Development and Discussion

[lovely_santa]

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.

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%.

Again, all of this is looking good. I think you are missing something though: Biters should have a breeding recipe (likely with a queen, which is a low% chance to acquire). Puffers shouldn’t be the long-term source of biter eggs, though you could go all “alien” and have the queens lay their eggs inside the puffers (require puffers for biter egg production). This would even justify the initial eggs - wild puffers might already be incubating new eggs. Does that sound at all interesting to you?

I do like this idea, have a queen small/medium/big biter that has a small chance to appear out of a biter egg. When breeding 2 queens together, these can lay an egg again. This way you can obtain multiple queens and start obtaining eggs that way. I do however want to keep some alien spores in there, so maybe they would require some advanced food, other than raw meat. Maybe meat dipped in alien goo, this way they still require some spores (instead of using all the spores in the eggsperiments).

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...

Yeah, I know. But can’t we use the ore powderizer (which is underused) to turn the crushed into dust?

Sounds like a good idea, I just have to make sure that crystal dust -> crystal slurry is a lot more productive that crystal dust -> crystal powder -> crystal slurry. I'll have to look at the specific ratios. 10 dust + acid creates 50 slurry, and 50 powder creates 50 slurry. So I guess 10 dust creates 25 powder. I guess the 10 lubricant is also a nice balance for this. So the recipe would be 10 crystal dust + milling drum -> 25 crystam powder + used milling drum.

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.

Concur with this idea; not sure how the recipe would work out, but makes much more sense than the random % distribution.

Guess we can leave this out, now that we have the idea of the queens (for now).

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.

Concur don’t increase the Brown output in Green Algae I, so let’s just increase the green and leave the time alone? Decreasing time implicitly increases brown. Not sure if it’s a change for Angels to make, or Trainwreck in Seablock, but with the addition of the brown side-effect in Algae I, Algae II should probably see a corresponding bump in the output of green Algae too. Since Green is the main source of Seablock power in the early game, and electrolyzing for slag to make mineral water gives such a small positive feedback loop with the current balance. I am curious what Trainwreck thinks, if he is listening.

I did some small increases to green algae:
Algae I now creates a bit more green algae, were the brown:green ratio was 5:20 is now 5:25.
Algae II crafts a bit faster now (15 sec instead of 20) to reduce power consumption
Algae II uses less input materials (80 instead of 100) to further reduce power consumption on input materials
Algae II is a bit more productive, creates 50 (was 40) algae per recipe.
In total, Algae II now produces 3.333/s instead of 2/s before.

Keep in mind that I can't increase it a lot further, as wood production should be a beter fuel source than algae.

Which segues into the final issue: power. It’s possible all the changes above will fix this (time will tell). But right now Bio looks to be very power-intensive; should a modest bio setup be eating 50% of the power of a modest sized base? Modules will just exacerbate this issue (as will higher tier machines). If the recipe changes do not bring it way down, then all the Bio machines’ power requirements should be lowered. Also on me module front: Will bio machines take productivity modules at all? If it’s just speed, then the power issue is really concerning.

Did you ever consider putting effectivity modules into your bio buildings? Especialy for your power setup, this realy reduces your power usage. For modules on the other hand I understand that this is quite power hungry.

[evandy]

I do like this idea, have a queen small/medium/big biter that has a small chance to appear out of a biter egg. When breeding 2 queens together, these can lay an egg again. This way you can obtain multiple queens and start obtaining eggs that way. I do however want to keep some alien spores in there, so maybe they would require some advanced food, other than raw meat. Maybe meat dipped in alien goo, this way they still require some spores (instead of using all the spores in the eggsperiments).

I can think of lots of options here; the queens could want who knows what in exchange for laying eggs. Your proposal is as good as anything I can think of thus far

I did some small increases to green algae:
Algae I now creates a bit more green algae, were the brown:green ratio was 5:20 is now 5:25.
Algae II crafts a bit faster now (15 sec instead of 20) to reduce power consumption
Algae II uses less input materials (80 instead of 100) to further reduce power consumption on input materials
Algae II is a bit more productive, creates 50 (was 40) algae per recipe.
In total, Algae II now produces 3.333/s instead of 2/s before.

Keep in mind that I can't increase it a lot further, as wood production should be a beter fuel source than algae.

All of that looks fine to me; no objections. We’ll see what everyone else has to say.

