I'm being stupid. How do Proliferators & Spray Coaters Work?

[WolfMaskMan]

Anyone know of some good resources to explain it?
OR can explain it laymans terms for me?

[Nekogod]

Spray coater sits on a belt and sprays anything that moves underneath it with proliferator, proliferator goes in a port on top of the spray coater.

When items coated in spray are used in a recipe (all items must be sprayed) that recipe is either sped up or the recipe produces extra free items.

If it's used on research cubes they get more hashes and are burned more slowly, if used on fuel for generators the fuel gets more energy and burns slower.

For example if you spray iron ingots and copper ingots with mk 3 spray and then feed the sprayed ingots into an assembler mk2 making circuit boards, you can either have the assembler produce 4 every second instead of 2, which will use resources twice as fast, nothing free here, it's just faster. Or you can have it spit out one free circuit board for every 4 it creates normally.

[WolfMaskMan]

Originally posted by Nekogod:

Spray coater sits on a belt and sprays anything that moves underneath it with proliferator, proliferator goes in a port on top of the spray coater.

When items coated in spray are used in a recipe that recipe is either sped up or the recipe produces extra free items.

Simple as that?

[Coops]

One other note. The proliferator gel must be fed into the spray coater one level up from the belt you are spraying. also, you can run the proliferator belt all the way through the coater and loop it to the next sprayer, thus one belt of proliferator gel can feed multiple sprayers.

I am currently running one line through 12 spray coaters

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Astro:

Originally posted by Nekogod:

Spray coater sits on a belt and sprays anything that moves underneath it with proliferator, proliferator goes in a port on top of the spray coater.

When items coated in spray are used in a recipe that recipe is either sped up or the recipe produces extra free items.

Simple as that?

Yeah pretty much. I've seen a few videos on it, but this one seems quite straight forward

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYDQTlVQwpE

[pat]

Originally posted by Nekogod:

Spray coater sits on a belt and sprays anything that moves underneath it with proliferator, proliferator goes in a port on top of the spray coater.

When items coated in spray are used in a recipe (all items must be sprayed) that recipe is either sped up or the recipe produces extra free items.

Good summation. The problem with all of the guides and instructional videos I've seen is that for some reason, they always assume that everybody is born with this knowledge. Lots of information about the various ways to set them up and the statistical differences between using them this way or that, but they never actually tell you what they're for.

[Dragonmaster]

Some information is provided in the in game guidebook.

[DelScorcho]

Skip Mk I and go straight with Mk II proliferation. As soon as possible use Mk III. I have a logistic setup only to make Mk III's now. Mk III's are sent out to other logistic production stations to proliferate everything I manufacture, from raw resources to end game items to 25% extra production. You can stretch out your resources a lot with +25%.

[dakin1]

Some examples of what the Proliferator does:

I used to run deuterium fractionators in banks of 10, which with a blue (Mk III) belt running the hydrogen through and recycling to the front would produce ~180 deuterium a minute.

I updated my setup to spray the inlet hydrogen with Mk III proliferator and also added stackers in the recycle loop to increase the hydrogen stack size being fed back to the inlet of the fractionators. I expected to see some improvement in production, but when I looked at my production statistics page after running the new setup for several minutes I was shocked to see it was producing ~1000 deuterium a minute (still with 10 fractionators). That's over 5x production increase with only a few simple changes to the setup.

Needless to say, the new Proliferator setup has made it much easier to ramp up my deuterium fuel cell production to increase production of rockets for the Dyson shell.

Also, if you spray the rockets feeding the launchers with Mk III (blue) spray, you will double the launch frequency of each launcher from 5/minute to 10/minute--huge improvement in getting the Dyson shells built.

[kris44dad]

Originally posted by Astro:

Originally posted by Nekogod:

Spray coater sits on a belt and sprays anything that moves underneath it with proliferator, proliferator goes in a port on top of the spray coater.

When items coated in spray are used in a recipe that recipe is either sped up or the recipe produces extra free items.

Simple as that?

You do have to spray all the inputs to an item to get the bonus.

[Xcorps]

I'm in yellow science still. At the moment I get more items from production speedup. You have to toggle the switch on every producer you have, so copy and pasting becomes even more valuable. It's not worth the time, effort, or material to spray everything with Tier ! unless you have low resources. It is good practice though for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 spray setups, so I do it anyway just to get muscle memory on laying out belts in parallel to allow for the easiest spray belt installs.

I'm still not 100% sure on how the sprayer proliferates if you spray *every* mat in the production process or just the 2 or 3 items that are going into a manufacturer.

I have seen a notice in the info that tells me something has 2 proliferation points but I don't understand how it went from 1 to 2. And I don't know the difference it makes either.

[A.C.Guernica]

How do they work? Not very good. The investment isn't worth it in my opinion. Glad that the recipe is relatively cheap to make or else it'd be 100 % washout. And it seems to me that they keep nerfing the ability of the spray. Now you can only use it on certain items. You can't use it to make extra of high powered fuel. It's locked in at a measly speedup. What's the point of putting in an item if you're only going to make it useless?

