alternate recipes

[ghostrider]

seems some of the alternate recipes are garbage compared to the original, or am i crazy? example: encased industrial beam vs encased industrial tube. then there's pure caterium ingot which you would think would be more efficient but no?

[Subarashii]

Aren't both of those recipes mostly better than their normal forms?

Encased Industrial Tube consumes less steel (you can make 2x as much steel pipe as you could beam with the same rate of steel ingots) and a similar amount of concrete.

And Pure Caterium consumes 33.3% less Caterium at the cost of using water.

I mean, sure they produce them at a slower rate, but at the same time, they consume a different (mostly lesser?) amount of the more important resources at the cost of time and power, from my understanding.

[Tenebris]

In the case of encased industrial Pipe, although it doesn't make the encased beams as quickly at base clock speed compared to the original recipe, it's more efficient because it uses less steel per beam. Roughly 6 less ingots per beam, which may not seem like much, but it really adds up quickly.

As for Pure Caterium (and all Pure Ingot recipes for that matter) are absolutely more efficient, because you're getting more ingots out per piece of ore, the only drawback is that you need water, which means that there's some areas of the map where you can't easily utilise them due to lack of water nearby.

Although you aren't wrong, some recipes are absolutely GARBAGE. Like Fine or Rubber Concrete, like, who tf would use Rubber or Quartz to make concrete!? (especially when Wet Concrete exists and is way better)

And then there's some like Crystal Beacons, Automated Miners, or any of the Cable alternate recipes. Absolute garbage, the lot of them

[Maehlice]

Don't look only at the output rate. Compare also the input and output ratios as well as the power consumption.

In most cases, the alternative is objectively better in at least one of those fields. In other cases, it may eliminate usage of a certain resource entirely (such as my favourite Iron Wire to make Stitched Iron Plates).

[GobboKirk]

Also I guess some of them could be situational depending on what you got available to you at the time.

[tommynocker001]

I got the caterium wire recipe and I don't have the research yet. I got the improved portobello miner last and the recipe is wack (plastics, I think), but it does not show up in the build list. Late game, useless, early game useless.
I also got coke fuel when I had no oil. The other choices in each list were all bad or useless!

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by tommynocker001:

I got the caterium wire recipe and I don't have the research yet. I got the improved portobello miner last and the recipe is wack (plastics, I think), but it does not show up in the build list. Late game, useless, early game useless.
I also got coke fuel when I had no oil. The other choices in each list were all bad or useless!

First off, Portobello, lmao.

Secondly, Alternate recipes can't be crafted by hand. They can only be automated. In the case of the portable miner alt recipe, you need a Manufacturer

[Grandaddypurple]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

In the case of encased industrial Pipe, although it doesn't make the encased beams as quickly at base clock speed compared to the original recipe, it's more efficient because it uses less steel per beam. Roughly 6 less ingots per beam, which may not seem like much, but it really adds up quickly.

As for Pure Caterium (and all Pure Ingot recipes for that matter) are absolutely more efficient, because you're getting more ingots out per piece of ore, the only drawback is that you need water, which means that there's some areas of the map where you can't easily utilise them due to lack of water nearby.

Although you aren't wrong, some recipes are absolutely GARBAGE. Like Fine or Rubber Concrete, like, who tf would use Rubber or Quartz to make concrete!? (especially when Wet Concrete exists and is way better)

And then there's some like Crystal Beacons, Automated Miners, or any of the Cable alternate recipes. Absolute garbage, the lot of them

I've actually messed with rubber concrete and coated cable (the latter using heavy oil residue) because I found it fun and I've never used near 30% of the total oil available... the wiki says about how inefficient it is just because factually, oil is rarer than iron/copper/limestone, but unless you aim at using every single drop of oil/quartz to maximize turbomotors or whatever, those recipes are far, far superior (and depending of your playstyle, fun to mess around with)

[Grandaddypurple]

Originally posted by ghostrider:

seems some of the alternate recipes are garbage compared to the original, or am i crazy? example: encased industrial beam vs encased industrial tube. then there's pure caterium ingot which you would think would be more efficient but no?

