The process of making U238 is pretty involved. The player needs sulfuric acid to do mining, which will become important for high tech science later. At this tech level the player already has blue science and plastic, so the main challenge is to add sulfur. The sulfur demand for mining is super low but it is important later for high tech science. Constructing centrifuges is a new step, which means automating concrete. Early concrete production will help later for the rocket silo. Processing uranium ore is as simple as bringing ore to the centrifuges. One final challenge is to filter the U235 and U238 so that contaminants don't clog the production line.
Production Science doesn't need to require more than 1 U238 to get the point across. This adds a raw ingredient cost of 1 iron + 75 petroleum to drill the 50 uranium ore to produce 10 production potions. It will add to the player's overall oil demand, but production science also unlocks coal cracking to compensate. The setup is more about learning new recipes rather than sinking a lot of resources. The biggest obstacle is that the centrifuge is gated behind a very expensive nuclear power tech which costs 1000xRGB. That's way too expensive for skipping nuclear power and only unlocking the centrifuge.
Pros
- More glowing green centrifuges! They're very pretty and any excuse to build more is good.
- Much thinking involved- players need to master uranium mining, processing, and sorting the random outputs. This is essentially the last resource line and paves the way to endgame.
- Low grind- According to the wiki the minimum tech for the rocket silo costs 1300 purple science, which would add a cost of 650 U238 or roughly 6500 ore(650 iron+9750 petroleum) to finish the game. The added resource cost is completely trivial next to the current full cost.
- Encourages mining a lot of uranium fairly early in the game. A common player mistake is to get all the nuclear tech researched but then realize you should have started mining hours ago. This tech change makes that kind of player mistake impossible. You should have started mining 15, 30 minutes earlier. Tops.
- A potent item sink for U238 before uranium demand ramps up. No more building up stockpiles of uranium with nothing to do.
- Early mining means the player is already stockpiling U235 for important stuff later on.
Cons
- The current research for ONLY centrifuges is too expensive. It needs to be split from nuclear power so that players can start mining sooner.
- Uranium generation might need to be tweaked to support the mandatory demand. A baseline cost of ~5000 uranium per rocket launch is pretty cheap, though.
