Just going to be quick here, but here are my recipe thoughts:
(chemical plants only)
Mother Culture (to kickstart)
: 120 seconds
: 1 wood
: 1 fish
: 10 water
: makes 1 Algae (liquid)
Growth Process
: 10 seconds
: 4 algae
: 1 stone
: 5 water
: makes 5 Algae and 1 Sludge (solid)
Dry Press
: 10 seconds
: 2 sludge
: makes 1 Algae Cake and 1 Light Oil
Refining Process
: 300 seconds
: 50 algae
: makes 10 Light Oil and 1 Brick
Algae Cake is burnable, lasts slightly less than coal. Idea is that Algae continues to grow at a high rate, requiring you to "kill off" a lot of it when it gets too much. To make 1.4 Light Oil per second, you would need 20 Growth Process, 10 Dry Press, and 12 Refining...which takes in 2 Stone and 10 Water per second, and the byproducts are 1 Algae Cake (that you have to burn to discard) and 0.04 Bricks per second. You have to be careful and place a tank with a pump to make sure your Algae doesn't run dry from your refining process.
Stone cracking could be added to break bricks back down into stone and be reused in the process, but the difference to the system is a net loss in stone...which is a good thing, since you don't want to have a perpetual machine. The cake could be used to power the entire process, but there's not nearly enough output to pay for it, so you'd have to come up with a nice way of handling the power flow.
