Factorio Forums

What?

Artificial soils and biolabs should be craftable in the biochamber to benefit from its 50% productivity.

Why?

Considering the fact that the biochamber received this stat very late in development, I suspect that the developers simply forgot/didn’t have time to properly adjust the recipe list to this change. If a biochamber can make another biochamber, then cultivating a biolab should also be well within its capabilities. And the soils are just a no-brainer, they would pad out the recipe list nicely. One is a powerful building made of expensive resources, and the other is a floor tile that’s made in bulk quantities. A productivity bonus would be very handy to have for both of these.

By the way, I may make a separate post on this later, but why do the soil recipes accept productivity modules? Landfill and concretes don’t, and yet these soils do. They’re definitely not intermediate products, they’re not used in even a single recipe (besides their own telescopic upgrading). Smells like oversight to me…

Maybe some sort of bio-explosives recipe that doesn't require coal synthesis would be nice too considering how useful rockets are for dealing with pentapods would be nice, although I'm not sure if some of the other military recipes would fit in nicely as well. The capture rocket seems like it should fit, though the poison and slowdown capsules definitely look like they could be made in a biochamber, with both of the grenades perhaps by proxy. Tangentially, getting coal synthesis with rocket turrets just feels too late considering that you can't even make military science on Gleba before that 2000x military science pack research.
Tl;dr is that maybe coal synthesis should be earlier and you should be able to make the grenades and other military stuff in the biochamber as well.