Spraying everything with proliferator mk3

[general fufu]

Hello.

So i asked google which products i should spray, and google came up with different answers. So i decided to spray everything. This have however lead to a bigger coal consumption than i feel comfortable with:P

So i'm wondering what you people do. Do you also just spray everything? And should i be worried about the coal consumption?

This is my first real game after my first one where i was just playing around and making a mess.

[Halcyon]

I've never even made it to that stage of the game, so my thoughts are uninformed. That said, coal is a non-renewable resource in a cluster (AFAIK) and converting it into an increased production rate/efficiency effectively converts a non renewable resource (coal) into another non renewable resource (space) by reducing the number of assemblers needed to achieve a certain throughput. To me, the question is then "Do I need coal?" vs "Do I need space?"

I don't like the idea of trading coal for space while knowing that I can't increase the amount available to me, but I've also never reached the point where space constraints become meaningful. I feel like in the late game I will probably be more constrained by space than by veins, because there's a tech (vein utilization) for improved vein efficiency, but there's no way to reduce the size of buildings or increase the available surface area for them in a cluster once every planet is fully paved.

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Halcyon:

I don't like the idea of trading coal for space while knowing that I can't increase the amount available to me.

You absolutely can increase the amount available to you, there is a repeatable research called veins utilisation that decreases the amount a node drops for every 1 you take from it effectively increasing the amount you can mine dramatically. At high enough levels all resources effectively become infinite.

OP are you also spraying the coal and the proliferator, both will increase your return on coal invested, you can also generate infinite energetic graphite through xray cracking which can help too.

Coal is one of the most plentiful resources so as long as you keep up with your VU research it shouldn't be a problem.

[Bobucles]

Proliferator is exactly as powerful as the value of the sprayed item. Choose extra products at every possible opportunity, getting 1.25x universe matrices per cube is basically giving 25% more of every single thing in your factory.

Spray everything. Spray the highest value items first (research, high tech), then slowly work your way down picking the easiest high tech recipes, then proliferator production (yes, it is net profitable), then the difficult recipes, then the cheap recipes, then raw ore.

[josmith7]

And the ultimate limiting factor in the game is you computer's processing power. Proliferation lets you achieve more output for the same amount of factory and belts -- and thus more output for the same amount of calculations.

I don't quite proliferate everything - there are a few recipes that get no benefit from proliferation. And I don't always proliferate the production of proliferation; because the direct injection blueprint is so nice and compact [my science production blueprint proliferates each stage of proliferation production -- but my general proliferation production blueprint does not].
But otherwise by the end of the game I'm +production proliferating everything.

[I exist]

if u have the inf resources mod on u will get infinite coal genaration

[Doenyon]

I tend to only spray raw ressources, like coal and oil mostly. And then I also proliferate things that need lots of space to produce to save on that. As space is the most important currency.

[Bobucles]

Originally posted by Doenyon:

I tend to only spray raw ressources, like coal and oil mostly. And then I also proliferate things that need lots of space to produce to save on that. As space is the most important currency.

That's exactly why it's important to boost the most expensive items first. Consider boosting the value of a single universe cube. That's the same as proliferating the hundreds of resources and the antimatter that went into making it. Which is easier to do?

[Nekogod]

One thing to note as well for very long production chains that use coal, proliferating everything can actually result in a net REDUCTION in coal use.

For example 120 Universe matrices a minute with no proliferation uses 3960 coal per minute

Proliferation (mk 3 extra product) drops that number to 2158 per minute + 584 per minute to make the mark 1 proliferator. A total of 2742.

A net reduction of about 30% coal used.

It also drops power needed from 2.9GW to 2.4GW despite massively increasing the power required per machine it reduces the number of required machines so much that it more than cancels out.

[圣堂表哥]

if you are not playing infinite resource, here's my choices:

#1 graviton lens - it provides 400% boost on ray receiver and doesnt increase consumption speed, which saves a lot of space and graviton lens required in late game.
to give you a detailed example, I'm at the stage of 9k/min white cube + 600/min antimatter fuel rod which requires 12600/min photons. Spraying on graviton lens decreases ray receiver amount from 1050 to 525 and graviton lens consumption from 105 to 53.

