Bevredigend – Dealing with the Biomass Burden

This is a guide to help you get comfortable with something that can’t be automated. There are a few steps required to make this happen but you still have to gather a lot of resources by hand. I will call the Biomass Burner “Burner” in deze gids.

The guiding fact about the Burner

The Burner burns on demand. This means when you use less power, the fuel will be burnt slower. You can divide the fuel burnt over more Burners. This will cause the same demand of power to be shared over all the stacks of fuel inside the Burners connected to your grid.

If you have only one constructor on a 30MW Burner it will be burning for the 4MW you got on your constructor, if the constructor is running at 100% clock speed. The Dark Grey line shows Production. The production is what your Burner actually Produces

What fuel to feed?

Because alien carapace, alien organs, hout, and leaves can be crafted into more beneficial fuel you should not feed these items raw into the Burners under any circumstance.

Feed flower petals until you can make biofuel. If you run low on flower petals, make biomass from the leaves and wood. First handcraft in the craft bench, later you can semi-automate this.

Solid Biofuel gives the most energy per burnt item, you learn how to make that later in the game

Setting up the base

Find a spot where you have copper, iron and limestone nodes close to each other. Make sure the nodes are either normal or pure. Impure nodes are too poor to start with.

There are deposits on top of the node which can be of a different purity than the node itself. Always aim for the side of the node to see its purity.

If you configure a building and tell it what to make, you will see how many items are going in and out per minute. Remember this because you will need this information later.

For concrete it’s best to use one miner and one constructor to turn limestone into concrete and store this in a storage container

For both Iron and Copper production I recommend the following setup:

Miner > Smelter > Container > Constructor > Container

You can replace the miner with a container and some portable miners. This saves you 5 MW but you need to walk some more. Walking, gathering, and hand feeding are what has to happen a lot in this stage.

Find a place where you can make one or two rows of Burners together. You need them to be organized from the first one you build.

For iron, make iron ingots in the smelter and iron rods in the constructor.

For copper make copper ingots in the smelter and wire in the constructor.

If you look at the numbers you will see you make more ingots than you consume per minute

Next to the containers which will store the unused ingots, you can make this setup:

• Ijzer: Container > Constructor > Container
• Koper: Container > Constructor > Constructor > Container

Tell this iron constructor to make an iron plate, tell the first copper constructor to make wire, second one cable.

Now the ingots will backup in the first container and you have to manually feed the container next to it in order to get the production going.

When you start building you want your fifth machine to be a Burner. This will get you a ratio of four machines to one Burner.

Make sure you always have storage next to your Burners for spare fuel and place them in rows next to each other, facing the same direction for a good overview.

Treat the row of Burners as your power plant. At the starter stage of the game, this is the fact to deal with. Actually, this is the closest thing to maintenance this game gets.

Get making some items and unlock the logistics row in Tier 1.

Now you can replace the ingot containers with a splitter. After this unlock the other two rows.

The trick to get a comfortable power demand

Bij 100% clock speed you consume 4 MW with smelters and constructors. This can rapidly build up your power demand, so you need to make a cut in this.

When you unlock Field Research you get two new key buildings: The MAM and the personal storage box. This box is very handy to build next to your row of Burners. Build this Mam and make sure you get a blue powder slug. If required you can use the interactive map to look them up, they can be found in any starting area.

With this blue power slug, you can research the tree “Power Slugs”. On the right side of the tree, you see a branch called “Overclock Production”. Get the goodies required and start this research as soon as possible.

Once the 5 minutes are passed and the research is done you will see find out when configuring a machine there is also onderclocking. This will be the key to comfort. When you configure a building you can now see the clock speed.

Slowing down the production to save energy and time.

Bij 100% clock speed you have 4 MW consumption for smelters and constructors.

Bij 50% clock speed you have 1,3 MW consumption for smelters and constructors.

So if you half the production and double the building you already save 1,4 MW.

Je hebt nodig 2 structures for the same job, wat betekent dat je nodig hebt 2 × 1,3 = 2,6 MW.

Or you don’t need that much items per minute and enjoy slow cooking and slow burning.

I usually divide by 2 because it is easy to calculate with.

If you do this on multiple production lines you are already slowing down the burning speed of the fuel in your Burner significantly.

Look at what number of items your miners are making and under clock this to the demand of the smelter.

Because Burners burn on demand either over or under clocking of the biomass Burner won’t influence the burning speed. Only demand does.

Under clocking will make you meet the maximum capacity sooner, thus a fuse breaks sooner, which might force you to build the next Burner earlier.

Overclocking will get the fuse to break later. When the overclocked Burner runs out of fuel you will also loose more power at once.

Maffiabaas’t touch clock speed, just build enough Burners.

Setting up the Biomass power plant

• Make a grid of 3 × 5 foundations.
• Bouwen 2 rows of 4 Burners.
• Make some personal storage boxes in front of each row.

Now you have 1 foundation with storage and 4 foundations behind it with Burners and walking space in between.

This is a nice setup to start with and the concept can be either copied or expanded to your wishes. With one layer of this you can make it to coal power and get rid of the gathering by hand.

The automation part

Jij’ve build your layout for your biomass power plant.

On the side where you have the personal storage boxes you want the automated production to end in a storage container.

If you have unlocked obstacle clearing in Tier 2 already you can make the following setup for wood and leaves:

• Hout: Container > Constructor Biomass(hout) > Constructor Solid Biofuel > Container
• Leaves: Container > Constructor Biomass(leaves) > Constructor Solid Biofuel > ContainerIf you haven’t unlocked obstacle-clearing yet, you can forget the second constructor for now and use biomass. Belt speeds and production speeds make you need to take care of the ratio in these biomass and biofuel constructors. The maximum capacity of a belt at this moment is 60 parts per minute.

  Because at 100% clock speed a constructor making Solid Biofuel would need an input of 120 items per minute, you can only use 50% clock speed to make it work efficiently.

Alter your clock speeds on your biomass constructors as well so that the value of their output matches the input of the solid biofuel constructor.

Make sure you throw the items into the right container else you might need to rebuild a part of the system. You can right click on a stack of leaves in your inventory and split this until you have one item. If you drag this one item out of your inventory you can toss this in front of you. In this way, you can toss it on or near the container which needs to be fed with leaves. You can do the same with wood as a temporary mark.

Now you can refill the Burners with either flower petals or solid biofuel and throw in your harvested leaves and wood into the “biofuel factory” when you come home.

Make sure you have your Alien organs and Alien Carapace in your inventory and go to your Mam. Look for the research tree Alien Organisms. If you research Structural Analysis and Organic Properties in this tree you can make biomass out of these items as well. You might need to do some hunting to get enough items.

I recommend a third constructor making the biofuel and handcraft the biomass out of Alien Carapace and Alien Organs which you can container feed to the constructor. Maffiabaas’t forget clock speed, this one may slow cook when you have enough wood and leaves.

There are two things that can not be automated. So you need two habits: harvesting and refilling. Jij need to be automated to do them.

I hope you can use this guide to get you going through the first stage of the game. The first automated form of energy is coal. Als je het niet doet’t like rushing or grinding in a game you might find some comfort in this guide.

If you want to rush to coal to get rid of this not fully automated system you should look for the guide genaamd 90 minutes to coal. The author describes a nice way to get rid of the burden of hand gathering and hand filling. So maybe you don’t need this guide when you rush.