Since When Is Copper Important?

[Rephath]

I played this game a year or three ago, stopped, and am starting up again, and I'm running out of copper. Did I forget how important copper was? Or did they rebalance the game in the intervening years to make it more central to crafting?

Edit: I've launched the rocket a few times in the past. I think the 0.17.0 is what changed things because that seems to have changed a lot of formulas to make them more copper-centric.

[Fel]

Not really, copper was always very important.
It's just that in the early parts of the game you need a lot more iron, the copper needs slowly creep in as you continue to tech up, especially around the circuits.

[DaBa]

Don't know about which point you are in the game, but early copper is not very important, you can get VERY far with just a single yellow belt of copper. But, as soon as you get to Advanced circuit and then processing units, copper demand will spike up and continue to rise along with iron, since the you will ALWAYS need more electronic circuits.

[Jupiter3927]

You really need to start worrying about copper when you get red circuits going.

[shadain597]

Yeah, either you didn't get to late-game tech last time or you've simply forgotten how important copper is. Pretty much all of the resource demands have sudden spikes at new science pack tiers, but copper might be the one that you feel the most, due to the way circuit progression works. Iron consumption kinda sneaks up on you too, because it's in high demand all over the factory, including in the circuits. But the most deceptive form might be steel--the ratio of 5 iron to 1 steel means it's easy to underestimate just how much iron the factory will consume. 25 steel doesn't look so bad for 1 recipe, until you remember that it is 125 iron plate that has to go through 25 smelting recipes that each have a base craft time of 16 seconds.

[Rephath]

I looked into it on the wiki. I'm betting I was playing before the 0.17.0 update a few years back, because some of the formulas got changed up at that point.

[DCYW]

Needs copper for copper wires and electronics especially circuits.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Rephath:

I looked into it on the wiki. I'm betting I was playing before the 0.17.0 update a few years back, because some of the formulas got changed up at that point.

Before 0.15, they cost 16.5 copper per blue pack.

In 0.15, Blue got a large overhaul, but the cost dropped to 9.5 copper per.
Shortly after, it changed from assembler to miner, but the copper cost is the same.

In 0.17, it changed to 3 Adv. Circuits, which means 6 circuits (9 copper) and 12 wire (6 copper). It yields twice the blue, so ultimately it's only 7.5 copper per pack.

So if anything, blue science lost a lot of copper in its cost. They did expand on end-game science, adding in purple and yellow (and military black) that use way more copper than before. Purple uses 57.5 to make 3 packs, and yellow takes 144.5! to yield 3.

That's close to 20 copper per pack. All of that is used in the various levels of circuits though. If you dedicate a lot of your copper straight to the circuit productions, then you rarely need more than 1 belt of copper for nearly anything else.

The exception to all this though, the Low Density Structure. This bad boy was around in 0.12, and only used for the rocket. It cost 5 copper per. In 0.17, it dropped form 10 steel to 2, but the copper cost raised 4x, to 20 per structure, and was now needed for yellow science. This is likely to be the next biggest consumer of copper in your base. It is this, plus Processors (40 copper each) that is the reason yellow science eats up so much copper.