Finally a first thoughtful feedback about bio! (Thanks)
evandy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 4:24 am
Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?
EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...
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So you need 370.4 alien spores, which you get from fish. My recommendation is to use Levac Fish Petting and/or Durflurp Jellyfish Petting. These will give the same amount of spores, in half the time (30 instead of 60 seconds). They also have a much higher survival rate (3 + 85% instead of ( + 75% + 50%). The small loss in fish is easily compensated by the fish breeding in combination with the Green Algae I recipe, which produces brown and green algae. If you have a lot of saline water, you can opt to make brown algae directly, and then only focus on Levac Fish. I just want to note, if you have excess meat, you can always use santa rays to get more fish water and consume your meat. Factorian fish were just added as completion so you can breed them for your own purposes, without being an addition to bio, hence why they are tougher to pet.
As you get an average of 37.5 Alien spores / 100 polluted fish water, you require that recipe 9.877 times, which translates into 987.7 fish water as your picture already shows. Now using the fish breeding that I recommended, that roughly translates into 50 times that recipe, or 1500 buildings (actualy a bit less since you get some fish water from the breeding as well).
So now for some better balancing. I'll increase the fish water requirement for petting and breeding from 20 to 100, which is an increase of x5. However this results in a huge increase of sulfuric waste water production, so I'll compensate the Alien spores production to generate 30-40 waste water and 70-80 alien spores (increase of x2 the spores). A last balancing tweak on this part is that alien bacteria only require 50 spores instead of a 100 (increase of x2) and 1 alien bacteria can make 5 seeded dishes (increase of x1.667). This will have a total increase of (5x2x2x1.667=) x33.333, which will reduce your fish tanks from 1500 to 45.
I have similar reasoning for your biters. Butchering biters will give you a 90% chance of getting you crystals. You should keep them in the zoo in order to get a guaranteed crystal and only have 10% chance of loosing a biter (meaning you get 10 shards/biter) on average. This again will only take 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds, which is already a x2 increase and you won't require as many puffer breedings. How you obtain the required meat is up to you, I would opt for hatching the other puffer eggs that you don't use and butcher them to obtain the meat. (which would most likely be gaseous puffers I believe). This should decrease the amount of biter eggs you require, resulting in less alien spores required as well.
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Now to balance this out a bit, I think it would be good to increase the crystal production to 1/biter instead of 1/recipe, so the zoo keeping gives 4 crystals at once, which is a boost of x4. To make it a little easier, puffer breeding might have a higher chance of creating their own egg, but make sure the sum = 100%.
Finally I am thinking of adding 3 tiers of the buildings, similar speed progression as refinery has (0.75 > 1 > 1.5).
evandy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 4:24 am
EDIT2: Also, why can't I make crystal powder from crystal dust? (alternatively, why do we have both items)? Seems like we should either be able to turn dust into powder, or they should be the same thing.
Powder is the small bits coming from grinding, while the dust is coming from crushing. They both end up in crystal slurry. The powder doesn't require sulfuric acid, which the dust does...
Hellspawn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 10:32 am
evandy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 4:24 am
Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?
EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...
It get´s even worse when you start to calulate how many of the crystas you need to build a single tier 3 Module.... You need 160 of them,
not counting the ones you need as a intermediate product (e.g. whetstone, big biter production etc.).
I have (spagetti) setup up and running, but it really takes ages to get the first crystals dribble out of that. I would sign the motion to get a productivity boost for some facitlitys.
As I said above and evandy said to you, keeping biters in a zoo will be the highest increase of your setup, and using different fish. The small tweaks to puffers and building tiers should also help down the line.
Xeorm wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 9:27 am
It looks like the issue is more that the options selected were bad for producing what you want, more than anything. From what I can see, the process works like this: Get fish going. Either using the breeding or petting option. Petting option produces fish water in half the time, but results in less fish. Breeding takes longer, but produces fish. Alternatively, farm for mushredtato's. Much quicker that way than fishing. Either way, this produces alien bacteria. You use the bacteria to make eggs, which are then hatched into biters. Then you have two options from there. You can butcher the biters immediately for .9 splinters per biter, or keep them in a zoo, costing .1 biter per splinter, but requiring raw meat. Meat coming primarily from either extra fish or extra puffers.
I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm betting if you breed fish, and use the biter zoo option, you'd get drastically different results. You wont' need to make as many eggs, which is the main bottleneck. Any replacement eggs you'd need would be generated by the fish breeding necessary for the raw meat. Unless I'm mistaken, santa ray breeding should yield the most raw meat too, if you're lost on which to use. You'd still need 400+ biter refugiums for 10 shards a second, but that's an improvement at least! You'd need massively less aquariums as well.
I prefer using fish to to get the alien spores, doing it with farming is a nice option if you don't want to do fish however. Santa ray can both be used as a meat generator and a meat sink (depending on what recipes you use). Fishing will definitely require less buildings with the suggestions I made, similar to the higher yield of the biter zoo keeping. I am still a bit lost on the puffers tho. Like I said a while back already, I do think making cross-breeding puffers to get a specific type of egg would be a better way of breeding, and have similar yields as the fish/biters.
evandy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:58 pm
...
I went tried this... if you discount the Lithia Salt vs Lithium Chloride bug I found, I was able to reduce things down to ~ 500 Fish Farms, 500 Puffer Refugia and 500 Biter Refugia for 10 Crystal Shards/sec. It also brought power down to about 500MW. I still think this is out of balance, but not by an order of magnitude.
Santa, you said way above that you are open to comments on balance issues with the new bio stuff, consider a request for rebalancing made. There is not enough throughput in bio. I wouldn't simply increase Bio machine speed, as it wouldn't help the things like 80 Assemblers & 10MW required to produce 1 biter egg per second. In order to keep Bio firmly "different" I make the following suggestion:
- Increase the inputs/outputs of all the Farming/Breeding recipes by a factor of 5x, keep their times as is.
- Don't increase output of seeds/eggs/etc though, this will keep the slow ramp-up as you grow your bio base in place as-is
- This will not change your ratios, but make Bio firmly "different" by creating in bulk at low power, but it takes a while
For sure this is exactly what I wanted, feedback. I do think multiple machines could help to scale the setup for late game, when you get to crank out lvl 3 modules at higher rate, even when you productivity/beacon your bio setup. I do think the main issue with biters is the egg output, which I do not have a good solution to at this point.
evandy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:58 pm
Based on other conversations, this generally applies to EVERYTHING bio production - BioPlastic is so limited throughput as to be useless, same with BioResin and BioRubber. Bio just needs more throughput across the board.
Do you mean increase the bio yield on the Raw bio X (seed to tree)? Or do you mean the yield from Raw bio X to liquid X (X being plastic, resin, rubber) I was maybe thinking that you get 6 (tier 1) and 9 (tier 2) raw bio X from the seeds, and leave it to produce 5 of the liquid X for each raw bio X.
evandy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:58 pm
Only real exception to that is algae, which is much closer to in-balance as much as seablock has been banging on it. However, with the new Algae1 change, and the power consumption bump from Algae 2, I would suggest only modestly increasing output of algae farms (by 1.5x or 2x maybe).
For green algae I, I don't want to increase the brown algae anymore, since I don't want you to end up with stacks of brown algae... I could increase the green algae II to 50 or maybe 60 algae per cycle, but I rather just decrease the input from 100 to 80 and require 16 seconds instead of 20.