Why don't biomass burners have conveyor ports?

[Bookslayer10]

I've been wondering why biomass burners are unable to be automatically fuelled for a long time, but I haven't found a good answer in the steam discussions or other places online. Obviously either way you won't be able to automate biomass burning, but shouldn't you be able to connect up multiple generators to a container for easy refuelling and integration into bio-fuel producing constructors? That is the fun of this game, building infrastructure to reduce manual labour and improve efficiency.

It seems to me like it accomplishes nothing to have biomass burners exclusively manually filled.

[Suzaku]

The point is to make it suck enough that you want to advance to the automated stuff.

[Bookslayer10]

Originally posted by Suzaku:

The point is to make it suck enough that you want to advance to the automated stuff.

But it already gets you to gather biomass manually, that should be enough, right?

[steventirey]

Originally posted by Bookslayer10:

Originally posted by Suzaku:

The point is to make it suck enough that you want to advance to the automated stuff.

But it already gets you to gather biomass manually, that should be enough, right?

Large amounts of biomass aren't hard to gather, and is only made far easier once you get to solid biofuel (which lasts much longer than leaves and sticks.

[Bookslayer10]

Originally posted by steventirey:

Originally posted by Bookslayer10:

But it already gets you to gather biomass manually, that should be enough, right?

Large amounts of biomass aren't hard to gather, and is only made far easier once you get to solid biofuel (which lasts much longer than leaves and sticks.

Okay, well why can't gathering biomass be made more challenging then, so that people still want to reach coal power?

[Tomcat]

They should use RNG when harvesting biomass such that you can fail on pulling grass.

[Amanoob105]

Originally posted by Bookslayer10:

But it already gets you to gather biomass manually, that should be enough, right?

Although, as an example, it takes ten leaves to make 5 biomass can make it a bit of a pain to gather, once you realise you can use one alien organ to make 200 biomass (and unlike plants that option respawns) it becomes far easier to make more.
Then as above, you get the option to make solid biofuel which makes what you have last even longer.

Not to mention there's the trick with flower petals which are crazy good for power when used in bio burners. Beaten only by solid biofuel.

So yeah, pretty much as above. Not being able to automate that final part is to help get you to want to switch to coal where you can.
The other main reason for wanting to go for coal is it is far more powerful for generating power.

[steventirey]

Originally posted by Bookslayer10:

Originally posted by steventirey:

Large amounts of biomass aren't hard to gather, and is only made far easier once you get to solid biofuel (which lasts much longer than leaves and sticks.

Okay, well why can't gathering biomass be made more challenging then, so that people still want to reach coal power?

Because it can't be that hard, as it is your first source of power. And it can't bee too easy, as they want you to advance to better forms of energy and leave biomass burners behind.

[lpnlizard27]

bio mass isnt hard to figure out.

By that i mean if you need to "automate" it for a given period of time then build More of them and fill them before you go explore.

you can get them to last for several hours uninterrupted on solid biomass, which itself is fairly easy to automate into containers. I have one container i dump all my biomass things into and it gets separated out and taken to machines that basically all end in solid biofuel.

[Bookslayer10]

The whole point of making biomass burners annoying is to stop them becoming a noob trap. The thing is, adding in conveyor inputs wouldn't affect new players much, because it's already pretty advanced to automate turning leaves into bio-fuel, so most wouldn't even use the port a lot. Without carapaces it still is very annoying to gather lots of biomass, and people can already spam tons of burners to reduce the annoyance of refuelling. New players would still want to switch over to coal, right?

I think letting more experienced players do things to improve biomass burners, like gather carapaces, underclock, and maybe automatically refuel burners, should be fine. They already know how much better coal power is, they will want to get that researched as soon as possible already, so making biomass burners annoying because they don't have a belt input is just a negative.

[Bobucles]

For the most part, the lack of conveyor ports is to the player's benefit. Treating bio burners as a standard energy source is a noob trap. Devs don't want players building bases with bio burners, losing base power, and trapping them in a cycle of harvesting fuel to keep the base online. They deliberately rip the band aid, and force players into full coal self sufficiency.

Bio burners can still be used as emergency power. They do not activate until the grid needs extra power, but at that point bio burners may not be enough.

[Lil Puppy]

Because the chainsaw doesn't have conveyor output, duh.

[sergetechone]

Let try to answer the OP here.

It is for the player to get stated using coal as a automated fuel and a power source. And after ... using oil convert to liquid fuel to use fuel generators. The fuel generators can use liquid bio fuel using ---> Leafs / Wood ---> bio masses --- > Solid bio fuel + water ---> Liquid bio fuel ---> Generators.