Which segues into the final issue: power. It’s possible all the changes above will fix this (time will tell). But right now Bio looks to be very power-intensive; should a modest bio setup be eating 50% of the power of a modest sized base? Modules will just exacerbate this issue (as will higher tier machines). If the recipe changes do not bring it way down, then all the Bio machines’ power requirements should be lowered. Also on me module front: Will bio machines take productivity modules at all? If it’s just speed, then the power issue is really concerning.

Did you ever consider putting effectivity modules into your bio buildings? Especialy for your power setup, this realy reduces your power usage. For modules on the other hand I understand that this is quite power hungry.

Sure, but I’ve always thought of them as a way to balance out the massively increased power that comes from speed modules & beacons. Are you proposing that we just need them in the beginning buildings? I guess that was not what I had been thinking, but we’ll see. The 3 tiers of building (and all the other changes) may make this point moot anyways.

[evandy]

Ok, I said that I'd sit down and noodle on bio-plastic. (extend this discussion to bio-resin and bio-rubber, I expect they are the same)

Industrial Plastic 1: ~175 machines to make 50 plastic/sec from coal @ 130 MW
Industrial Plastic 2: ~225 machines from multi-phase oil @ 150 MW
Industrial Plastic 3: ~160 machines from multi-phase oil @ 50 MW
Bio-plastic: ~3200 machines (farming beans from binafran) @ 500 MW

Bio-plastic has some definite advantages in that it has FAR fewer steps, but unless you provide massive numbers of beacons, and even more massive amounts of power it's just ... utterly useless. I'd really love to use it for my seablock, for instance, because getting back to water is MUCH easier than traditional industry but it needs 10x the machines and 2-4x the power that it should have to be competitive. I'll trade a bit of space & power for easier setup and fewer side-effects, but there are limits.

Similar to our discussions on breeding & zookeeping, the major issue here is throughput. Either the recipies need to run MUCH faster, or they need to produce in massive bulk. If you want specific suggestions, then at least in this case maybe something like:
- Bioplastic should produce 10 liquid plastic each (instead of 5)
- Bio extraction (for nutrient pulp and fuel oil should be brought down to 2s recipes (instead of 4)
- Farms should produce ~3x current yield (not sure if seeds should go up or not)

Open to other ideas, but basically the slow-recipe nature of Bio is currently not being compensated for in yield.

[mathturtle]

I came to add some suggestions to farming and I see it is already being discussed

evandy has said all I wanted to on bio-plastics so I'll just +1 his comment above.

I don't want to sound too negative, I do love your mods and I wanted to suggest some ways they could be better. The other things I wanted to comment/suggest are:

1) advanced seeds (the ones that have dormant seeds) breed way too slow. I tried to use zelosquash for bio-plastics in my last seablock run and it took 20-30 hours to get half of my 40 farms running because the seeds weren't multiplying. I think it would actually be faster to breed the gardens and process them into seeds than to use the multiplication of the dormant seeds. Also, given that these crops need fertilizer and have a more complex ingredient and output chain I would expect them to produce significantly more than the simpler crops... but they don't. A third of the advanced crops make leaves and the others only make small improvements on the simple crop yields.

2) leaves are pretty much useless unless I missed a recent change and thus any crop that processes into them is useless. There are so many better ways to make nutrient pulp that make more of it. My suggestion is to add a recipe that turns leaves into cellulose fiber, potentially turning these crops into upgrades for tianaton rather than things no one bothers with.

[evandy]

I came to add some suggestions to farming and I see it is already being discussed

evandy has said all I wanted to on bio-plastics so I'll just +1 his comment above.

I don't want to sound too negative, I do love your mods and I wanted to suggest some ways they could be better. The other things I wanted to comment/suggest are:

1) advanced seeds (the ones that have dormant seeds) breed way too slow. I tried to use zelosquash for bio-plastics in my last seablock run and it took 20-30 hours to get half of my 40 farms running because the seeds weren't multiplying. I think it would actually be faster to breed the gardens and process them into seeds than to use the multiplication of the dormant seeds. Also, given that these crops need fertilizer and have a more complex ingredient and output chain I would expect them to produce significantly more than the simpler crops... but they don't. A third of the advanced crops make leaves and the others only make small improvements on the simple crop yields.

2) leaves are pretty much useless unless I missed a recent change and thus any crop that processes into them is useless. There are so many better ways to make nutrient pulp that make more of it. My suggestion is to add a recipe that turns leaves into cellulose fiber, potentially turning these crops into upgrades for tianaton rather than things no one bothers with.

