Blast Furnace is pointless

[sxl2]

I set one up with the basics, one tower. That gave me 1920 Plate/m.

It took forever to set up and cost about 33 Mw to run**

1920 Plate/m using Tier 2 recipe is 64 smelters, 6.4 Mw.

One I get fracking, why the hell would I use Blast furnace?

64 reg smelters is a lot, but easier and faster to set up, cheaper to build, cheaper to run, and doesn't really take up any more room, actually a lot less. Blast furnace has not a single advantage except more efficient use of Xeno, and even that is counter-balanced by needing extra Ignium and Stone to run...it's a complete waste.


**I include the power cost of mining/processing coke and mining stone, but not the cost of mining or crushing xeno, since that is the same in either scenario. I also include the cost of running casters, as I am comparing with the cost of running smelters. I left out processing slag because there's residual upside to more concrete, if you want it, although it's nominal.


Also, is it just my RNG or are Ignium veins much rarer than the other ones? So it seems like preserving ignium more important than extra xeno/technum products, even after fracking.

[Kishore X]

I like the blast furnaces. After I did one I found others quite fast to do. 2 air intakes, 3 hot air things, 4 lifts.
Maybe it depends on your map. My seed sounds opposite to yours as I have very little xeno and tonnes of ignium.
I am low on Xeno, and my next vein is 4km away. I have level 24 mining efficiency but one xeno fracking node is not enough even with dedicated green belts per vein so I need to be economical with xeno. So the blast furnace makes sense for me, plus it looks cool.

[sxl2]

Originally posted by kishorenaib:

I like the blast furnaces. After I did one I found others quite fast to do. 2 air intakes, 3 hot air things, 4 lifts.
Maybe it depends on your map. My seed sounds opposite to yours as I have very little xeno and tonnes of ignium.
I am low on Xeno, and my next vein is 4km away. I have level 24 mining efficiency but one xeno fracking node is not enough even with dedicated green belts per vein so I need to be economical with xeno. So the blast furnace makes sense for me, plus it looks cool.

So I guess it's just RNG...but that means I can eventually explore further out and eventually I'll find them. Same for you with xeno.

I guess it was fun to get running, but I still don't see the point. Nominal value for effort compared with other approaches (the issue we're each having with different RNG can be solved by scanning further out and using cargo...still seems cheaper and more efficient power and setup. Especially if they improve cargo ships at all, which are a bit clunky atm.
(but throughput with parallel loaders solves most of that.)

[Valentria]

My map also has only 2 Xeno veins that I can see and are very far away, but plenty of Ignium. I am only just setting up a blast furnace on the Xeno, to see how it all works and fits together.

I wish the game gave you more info on stats before building it - I had to construct the whole thing and hook it to power, then view the screen panel to see that it can only process 800/m of ore..?? So when I went deep on the ore vein and set up miners on every point I could find, I get 12 full lanes of 640/m of ore. To process all of that ore through blast furnaces, I'd need 9 of them.

I've not done the math on how many other machines I'd need to maximize the output, but it seems that just the casting machines alone would be over 500.

It would be fun to build, but at this point in the game build there doesn't seem to be a reason to generate that much of anything. In fact getting only one working would probably give me more than I currently need.

[Valentria]

Ahh... just saw that I added a 2nd tower to the BF, so added +25% speed (800/m vs. 640/m). I feel a spreadsheet coming on....

[Silvertongued Devil]

Are you taking into account the MW and setup time of the fracking? Or that you need to move three times as much ore to smelt the same amount as a blast furnace?

I mean, I do agree it's not necessarily a great usage in terms of "we have infinite resources so it's 'k" but if fracking produced lower amounts of ore or something it might be desirable to be able to use it more efficiently.

After all, a single line going into a blast furnace produces three times as much as the advanced smelters do with the same amount of ore.


It's worth noting, though, that half the tech tree at blast furnace level still needs to be added to the game and that balancing will continue to happen, so maybe it will get more useful in later versions.

I just wish I could use it to make steel.
And also that the air intake filters weren't on the inside of the machine facing away so that they were practically invisible and I needed to look up a dang guide just to realise they were there to begin with because at no point has that ever been a thing anywhere else and I'm not mad you're mad. X(