Portable fuel doesn't feel like an upgrade

[Mister Fabulous]

I set up a portable fuel factory to feed my boilers. I have 1 fluid assembler per boiler since it's pretty close to what would be needed to feed a boiler running at max capacity. It was satisfying to finish building it, but I wasn't feeling the benefit after it fired up.

I have 10 boilers, so that's a 36 MW capacity. The portable fuel setup consumes about 6.5MW with all the machines running before it slows down due to not actually needing the whole 36MW.

If I was running full tilt, about 20% of my total available power would be going to make the fuel. How is this better than just feeding regular ignium to the boiler?

I'm really bad when it comes to figuring out how much energy it takes to make an item, but all those machines to make the fuel doesn't seem better than just a couple miners pushing ignium.

[Fenix]

I personally don’t like portable fuel, as a primary fuel source.
Once you unlock fracking, and tap a ignium node, the olumite is better used to make Fracking liquid, and you use Ignium for your boilers.

I was just using ignium with a container of Portable fuel, as backup, just in case the ignium runs out, and I need to move the drone miners to a new location.
Once moved, I’d use the Portable fuel, until the ignium made it back to the base.

[Cain]

Stay away, only Ignium is at 97% efficiency
there is still room for improvement
read this:
reddit.com/r/foundry_game/comments/1crypnb/on_fuel_efficiency/

[Phoenix Cat]

The reason I switched, is yes it is less effective, but it saves your ignium for other things. I happen to have had a large olumite patch near my landing zone. So for me, it was just build more boilers and turbines and I made up the difference.

[barbrady123]

I really don't see the purpose of any fuel beyond Ignium. I've done a few playthroughs and I end up switching to solar before even a single Ignium node is even close to depleted.

[DerMiez]

@Devs: The fuels need to be rebalanced asap. Refined stuff should be better, not worser than its raw variants. The portable fuel also needs its barrel as residue for refilling or direct input of liquid fuel into the boiler.

[terzo]

Love the game, but the alternate fuel sources will hopefully be tweaked. To run 100 boilers you need about a full line of 640 raw iridium. May be more since I’m never running them full throttle. I also created a the portable fuel solution, that’s pretty easy to do but burns the same as iridium as it’s just a slightly higher MJ value. And then the same for Fuel rods. I found making 80 a minute was plenty for my 100 boilers, though the amount of oil I consumed and the fact that I needed like 60MW of power to just make the fuel rods to generate around 380Mw power. I also blew through a few oil nodes with this experiment. I’ve moved to pure solar power. I have around 1000 large solar panels and a crazy amount of batteries. During sun I producing around 73OMW of power at night I consume around 240MW from the batteries.

I wanna burn oil, it’s just not very efficient. Having 21 fluid assemblers making 4 fuel rods each, which takes around 18 crushers making iridium powder, 28 chemical processors making fuel, 7 distillations columns making the liquid to turn into fuel, of course a couple of flare stacks for waste, water pumps, and then some rods to make around 900 wire. All this assumes you are making the containers and recycling the containers to store the fuel in. So love the production complexity. Just which I got more than 100MJ for all this effort.