Gleba and quality ore.

[Hurkyl]

I started thinking about implementing quality on Gleba and realized something.

Cultivating bacteria is a short loop that can easily breed and maintain higher quality. So the only limiter on your ability to produce high quality iron and copper ore is your ability to produce quality bioflux.

By default, each bioflux is worth five ore in the cultivation loop. If you load the biochamber up with 4 legendary prod 3 modules so you have +150% productivity? Each bioflux you produce is worth a whopping nine ore.

I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about what shenanigans you can do with this.

[Simon]

I feel like you might struggle producing enough bioflux of the right quality. You would need like one per minute just to keep the iron bacteria in circulation. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it does sound like quite the challenge just to get it working.

[Hurkyl]

It would definitely be hard to keep legendary bacteria spinning around... but uncommon or rare? Probably not so much. Also, quality Bioflux also keeps for a ridiculously long time, so you can afford to wait for the epic/legendary bioflux to stockpile a bit before spinning up some higher quality bacteria.

[Townsie]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

It would definitely be hard to keep legendary bacteria spinning around... but uncommon or rare? Probably not so much. Also, quality Bioflux also keeps for a ridiculously long time, so you can afford to wait for the epic/legendary bioflux to stockpile a bit before spinning up some higher quality bacteria.

That is what I also think is the problem. You would need a splitter system from every but the legendary bio reactor to every bio reactor to sort the bacteria for multiplying and you would need the right bioflux there when the right bacteria is there too. Quite solvable on paper, but I dont think it is very efficient. Id rather look for a new patch on Nauvis and put quality big drills on it.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Townsie:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

It would definitely be hard to keep legendary bacteria spinning around... but uncommon or rare? Probably not so much. Also, quality Bioflux also keeps for a ridiculously long time, so you can afford to wait for the epic/legendary bioflux to stockpile a bit before spinning up some higher quality bacteria.

That is what I also think is the problem. You would need a splitter system from every but the legendary bio reactor to every bio reactor to sort the bacteria for multiplying and you would need the right bioflux there when the right bacteria is there too. Quite solvable on paper, but I dont think it is very efficient. Id rather look for a new patch on Nauvis and put quality big drills on it.

Wait what? I think you can just collect the desired quality with a filtered inserter and bots to start the process and then it self sustains without any splitters.

As long as you are using enough bioflux - getting above rare would be hard.

[Townsie]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

Originally posted by Townsie:

That is what I also think is the problem. You would need a splitter system from every but the legendary bio reactor to every bio reactor to sort the bacteria for multiplying and you would need the right bioflux there when the right bacteria is there too. Quite solvable on paper, but I dont think it is very efficient. Id rather look for a new patch on Nauvis and put quality big drills on it.

Wait what? I think you can just collect the desired quality with a filtered inserter and bots to start the process and then it self sustains without any splitters.

As long as you are using enough bioflux - getting above rare would be hard.

Well yeah, but the "ore needs to be there when flux is there"-problem ist still happening. But youre right, if you got enough production you can get there. It still seems harder and more complex than a miningpatch with modules

[Hurkyl]

Huh, steam only just now notified me that this got some more replies.

I don't think the "spin up a high quality bacteria" process is too difficult. I've done a bunch of quality filtering (both along production chains and in recycler loops), and have a bacteria system that wakes up and starts from scratch when iron/copper plate buffers get low. So I don't think it would be difficult to set up a progressive system for using lower quality bacteria loops to seed higher quality ones and wired to activate only when enough bioflux is available.

And once you have a single higher quality bacteria, you just can just keep feeding it bioflux until supplies run out.


Uncommon bioflux shouldn't be hard at all to come by once you're doing serious quality stuff. With legendary Q3 modules in just the bioflux biochamber, a quarter of every bioflux you produce will be uncommon or better. Do quality in the mash/jelly chambers too, and more than 1/16 of your bioflux will be rare+.

And each bioflux is only something like 1.17 fruits+nuts to make (that's total, not each).

I've been puzzling through the math, and I'm getting the impression that it helps a great deal when a quality production chain is the same 'length'. E.g. Combining a stream of normal iron ore and normal copper ore gives you an imbalance when crafting green circuits; the end result is a bunch of higher quality copper cables you can't pair with lower quality iron plates.

But if you start with an uncommon iron ore stream, the distributions all line up.

So, I think the benefit of having a stream of higher quality ore is more beneficial than it might initially seem. But I haven't pushed the analysis to a point where I'm really confident in those sorts of squirrelly judgements, so maybe I'm way off base.