I will +1 the idea that leaves should process into cellulose fiber (rather than nutrient pulp).

Regarding the # of seeds, see my suggestion to triple farm yield above. If you were getting more crops out, would you still need more seeds? The main concern I have with the idea of increasing seeds is that eventually they could back up everything so you need a way to destroy any excess (can they be composted? I don't recall).

[Chapeau-Claque]

Some feedback on Farming. I play Sea Block where farms are mainly a power source - no coal to be mined.

I think the crops should be designed to give roughly the same yield (in MJ) at the same corresponding levels in the three chains, yields increasing some with higher level crops with a significant jump when the seeds are a in separate cycle, that is dormant to seed instead of seed from part of the crop. One but only one crop in each chain could yield cellulose, say the L4 as the current Desert L4 and L3/L4 in Swamp & Temperate.

As a suggestion, L5 gives 100% and L1 25%; aprox linear with the dormant jump adding, say 25%. The L5 trinkets could cost 5%. This might make L1 unfeasable due to cost in power to run - some trials & experiments to work this out needed. Some variations of +/-2% to blur the cookie stamp lines.

As to how much 100% is, trippling the current from start is way too much, better to have a high tech recipe the cuts cycle time, details TBD.
I suggest 100 MJ (gross) for an advanced farm L5 crop yield as a ballpark figure. A 60 second production time gives 1.67 MW again gross.
The 100 MJ is fuel oil & coal products only, any mineral oil is bonus.

My .02

[Arch666Angel]

Each Mod has it's own mechanic or vibe it introduces:
Refining has the mix an match options
Petrochem plays with fluids, loops and balancing out between intermediates and end products
smelting has the staggered efficiency effects
bio plays around with probabilities and slow but high volume (which does not necessarily means efficient) production

Bio in special was designed around the idea that you have many options but you will never get all of them unlocked at the start of the game and won't even have all of them midgame, so you have to always work around the things your environment provided you with (gardens, seeds, trees). Having tech for later up that allow for mutations and evolutionary jumps with a certain chance would be true to this, making everything plain better not. There should always be a drawback for added efficiency and gain, may it be bigger complexity or just more effort you have to put into a certain chain. The greater the challenge, the bigger the reward.

[LordRasko]

Cant craft concrete because i need iron sticks (tested it, it is bio industries fault but i'm supposed to post it here)




why do i need orange science for railway 2. nothing needs plastic or advanced electronics (Angel, Bob and Bio Mods)

[evandy]

Bio in special was designed around the idea that you have many options but you will never get all of them unlocked at the start of the game and won't even have all of them midgame, so you have to always work around the things your environment provided you with (gardens, seeds, trees). Having tech for later up that allow for mutations and evolutionary jumps with a certain chance would be true to this, making everything plain better not. There should always be a drawback for added efficiency and gain, may it be bigger complexity or just more effort you have to put into a certain chain. The greater the challenge, the bigger the reward.

Angel,

I think that describes the vibe that I was expecting to see from Bio very well. I just don't think we're there yet; most of it is still the early unlock levels of stuff, and not the final end chains. I am 100% behind rewarding effort; but pure scale of machines is mostly about waiting for the factory to produce & bots to place. The idea of slow breeding for the bits & pieces to unlock more efficient processing I can totally get behind! I would be super interested in your thoughts on where all of this should go and how to get there.

[mathturtle]

Regarding the # of seeds, see my suggestion to triple farm yield above. If you were getting more crops out, would you still need more seeds? The main concern I have with the idea of increasing seeds is that eventually they could back up everything so you need a way to destroy any excess (can they be composted? I don't recall).

I don't have the current version handy to test but seeds could be composted last time I tried. I think you had to process the dormant seeds before composting them but it provided a nice way to use the overflow since those farming recipes all need fertilizer anyway.

The issue is that the startup time gets a little insane. I got seeds from a garden so I can run one farm. Great. If I want to run a second I have to win the 1 in 20 chance of an extra seed 5 times. Doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that each attempt has to wait 1-2 minutes for the farm to grow in between. So the average number of tries to get another 5 seeds is 95, which takes 1.5 hours (with upgraded farms) or 3 hours with basic farms. But if you are belting your seeds instead of micromanaging putting them in the "right" farms, the first farm will take 2 crafts of extra seeds before letting the second one have any. So realistically the first time an automated system will let the second farm have seeds is after an average of 295 tries to get more (expected number of tries to get 15 extra seeds). 295 tries with 1 minute in between is almost 5 hours with the upgraded farms! The yield on one farm would have to be huge for that to be worth using.

