Krastorio 2 Greenhouse + Wood Pyrolysis

Description

The mod first and foremost provides a greenhouse for easily growing wood, pyrolysis tech for converting wood into coal and oil, plus early access to Coal Liquefaction. The wood pyrolysis recipes are meant to mimic real-life fast pyrolysis, which may produce varying amounts and qualities of oils, gasses and solid char through destructive distillation of carbonic material. The mod is somewhat similar to the Wood Gasification mod.

In Space Age, tree seeds can be obtained as soon as the greenhouse tech is unlocked (and extracted at half the cost and twice the speed), and 4 greenhouse variants for Gleba crops can eventually be unlocked as well (they may produce yumako fruits, jellynuts, stone/spoilage or spoilage; all of them are restricted to being built on Gleba only).

Notes on wood pyrolysis

In relation to oil production, the basic wood pyrolysis recipe is suitable for producing large amounts of heavy oil for lubricant, but the advanced version is particularly efficient when it comes to all the petroleum-derived products, which are needed in bulk. Having several outputs, the latter recipe certainly makes the overall process harder to manage, and optimal production requires simultaneous use of advanced oil processing and coal liquefaction, but in return, ~25.5% more plastic or ~22.4% more sulfur can be obtained from the same input, with less power and with a smaller factory footprint. This applies to rocket fuel production too, except the relative output is virtually the same.

To prevent coal from clogging up production, it seems best to send the coal to where it's needed first, and then liquefy the rest. (Make sure that the coal can always be off-loaded onto a conveyor belt in time, so the pyrolysis process doesn't stall temporarily, with possibly cascading slow-downs as a result.)

Notes on balancing

By default, a greenhouse + basic steam setup that burns the wood for energy is about twice as space efficient as an ideal solar + accu setup, and much cheaper too. It feels wrong for biomass to out-compete photovoltaics, but it also pollutes a lot! It's not clean energy, just a form of renewable coal power that takes up a lot of space and makes it that much harder to delay confrontation with the biters.

Making Coal Liquefaction available early is perhaps overpowered, but the mod can already circumvent the use of oil wells, and mining and liquefying coal before large productivity gains have been acquired is a trade-off. And if wood can be converted to oil, why not coal! The process naturally completes the mod.

In Space Age, higher quality tiers increase the output of the greenhouses with no downsides (aside from crafting cost). As a sort of compromise, the Gleba greenhouses by default output only about 40% of what an agricultural tower could from the same amount of space, which seems reasonable enough when they can also be placed in any biome and require no extraction and cycling back of seeds. But even with that, the outputs derived from Gleba crops are enormous (like, 11 yumako + 2 jellynut greenhouses provide for as much plastic production as 120 wood greenhouses do), not to mention that burning the output of a single jellynut tree can provide up to a hundred times the power of a solar panel. Space Age just has ridiculous balancing like that.

Mod integration & recommendations

The iron plates in the greenhouse recipe will be replaced with some variant of glass if either AAI Industry, Factorio+, Glass or Crushing Industry is installed. An Electric Boiler makes setups with Coal Liquefaction a bit easier to build, while potentially saving on coal. A Water pumpjack or Stone Water Well provides easy access to water in arid locations. Valves can make it easier to manage oil production (especially the coal liquefaction loop), and so may a Flare Stack. Perhaps you will like the Color Coded Pipes used in the screenshots above as well.

Licensing

The mod is released under the same GNU LGPLv3 license as Krastorio 2 by raiguard, which it borrows graphical assets from. Those assets are all the greenhouse-related .png-files in the assets folder, except my recolored derivatives and the custom remnants.