Are Blast Furnaces and Geothermals worth it?

[doomagent13]

I mostly enjoyed playing through the main game, and then got into FF. While much of the T4 stuff seems worth using, particularly Conduits, I have been a bit more sceptical of Blast Furnaces and Geothermals.

Geothermals take a LOT of resources. Unless I am missing something, the entire MagmaBore setup costs less than 3 Geothermal generators. I haven't done the math, but Turbines and Conduits seem likely to be cheaper, and more flexible. (Mk3 LETs could also work, although the Mk4 PSBs that the Conduits connect to help buffer the Turbines spin-up time, and are easier to setup.)

Blast Furnaces use a LOT of energy, and seem to be slower than (appropriately upgraded) Ore Smelters for everything except Chromium and Molybdenum. An Ore Smelter with Mk3 Induction can handle 40 ore per minute, producing 20 bars per minute. A Blast Furnace appears to only do 30 and 15, respectively. For Chromium and Molybdenum, a Blast Furnace is only 3 times faster than an Arc Smelter Upgraded Ore Smelter, but uses twice as much ore and a LOT more power. Obviously, Blast Furnaces work in the Cold Caverns, but that is the only advantage for T1/2 ores.

It is quite possible I am missing something about Blast Furnaces and Geothermal generators. If not, they just don't seem worth using.

*Exact numbers apparently depend on difficulty settings, but the ratios are probably similar, if not the same.

[Wariat117]

I think that you can boost geothermal with freezon injector, but I don't have FF so not sure if that's worth it anyway.

You could create new world with mods just to try those machines out, test with stuff and make decision which will satisfy you :D

[Ecclesia]

Geothermals: they generate about 11-12 worth of turbines, so take up alot less space. Ultimately it is your choice if you want to use like 25-30 geothermals or 11-12x that amount of Turbines to charge the Magmabore. Geothermals, once installed, are pretty much self-sufficient (they power the freezon particle collector for a fraction of their output, in turn they have 100% uptime forever, no resource needed).

Blast Furnaces are just nice to have, period :P They are incredibly fast, and speed is what you want for FF expansion, everything is done in bulk. Sure, you can worry about efficiency, but when you have a 50 million chromium vein, with T3 trenchers drilling on it, you will not empty that vein long after you complete FF.

Oh, and also: 1 geothermal can power 2x Blast Furnaces, so power isn't a problem either at some point. Once you are ready to power the Magmabore for the final stretch, you can turn all that power around and face it to the Magmabore, your Blast Furnaces are no longer needed at that point (since you have built everything already :P ).

[doomagent13]

It was my understanding that Geothermals provide about 5k. Turbines provide a little over 1800. Therefore, it only takes 3 Turbines to roughly equal a Geothermal. 6 Turbines have more output than a Conduit can handle; 66 Turbines is more than enough to power the MagmaBore, while allowing for less than 100% throughput through the chain of Conduits and Mk4 PSBs. Each Turbine takes 45 Advanced Machine Blocks, along with 36 Plastic Pellets and Gold Bars, and 9 Steel. 1 Geothermal takes 1500 each of Chromed Machine Blocks and Magnetic Machine Blocks. If built on the surface, it takes a few hundred Alloyed Machine Blocks to get ~10k pps from Turbines to a MagmaBore. And like I said, the entire MagmaBore setup appears to take less resources than 3 Geothermal generators.

It might be worth mentioning, I built for resources to be processed in a steady stream, rather than in bulk deliveries.

[Ecclesia]

Nah those numbers are a bit off. Sounds like you are playing on Rapid? On plentiful power turbines only give 450 pps and geothermal over 5000. On rapid the ratio should be about the same.

[Ecclesia]

Also, bringing in resources in bulk + guaranteeing a steady stream do not exclude each other. The idea is you want to streamline all parts of the chain (trencher, bulk cargo lift, blast furnace) in such a way that no part is the bottleneck and keep expanding on that.

Sure, technically a cargo lift is by definition not a steady stream, but in the grand scheme of things it is. By the time it comes down the trencher should be done filling hoppers and when it comes up the blast furnace should be done smelting. 100% movement time for the lift.

[doomagent13]

It's Rapid resources and Plentiful power. (I just took the default settings for a first world.)

If the ratio is what you say, that would suggest 6 Geothermal generators would be enough to power the MagmaBore. (It would also suggest the wiki is out-of-date/wrong, which could be true.)

Unless Blast Furnaces get faster and/or Ore Smelters get slower, I don't see how Blast Furnaces could be worth using for T1 or T2 ores. They are better for T4 ores, but then you have to send bars one way or the other between the Cold Caverns and the Surface in order to have them all together for further processing/crafting.

