Restarting nutrients supply is a pain in the ass

[CheeseMcBurger]

I have a small factory and restarting nutrients is a pain in the ass. You need an abnormal amount of spoilage to get it going again and the nutrient production in the biochambers takes so many nutrients, it's absurd. This is not fun, it's nothing but a major pain in the ass.

[Nova]

Do you know you can put efficiency modules in biochambers to reduce the need for nutrient to 20%?

[rollc_at]

Restarting a late-game K2 base is also a major PITA - during a blackout you need 500MW to feed each fusion reactor, but you also need a tiny bit of power to run the offshore pumps to the backup nuclear reactor, hopefully you kept a stock of nuclear cells outside of your logistics network, etc. If you want that fully automated, you end up with a whole chain of separate power grids and circuit breakers.

Same goes for Aquilo. I have a humble base that produces ~90 science packs per minute, and I've just had my first "cold boot" experience. It needed a minor redesign to get it going - I've added a second nuclear reactor to keep up with both warming the base and producing enough power; and I've built a second, tiny backup base, that can heat and power itself (epic solar + solid fuel from ammonia) and produce just enough water to supply the main nuclear setup. Of course down the line there's fusion, but it also needs a bit of power to get going, and has a complex supply chain if you ever do run out of fuel. So I'm keeping the current nuclear setup in place, just in case.

I think of it, it's all just a part of the puzzle. This is an engineering/logistics game. You can engineer the factory to be great at never stopping, you can engineer it to make it easier to restart it, you can engineer it to be good at getting things going quickly (speedrun strats), etc - these are all design challenges/trade-offs and a part of the game.

I'm yet to experience cold-booting my current Gleba base - I chose the strategy of "it must never stop", and it hasn't for over 100 hours; but restarting it would indeed be a PITA, as the power grid also depends on burning off the leftovers.

Think of nutrients as your power grid; just instead of running power poles or circuit breakers, you have belts with items that spoil. Prioritise how you distribute these, and the puzzle should be easy.

[CheeseMcBurger]

I chose the strategy of "it must never stop", and it hasn't for over 100 hours
Think of nutrients as your power grid

Copium. No-one designs his factory to be a pain in the ass to reboot or cold-boot. If anything, designing the game around this mechanic is an oversight from the game developers. It shouldn't be *that* to cold-boot, especially if it is already brutal to design a factory that does not need it on Gleba.

these are all design challenges/trade-offs and a part of the game.

Thanks for explaining the word balancing. Confirms that I am at the right place.

[mouzy]

Nutrients can be a little tough to reboot but I think it's pretty manageable - gleba bases make tons of spoilage just by running and you can hook up an assembler to make nutrients from spoilage if your nutrient production stops for some reason.

As long as you prioritize getting those nutrients to bioflux production, you shouldn't need very many - my factory uses priority splitters for that and has been able to cold restart nutrients fine.

[rollc_at]

No-one designs his factory to be a pain in the ass to reboot or cold-boot.

No-one designs their factory to be attacked by biters either. Nobody is telling you how to play the game. Any% speedrunners disable pollution spread, because it's allowed. You can change spoilage rate too.

[DAMO238]

A simple fix could be to ensure that the nutrients from spoilage recipe does not need any yummy value. Currently, even if you have a cold boot setup, if the bioreactor does not have any partially used (yummed?) nutrients, then the cold boot will fail as the only way to get nutrients requires either the player hand crafting or nutrients. If nutrients were not required to make nutrients via the worst recipe, you would always have a fallback option if worst comes to worst.

[Nemoricus]

So, after looking at my own Gleba base, I noticed that the part of it that makes infrastructure had run out of nutrients, likely due to getting choked on spoilage somewhere. Now, this wasn't a completely cold boot, since I was able to pull bioflux from the agricultural science area and some nutrients to get it restarted. But since the engineer was on Aquilo, I had to use bots to place the items in the right spots. Very quick to reboot after the bioflux was turned into nutrients.

But, the key part of running bases on Gleba is making bioflux. It lasts a long time, turns into a *lot* of nutrients, and will comfortably run a large amount of biochambers all on its own. So you want to turn mash and jelly into bioflux as soon as possible.

Another thing to do is to run spoilage into a storage area, so that while your base is running you can build up a good supply of it against problems. After that, the simplest chain to reboot a Gleba base would be: Nutrients from spoilage to turn on biochambers doing yumako mash, mash to nutrients, jelly, bioflux, and bioflux to nutrients, in that order. One assembler and five biochambers is all you'd need to start making bioflux to reboot the main part of the base.

Also, as noted earlier, efficiency modules are going to be great here. Cuts the nutrient cost for running a biochamber to 0.2x.