Source: WolframAlpha's

Code: Select all

NegativeBinomialDistribution[n,p]

where n is the desired # of successes and p is the probability of success.

[evandy]

Just noticed that Concrete Bricks now take Stone bricks as input? Just curious - why bricks, not stone or crushed stone? Concrete typically takes agregate, not fully formed bricks. Admittedly slag is already an input (as is silicon ore) so that seems to be taken care of.

[danyax]

I propose to add higher tiers of Electric Boiler. Steam is in high demand in petrochem, all buldings has tiers and accept speed modules, but boilers remain the same. Adding module slots to boiler also would be nice.

[lovely_santa]

I do like this idea, have a queen small/medium/big biter that has a small chance to appear out of a biter egg. When breeding 2 queens together, these can lay an egg again. This way you can obtain multiple queens and start obtaining eggs that way. I do however want to keep some alien spores in there, so maybe they would require some advanced food, other than raw meat. Maybe meat dipped in alien goo, this way they still require some spores (instead of using all the spores in the eggsperiments).

I can think of lots of options here; the queens could want who knows what in exchange for laying eggs. Your proposal is as good as anything I can think of thus far

I finished the crystal production tweaking. The example I show here is taken from a previous post, producing crystal shards at a rate of 10/s. The main points here are power consumption and the required amount of crafting machines. The crafting machines are shown below, and roughly count for 50 MW of power in total. Now to the details:

So I did add in the queen biters, resulting in a way quicker way of obtaining biter eggs. You'll still need to get puffers to get the initial eggs. From there you have a small chance (5%, 2.5% and 1% respectively) to get a queen biter. The remaining chance is a regular biter. The may way of obtaining crystals is still zoo keeping and feeding them Alien-processed meat. This way it still requires you to get some alien bacteria. The new ratios are shown in the picture below.

raw_shard.png (118.01 KiB) Viewed 7677 times

As mentioned in my previous post, I tweaked the ratios for fish tanks as well, and here is my new ratio to go together with the biter breading. You can always take the alternative route with farming, but that is up to you.

alien_bacteria.png (104.12 KiB) Viewed 7677 times

And I also fixed the crafting times of meat processing, so for example I chose to get the required meat from puffers. I know this is not a prefect recipe that I am showing here, but it's more to quickly give a result, since this didn't need much tweaking.

meat_puffers.png (66.49 KiB) Viewed 7677 times

As the final request of this part, I added the conversion recipe to convert crystal dust to crystal powder as mentioned in my previous post. This is now even a prefect balance to process the raw crystals to their polished versions (and to harmonic) if you choose to do so. I kept in mind that crystal slurry from crystal dust (+ acid) is still more efficient than first converting it to powder and creating slurry out of that.

crystal_processing.png (217.47 KiB) Viewed 7677 times

As of now I didn't add in the 3 different tiers of buildings as I concluded this was kind of cheating to fix the recipes rather than taking on the recipes themselves. For this reason I did NOT add the different tiers just yet, but I am still considering this for a future update to boost your production, rather than reducing the initial footprint.

Any more thoughts about this? I guess this is fairly decent for a next release, especially compared to what it is now.

[lovely_santa]

Ok, I said that I'd sit down and noodle on bio-plastic. (extend this discussion to bio-resin and bio-rubber, I expect they are the same)

Industrial Plastic 1: ~175 machines to make 50 plastic/sec from coal @ 130 MW
Industrial Plastic 2: ~225 machines from multi-phase oil @ 150 MW
Industrial Plastic 3: ~160 machines from multi-phase oil @ 50 MW
Bio-plastic: ~3200 machines (farming beans from binafran) @ 500 MW

Bio-plastic has some definite advantages in that it has FAR fewer steps, but unless you provide massive numbers of beacons, and even more massive amounts of power it's just ... utterly useless. I'd really love to use it for my seablock, for instance, because getting back to water is MUCH easier than traditional industry but it needs 10x the machines and 2-4x the power that it should have to be competitive. I'll trade a bit of space & power for easier setup and fewer side-effects, but there are limits.

