Painful way to handle useless recipes

[DrNewcenstein]

I started a new game a couple of weeks ago, and of course the early game is where alternate recipes really come in handy, like turning iron ingots into screws rather than making them from rods, stitched iron plate (copper wire + iron plate as opposed to the default iron plate + screws), etc.

However, hunting down hard drives in the early game is much more difficult; time/distance, items needed to unlock the drop pods, etc. And then of course you wait 10 minutes (must be platter drives, not SSD) and get something utterly useless like Steamed Copper Sheet, "Pure" anything, and some other whack-job recipe that takes three times as much (or more) resources to gain one extra item.

Early on, I was re-rolling the results (save, scan, reload), but at 10 minutes each, you can easily spend a couple of real hours trying to get something you can use right then, and still not get it.

I've finally unlocked Aluminum, which means I'm over halfway through the game, and have been hunting down hard drives. I've acquired 5 in a short amount of time, which had door requirements I could fill easily. After spending an hour on the first one, I finally decided to just take whatever POS recipe it coughs up, just to get them out of the way.

There are a lot of alternate recipes, and from what I saw of my first save, after locating almost 70 crash sites, there are more useless than useful, so this strategy may not work out like I'm hoping. When you do get a good recipe, it may not be useful at that moment (at least compared to another), but you also usually get 2 crappy ones with it. I guess that's fine as it makes your choice easier, but this may be where I run into problems if it does work: I'll have 3 to choose from that I really want/need, and I'll be in a quandary over it.

At any rate, after chain-smoking 5 hard drives, I actually came away with 3 useful recipes - electrode circuit board (can be made with 2 refineries easily enough), TurboFuel (really got attached to this stuff in my first save), and making poly resin + heavy residue (instead of only when making fuel), which will come in handy for polyester fabric, if I can ever get that recipe - though there are still others out there I would have preferred.
I don't even remember what the 2 useless ones I took were. Fine Concrete and some other dumb 5h1t just to get it out of my way.

Anyway, TL/DR; just like when you were kid, if you eat your vegetables first to get them out of the way, the rest should be meat and potatoes.

[The Big Brzezinski]

I presume they're meant for contexts yet to be added to the game. Situations requiring creative solutions you can't just reference the map for, something like that. The biggest problem seems to be getting a new, better recipe for a product, but you already have the last factory you'll ever need producing it. Casted screws are great, but if you've already got a vanilla line cranking out 5k a minute, you don't really care unless power is becoming an issue, and I've yet to see that.

[IPWIW]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

and of course the early game is where alternate recipes really come in handy

However, hunting down hard drives in the early game is much more difficult

i hunted all hard drives after finishing t7
ｙｏｕ　ｄｏｎｔ　ｈａｖｅ　ｔｏ　ｄｏ　ｉｔ　ｎｏｗ

[Evilsod]

I'm not really sure what to say about Hard Drives, or what you do about them.

They are amazing on your first playthrough. It feels great to find this sweet recipe that is actually worth tearing down some of your factory to accomodate.
The issue really stems from unlocking a really good recipe in one game, then when you try a fresh playthrough, you never find it again.

The one for me atm is Steel Screws. It provides you with an utterly trivial recipe given how easily you can create massive amounts of steel beams. I haven't found that again this time so I'm having to dedicate entire iron patches to producing the screws I need for a few crafts.

But then... what do you do about it? It is what it is. It's only a problem if you make it one by save scumming till you get a recipe you want.

[cswiger]

Casted Screws is a good alternative versus Steel Screws. I find myself with spare iron ore capacity a lot more than I find myself with extra steel, and you can use Casted Screws even at the earliest tech levels.

[DrNewcenstein]

Steel Screws takes Coal+Iron into a Foundry to make Steel Ingots (Step 1), which then get turned into Steel Beams (Step 2) which then get combined with something else to make screws (Step 3, plus whatever they get blended with) - (or do they just get punched into screws from beams? I passed on it and can't recall what the recipe said exactly).

Casted screws take Iron Ore into Iron Ingot in a Smelter (Step 1) into Screws (Step 2) in a Constructor. There is absolutely no way to beat that.

I've got a pair of Mk2 Iron nodes each feeding 2 boosted smelters which each feed 2 boosted Constructors making Casted Screws which converge into 1 short storage container. I have 500*24 screws in about 20 minutes.


If you're drowning in steel beams and encased industrial beams, convert that line to pipes, or dump the coal off to make something else until pipes and beams run low.


