Burner Biochamber

by Jtmzac

Adds a burner version of the biochamber that can also make oil based solid fuel, but can only be placed on non-Gleba/agricultural planets. This preserves the existing Gleba game design, but makes it much better to use on other planets.

Content
a day ago
2.0
39
Manufacturing
Owner:
Jtmzac
Source:
N/A
Homepage:
N/A
License:
MIT
Created:
3 days ago
Latest Version:
1.0.4 (a day ago)
Factorio version:
2.0
Downloaded by:
39 users

Adds a biochamber that uses standard chemical fuels instead of nutrients, but can only be used on non-Gleba/agricultural planets. This makes using them a lot less clunky on planets where they have limited recipes anyway. The burner variant unlocks at the same time as the normal biochamber.

The petroleum solid fuel recipes have also been added to the burner biochamber to give it the expected productivity jump that you get from the foundry and electromagnetic plant.

By default the burner biochamber is allowed on all planets, but disabled on Gleba and several modded planets where the normal biochamber is a key part of the game design.

The default of allowing placement on all unspecified planets, along with whitelisting/blacklisting certain planets is all configurable in the settings. Some of the defaults could be wrong, I haven't actually played all these planets and are guessing based on the recipes and technologies they add.

If there is another planet where it should be blocked by default then let me know and I can add it to the settings.

Solid Fuel Recipes added in 1.0.2

After doing some more analysis with calculators I found the burner biochamber was only providing a 20-30% reduction of input resources for rocket fuel production, the main thing you would use it for.

By adding the solid fuel recipes, this becomes 50-60%, which is more in-line with the EM plant and foundry boosts.
Note that these bonuses are the upper range, and decrease as you get closer to the productivity cap of 300%.

I did look at increasing the fuel cost of the burner biochamber, but as you reach the productivity cap, a fuel consumption of 4MW becomes so dominant that the input resource reduction drops to less than 20%, rendering the whole building questionable. The current default of 2MW keeps it more around 30%, so it's been left at that.

I don't think adding these recipes should have any significant balancing implications elsewhere thanks to the placement restrictions, but let me know if I missed anything.

Why make this?

I like the biochamber on Gleba, but it's effort to benefit ratio on other planets feels poor compared to the foundry and EM plants. By restricting the burner version to certain planets, it becomes possible to buff and simplify its usage, while preserving the original biochamber on agricultural planets where it's much better integrated into the game design.

Why does it work in space/on Muluna?

This matches the normal biochamber, which does work in airless environments. Just imagine the chamber is eating the chemical fuel instead of burning it.