If you use mods ... yes ... it ill have a biofuel burner with automated belt.

You still need to collect leafs / woods either by hand or chainsaw.

[Bookslayer10]

Thanks for the explanation everyone. I guess if it's possible to get biomass almost automated, it could be very bad for new players, particularly ones who did use the automation and build up a big biomass conveyor layout. If they decide to research steel first because they just finished what they think is a great power setup, they might then don't want to divert coal to new generators. It's possible that happened a lot when the devs were first play testing, I wouldn't know.

Kinda sucks that (at least in a vanilla game) you can't set up a line to automatically top up solid biofuel biomass burners with any organics. That would be fun to make and useful early
game, but biomass really isn't supposed to be a viable energy source after all. As was mentioned there is also liquid biofuel, maybe just making an automatic line to make and burn that stuff would be fun. Pretty much useless, but fun.

Hey, what if liquid biofuel powered fuel generators acted like biomass burners and only ran when there was demand? Then semi-automating liquid biofuel would have an actual purpose as fuel for peaker plants, instead of batteries. Just pop in any organs you stumble across and you constantly have a safety net for power spikes; that seems like it would be a cool addition - it raises a few questions though. Do peaker plants like that even work with normal biomass burners? Would biomass burners set themselves to run at full capacity just to charge batteries? Do biofuel generators already work that way, and I just never tried them?

[umop-apisdn]

TL; DR: Stop picking up plants to gather biomass. Kill critters, instead.

I'll start with the information that flowers are actually the best plant-based fuel, because they burn for as long as wood, but stack to 500 instead of 200. This lets you spend longer not feeding your burners.

That being said, here are some reasons that might make you decide you never want to pick another flower again:

The game tracks each and every plant you pick, which bloats your save file; If nothing else, this makes autosaves take longer. Stop it.

Another reason to use critter meat for fuel instead of plants: Animals eventually respawn. Plants don't. Ironically enough, burning plants isn't a renewable energy source.

Picking up too many plants too quickly (without a "press 'E' like a madman" macro) can induce RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury, also known as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome). Running around tapping 'E' as fast as you can is really bad for you, and can cause pain in a surprisingly short period of time. That burning feeling in your wrists? That's your tendons dying, and it can become permanent.

The little spiders in caves all over the place are easy to kill (smack 'em twice with your zappy stick while walking backwards), and give 1 organ each. The big ones drop 3, and aren't that much harder to fight; strafe (move sideways) to avoid their slashing attack, and don't let them jump on you. Both "moves" have a pretty long wind-up, so are fairly easy to avoid.

"Little" hogs are easy carapaces, once you figure out how to side-step their charge. That being said, the larger version is made of pure murder and malice; don't engage them until you have ranged weapons.

Even spitters aren't that hard to make give up their organs, once you realize that staying close hurts less. If you can find the "sweet spot" in between where they will shoot their ranged attack and where they will puff a burst of flame, you don't even have to get hurt. This works for the larger varieties, too, although their ranged attacks are more dangerous, so stay close. Little ones drop 2, big ones drop 3. Alphas drop 5, but it'll be quite a while before you even see one, much less manage to kill it.

Fireflies suck, and aren't worth the single carapace you get from having to fight 3 of them; avoid their "trees" if you can, or just get them to hatch, then run away; they'll eventually despawn, if they don't see you.

Getting to the point:
You can gather 11 Alien Carapace and 4 Alien Organs, then toss them into the MAM to unlock the ability to make biomass out of the rest of them. If you checked the box to skip the tutorial, you start with almost enough parts in your inventory (not counting critter bits) to unlock it immediately. Stop by a crashed pod or two and pick up some wire, and you can unlock and build the MAM (Field Research milestone) without even handcrafting.

You can make 100 biomass from every Alien Carapace, and 200 biomass from each Alien Organ. Two organs is a full stack of Solid Biofuel, once you unlock the "Obstacle Clearing" milestone in the HUB Terminal. A full stack of Alien Organs is 50 stacks of biomass, or 25 stacks of Solid Biofuel, which is an absolutely staggering amount of fuel, especially considering you never have to pick a single flower to get it.

Bonuses for researching critter bits:
For 5 Alien Carapaces and 1,000 wire, you can unlock an additional hand slot.
For 5 Alien Organs and 2,000 wire, you can unlock 6 more inventory slots.

[Bookslayer10]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

...

100% going to be doing all of this in my next playthrough now, although I may still wait for a rebar gun to deal with most spitters.