I hope you don't mind I replied here because it's less about bugs in the current version and more about discussion of the direction of the mod.
Arch666Angel wrote:Psawhn wrote:Ahh, so it's intended that solid fuel is much more expensive than vanilla. Out of curiosity, why? It does feel very expensive compared to vanilla, and with its absence there's no way to convert petroleum to fuel without using coke as a seed. (And the only pure liquids -> coke recipe I can find is cracking it out of gas condensates + thermal water -- otherwise we're using coal as a seed for solid fuel.) It feels unintuitive because the world runs on oil + gas as fuel, so I feel like there should be a way to turn liquid oil into fuel in-game without piggybacking off of solid carbon first.
Well, I say "no way." You should take a look at the added bob's liquid fuel canisters. 5 Liquid fuel + 1 Empty Canister -> 1 Liquid fuel canister (150 MJ), unlocked by Barrelling. The recipe to convert 1 Fuel Oil to 1 Liquid Fuel is still in, so its energy yield is more than 10 times the conversion to solid fuel using coke.
You dont need the solid fuel anymore for the rocket fuel, since it is build from the rocket fuel chain. If you compare it with vanilla, solid fuel makes coal more or less useless in the endgame, you usually have tons of it hardly using anything specially after the transition to solar. So you want uses for both of them, also you get far more oil/gas with petrochem compared to the vanilla game, even more so if you use the wood to methanol recipes from bio-processing and/or do additional coal cracking.
And you are right, I should probably do some adjustments to that recipe or remove it.
Ahh, that makes plenty sense. I should point out, though, that I'm not using bio-processing or smelting as I get the impression from the stickies that they aren't quite finished or polished yet. I also get the impression that bio-processing adds quite a few shortcuts through the processing chains and makes methanol production much easier. So I can't comment on balance regarding bioprocessing.
I apologize in advance for the incoming wall of text in defense of
some kind of petroleum->fuel equivalent without coal.
To start with, I feel like a hard requirement of coal for petroleum based fuel goes against the spirit of petrochem, which you've said to be about increasing options at the cost of logistical complexity while keeping heavy inspiration from real life. So along with that philosophy I'd really like to be able to choose how dependant I am on coal for fuel.
There are plenty of advantages to coal already. With your refining mod it's the only resource in the game that you can use with no processing of any sort -- just dig it out of the ground and stick it in smelters, boilers, or car engines for fuel. (Even wood requires some kind of algae/greenhouse setup to automate versus chopping by hand). One also can't completely cut ties without a massive logistical complication, as the carbon dioxide/solid carbon chain is very simple to use coal as the root and much more complicated using a petrochem process. (And, coming in 0.15, grenades are used for military science packs and explicitly require coal).
For power, I do think coal is still competitive with solar, as solar requires massive dedications of space for the panels and sulfuric acid for the batteries. (So, funnily enough, nerfing sulfuric waste water production indirectly helps make coal more viable for power generation). In vanilla, coal is simpler and more efficient to use over solid fuel or rocket fuel, until perhaps full beacon/productivity module setups start violating the laws of physics when making rocket fuel. But even if coal is disfavored for mid- to late-game energy production, that's also a reflection of real life. Coal is falling out of use all over the world and introducing some very serious economic and political consequences as a result.
I've previously mentioned that the lack of some kind of gasoline/kerosene equivalent for fuel is conspicuous in its absence, and counter-intuitive compared to the importance of petroleum fuels in real life.
Finally, your Petrochem mod already gives plenty of opportunities to complement the refining chain with coal cracking, which provides an incentive to have coal available in some form or another.
I'd be more than happy if the solid fuel production that involved coke was more efficient in one or more ways to an only-liquids -> fuel process. Inefficiencies could include a slightly higher cost of petroleum per megajoule or presence of byproducts. I think that would be a really good tradeoff that keeps with the spirit of your mods and provides an interesting choice for players. For example I can see a [13 Fuel Oil -> 1 Solid Fuel + Byproducts] recipe as competitive, given the added hassle of dealing with the byproducts and loss of efficiency of MJ per fuel oil in trade for the freedom from needing coal.
(Also, deviously, would changing the recipe be able to affect players who still have the vanilla petroleum->solidfuel recipes either via a mod or an older save file?
I still have the vanilla recipe in my current savefile because it was already researched, but I did verify that it is properly removed from a new world.)
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