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Xcorps:

I'm in yellow science still. At the moment I get more items from production speedup. You have to toggle the switch on every producer you have, so copy and pasting becomes even more valuable. It's not worth the time, effort, or material to spray everything with Tier ! unless you have low resources. It is good practice though for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 spray setups, so I do it anyway just to get muscle memory on laying out belts in parallel to allow for the easiest spray belt installs.

I'm still not 100% sure on how the sprayer proliferates if you spray *every* mat in the production process or just the 2 or 3 items that are going into a manufacturer.

I have seen a notice in the info that tells me something has 2 proliferation points but I don't understand how it went from 1 to 2. And I don't know the difference it makes either.

Wall of text incoming with lots of maths, you've been warned!

Speedup doesn't give more items per se it just makes the machines faster so reduces time per item with an equivalent increase in resources used, the extra production setting does actually give more items, completely free (aside from the cost of the proliferator and extra power needed).

On longer chains the extra product setting has better yields and smaller builds because it compounds, whereas the speed up does not.

For example 30 electromagnetic turbines per second unproliferated needs 300 assemblers and 420 smelters, 600 iron /s, 120 copper /s using 324 MW

With MK3 speed up it needs 246 assemblers and 423 smelters, 29 water pumps, 68 chemical plants, 600 iron /s, 787 coal /s, 120 copper /s, and 63 titanium /s using 850.6 MW

With MK3 +production it needs 242 assemblers, 275 smelters, 6 water pumps, 32 chemical plants, 283 iron /s, 140 coal /s, 56 copper /s and 13 titanium /s using 634.0 MW

I tend to use MK2 for a lot of stuff since it's benefit per % of extra power needed is much better than MK3

With MK2 +production it needs 260 assemblers, 313 smelters, 325 iron /s, 171 coal /s, 64 copper /s using 434.8 MW

Regarding spraying every mat vs only spraying the products in the final step -1, it compounds if using the +production setting. Spraying ore means you get 25% more ingots, spray those ingots and you get 25% more of the next product and so on.

So if you say sprayed 30 iron ore and 15 copper ore you'd get 37.5 iron ingots and 18.75 copper ingots, spray those and you'll get 46.875 circuit boards. 56% more output for no extra input (aside from the proliferator). If you only sprayed the ingots and not the ore then you'd only get 37.5 circuit boards. On longer chains it gets pretty wild.

And whilst builds of equal size will give and use more products per second using the speed setting, builds of equal output that have enough links or a big enough first step will be smaller and use less resources using the extra products setting as with speed every link is cut in half, with extra products every link is reduced by an additional 20%.

So in a 5 link product that has say 120 smelters then 60 assemblers then 30 assemblers then 30 assemblers then 15 assemblers

The speed setting drops it to 60, 30, 15, 15, 7.5 a flat 50% each step

The extra product setting drops it to 39.32, 24.576, 15.36, 19.2, 12, a 20% drop for the final step, 36% for the step before that, then 49% then 59% then 67%.

Proliferation points are an indicator of which proliferator it was sprayed with, MK1 is 1 point, MK2 is 2 points and MK3 is 4 points. If an item has 2 points it means it was sprayed with a MK2 and will offer the MK2 benefits.

How do they work? Not very good. The investment isn't worth it in my opinion. Glad that the recipe is relatively cheap to make or else it'd be 100 % washout. And it seems to me that they keep nerfing the ability of the spray. Now you can only use it on certain items. You can't use it to make extra of high powered fuel. It's locked in at a measly speedup. What's the point of putting in an item if you're only going to make it useless?

They haven't changed what it can be used on at all, it's the same now as it was when it was added to the game. You can't use it for extra antimatter fuel rods, but you can get extra deuterium fuel rods.

It's huge in +production mode for long late game builds like green cubes and rockets it can reduce your power requirements (counter intuitively) by a decent amount and raw resource usage by 80%+ in some cases, in fact if you're using coal to make graphite for green cubes then fully proliferating the entire chain with mk2 actually uses less coal in total since it reduces the amount you need for graphite by so much.

[Xcorps]

That was an awesome post, thanks. I guess I got confused in a guide that said you only something like a 0.8% boost from using the MKI spray. Maybe that was on the spray itself?

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Xcorps:

That was an awesome post, thanks. I guess I got confused in a guide that said you only something like a 0.8% boost from using the MKI spray. Maybe that was on the spray itself?

Hmm spraying MK1 with MK1 costs 1 charge but only adds 1.5 charges so you only gain .5 of a charge per spray. So you spend 12 charges to get 18 extra

In total you trade 156 charges (13 sprays * 12 charges) for 162 charges (12 sprays * 13.5 charges) an increase of 3.8%

Whereas spraying Mk3 with MK3 is 15 extra charges per charge so you spend 60 charges to gain 900 extra trading 3660 charges (61 sprays * 60 charges) for 4500 charges (60 sprays * 75 charges) an increase of 23%

My fave to use is Mk2 for most things though, it only uses coal so is much cheaper and is 1.4x more power per extra product

Mk3 is 1.7x more power per extra product

I reserve MK3 for fractionator loops to keep them tiny, a quad stacked MK3 proliferated hydrogen line produces more Deut with 8 fractionators than my non stacked non proliferated line with 50 fractionators. And for late game expensive products like rockets, green cubes, duet fuel rods etc

[A.C.Guernica]

I'll keep that in mind, thanks for the post.