Phosphorus

The element that punishes buffers.

White phosphorus ignites in air. Leave it waiting for 15 minutes, in a chest, on a belt, in a train or in your pocket, and it bursts into flame: the chest takes the damage, fire spreads to every stack of white phosphorus nearby, and all that's left is ash. Your usual answer to everything, a bigger buffer, is now a fire hazard.

So you have three choices:

• Use it right away. Plastic, lubricant, processing units and batteries all need phosphorus. Build the furnace next to the consumer and keep the belt short.
• Burn the surplus. The combustion tower burns white phosphorus into heat for your heat pipes and leaves ash, which you dissolve into phosphoric acid, pour into concrete or ship to Gleba as fertilizer.
• Make it safe. Convert it to red phosphorus in a kiln running on the tower's heat, wash it, and ship it anywhere. Red phosphorus never ignites. A retort turns it back into white right where you need it.

Every one of these costs something, and working out which one each part of your base should use is the puzzle.

Requires Space Age to be owned (for the spoiling feature), not enabled. Plays in vanilla, with Space Age, and with Brevven-style material packs up to Krastorio 2 and Space Exploration.

What you build

• Phosphorus furnace: phosphate rock, coal and stone into white phosphorus (coke, graphite electrodes and silica with material mods). Phosphate rock is a new violet ore, found away from your starting area.
• Combustion tower: burns white phosphorus into 2 MW of heat and ash. White phosphorus in its fuel slot is safe.
• Conversion kiln: turns white into crude red phosphorus in batches of 50, heated by the tower next to it.
• Phosphorus retort: turns red back into white next to the consumer.
• Glow marker: an unpowered green lamp that burns for 24 hours, dims, and leaves a little ash. Point at it to see how long it has left.

The fire

• A burning full stack destroys an iron chest. Fire resistance helps, but only up to 50 %; walls keep theirs, so walls and gaps make firebreaks.
• Fire jumps to white phosphorus in neighbouring inventories, a few hops at most. Wooden buildings burn better.
• In vacuum, on thin-air worlds and under water there is no fire. It still turns to ash.
• Nothing destroys white phosphorus for free: other mods' incinerators, crushers and recyclers can't take it.
• Too harsh? The time before it ignites is a startup setting, from 2 to 120 minutes.

What needs it

Plastic, lubricant, processing units (doped silicon), batteries (phosphoric acid), and heat pipes and heat exchangers (red phosphorus). Each can be switched off in the startup settings.

The rewards are optional: red phosphorus primers for more ammunition, incendiary magazines, grenades and flamethrower ammo, doped advanced circuits, etched processing units, ash-dried explosives, phosphate concrete, landfill from ash, fertilized Gleba nutrients, and uranium from phosphoric acid.

Compatibility

Phosphorus reads the recipes your mods already made and builds on them, so it fits whatever pack you play. Its buildings copy the recipes of the vanilla buildings they resemble, so a material pack's invar, zirconia or tungsten carbide show up in them too. Everything below switches on by itself when the mod is installed.

Space Age
- Fire follows the planet: no fire on space platforms or thin-air worlds; heat pipes on Aquilo run on red phosphorus shipped in.
- Gleba: ash-fertilized nutrients, half again as many.
- Recyclers can't destroy white phosphorus.

Space Age planets
- apia: shares its phosphoric acid. Muria: phosphoric acid is acidthrower ammo. Maraxsis: no fire under water.
- Flare Stack, Rubia, Paracelsin, Panglia: their incinerators and crushers can't take white phosphorus.
- Heat shielding takes ash instead of sulfur.

Brevven's mods (both lines)
- BZ Carbon: coke and graphite electrodes in the furnace. BZ Silicon: silica flux, and silicon for doping.
- BZ Tin: phosphor bronze, twice the plates for 4 red phosphorus.
- BZ Gold: the doping goes into the CPU. BZ Aluminum: aluminum cable in the furnace.
- BZ Chlorine: flame-retardant epoxy, and tributyl phosphate from red phosphorus and chlorine.

Planetfall legacy mods (ashier)
- Brim Stuff: wet-process phosphoric acid from sulfuric acid, NPK fertilizer slurry, and ash as the nitration drying agent.

Timeken
- ChemistryForYou: phosphine with sodium hydroxide, the real route. Glass for glow markers.

trikop's Manganese: lithium manganese iron phosphate batteries, a quarter more batteries for one manganese plate.

MDbob electronics: doped electronic components.

Krastorio 2
- NPK fertilizer (with Space Exploration), lithium iron phosphate batteries, incendiary rifle magazines, tributyl phosphate from K2's chlorine, K2 glass for glow markers, matter conversion.
- K2's crusher can't destroy white phosphorus.

Space Exploration
- Phosphate rock on SE planets and in core mining; the delivery cannon carries the stable forms, never white phosphorus.
- Orbits and asteroid fields are fireproof.
- SE heat shielding takes ash instead of sulfur; heat-resistant low density structures take ash.

Wood mods (Lignumis, Wooden Logistics, Wooden Industry, Wood Walls, big wooden poles): wooden buildings burn better and can carry a fire along.

The family
- Cadmium: cadmium from phosphorus furnace dust, and filter washing with phosphoric acid.
- Tellurium: tellurium copper is deoxidised with red phosphorus. With Cadmium too: phosphorus-doped cadmium telluride.
- Magnesium: a magnesia-lined phosphorus furnace, magnesium phosphate cement, and phosphorus in catalysed plastic. Magnesium's heated evaporators run on combustion tower heat.
- Gallium: phosphoric acid finishes GaAs wafers in 12 seconds instead of 20. With Cadmium too, phosphorus furnace dust can be washed for arsenic instead of cadmium.
- Neodymium: phosphoric acid comes out of the monazite leach, the extractant is made from phosphorus ash, and tributyl phosphate works in the separation steps.
- Caesium: the retort distils prepared caesium reduction mixtures, saving half the magnesium or coal compared with direct chemical-plant production.
- Antimony: when phosphoric acid is available at green science, it replaces water in Antimony's memory-substrate coating and shortens coating time.

Art: Hurricane046, Periodic Madness (MrSmoothieHuman1), Malcolm Riley, Flare Stack (snouz, GotLag, pepoluan). See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.