[Azlo]

The geothermal is totally worth it. In plentiful they generate 400-500 power with nothing and 8K-10K with freezon, way better than turbines.

For the BlastFurnace I saw some highly controversed thread :

As you said they use twice as much ore as a smelter, a lot of power (2500pps per furnace) but can handle way more ore. The Arc Smelter is better except in speed.
Some were saying that you should choose speed above efficiency but I disagree, I would prefer using the Arc Smelter 'cause using the Blast Furnace means that your veins would deplete twice as fast so you would have to change your trencher set up more often (finding a good vein, dig, build trencher, bring power, build or not a cargo lift etc ...).
I personnaly changed the recipes so that the Blast Furnace efficiency would be the same as the Arc Smelter, no change to the power consumption as it is easier to handle and I don't want to spoil the whole game.

[Ecclesia]

Originally posted by doomagent13:

It's Rapid resources and Plentiful power. (I just took the default settings for a first world.)

If the ratio is what you say, that would suggest 6 Geothermal generators would be enough to power the MagmaBore. (It would also suggest the wiki is out-of-date/wrong, which could be true.)

Unless Blast Furnaces get faster and/or Ore Smelters get slower, I don't see how Blast Furnaces could be worth using for T1 or T2 ores. They are better for T4 ores, but then you have to send bars one way or the other between the Cold Caverns and the Surface in order to have them all together for further processing/crafting.

Odd how Rapid Resources affects Turbine pps then, oh well.

Ooh and I did not realize you were talking about T1-2 ores! Yeah for those it makes no sense using Blast Furnaces. Standard smelters (not basic) are fast enough for that, you can just keep smelting that on surface, also because you don't need alot of that anymore in FF (well except Iron, Nickel and some Copper for specialized Block production for cold caverns).
So yeah to answer your final comment: there does need to be some form of transportation between CC and surface. I chose to send Imbued blocks down simply because of the ratio 1:8 to chromium/molyb bars.

Originally posted by Azlo:

For the BlastFurnace I saw some highly controversed thread :

As you said they use twice as much ore as a smelter, a lot of power (2500pps per furnace) but can handle way more ore. The Arc Smelter is better except in speed.
Some were saying that you should choose speed above efficiency but I disagree, I would prefer using the Arc Smelter 'cause using the Blast Furnace means that your veins would deplete twice as fast so you would have to change your trencher set up more often (finding a good vein, dig, build trencher, bring power, build or not a cargo lift etc ...).
I personnaly changed the recipes so that the Blast Furnace efficiency would be the same as the Arc Smelter, no change to the power consumption as it is easier to handle and I don't want to spoil the whole game.

It is true. For every X amount of Blast Furnaces there is an equal amount Y of arc furnaces that have the same production (bars / minute) yet double the efficiency, which feels really counterintuitive, hence many people stick with Arc Furnaces. I once saw DJarcas mention he wanted Arc Furnace to be a bootstrap, but surely then it should be the other way around? Start with Arc Furnaces which have crappy efficiency (meaning you will need a few more Hard Rock Grinders at the start), then go to Blast Furnaces which feel like a major upgrade.

That being said, I still go with Blast Furnaces in CC simply because the cost to make one is extremely low (around 100 C + M bars) and the power is there anyway at some point (especially once you get the first few geothermals working). And again: efficiency is a null-issue with T3 trenchers on a 50 million ore vein (really, it will NOT run out xD). Just build 4 Blast Furnaces, hook them up to one Casting Basin, and the basin will spit out bars. In plentiful/plentiful world, 10 cargo lift shafts with 20 blast furnaces (one on each side of shaft) and 5 casting basins were enough to at some point build a new geothermal every few minutes, that's how fast the bars were coming in. In fact, at that point the Imbued Block production became the problem :P

[Azlo]

Originally posted by Ecclesia86:

That being said, I still go with Blast Furnaces in CC simply because the cost to make one is extremely low (around 100 C + M bars) and the power is there anyway at some point (especially once you get the first few geothermals working). And again: efficiency is a null-issue with T3 trenchers on a 50 million ore vein (really, it will NOT run out xD).

I understand, one thing I forgot to mention about that. The blast furnace loses in efficiency, but you gain some with trencher MK3 (100% efficiency I think ?), so the whole thing is not totally stupid, even if I still disagree.

[DirtyCamper]

Geothermals are absolutely worth the effort. But only combined with freezon.
Build a few and you can keep the creepers away, and kill all the overmind spawn.
The net result is free resources for ever... munching spawn kill delivers free up to T3 (I think) ore..., so all but Moly and Chrome.