Hi, I joined my friends in a game but the most important jobs were already taken, so they asked me to provide wood.
I took to it and discovered your mod allows solid fuel production so I thought I might have some relevance to the game with my setup: providing fuel to the factory.
I soon realised though that I need huge amounts of bio farms (which are huge buildings in themselves) to produce enough wood pulp for just a little bit of fuel, not in the slightest enough to support big parts of the factory. I'm using ash recipes, I can still upgrade to fertilizer but that won't make a drastic difference it seems to my fuel output.
Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to produce large quantities of solid fuel without huge amounts of bio farms? Is this mod intented to be an "aside-thing-to-do" rather than a critical cog in the machine?

This is not meant as criticism, I do like the mod, more a question of whether I'm missing something.

Thanks in advance

Hi! When I started my own game, I've set coal frequency, richness, and size of coal patches to very low values because I wanted to see if I could sustain a factory on BI-produced energy. Because coal is very limited, I've planned big: 64 Bio farms is what I'm aiming for, 48 are already going.

Naturally, if you're just using ash, output will be rather low -- if you fully upgrade your production by using advanced fertilizer, you should get almost 8 times as much (75 wood + 150 wood pulp every 360s vs. 160 wood + 320 wood pulp every 100s). Last time I played (some weeks ago, modding doesn't leave much time for playing), I actually had trouble to use up all the pulp I produced; then again, I was fiddling around with the circuit network a lot, so the factory wasn't producing that much.

Anyway, I've prioritized the output of wood to go back into the cycle again: for growing seeds, for burning to ashes (needed as ingredient in fertilizer), and for wood gasification. Wood gasification allows to convert wood to petrol gas, from which I get sulfur, which is also needed in fertilizer. Excess wood is turned into charcoal and coal, all wood pulp goes into wooden bricks which are converted into solid fuel later on.

If you don't have that much wood/wood pulp in the beginning, don't be afraid to go dirty for a while! You can burn char coal and wood bricks, in boilers, charcoal actually has a better fuel value than real coal. However, you pay for it with more pollution, thus attracting more enemies. Placing bio gardens and terraformers around your steam engines may help in this case (haven't used them because I'm also playing with this mod, where damaging trees at night will spawn new enemies).

Also, wood production isn't the only way to get power out of BI! Once you've got accumulators researched, the solar farms (50 solar panels -- or was it just 30? -- condensed into a big one) and musk floor will come in very handy. Before that, solar boilers may be a better choice (heat water with solar power, store steam in tanks, and use it in steam engines during the night).

I wouldn't expect to run a complete factory on solid fuel made from the wood/wood pulp produced in just a couple of Bio Farms, but if you'd make use of everything this mod has to offer, it certainly will take care of your power needs! (Also, if you're running out of space for Bio farms at the current spot, you could always build some more outposts to produce more wood.)

Alright, I'll start by giving fertilizer a shot and ramping up the amount of bio farms. Thanks for the elaborate answer!

You're welcome, and good luck! :-)