[argrond]

Originally posted by Simon:

I feel like you might struggle producing enough bioflux of the right quality. You would need like one per minute just to keep the iron bacteria in circulation. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it does sound like quite the challenge just to get it working.

Seems like that's for 20-30 farms and recyclers for nuts and yumako. There is no way to maintain flux quality just by cycling itself, you may need mash and gel to be of the designated quality since you can produce as much base resources as needed for that.
That may cause a lot of trouble with curious fauna of Gleba, so I believe sufficient defences are needed for that process to be secured properly...

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Possible but annoying.

Will require an obscene number of buildings not only to account for the different quality tiers but also to produce a decent amount of stuff. With biochambers, just bioflux production is 5 yamako+2 jellynut feeding 6 bioflux and then it's 1 bioflux for 4 bacteria.
It will also involve a lot of resource voiding.

[Hurkyl]

Running the numbers, without any modules, a single Yumako tower and 40% of a Jellynut tower yields 45 ore per second -- enough to saturate a blue belt. (unstacked)

Each Yumako and Jellynut tree tile produces a little under 1/6 items per second -- each harvest is 50 items and the tree takes 5 minutes to grow.

So 45 plots working full time will produce 7.5 Yumako, and 18 plots produce 3 jellynut. With the innate productivity that averages out to 9 bioflux per second. And each bioflux is 5 ore. (you get the productivity bonus on that recipe too)

Thanks for giving me the motivation to actually work out the yield to confirm my impression that it's actually pretty good (and that people are underestimating it).

Originally posted by argrond:

Seems like that's for 20-30 farms and recyclers for nuts and yumako.

Huh. A recycler can process 16 yumako/jellynut per second, but only 1.33 bioflux per second (before modules). For completeness, it's also 16 mash/jelly.

Noted.

But if you want to do a recycling loop to enrich your products, doing it on the bioflux would be a little easier to keep control of and give you better yield, since you aren't 'wasting' opportunities for quality rolls when the ingredients are already of the target quality.

So it's a balance between the modules you want to invest (because you need to fill more recyclers if you're recycling bioflux) versus the yield you want to get. I imagine recycling bioflux wins out in the end, even if you need to use lower quality quality modules in order to have enough.

If idea isn't clear, a different framing is that it's better to get quality mash by winning a quality roll on the mash recipe rather than winning a quality roll on recycling a yumako and then processing normally. And similarly for a quality bioflux.

[brown29knight]

I have some tangential information that may prove useful: (none of this is about using the metal bacteria, all of it is about recycling bioflux)

I was demolishing a legendary biter egg production line, and trying to decide what to do with the thousands of rotting bioflux I had around, so I started recycling it for quality to see what would happen.

Is seems that when the quality increases, the spoil time is immediately recalculated based on the remaining freshness. (obvious in hindsight,)

In the case of normal to legendary bioflux, this means things that would spoil in 2-3 min were suddenly viable for another 40 min.

As spoil timers average when an item is stacked, this means that as long as you have 1 legendary bioflux being made every couple of min, the entire lot should not expire, you are constantly adding too much time to the stack for that.

Putting it plainly, you should have a lot more time than expected to work this process, as long as recycling of the bioflux is used to generate some or all of the legendary material, and at least one legendary bioflux is made every few minutes.

It will be near to expiry when it is done, so automate its usage ahead of time.

[Hurkyl]

Using bioflux for quality plastic is another intriguing possibility. But the twist is you want to do it on Nauvis rather than Gleba.

Not bioplastic. That's constrained by having a 2 step chain (Yumako -> Mash -> Plastic), so it doesn't compete with mining the ore directly.

But there is another chain:

• 6 Spoilage -> 1 Carbon
  
• 5 Spoilage 1 Bioflux -> 2 Sulfur
  
• 5 Carbon 1 Sulfur -> Coal
  
• 1 Coal -> 2 Plastic

So this is a chain we can use for quality coal.

And this is super good on Nauvis of all places. With a Captive Biter Spawner and one Bioflux per minute, you can produce 15 nutrients per second (minus the cost to feed the Biochambers). More with modules.

So nearly 900 nutrients per bioflux.

So you can basically produce limitless Carbon on a two-stage quality chain two-stage quality chain: Biter egg -> Nutrients (-> Spoilage) -> Carbon. Getting quality spoilage is practically free, so I will consider that cost negligible in the further analysis.

And interestingly, this production chain for plastic is cheaper than the bioplastic one (if I'm ignoring the petroleum gas), since if you make sulfur in a biochamber you're getting 3 coal per bioflux, and so 6 plastic.

Bioplastic only gets you 4.5 plastic per bioflux, and consumes some mash too.