Similar to our discussions on breeding & zookeeping, the major issue here is throughput. Either the recipies need to run MUCH faster, or they need to produce in massive bulk. If you want specific suggestions, then at least in this case maybe something like:
- Bioplastic should produce 10 liquid plastic each (instead of 5)
- Bio extraction (for nutrient pulp and fuel oil should be brought down to 2s recipes (instead of 4)
- Farms should produce ~3x current yield (not sure if seeds should go up or not)

Open to other ideas, but basically the slow-recipe nature of Bio is currently not being compensated for in yield.

I'm kind of lost what plastic production you are using. By saying plastic is producing 5 at a time I assume you're using the liquid plastic recipe made from tree, using acetone gas. However, the acetone gas from nutrient pulp has (almost) tripple the plastic yield if you're using the recipe that also uses the Cellulose Acetate (from fermentation base). The one from the trees is more focussed to be used with petrochem. I think when you start using the full farming recipes, you get a better result.

By just entering the recipes in helmod, I got a recipe set to around 250 MW. Keep in mind, helmod is not the greatest at selecting the most efficient buildings. After manualy selecting the best buildings (but still tier 1), I got this result of 138 MW, which is quite balanced considering only the industrial plastic 1 and 2 as you mentioned, as industrial plastic 3 is more advanced, as I would use higher tiers of buildings by then.

plastic.png (336.94 KiB) Viewed 7672 times

As you can see, more than 50 MW (over 1/3rd) is used for the farming process, which is quite a lot, and they require quite alot of power as well. I'll increase the crafting speed of the farms (factor x2) and reduce all crafting recipes (from 60 and 45) to 30 (another factor x2 in this exact case). This will reduce the power consumption to something less than 15 MW for the farms. Since this is already quite a production (50/s) the 100-ish buildings seems a reasonable deal.

I'll also crank up the processing speed from 0.75 to 1 (factor 1/4), resulting in only 60 processors.

A final tweak, I'll reduce the time to make the liquid plastic from 4 to 2 seconds (factor x2), to be in line with petrochem, resulting in only 38 buildings instead of 77.

EDIT: After implementing these changes, this loop now takes less than 95 MW of power.

EDIT2: I forgot the nutrient pulp in my reasoning above. So let's calculate those as well...

pulp.png (275.74 KiB) Viewed 7656 times

So there are 2 things to notice: You need a quite significant amount of crop to extract the seeds again, so I might lower the amount of crops required to get seeds (5 instead of 10, factor x2). The next thing to notice is the huge amount of nutrient extractors and farms again that are required. I feel like I need to increase the yield of the nutrient pulp to reduce the requirement amount of crops to farm. Instead of increasing the yield, I'll reduce the input by half and speed up the recipe, resulting in a factor x2 increase (buildings required and ingredients).

After implementing this, it did increase power a bit, it is now at 120 MW, but is still quite within limits.

[lovely_santa]

I came to add some suggestions to farming and I see it is already being discussed

evandy has said all I wanted to on bio-plastics so I'll just +1 his comment above.

I don't want to sound too negative, I do love your mods and I wanted to suggest some ways they could be better. The other things I wanted to comment/suggest are:

1) advanced seeds (the ones that have dormant seeds) breed way too slow. I tried to use zelosquash for bio-plastics in my last seablock run and it took 20-30 hours to get half of my 40 farms running because the seeds weren't multiplying. I think it would actually be faster to breed the gardens and process them into seeds than to use the multiplication of the dormant seeds. Also, given that these crops need fertilizer and have a more complex ingredient and output chain I would expect them to produce significantly more than the simpler crops... but they don't. A third of the advanced crops make leaves and the others only make small improvements on the simple crop yields.

2) leaves are pretty much useless unless I missed a recent change and thus any crop that processes into them is useless. There are so many better ways to make nutrient pulp that make more of it. My suggestion is to add a recipe that turns leaves into cellulose fiber, potentially turning these crops into upgrades for tianaton rather than things no one bothers with.

1) The advanced seeds are a bit like kovarex, you just have to set it up and leave it running for a while. You don't have to start from 1, as you can get 5 seeds at once (with a chance) from the gardens, so maybe you won't get it right from the start, but you can increase the amount of gardens late game even, then you should for sure have an infinite supply.

2) Leaves are used for Rancid Puffing, which is used a lot to create raw gas from ammonia gas (blue algae). It really depends on your play style. I could maybe add fiber from leaves recipe using the bio press... I would have to look at ratios to make sure it's slightly beter than green algae, which will be difficult I believe...

Regarding the # of seeds, see my suggestion to triple farm yield above. If you were getting more crops out, would you still need more seeds? The main concern I have with the idea of increasing seeds is that eventually they could back up everything so you need a way to destroy any excess (can they be composted? I don't recall).