As for the recipes I'm finding, I know that they are placeholders for something that may or may not be needed in the future. I cannot imagine Wet Concrete being needed. Does it stay wet all the time?
I can see Pure ingots and whatnot being needed for precise and delicate components, like computers or somesuch, but IMO these recipes can be disabled/removed from the options list until they're implemented in the game.

A much more reasonable idea is that each HDD contains all of the recipes, but you can only pick one per drive. Although I could understand that the drive was damaged in the crash, and the recovery process was only able to find 3, from a lore standpoint at least.


As for hunting them down after Tier 7, I did that in my first save, and found a lot of alternates that I could have put to use in Tier 3, had I known they were out there. With my current save, I knew they were out there, and I knew when I needed them. I did finally find Casted Screws after rerolling a few times, but I got Steamed Copper Sheet, Fine Concrete, Iron Alloy Ingots, Cheap Silica, Pure Quartz, Charcoal, Pure Copper Ingots, Fused Wire, Coated Cable, Coated Plates, Overly Expensive Iron Plates (50 screws as opposed to the default 12, for only one extra plate), Steel Wire, Flexible Smart Plate/Flexible Steel Framework (neither of which you need outside of the Space Elevator project), Recycled Rubber/Plastic, Wet Cement, Heavy Residue + Polyresin, and a host of other useless recipes, 3 at a time, before Casted Screws came up.

There's even one that adds 5 inventory slots. I don't need that. I try to keep my inventory slots less than an industrial container, so I can dump my luggage into one without needing a 2nd box for the remainder.

[Shadow Draxis]

I haven't really bothered with alternate recipes. Seems more annoying to rework everything to change things. The only one I would say is beneficial is the turbo fuel.

[Dragorin]

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks a lot of alt recipes are "way would I ever do that?". Only two I've used so far are Iron bars to screws(love this one) and Coke to Steel coke. I setup a rubber chain and ended up producing 600 steel coke per minute. That came at a nice time when my steel beams were being eaten by the last item the space elevator needed.

[cswiger]

Almost all of the alt recipes allow you to make their product more efficiently than the standard recipe-- they require less energy per product and the rate of production per minute is (usually) greater than the standard recipe.

In some cases, that doesn't matter. For example, I've always run a huge surplus of Limestone/Concrete, so the Wet Concrete and Fine Concrete recipes have never been useful to me.

[Timi]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

As for the recipes I'm finding, I know that they are placeholders for something that may or may not be needed in the future. I cannot imagine Wet Concrete being needed. Does it stay wet all the time?
I can see Pure ingots and whatnot being needed for precise and delicate components, like computers or somesuch, but IMO these recipes can be disabled/removed from the options list until they're implemented in the game.

You are way overthinking those.

Pure Iron Ingots have the benefit of converting 7 ore + some water into 13 ingots. Normal recipe does only 1 ingot per 1 ore, so you can almost double the yield of an iron node with the pure recipe.

Wet concrete serves a similar purpose. Normal recipe gives you 1 concrete for 3 limestone. Wet concrete gives you 4 concrete for 6 limestone, once again doubling the yield, while also doing it nearly four times faster.

Steel Screws do something similar as well. 1 steel beam into 52 screws, while casted screws are 5 iron ingots into 20 screws. In terms of iron ore, Casted Screws are 4 screws per 1 ore, while steel screws are 13 screws per 1 ore, and being much faster at it (50 screws/min with Casted, 260 screws/min with Steel)

All those have their benefits over the others, especially when fitting them into larger production chains. Maybe one subfactory can avoid iron input completely, and instead go full steel, maybe you can squeeze more raw materials locally with pure recipes, etc.

[breakwind]

My current playthrough I got the steel beams into screws one. My last playthrough it was the iron ingots into screws one. Both are the most useful recipes in my book, as screws in the early to mid game was my automative bugbear...never enough to feed the beast

[T3kx]

Iron Bar to Screws, Caterium or iron to Copper... Those are imho factory SPACE/TIME-SAVER (resources isnt an issue).

Also it's it helps to build remote station without having the redo a part of the whole chain or a somewhat complicated train feeding resources.

Personally, I hunt them down a little every tier so It suggest Tier-related upgraded.
I like optimization, those helps a tons.

[Vyndicu]

@OP, you do know there are more hard drives than recipes right?

I am still on my first run and I have unlocked many useful recipes. The one I am looking forward most is steel coke, pure ingots, and turbofuel.