So the only relevant costs on the production chain are

• Fruits/Nuts -> Mash/Jelly -> Bioflux -> Sulfur -> Coal -> Plastic

and the yield is again pretty good.

This seems like a super good way to get quality plastic, which should help boost quality advanced circuit production.

And because of the longer production chain, this is maybe a good solution to the "what do you do with the lower quality bioflux" question that would come up if you're going for quality ore production.

I need to start looking at the production chains for the equipment grid items. Having the agriculture boost to quality seems like a good path to puzzle through for bringing down the costs of high quality equipment.

[Simon]

Originally posted by argrond:

Originally posted by Simon:

I feel like you might struggle producing enough bioflux of the right quality. You would need like one per minute just to keep the iron bacteria in circulation. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it does sound like quite the challenge just to get it working.

Seems like that's for 20-30 farms and recyclers for nuts and yumako. There is no way to maintain flux quality just by cycling itself, you may need mash and gel to be of the designated quality since you can produce as much base resources as needed for that.
That may cause a lot of trouble with curious fauna of Gleba, so I believe sufficient defences are needed for that process to be secured properly...

Yeah, so about that. I just learned that bioflux recycles into itself.

[brown29knight]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Using bioflux for quality plastic is another intriguing possibility. But the twist is you want to do it on Nauvis rather than Gleba.

Not bioplastic. That's constrained by having a 2 step chain (Yumako -> Mash -> Plastic), so it doesn't compete with mining the ore directly.

But there is another chain:

• 6 Spoilage -> 1 Carbon
  
• 5 Spoilage 1 Bioflux -> 2 Sulfur
  
• 5 Carbon 1 Sulfur -> Coal
  
• 1 Coal -> 2 Plastic

So this is a chain we can use for quality coal.

And this is super good on Nauvis of all places. With a Captive Biter Spawner and one Bioflux per minute, you can produce 15 nutrients per second (minus the cost to feed the Biochambers). More with modules.

So nearly 900 nutrients per bioflux.

So you can basically produce limitless Carbon on a two-stage quality chain two-stage quality chain: Biter egg -> Nutrients (-> Spoilage) -> Carbon. Getting quality spoilage is practically free, so I will consider that cost negligible in the further analysis.

And interestingly, this production chain for plastic is cheaper than the bioplastic one (if I'm ignoring the petroleum gas), since if you make sulfur in a biochamber you're getting 3 coal per bioflux, and so 6 plastic.

Bioplastic only gets you 4.5 plastic per bioflux, and consumes some mash too.


So the only relevant costs on the production chain are

• Fruits/Nuts -> Mash/Jelly -> Bioflux -> Sulfur -> Coal -> Plastic

and the yield is again pretty good.

This seems like a super good way to get quality plastic, which should help boost quality advanced circuit production.

And because of the longer production chain, this is maybe a good solution to the "what do you do with the lower quality bioflux" question that would come up if you're going for quality ore production.

I need to start looking at the production chains for the equipment grid items. Having the agriculture boost to quality seems like a good path to puzzle through for bringing down the costs of high quality equipment.

The only issue I have with this is that usually plastic production on Nauvis is not an issue. Coal is easy to come by, and more so with quality big mining drills. Petrol gas is likewise not a limited resource in most cases. Plastic recycles into plastic, so you can simply overproduce it and recycle it to the quality you want.

Now show me a way to reliably produce large amounts of quality carbon fiber, and you'll make my day. I can make tons of the common stuff, but other than recycling it for quality, I have yet to find a good bulk method of getting the quality stuff.

[brown29knight]

Originally posted by Simon:

Originally posted by argrond:

Seems like that's for 20-30 farms and recyclers for nuts and yumako. There is no way to maintain flux quality just by cycling itself, you may need mash and gel to be of the designated quality since you can produce as much base resources as needed for that.
That may cause a lot of trouble with curious fauna of Gleba, so I believe sufficient defences are needed for that process to be secured properly...

Yeah, so about that. I just learned that bioflux recycles into itself.

Most agricultural processes do. Makes it a lot easier to get quality, but the spoilage timers on the quick ones like mash can be a pain to work with.

[Aestrea]

Originally posted by brown29knight:

Now show me a way to reliably produce large amounts of quality carbon fiber, and you'll make my day. I can make tons of the common stuff, but other than recycling it for quality, I have yet to find a good bulk method of getting the quality stuff.

You can keep reprocessing asteroids until they become the quality you want and then extract them. When it goes up a quality, throw back into the same belt and make sure a splitter is pushing them to the next tier belt storage in the loop each time just in case it jumps up a few qualities to prevent clogs. It is time consuming with only 2 quality slots but very easy to scale.