I don't have the current version handy to test but seeds could be composted last time I tried. I think you had to process the dormant seeds before composting them but it provided a nice way to use the overflow since those farming recipes all need fertilizer anyway.

The issue is that the startup time gets a little insane. I got seeds from a garden so I can run one farm. Great. If I want to run a second I have to win the 1 in 20 chance of an extra seed 5 times. Doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that each attempt has to wait 1-2 minutes for the farm to grow in between. So the average number of tries to get another 5 seeds is 95, which takes 1.5 hours (with upgraded farms) or 3 hours with basic farms. But if you are belting your seeds instead of micromanaging putting them in the "right" farms, the first farm will take 2 crafts of extra seeds before letting the second one have any. So realistically the first time an automated system will let the second farm have seeds is after an average of 295 tries to get more (expected number of tries to get 15 extra seeds). 295 tries with 1 minute in between is almost 5 hours with the upgraded farms! The yield on one farm would have to be huge for that to be worth using.

Source: WolframAlpha's

Code: Select all

NegativeBinomialDistribution[n,p]

where n is the desired # of successes and p is the probability of success.

As mentioned in my posts above, the farms are boosed quite a bit. I'll leave it for now, maybe re-check if it is still as bad in the next release... It takes 30 seconds to craft the recipe now, with the upgraded farms a crafting speed of 2, resulting in effective time 15 seconds. On average, every 1 in 20 recipes you'll have 1 extra seed, which requires x5 for a new full set, so 1 in 100 recipes in total, which is 1500 seconds, or equal to 25 minutes.

So every farm will create every half an hour a new set of seeds for another farm. No ones says you have to start with only 1 set, if you find more gardens (or get lucky) you can already start with 2 sets. If you look at tier 3 seeds you have 40% chance, so there you can maybe get 3 or 4? It realy depends how many gardens you obtain, and which tier you want to farm. This is for sure a huge increase then what it was before.

I propose to add higher tiers of Electric Boiler. Steam is in high demand in petrochem, all buldings has tiers and accept speed modules, but boilers remain the same. Adding module slots to boiler also would be nice.

I am not so sure how this will work in factorio, that would just result in a boiler consuming more power to have more steam production... I don't see that the steam production footprint is that big versus the rest of the petrochem setup? In the worse case you can always set up a nuclear reactor to create steam, which produces 103 steam/s for every heat exchanger.

[evandy]

I finished the crystal production tweaking. The example I show here is taken from a previous post, producing crystal shards at a rate of 10/s. The main points here are power consumption and the required amount of crafting machines. The crafting machines are shown below, and roughly count for 50 MW of power in total. Now to the details:

Looks great so far. Only real surprise and question is this: 100% return of the biter queen? I was kind of expecting something like a 5% chance of the queen dying off (to be balanced by the chance of getting a new queen from hatching eggs). Otherwise this all looks great through helmod; time to start building & testing for real.

As the final request of this part, I added the conversion recipe to convert crystal dust to crystal powder as mentioned in my previous post. This is now even a prefect balance to process the raw crystals to their polished versions (and to harmonic) if you choose to do so. I kept in mind that crystal slurry from crystal dust (+ acid) is still more efficient than first converting it to powder and creating slurry out of that.
crystal_processing.png

Didn’t have to be perfect, as you can always void crystal slurry, but making it perfect is certainly helpful!

As of now I didn't add in the 3 different tiers of buildings as I concluded this was kind of cheating to fix the recipes rather than taking on the recipes themselves. For this reason I did NOT add the different tiers just yet, but I am still considering this for a future update to boost your production, rather than reducing the initial footprint.

Any more thoughts about this? I guess this is fairly decent for a next release, especially compared to what it is now.

Agreed that the 3 tiers can wait until we have lived with all of this for a while. It’s a big change so far (and in the right direction), so let’s see what we have. The purpose of the higher tiers is really to scale it well in late game, so should be an easy add down the road.

I'm kind of lost what plastic production you are using. By saying plastic is producing 5 at a time I assume you're using the liquid plastic recipe made from tree, using acetone gas. However, the acetone gas from nutrient pulp has (almost) tripple the plastic yield if you're using the recipe that also uses the Cellulose Acetate (from fermentation base). The one from the trees is more focussed to be used with petrochem. I think when you start using the full farming recipes, you get a better result.

