Algae production doesn't make sense.

[ICKA]

 

So I've played this game for a while and honestly, the way algae works in this game has always kinda baffled me. For the most part, algae is a nonrenewable source, which honestly just doesn't make that much sense when it's something that lives and thus grows. This game doesn't have any of that, and you'll never see a water tank covered in overgrown algae like you might in real life. Granted, this game definitely does not take everything from real life.

There is a way to grow algae in the game, but indirectly. Pufts make slime which can be processed into some algae. However the amount produced is abysmally low. I'll refer to this thread for an example below.

Say we had the choice to feed one pacu or one sage hatch from a puft farm. Both eat 140 kg of material. Let's look at the pacu first. If we wanted to feed that one pacu with only renewable resources, we'd need to produce 140 kg of algae per day. A algae distiller produces a maximum of 120 kg of algae a day and requires 120 W. We'd need two for this, but only one would run constantly. Algae distillers turns 1/3 of the mass of slime into algae and 2/3 into polluted water. According to the linked thread, a regular puft produces 15 kg of slime a day (they consume 30 kg of polluted o2 and 50% is turned into slime). Only 5 kg of that comes out as algae. So we'd need 28 pufts to feed one fish. From this we'd get a bit of food and 70 kg of polluted dirt that could be used to make dirt or feed half of a sage hatch's diet. 

If we were focused on feeding the sage hatch we could use slime, since no processing is required we can remove the algae distillers, and we'd need 1/3 of the pufts as we did for the other. So 9.33 or 10 pufts. Then from the hatch we'd get 140 kg of coal we could use to gain power.

So in comparison, we'd need much less pufts to feed the hatch and we'd get extra power out of the process. If we tried to feed the pacu we'd get more food overall but we'd need to expend power and take care of three times as many pufts. In the end feeding the sage hatch would be the much easier option and we'd get extra power out of it, feeding the pacu would help make more food, but food isn't too hard to create with a farm.

I think algae should be changed to be something that grows instead of having to be produced and processed. Perhaps make it so that it'll infest water tanks and slowly drain them unless you clear them out by hand or machine. Or maybe make a plant that produces algae but needs lots of water. I know algae is supposed to be helpful for early oxygen production and it's something you're supposed to burn through early on. But it just seems so weird how something that always seems so abundant in real life is more like a rare material that needs to be processed artificially.

Edit: Apparently I'm horrible at math, surprised nobody corrected me. Well, either way you'd still need a lot of pufts and machinery for just one fish.

[Sevio]

Algae were okay as they were before ranching. An early game resource you could burn through to stay alive while you teched up to electrolyzers, but now with pacu there is an incentive to use algae, but no feasible renewable way to make it.

I'm not sure if Algae should be kept an early game limited resource while expanding it into a renewable resource later on (perhaps some late tech building that lets you grow Algae), or whether it needs a complete rework and they should be focused less on producing oxygen and more on removing carbon dioxide to grow them and turn them into fish food.

But something definitely needs to be changed with them.

[Sevio]

Side note: At a pacu's rate of consumption (140 kg / cycle), if you were to equate that to oxygen at the conversion of an Algae Deoxydizer, each pacu you feed would be depriving your colony of 212.12 g/s of oxygen, more than twice that of a duplicant.

And that's being generous by not including the puft loss of the PO2 -> Slime -> Algae/PH2O -> PO2 feedback loop.

[SkySentinel]

Typical algae farm IRL