Biofuel question

[Cheboygan]

I'm super early game, and will be ditching the biofuel as soon as I can, but in the meantime: Does bio get consumed at the same rate regardless of how many generator I have online? Should I be putting generators on standby if I don't need the consumption headroom? Or should I run them full tilt without fear of wasting all my biofuel?

[Suzaku]

Biomass burners scale themselves based on the demand, so you only burn fuel as quickly as needed, regardless of how many burners are running. Having more burners means greater energy capacity, or less frequent refilling.

Biomass burners are the only generator that works like this. All other generators run at full power at all times.

[The Big Brzezinski]

In other words, once you have enough burners to supply your power needs, additional ones amount to a bigger fuel tank, which can be useful.

[Shadow]

More burners = bigger fuel tank, that's true. But it also means more running around going in and out of menus whenever you do need to refuel, so there's still something of a balance to be struck there.

No need to think too hard about it though since I think most people only use them to get the ball rolling until they can automate power generation.

[Mist of Majora]

More burners are def important, but it's even more important to beeline it to solid biofuel ASAP. You get a lot more energy in a single unit of biofuel than if you had burned the raw materials used to create it, and likewise for solid biofuel.

I'd also highly recommend automating the whole process of converting leaves & wood to biofuel, then to solid biofuel. You may be losing a bit of coveted power to run the process, but I find being able to just drop off leaves and wood and then continue on to other projects is worth the energy draw.

[Cheboygan]

Thanks for all the info folks. I just unlocked Coal, and anticipate only filling my generators one or two more times. This has been really helpful!

[broken condom]

Originally posted by Cheboygan:

Thanks for all the info folks. I just unlocked Coal, and anticipate only filling my generators one or two more times. This has been really helpful!

try for a power production capacity of like twice what your max consumption is. a blue slug and a mam should get you on the path to tell, if you haven't already. also, unless you're better with numbers than me ( fairly easy to be, tbh) go for two coal burners to every water extractor. don't even link the extractor pipes together. this ensures max water flow.

also, the prefered biopower is solid unless you have massive amounts of it, in which case you can shift some to liquid biofuel and burn it off for even more power.

[Xenomorph Kitty]

Originally posted by broken condom:

Originally posted by Cheboygan:

Thanks for all the info folks. I just unlocked Coal, and anticipate only filling my generators one or two more times. This has been really helpful!

try for a power production capacity of like twice what your max consumption is. a blue slug and a mam should get you on the path to tell, if you haven't already. also, unless you're better with numbers than me ( fairly easy to be, tbh) go for two coal burners to every water extractor. don't even link the extractor pipes together. this ensures max water flow.

also, the prefered biopower is solid unless you have massive amounts of it, in which case you can shift some to liquid biofuel and burn it off for even more power.

If you really want a good place to set up your first coal plant. The craters are a very good spot as you have lots of access to water and three pure coal nodes. When I unlocked coal in my recent save I made a coal plant with 24 gens. A pure coal node can fuel 8 gens on Mk.2 belts, obviously.

As for water. I use 3 extractors per 6 gens, with the third extractor in each set underclocked to 25%. Flawless power and has been for hours while I got my steel factory up and running. It's such a good feeling moving away from burners.

Although I still have the ten I started with, and the little setup I made that automated making the solid biofuel. Just keeping them around really as a kind of backup. As I make so much power from my coal plants the burners are not even consuming anything anymore.