Factorio Forums

Let's look at resin.

We have 1 ASM2 outputting 1.5 resin. It requires

5.4 Liquifier Mk2s (Liquid resin) that needs Raw Bio Resin and Ethanol Gas.

Raw Bio Resin:
180 Aboretums (Raw Bio Resin)!
45 Temperate Tree Seed Generators (Temperate Tree Seed)
120 ASM2s (Soil)
75/5 Washing Plants (Mud)

Ethanol Gas:
2.2 Chem Plan MK2 (Ethanol Gas)
2.9 Liquifier Mk2 ( Fermentation Base)
14.3 Bio Processors (Corn)
45.8 Desert Farms (Primedeadelion)
Additional Desert Farms for seed generation...

All to make 1.5 resin. Sure, the 30 wood can be turned into resin as well, for a total of 7.5 resin total.

Or you can get 1 resin from 5 wood. You can get 35 wood, equivalent of 1.5 resin, for:
60 Aboretums (wood 2)
10 Desert Tree Seed Generators (Tree Seed)
1.8 ASM2 (Fertilizer)
35.6 ASM2 (Soil)
14.9/5 Washing Plant Mk2 (Mud)
0.3 Chem Plan Mk2 (Urea)
2.7 Liquifier Mk2 (Ammonia Gas)
1.1 Chem Plant Mk2 (Blue Cellulose Fiber)
2.7 Algae Farm Mk2 (Blue Algae)
Then a carbon dioxide line for 33.4

Power consumption is 89.6MW for resin, 15.5MW for wood to resin. Making raw trees is nearly 6 times more efficient.

But that's not all. If I want to have a full yellow belt of wooden boards I would need 71.2 ASM2 just to turn paper into boards!

I'm all for increased complexity for renewable resources, but it has to be reasonable to itself. For instance, that wooden board line goes from 3 to 10 entities. Then a jump to 24 for brown algae to Alginic Acid. A roughly 3 to one jump from the farm. Reasonable. But then a jump to 71.2... That's a ten fold jump from the base of a pipeline 10 production lines or more higher (16 if taken from raw materials). It would require 233 discrete buildings and 36.9MW of power.

Compared to many of the other mods, like smelting, refining, and even petro chem, these seem to be ludicrous numbers for something that is much simpler to make elsewhere. 13.3 wooden boards from oil:

3.4 EASM1 (wooden board)
1.5 Chem Plant Mk2 (Synthetic wood)
4 Oil Refineries
2.5MW

233 buildings vs. 9 buildings
36.9MW vs 2.5MW

Again, I can understand complexity as it's "free" instead of gathered, but it at least has to be somewhat reasonable. Especially as this is only red green science level tech. There's added complexity through waste, scale, and/or time. And then there's bio.

Thanks for doing the math. You're absolutely right, the new gardening stuff in the bio-processing mod isn't remotely balanced. I think Angel was going for more realism with the long crop-growth times, but he didn't make any other changes to counteract that. The outputs need to turn into vastly more resources to justify using farming at all.

My process is that I try to add all main features I want in first and then go over and bring in some real numbers and balance to the whole picture. I already did a small balancing pass to see how things turn out, but since I'm still adding stuff the main balancing pass and discussion will take place after that. But never the less I'm grateful for the input, already shows me on which parts I have to do some calculations and thinking over how much output I want these processes to yield.