Why no early-on continous energy source?

Question

I can understand that, if the theme of the game is of a megacorporation exploiting natural resources, we would not use wind or solar power. However, the lack of an early available renewable energy source is really vexing.

While coal and/or gasoline are not renewable in reality, they are in the game because you can mine them indefinitely. However, you only get those later in the game.

You can't really automate anything so long as you depend on a fuel that you have to manually add all the time. We could really use a way to automize biofuel (maybe a drone?), especially when you consider that each time you gather biomass, the sources for it become scarcer.

Comments

It would make it a bit easier in the beginning.  Though I have to say I am glad that it is not automated.  Why?  Because I find it help push me to want to move up the tiers to get coal.  Besides if you use bio fuel it takes awhile for the generators to burn through a stack.

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Don't see a need for it. You really only use biofuel for a short time before coal power is unlocked. Then it's easy street.

Answer 1

Search and you will find a lot of topics on this.

Short answer, biofuel is to get the basics up and running, so we can send off first space elevator load.

Answer 2

It's designed this way on purpose and most likely won't change. You're not supposed to be able to automate anything in the beginning of the game because it's supposed to seem like a manual chore to maintain power. It's so when you finally do get access to coal power it's much more meaningful (and feels like a big accomplishment to the player) to finally have an automated power source.

Answer 3

It really is a non-issue...

Until you get to the point where you get coal up running, you shouldn't be worrying about "big" factories just yet.

A single miner for limestone, and a constructor for cement.

A single iron miner, smelter, and a constructor for plates, rods and screws

and a single miner, smelter for copper and constructor for wire and cable.

That is enough to get your base started and work through the milestones.

You can power the above with the 2 burners in your  hub and an additional biofuel burner. (I never needed the additional burner, since all machines were never active at the same time).

With only that as power need, collecting a bit of leaves is trivial.

If you start making a big factory trying to maximize your mining capacity before coal... Then, yeh, you're making it hard on yourself.