Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Give bioflux two fuel categories: food and burner.

What?

Now that items can have multiple fuel categories, let us burn bioflux.

Why?

As it currently stands, most spoilable items can be burned to dispose of excess. The only exceptions are nutrients (which spoil quickly enough), bioflux (which does not spoil quickly at all), science packs, and fish. If you want to dispose of them, you need to pick up recyclers from Fulgora.

By allowing bioflux to be burned, Gleba builds that rely on disposing of overproduction are a bit easier to manage if you don't go to Fulgora first. And now that the engine can handle this (using ItemPrototype:fuel_categories), Space Age may as well use it.

The reason I don't suggest this for nutrients is that you can't give the item a different fuel value for the different categories of fuel. This means that you can get ridiculous amount of power. One bioflux makes 30 eggs, which can make up to 1500 nutrients. That'd be 3 GJ of energy for each bioflux; 7.5 GJ if you burn them in a heating tower.

Also, nutrients spoil quickly, so you can put them in a few chests until they turn into something that can be burned.

Potential downsides

6 MJ of energy in a heating tower is 15 MJ out. Which is... a lot, actually. It's not enough to make bioflux superior to rocket fuel, but it is quite a lot of energy.

Burner fuels are also used in vehicles (cars, tanks, trains) and give different vehicle acceleration forces. Nice idea to have another fuel type, but would need to figure out where it falls in the scale -- perhaps somewhere between coal and solid fuel (based on its 6MJ fuel value)?
Wiki for tank fuels as an example.

Spoilage has decreasing modifiers to vehicle performance, but none of the other spoilable, Gleba-based fuels have any vehicle performance modifiers. I figure bioflux should work the same way.

Part of your premise is weak: you can convert bioflux to nutrients. Nutrients, by your account, spoil at an acceptable rate.

Burning things is always fine.