Hi, I've been testing out your mod, and the recipe for burning wood into (char)coal doesn't feel right to me.

Rather than arbitrarily increasing total energy content 20-fold through charcoal burning, I would prefer to just increase yields from trees instead. If growth time was reduced from 10 to 5 minutes and yield pr. harvest was increased from 4 to 40 pieces of wood, the same (energy) output rate could be achieved, for both wood and coal. It would provide much better direct parity with Yumako trees, and it would also allow for much easier integration with greenhouses and coal-producing recipes from various mods, such as Krastorio 2 Greenhouse + Wood Pyrolysis (a mod of mine). The output rate for the greenhouse would just have to be increased a bit in the settings (from 0.5 to 0.8 wood/s for parity), and the pyrolysis recipes could be left as they are, because they wouldn't have to compete with the 20x output bonus.

It might be difficult to adjust growth time and yields for all Nauvis trees (including any from mods), but since there are no naturally generated variants on the map, I guess it would be enough to only do it for the growable one.

What do you think?

My general approach to developing the mod has been to minimize changes to existing parts of Factorio and only add, or make changes where it's absolutely necessary (like making foundation cheaper and moving it in the tech tree) which is where the massive wood-to-coal multiplier comes from, as well as other decisions like the sediment-to-stone recipe being very generous instead of making landfill cheaper.

However, I will agree that the multiplier when turning wood into coal is pretty significant. I've also had people make comments about doing things like shipping stacks of wood via rocket for the huge energy density since they can be turned into coal at the other end. Which is not necessarily a move I have a problem with, but it does identify a case worth paying attention to.

I'm still hesitant to mess with trees, but I might be willing to reconsider this specific case and make trees provide wood a bit faster and then tune down the coal multiplier, will give it some thought. However, I still don't know if I'd go all the way to energy parity of 2 wood per coal.

Thank you for replying! After reading carefully, this is my opinion:

Speaking to your point about other recipes: Making the sediment-to-stone recipe generous seems unproblematic and like a good idea to me, because the ingredient is one that belongs to this mod, and there is no energy content to account for. It seems unlikely to cause issues with other mods.

On the other hand, it can be very problematic to apply a large multiplier to an intermediate process that involves items (especially fuel items) from the base game as ingredients. Not only because it breaks energy parity and makes the process ingredient (wood, in this case) a much too efficient carrier of energy, but also because it splits related processes into those that benefit and those that don't, depending on their place in the chain. The change may seem minimal or carefully targeted, but it actually has significant side effects in relation to mods that provide their own (often balanced!) means of producing wood or converting it into coal and other materials (such as oil). Applying the bonus right at the stage of resource production instead of later, ensures consistency across the process chains and generally pre-empts the need to rebalance such mods specifically for this one. It resolves the issues with energy parity and density at the same time.

Applying an energy bonus factor of 20x seems fundamentally very sensible to me, not only because it makes the challenge less tedious, but because the energy output of Yumako trees and Jellystems already is greater than that of normal trees, by a factor of 25x and 62.5x, respectively. It seems to me that, here is an excellent opportunity to more directly "fix" some of that disparity of Space Age, by just making the trees of Nauvis 80% as productive as Yumako trees. (It seems even more fair when you consider that Nauvis receives twice the amount of sunlight that Gleba does...)

So I still think that only modifying the yield of trees is the better option, but you seem to worry about "messing with trees". What do you figure is the problem with that, if you don't mind my asking? It seems simple enough to change the parameters, if it is only for the growable tree.

Anyway, I hope that you at least find my thoughts useful!

The point about messing with trees is not a technical issue, it's the design goal I mentioned above about making the minimal number of changes possible to the base game while allowing for the seablock experience.

However, that decision was made when the mod was relatively new, and I've since spent quite a bit more effort building integrations for other mods. So, your argument about the huge energy multiplier representing a compatibility problem with other mods is a compelling one. Will absolutely consider a change here to buff trees and then nerf the charcoal recipe.

All right, thank you for considering it!

I've checked several mods, and the common thread I found was that they all boost the production of wood rather than the amount of materials obtained from processing it, and many of them even contain a setting to configure it, but not recipes after it. So increasing wood yields generally seems much better for compatibility out of the box.

By the way, the greenhouse from Krastorio 2 Spaced Out outputs 50 wood/min with its basic recipe, and with one-fifth of it converted into seeds which are cycled back, the net output becomes 40 wood/min. Agricultural towers may output about 18.4 wood/min from a 21x21 area (where 46 of 48 "fields" are utilized), and half of it must be be converted to seeds, leaving the net output at only 9.2 wood/min. If a greenhouse requires a total of 73.5 tiles, then exactly six of them can provide 240 wood/min from the same 21x21 area, making them ~26.1x as efficient as agricultural towers. Even when accounting for greater power consumption (900kW for six greenhouses compared to max. 100kW for one tower), the factor is reduced to no less than ~23.2x. (This still doesn't account for space and energy required for seed extraction, which favors the greenhouses.) And the wood from the greenhouses get to enjoy the 20x bonus for charcoal production on top of that, for a total bonus of 464x! I figure you'll want to address that.