[DrNewcenstein]

Yes, I know there are more drives than recipes. That ensures you get the same crappy recipes more often.


Steel screws cannot be more efficient because Steel is made from Iron ore and Coal. You're using more resources. Yes 52 in one whack of a steel beam is nice, but you first have to process the iron ore (1 miner) and coal (now 2 miners) through a foundry to make an ingot, and then run that ingot through a constructor to make a beam, and then run the beam into a 2nd constructor to make screws.
All that power consumption adds up, especially if you're overclocking, as does the manufacturing time.

By comparison, the vanilla way is iron ore into ingot, ingot into rod, rod into screw. The alternate recipe skips the rod, so it goes ore->ingot->screw. One miner, one smelter, one constructor.

Same with "Pure" anything - you're adding Water, and thus more power drain, and processing through a Refinery (which is expensive enough resource-wise to build), whereas standard ingots are a 2-step process: miner + smelter = ingot. Yes, you're getting more with each hit, but at a very high setup cost and power cost. You can set up peripheral nodes to focus on basics like Iron Plates/Rods/Screws easily enough, at least in Grass Fields, using only plates, rods, and screws (and reinforced plates).

Refineries take:
-Motors:
--Motors are made from Rotors (Rods + Screws) and Stators (Steel Pipe + Copper Wire)
---Steel pipe for the rotor requires Iron Ore + Coal
-Encased Industrial Beams:
--Made from Steel Beams (or Pipes as alternate) and Concrete
---Steel Beams/Pipes are made from Iron ore and Coal
-Cable
--Cable is made from Copper Wire, unless there's an alternate to do it in one Constructor
-Steel pipe
--again, steel pipe takes iron ore and coal
-Copper Sheet

It is simply not cost-effective to build a Refinery to make "Pure" anything that can be made in a single process, such as ingots or quartz crystal, when those items are not requested in the game specifically. If you need Pure Quartz Crystal and Steamed Copper Sheet to make a Superposition Oscillator, as currently requested by at least 2 drop pods, then that's fine.
However, you cannot make one, and nothing calls for those items. If you make Fine or Wet Concrete, it stacks with standard 2-step concrete (miner to constructor).

Coke Steel Ingots are even more expensive, because you need 2 refineries - Crude into Heavy Residue, Heavy Residue into Coke. At least you only combine that with iron ore, but you get the same results for fewer resources with the default recipe of iron ore + coal into a foundry.

[Evilsod]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

Steel screws cannot be more efficient because Steel is made from Iron ore and Coal. You're using more resources. Yes 52 in one whack of a steel beam is nice, but you first have to process the iron ore (1 miner) and coal (now 2 miners) through a foundry to make an ingot, and then run that ingot through a constructor to make a beam, and then run the beam into a 2nd constructor to make screws.
All that power consumption adds up, especially if you're overclocking, as does the manufacturing time.

You're being very narrow-minded with some of your thought processes.

Standard screw recipe = 6MJ/item
Casted = 4.8MJ/item
Steel = 0.92MJ/item

I don't believe those figures take into account the process to make the Steel Beam. But then that's going to get very messy because there are alt recipe's to make those too.
Then again, it already is very messy.
Steel screw creates 260/min vs 40/50 for the other two recipes so you're also going to need a lot more space to make it.

I think you're forgetting that a lot of these are alternatives are meant to provide just that, alternatives. Steel Screws streamline the process for creating significant quantities of screws for Computers/Heavy Mod Frames into a single Constructor fed by 5/min Steel Beams. It's a trivial investment.

Coke Steel Ingot is also a way of getting extra Steel from your Plastic/Rubber production allowing you to keep your coal for Coal Generation (or Turbofuel).

The construction cost of the buildings is kinda irrelevant in this type of discussion. It's safe to say you have the resources to do whatever you want since everything is infinite.

Yes, some alt recipe's are trash as their use is just questionable, but not as many as you're trying to say.

[Vyndicu]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

*snip*

Yes. I am aware of all that.

I am having a serious efficiency problem with my plastic where the heavy oil is just backed up.

I have like only 3 options to use up all of that heavy oil (based on recipes I have access to): Produce enough petroleum coke for steel (way more than I would ever need!), reprocess to fuel or turbofuel for fuel generators, and polymer resin for rubber.

I am going to use a mix of all 3 to minimize backed up production line and upscale what I have which is terrible with heavy oil balancing right now.