[DarkShadow44]

I didn't consider it too bad. Just need a spoilage storage and an assembler to convert it to nutrients. Then you have two biochambers, one to create mash, one to turn it into nutrients. As long as you got fruit, it only needs a few spoilage to give you enough nutrients to run itself and a bioflux setup.

[The Phoenixian]

I feel like this thread is a lesson in "You get what you design, and you don't get what you don't design."

If you ask yourself how the Gleba factory is going to cold start, you can get it to restart effortlessly, even if the entire biologics sector is destroyed and has to be rebuilt by bots.

But if you put something in the loop between the cold start equipment, add speed or productivity modules without thinking, or otherwise design for something that interferes with that cold start capability and yeah, you can break that. And by "You" I mean "me." I was there making those mistakes and breaking a system that had previously worked perfectly.

A lukewarm start from spoilage-nutrients into bioflux-nutrients is simpler but as long as the chain is simple, uninterrupted, and short then cold starting from spoilage into yumako processing and yumako mash nutrients works just fine, as others say.

[mako00]

Copium. No-one designs his factory to be a pain in the ass to reboot or cold-boot. If anything, designing the game around this mechanic is an oversight from the game developers. It shouldn't be *that* to cold-boot, especially if it is already brutal to design a factory that does not need it on Gleba.

Sounds like a skill issue. Gleba trivially restarts with the spoilage to nutrients recipe (it never really stops), unless you designed your factory to burn all spoilage instantly.

[GTG3000]

Every module on my glebase has assemblers to restart with, and all the spoilables go through filters, with output being priority routed to refill the cold start assembler first. Everything just restarts so long as there's yumako and jellynut available. Takes a few circuit conditions like "don't restart the metal bacteria loop if there's no bioflux coming in yet", and some design to ensure that whatever nutrients the assembler makes reach the bioflux => nutrient assembler powering the module.

Mash/Jelly/nutrients never leave their modules and fruit/bioflux have very long expiration timers.

The only part of my base that can't restart from cold is the pentapod egg loop since you can't just magic some pentapod eggs from mashing tumako and jellynut together - but it will only ever stop if something happens to my farms, at which point I have bigger issues.

I do wish however that there was a way to filter by expiration % outside of inserter shenanigans.

[mmmPI]

The only part of my base that can't restart from cold is the pentapod egg loop since you can't just magic some pentapod eggs from mashing tumako and jellynut together - but it will only ever stop if something happens to my farms, at which point I have bigger issues.

You can't use magic, but you can use recyclers if you keep a few stack of biochamber aside for this purpose. That won't "guarantee" a restart because of the % but the more you keep the safer. If you get 25% chance of getting a pentapod egg while recycling 1 biochamber. With 20 biochamber reserved , it yield a 99.683 % chance of getting an egg, and 99.999% with 40 biochamber reserved for recycling in case of need to restart the pentapod eggs.

I saw you used the word "glebase" and thought we had some similar taste so maybe you would appreciate the trick x) maybe you knew about it and just didn't bother because you have safe base already, but it can also be used to restart nutrients since it's also part of the ingredients for the biochambers and it wasn't mentionned in the discussion so i wanted to mention it anyway

[GTG3000]

The only part of my base that can't restart from cold is the pentapod egg loop since you can't just magic some pentapod eggs from mashing tumako and jellynut together - but it will only ever stop if something happens to my farms, at which point I have bigger issues.

You can't use magic, but you can use recyclers if you keep a few stack of biochamber aside for this purpose. That won't "guarantee" a restart because of the % but the more you keep the safer. If you get 25% chance of getting a pentapod egg while recycling 1 biochamber. With 20 biochamber reserved , it yield a 99.683 % chance of getting an egg, and 99.999% with 40 biochamber reserved for recycling in case of need to restart the pentapod eggs.

I saw you used the word "glebase" and thought we had some similar taste so maybe you would appreciate the trick x) maybe you knew about it and just didn't bother because you have safe base already, but it can also be used to restart nutrients since it's also part of the ingredients for the biochambers and it wasn't mentionned in the discussion so i wanted to mention it anyway

Hm, I may try that later. Currently I do not keep an excess of pentapod eggs, so if i run out of nutrients for some reason there wouldn't be much to recycle.

[mmmPI]

Hm, I may try that later. Currently I do not keep an excess of pentapod eggs, so if i run out of nutrients for some reason there wouldn't be much to recycle.

Uh ? You do not need any nutrient in reserve to recycle the biochamber, only the biochamber themselves.

It can restart both nutrient AND/OR pentapod eggs is what i meant

[GTG3000]

Hm, I may try that later. Currently I do not keep an excess of pentapod eggs, so if i run out of nutrients for some reason there wouldn't be much to recycle.

Uh ? You do not need any nutrient in reserve to recycle the biochamber, only the biochamber themselves.

It can restart both nutrient AND/OR pentapod eggs is what i meant

Oh! I misunderstood you at first. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, definitely will be implementing it.