Yes, bio-plastic from arboretum is what I was looking at. I didn’t even realize there was a straight farming one, honestly, so shame on me. I’ll need to dig into this one more, but it certainly looks more reasonable in usage!

As you can see, more than 50 MW (over 1/3rd) is used for the farming process, which is quite a lot, and they require quite alot of power as well. I'll increase the crafting speed of the farms (factor x2) and reduce all crafting recipes (from 60 and 45) to 30 (another factor x2 in this exact case). This will reduce the power consumption to something less than 15 MW for the farms. Since this is already quite a production (50/s) the 100-ish buildings seems a reasonable deal.

I'll also crank up the processing speed from 0.75 to 1 (factor 1/4), resulting in only 60 processors.

A final tweak, I'll reduce the time to make the liquid plastic from 4 to 2 seconds (factor x2), to be in line with petrochem, resulting in only 38 buildings instead of 77.

So there are 2 things to notice: You need a quite significant amount of crop to extract the seeds again, so I might lower the amount of crops required to get seeds (5 instead of 10, factor x2). The next thing to notice is the huge amount of nutrient extractors and farms again that are required. I feel like I need to increase the yield of the nutrient pulp to reduce the requirement amount of crops to farm. Instead of increasing the yield, I'll reduce the input by half and speed up the recipe, resulting in a factor x2 increase (buildings required and ingredients).

Not really ready to comment on all of this since I haven’t studied the recipe as much, but generally I think you hit the nail on the head that the number of farms and bio-processors looks out of bed. Everything else seems generally fine. I still think that the simple thing here is to just scale the inputs/outputs of the base recipe to make it process more in a single machine. Needing to “solve” the problem of feeding the machines with scads of input is a nicely interesting problem to work, and keeps bio feeling nicely different from everything else.

As you state, power use is now well within limits to make it interesting. I concur with you above that all of this seems ready for a next release, to be banged on, thought through, and ready for more feedback after use. The outstanding list of future considerations (none of which is urgent prior to release in my opinion) seems to be:
- Puffers - you wanted to change to cross-breeding instead of the % returns
- Add 3 tiers of machines
- Address the Arboretum bio-processing outputs (are they useful with farming in the picture? Or just a niche small-usage thing, in which case leave them as is?)
- What do you think of earlier idea that leaves should process into cellulose (instead of pulp)? Is this worth thinking about?

[lovely_santa]

I finished the crystal production tweaking. The example I show here is taken from a previous post, producing crystal shards at a rate of 10/s. The main points here are power consumption and the required amount of crafting machines. The crafting machines are shown below, and roughly count for 50 MW of power in total. Now to the details:

Looks great so far. Only real surprise and question is this: 100% return of the biter queen? I was kind of expecting something like a 5% chance of the queen dying off (to be balanced by the chance of getting a new queen from hatching eggs). Otherwise this all looks great through helmod; time to start building & testing for real.

You require 2 and it returns 1 + 99%. You can always turn the queen into meat and get (90+45)%/(70+35%)/(50+25)% crystals from them as well in case you have too many. I am thinking of maybe decreasing the return rate for the higher tier biters, but keeping in mind the 1% chance of gaining a big biter queen is already quite slim, so you would end up with a net loss of big queens, and such you'll always need eggsperiments then. For now I kept them all at 99%, so you'll never have excess big biter queens (not including the rng factor).

As the final request of this part, I added the conversion recipe to convert crystal dust to crystal powder as mentioned in my previous post. This is now even a prefect balance to process the raw crystals to their polished versions (and to harmonic) if you choose to do so. I kept in mind that crystal slurry from crystal dust (+ acid) is still more efficient than first converting it to powder and creating slurry out of that.
crystal_processing.png

Didn’t have to be perfect, as you can always void crystal slurry, but making it perfect is certainly helpful!

It was more like a happy accident... I didn't knew it until I saw it haha

As you state, power use is now well within limits to make it interesting. I concur with you above that all of this seems ready for a next release, to be banged on, thought through, and ready for more feedback after use. The outstanding list of future considerations (none of which is urgent prior to release in my opinion) seems to be:
- Puffers - you wanted to change to cross-breeding instead of the % returns
- Add 3 tiers of machines
- Address the Arboretum bio-processing outputs (are they useful with farming in the picture? Or just a niche small-usage thing, in which case leave them as is?)
- What do you think of earlier idea that leaves should process into cellulose (instead of pulp)? Is this worth thinking about?

