Agricultural Science Packs used up too fast

[lindsayforum]

Agricultural science packs are being used 2 times or more faster than other science packs researching in bio labs. I've attach a short video of a biolab using science packs. You can see it goes through a few agricultural packs per science cycle while the other packs are using less than one pack per research cycle.

This is on space age version 2.0.32 with no extra mods. Happy to upload the save too if that helps.

Love the game!

[boskid]

This is working as intended since your agricultural science packs are almost fully spoiled. "Spoilables and research" tip explains this shortly:

03-10-2025, 15-42-39.png (6.84 KiB) Viewed 647 times

[lindsayforum]

Ahh, ok, missed that. Thanks for the fast reply!

[Tertius]

To ensure good freshness of the agricultural science pack, revisit your science pack production line.

Keep buffering as small as possible. Don't store spoiling items with the intention to use them later, only store them if they have no use any more and wait for final spoiling. Instead, do produce continuously without ever stopping production, even if you don't need all the products. Continuously burn surplus instead of not producing surplus.

If you limit the pentapod egg insertion into the biochamber so there is never more than 1-2 pentapod eggs in the input slot, the eggs used for the science pack are much fresher than if you let the input slot accumulate 4 or 5 eggs all the time. The egg freshness is inherited by the science pack. The same with bioflux. Connect the output of your bioflux production directly to the science production. No intermediate storage between them. If you want to store bioflux, do it with the leftover bioflux left after science production.

Finally the fruit farm production: deactivate your agricultural towers while you have enough fruit in storage. Don't harvest everything you can harvest. Instead, activate the towers only if a small intermediate buffer runs empty, and stop them again as soon as that buffer began to fill.

It's possible for agricultural science packs to have about 94-95% freshness when they leave their production biochamber.

[Noites]

image_2025-07-24_193157715.png (28.64 KiB) Viewed 142 times

If the Science capacity % of the Agricultural science pack is affected by the Freshness %. and the Science capacity is shown here for the selected pack. Shouldn't it be reduced?. as the indicator for the remaining Science capacity is incorrect.

[eugenekay]

image_2025-07-24_193157715.pngIf the Science capacity % of the Agricultural science pack is affected by the Freshness %. and the Science capacity is shown here for the selected pack. Shouldn't it be reduced?. as the indicator for the remaining Science capacity is incorrect.

The "Remaining" mechanism is the one used by all Science Packs (and Ammo Magazines), to indicate how many "Research Cycles" (or bullets) are remaining in that Pack. When you combine two item at 45%, you get one item at 90%.

The "Freshness" / Spoilage mechanism is specific to Space Age & Agricultural Science Packs. Values less than 100% causes the Lab to consume additional "Remaining" points, for the same amount of "Research Cycle" progress. When you combine two Items at 45% Remaining / 45% freshness they are combined to 90% Remaining / 45% Freshness; not to 45% Remaining / 90% Freshness.

Simply: these two Statistics are referring to different Properties. That's why they work separately.