Encased industrial pipe is easier to deal with and more efficient than the original recipe, it's a winner all around

[Tenzek]

Given a belt of 780 caterium ore/minute, you can make 260 caterium ingots with 17.3 smelters or 390 pure ingots with 32.5 refineries.

Encased Beams are identical to pipes for concrete usage, but they use more than 50% extra steel. In order to match the pace of encased beams with encased pipes, you need 1.5 times the assemblers, and a little more than 1.3 times the constructors.

So in both cases, you get a lot more product per ingot, but at the cost of a lot more power used.

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by Tenzek:

Given a belt of 780 caterium ore/minute, you can make 260 caterium ingots with 17.3 smelters or 390 pure ingots with 32.5 refineries.

Encased Beams are identical to pipes for concrete usage, but they use more than 50% extra steel. In order to match the pace of encased beams with encased pipes, you need 1.5 times the assemblers, and a little more than 1.3 times the constructors.

So in both cases, you get a lot more product per ingot, but at the cost of a lot more power used.

Power usage is almost never factored into the "efficiency" of a recipe because any half decent Pioneer will have a ton of excess power.

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by Grandaddypurple:

Originally posted by ghostrider:

seems some of the alternate recipes are garbage compared to the original, or am i crazy? example: encased industrial beam vs encased industrial tube. then there's pure caterium ingot which you would think would be more efficient but no?

Encased industrial pipe is easier to deal with and more efficient than the original recipe, it's a winner all around

Adding to this, the exact numbers per encased industrial beam are: 10.5 Steel Ingots each for the Steel Pipe recipe, and 16 Steel Ingots each for the Steel Beam recipe.

Both recipes take 5 Concrete per beam, so that's a non-factor

[Tenzek]

Originally posted by Tenebris:

Power usage is almost never factored into the "efficiency" of a recipe because any half decent Pioneer will have a ton of excess power.

I wasn't suggesting that you had to care about power. That is simply what the tradeoff is.

[FullMetalSandwich]

There are some that are actually good, just rare. I found one that lets you make screws straight from ingots, bypassing rods entirely. Straight up just extremely useful.

Ya though, most seem to be to complicated to actually be useful.

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by erikwilder9009:

There are some that are actually good, just rare. I found one that lets you make screws straight from ingots, bypassing rods entirely. Straight up just extremely useful.

Ya though, most seem to be to complicated to actually be useful.

It's really not "most". There's tons of really good recipes.

Solid Steel: literally 50% more Steel ingots and all it takes is 1 extra step in the production chain, making iron into ingots before they go to the foundry

Any "Pure" Recipe: for just adding water, you can significantly increase the amount of ingots you get per ore (more than double in the case of Copper), same goes for Wet Concrete

The Copper Alloy recipe, as well as Fused Quickwire are both really good, as it allows you to sub in a more common resource (Iron, and Copper respectively) to make the most out of the less common one (Copper, and Caterium respectively)

Copper Rotors, and Quickwire Stators are both really good just because of the speed that they are able to build at.

Iron Wire is great for making some setups independent from Copper (such as for Stitched Reinforced Plates)

Plus there's a bunch of "Alternative" recipes that are just straight up new stuff that you wouldn't normally be able to make by default. Like making Heavy Oil Residue directly, Compacted Coal, Turbofuel. The list goes on. Point is, you shouldn't be dismissive of alt recipes just because a few are kinda crap.

[Kraft51]

Originally posted by Maehlice:

Don't look only at the output rate. Compare also the input and output ratios as well as the power consumption.

In most cases, the alternative is objectively better in at least one of those fields. In other cases, it may eliminate usage of a certain resource entirely (such as my favourite Iron Wire to make Stitched Iron Plates).

similar to myself, although i scope on phasing out Rods from my regular production entirely. relying on Cast/Steel Screws, Bolted Iron Plate, Bolted Frames and Copper Rotors. this way i can feed all my "specialised" factories only ingots, resulting in cleaner supply lines for the first 3 tiers of multi component parts.