I do want to add cross-breeding puffers, I just don't know exactly which puffers I should combine:
For sure a gaseous + rancid to get a gaseous puffer
Maybe blazing + Gaseous to get a Rancid puffer?
Then I got the question: do I combine puffer X + Y to get an egg of puffer X, Y, or maybe an egg of puffer Z? And there I am stuck for now...

The 3 tiers of machines do not only apply to Bio Processing Animalis, but also to Nauvis (arboretums) and Vegetabilis (Processor, Extractor, ...). On the other hand I want to wait to do this until I got all blocks (components) finished, so I can directly give it the correct recipes instead of coming back to it again... So maybe pushing to the next release is indeed not a bad idea, it's not off the list for sure.

The Arboretum bio processing doesn't have to be the most efficient, as it still produces power as a side effect. However, the ratios might need tweaking. It's also though to tell as I want to keep the ratios between plastic, resin and rubber, which makes balancing against petrochem quite challenging.

[evandy]

I propose to add higher tiers of Electric Boiler. Steam is in high demand in petrochem, all buldings has tiers and accept speed modules, but boilers remain the same. Adding module slots to boiler also would be nice.

I am not so sure how this will work in factorio, that would just result in a boiler consuming more power to have more steam production... I don't see that the steam production footprint is that big versus the rest of the petrochem setup? In the worse case you can always set up a nuclear reactor to create steam, which produces 103 steam/s for every heat exchanger.

If you are running Bob's, you can also use a heat source (either solid fuel, or liquid-fuel fired) to drive a heat exchanger, so you can use fuel oil, coal, or whatever to do this instead of electric if you want.

[danyax]

I propose to add higher tiers of Electric Boiler. Steam is in high demand in petrochem, all buldings has tiers and accept speed modules, but boilers remain the same. Adding module slots to boiler also would be nice.

I am not so sure how this will work in factorio, that would just result in a boiler consuming more power to have more steam production... I don't see that the steam production footprint is that big versus the rest of the petrochem setup? In the worse case you can always set up a nuclear reactor to create steam, which produces 103 steam/s for every heat exchanger.

If you are running Bob's, you can also use a heat source (either solid fuel, or liquid-fuel fired) to drive a heat exchanger, so you can use fuel oil, coal, or whatever to do this instead of electric if you want.

Let me explain im more details what is the problem.

Petrochem consumes steam of any temperature, but steam above 165C has no benefits - recipes consumes same volume, so extra energy used to create steam is just wasted

Electric Boiler produce 165C steam - perfect. Same as mk 1 boiler. All other boiler/heat exchangers produce steam with higher temperature.

So my ask is to create mk2 mk3 electric boilers that produce stream at 165C but has higher output, like 60 and 80 per second

My only concern is UPS impact. Higher tier building improves UPS because you need less of them

[zero318]

I propose to add higher tiers of Electric Boiler. Steam is in high demand in petrochem, all buldings has tiers and accept speed modules, but boilers remain the same. Adding module slots to boiler also would be nice.

I am not so sure how this will work in factorio, that would just result in a boiler consuming more power to have more steam production... I don't see that the steam production footprint is that big versus the rest of the petrochem setup? In the worse case you can always set up a nuclear reactor to create steam, which produces 103 steam/s for every heat exchanger.

If you are running Bob's, you can also use a heat source (either solid fuel, or liquid-fuel fired) to drive a heat exchanger, so you can use fuel oil, coal, or whatever to do this instead of electric if you want.

Let me explain im more details what is the problem.

Petrochem consumes steam of any temperature, but steam above 165C has no benefits - recipes consumes same volume, so extra energy used to create steam is just wasted

Electric Boiler produce 165C steam - perfect. Same as mk 1 boiler. All other boiler/heat exchangers produce steam with higher temperature.

So my ask is to create mk2 mk3 electric boilers that produce stream at 165C but has higher output, like 60 and 80 per second

Yeah, I agree on this one. The last 0.17 game I did had 145 electric boilers (and a reactor) just to produce enough steam to run the steam cracker arrays for a slightly unstable 1k science per minute. 100 of them were in one massive block just to convert coal/thermal water into hydrogen for making rocket fuel.

Normally I support more petrochem hell, but Factorio doesn't currently have a good way of handling high capacity piping over large distances. Without a higher tier of electric boiler, the only way to increase the steam supply is to increase the footprint, thus spreading it out too far to flow well. A higher tier of electric boiler would be quite nice for scaling up steam production without resorting to pump spam.