Make wood useful

[deer_buster]

Wooden walls could be a thing, plus it has the upside of already being a mod that you can use. I've used the mod, and it is nice to be able to convert some excess wood to a defensive barrier that can at least notify that something is attacking.

Granted, there is no practical late-game use for wood currently, and I think that is more what the OP was looking for.

[plepper1]

How about decorative items?

I've seen lots of screenshots of people decorating their factories with patterns made from various items (ascii-art-esque.)

That could be expanded on by using wood to produce flooring (not as good as concrete, but interchangeable) or flower pots?

Maybe even a bridge...able to cross over water without filling in the water. (and easily destructible if the far side is overrun by biters.)

Edit: Existing Mods:

• https://mods.factorio.com/mods/jjparkro ... den-floors
• https://mods.factorio.com/mods/PantherX/Dectorio
• https://mods.factorio.com/mods/MrP123/BridgeRailway

[Deadly-Bagel]

How about decorative items?

I've seen lots of screenshots of people decorating their factories with patterns made from various items (ascii-art-esque.)

That could be expanded on by using wood to produce flooring (not as good as concrete, but interchangeable) or flower pots?

Maybe even a bridge...able to cross over water without filling in the water. (and easily destructible if the far side is overrun by biters.)

What sort of decorations could I possibly make with 50,000 wood? I don't even use decorations in Minecraft or anything, I have absolutely no decorative skills and most play Factorio for the logic, not the little shrubs.

As for bridges, it's impossible to balance. Regardless of how expensive you make it, many players just won't use them. Personally I don't see the point, just landfill it, if you're worried about security you can have narrow choke points with turrets behind them, with or without gates nothing would get through. Then there's all the maps without lakes large enough for this, and either you make it cheap enough to be available early (but late game you still end up with thousands of wood) or you make it too expensive to use until late game when it's mostly irrelevant. There is an additional problem of biter pathing, I remember a case with the Water Fill mod or whatever it was (allowed placing of water tiles) where the biters chose a path that became unavailable so went as far as they could and sat there. You would end up with the same problem.

As I said if you want a use for wood it needs to be converted into a useful component like Coal or Oil.

[JohnyDL]

or use it as the bottleneck constraint of coal liquefaction, generally you don't need much/any liquifaction so as a way of disposing of wood and getting some useful product out the end at the cost of using a little extra coal (which is an underutilised resource itself) its a good way to upcycle the otherwise annoying and useless item. You can wood -> boilers -> steam + coal -> liquifaction -> oil AKA useful stuff.

[Lav]

The problem with a recipe having a fuel as a component is only a problem with furnaces because they don't have recipes. This could mean if you were using wood to power your Iron furnaces you could potentially end up with a bunch of Coal in your Iron feed.

If wood isn't automatically added to the ingredient slot, then you won't. This means you would have to add wood manually via smelter UI though, which is a bit bothersome. Then again, manual actions to get rid of manually collected resource makes sense on some level.

[plepper1]

What sort of decorations could I possibly make with 50,000 wood? I don't even use decorations in Minecraft or anything, I have absolutely no decorative skills and most play Factorio for the logic, not the little shrubs.

Nor do I, but someone out there does... It might not be my use, but someone could use it.

Maybe tie the wood into the proposed deep mines as an ongoing production cost in tunnel supports? (Wood -> beams -> ore)

[Lemlin]

or use it as the bottleneck constraint of coal liquefaction, generally you don't need much/any liquifaction so as a way of disposing of wood and getting some useful product out the end at the cost of using a little extra coal (which is an underutilised resource itself) its a good way to upcycle the otherwise annoying and useless item. You can wood -> boilers -> steam + coal -> liquifaction -> oil AKA useful stuff.

Me too. I have a setup which output rocket fuel.
Input wood+coal and output rocket fuel. Sound like a great deal.

[mp0011]

Chop wood into sawdust.
Use sawdust to feed some bacterias (or fungus, or alien bugs, or whatever) - this farm consume also electricity and water.
Bacterias produces methane in process, or, for simplicity, petroleum gas.

How to get bacterias? From alien bases - like ex-alien science packs, and some are randomly generated after each farming cycle.

Any power drop causes all bacterias in farm to die, you need to replant it again.
Also, such gas production should have some inertia/delay (similar to nuclear plant), not just You put the bacterias and get instant gas...