Coal should be re-purposed for activated charcoal filter for oxygen deoderizer, it's what they use in ductless stove bonnets (fan over your kitchen stove) to reduce smoke and collect volatiles (I am unsure how well it does this.) It's also used in some water filtering type  systems if I recall.

Dunno if activated charcoal is related to coal, but I am mentioning it.

[Lifegrow]

Just now, eggsvbacon said:

Coal should be re-purposed for activated charcoal filter for oxygen deoderizer, it's what they use in ductless stove bonnets (fan over your kitchen stove) to reduce smoke and collect volatiles (I am unsure how well it does this.) It's also used in some water filtering type  systems if I recall.

Dunno if activated charcoal is related to coal, but I am mentioning it.

Or compressed into diamonds.... Oh wait.... we have those now  

[Saturnus]

18 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

I also like to build sleet wheat farms when the mood takes me, so fertilizer is appreciated...

And you're very welcome to it if you so choose. The only thing that would change with fertilizer "balling up" is that you couldn't just wall your fertilizer makers in and leave them while gigatonnes of fertilizer outputted from them. And even that you could still do if you controlled the temperature a bit and let your hatches loose there.

In fact, I think all materials should "ball up" after maybe 5000kg. I find it completely unrealistic that you have something called a storage compactor but if you deconstruct it when filled what was in it is now much more compact, in fact, it doesn't even take up a tile. In the game as it is, you really only need one storage compactor... ever

[Lifegrow]

1 minute ago, Saturnus said:

In fact, I think all materials should "ball up" after maybe 5000kg. I find it completely unrealistic that you have something called a storage compactor but if you deconstruct it when filled what was in it is now much more compact, in fact, it doesn't even take up a tile. In the game as it is, you really only need one storage compactor... ever

Not sure if this is still the case, so correct me if i'm wrong - but the fact that after a tile contains a certain mass of items, the items vanish into the ether could be a pretty good reason not to stack all your crap on one tile...

[eggsvbacon]

4 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Or compressed into diamonds.... Oh wait.... we have those now  

how would you compress them into diamonds as is current game mechanics? I propose allowing coal to be used as a filter medium as activated charcoal? did im grandpa

[Saturnus]

Just now, Lifegrow said:

Not sure if this is still the case, so correct me if i'm wrong - but the fact that after a tile contains a certain mass of items, the items vanish into the ether could be a pretty good reason not to stack all your crap on one tile...

Never happened to me

[Lifegrow]

Just now, Saturnus said:

Never happened to me

Well you didn't stack high enough then  Pretty sure I clipped a vid in the bug tracker showing my coal disappearing in my hatch farm after it hit like 80 tons or something...

[eggsvbacon]

1 minute ago, Lifegrow said:

Not sure if this is still the case, so correct me if i'm wrong - but the fact that after a tile contains a certain mass of items, the items vanish into the ether could be a pretty good reason not to stack all your crap on one tile...

I think he's saying that each material themselves should ball up?? I mean, one would assume the compactor has seperate containers, it does allow you to pick and choose what materials are allowed for storage, that's where I base my assumption from.

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, Lifegrow said:

Well you didn't stack high enough then  Pretty sure I clipped a vid in the bug tracker showing my coal disappearing in my hatch farm after it hit like 80 tons or something...

I've had more than 400 tonnes of several different materials on the same tile. Not a problem at all.

[Lifegrow]

Just now, Saturnus said:

I've had more than 400 tonnes of several different materials on the same tile. Not a problem at all.

This was a while ago - thought i'd clipped it, but seems I didn't. It was a big issue for people who used drop storage, something I never did because of the lag it causes.