#2 antimatter rod - it doubles the power of artificial star (72->144), be careful it won't increase the energy contained in one rod so it burns at double rate, but you only need half the artificial stars to produce energy so that evens out.
The actual use for this is to increase Icarus power generation

#3 foundation - increase soil gain and reduce soil cost, i found them quite useful.

#4 proliferator - just let them spray on themselves, increases spray count from 60 to 75. minus the one they use on themselves you get 74 per proliferator.

general rule: when you dont have unlimited supply of proliferators, use them on higher end of products (green/purple/white cubes, rockets etc)

also, spraying on rockets and solar sails increases their eject speed.

[Kyrros]

Originally posted by general fufu:

This have however lead to a bigger coal consumption than I feel comfortable with

You will never run out of coal... seriously. Your actual computer will be replaced with a new one (or eventually all new parts - a la 'Ship of Theseus') before your game runs completely out of coal IRL.

Proliferator uses coal SPECIFICALLY because the player community consistently requested/needed an end-game use for coal, itself, since it was largely an unused resource once you hit White Jello.

While it does feel like a limited resource, especially on your starting planet. The majority of your coal use happens in the early and mid-game - and your home system is where the majority of the early and mid-game takes place, thus initiating that scarcity bias in your mind. By the time you get to the end-game, when you will actually be leaning heavily into Proliferator, your coal use will have dropped pretty low (comparatively).

Back to my 'You will never run out of coal' comment though.

You may not have experienced (or noticed) in your game yet; the starting system is the exact center of your local cluster/map - everything else reaches out from there. There also exists, a resource multiplier bonus for planets - the farther from the center of the map (i.e. the 'Home' system) a star is, the higher the base amount of resources will exist in deposits on planets in that system. Where your home system will have a couple hundred thousand coal (or even a million) - a similar system located out towards the edges of the map will have hundreds of MILLIONS of that same coal.

Resources in the game, in descending order of abundance:
Stone > Iron > Copper > Coal > Titanium > Silicon > The rest of the rares > Unipole Magnets

Given all of the above - then combine that with the 'Vein Utilization' (VU) tech - unless you are running with extremely low resource settings AND also extremely wasteful on top of that (to the point of being intentional) with coal, such as burning it for primary energy of entire star systems or something else equally inefficient (but impractical for normal players) it will literally take months or years of continuous 24/7 gameplay to actually exhaust your supply of most resources in the game - especially with coal being the #4 most abundant.

Literally the only resource one truly runs the risk of running out of is Unipole Magnets, as it is contained in only 4-10 clusters (36 (35?) nodes max) across 2 separate stars (Black Hole and Neutron Star only) - and even then, if you're lucky enough, the Black Hole/Neutron Star systems tend to already be on the outer rim, gaining that 'distance from center' multiplier - which is why many people wait until much higher VU level to even begin tapping Unipoles. At high enough VU levels, even Unipoles become 'infinite' for all practical purposes of IRL human lifespans versus playing DSP. At even higher VU levels, the IRL human civilization will have disappeared from the Milky Way before a game running continuously for millions (or even billions of years) will run out of resources.

All that to say this:
1.) Coal is abundant with very few end-game uses (replaced with more advanced recipes earlier on)
2.) Vein Utilization is an amazing awesome tech to continuously research, once Infinite Research is unlocked in your game.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Kyrros:

Literally the only resource one truly runs the risk of running out of is Unipole Magnets, as it is contained in only 4-10 clusters (36 (35?) nodes max) across 2 separate stars (Black Hole and Neutron Star only) - and even then, if you're lucky enough, the Black Hole/Neutron Star systems tend to already be on the outer rim, gaining that 'distance from center' multiplier - which is why many people wait until much higher VU level to even begin tapping Unipoles. At high enough VU levels, even Unipoles become 'infinite' for all practical purposes of IRL human lifespans versus playing DSP. At even higher VU levels, the IRL human civilization will have disappeared from the Milky Way before a game running continuously for millions (or even billions of years) will run out of resources.

I'd quibble very slightly, in that I've gotten some unlucky seeds and was at real risk of running out of Spiniform Stalagmite Crystals.

(Had to turn off my advanced carbon nanotube lines and revert back to the graphene + titanium recipe until I got my VU high enough that my one remaining planet with Spiniform Stalagmite Crystals could withstand the resource consumption)


Still, even playing on the new minimum resource mode, which gives up much or all of the distance multiplier on resources, running out of coal wasn't ever a concern.