Automated BioMass Feeder

Question

It's awful to have to manually feed the power plants. My teensy-tiny factory requires 6 generators right now. It limits my expansion terribly. These things need a hopper/feeder. I keep hoping that it shows up in the 'next tech tree level' but it never does. It should be available at the start of the game. I don't mind collecting a ton of plants but having to convert them to bio-fuel and still hand-feed the power plants stinks

Comments

Yeah but that's a few hours in, when you can automate everything else after 20 minutes. I'm sure you could craft everything you needed for the space elevator and tech at a craft bench with a bit of patience, but it's not why I'm playing.

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honestly i think its legit to have power automation start at coal power plant and biomass to remain 'scrub tier' tech. Honestly as well 200 bio fuel lasts ages too, the level of infer-structure that requires 6 biomass burners it'd seem better to be seeking progression in technology rather than facilitating the current solution, otherwise why progress right? Can just run it out for ages on bio-gen rather than needing to move on and adapt

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Why not automate everything? Just one click and finish game 100% automatic playgame.

Biomas should not be automated.

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I thought this way for a long time too but then I realized that if you build a bunch of biomass burners so that energy usage is about 50% of total output the rates of consumption are minimal and so long as you are progressing through the tech tree to expand your slots a single large trip of collection has ALWAYS been sufficient to carry me along until I get coal. I do tend to race to coal and let buildings fall behind but once you have coal you can make up for lost time very quickly.

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Even if you would be able to feed the biofuel burners automatically, you still have to run around like crazy and collect plants and leaves, creat biomass of them and then create biofuel of it to keep your stock filled.
What a waste of time.
I usually start with 6 biofuel burners  to power the basic factories. I have 2 constructors in line to make the biofuel from a storage container. when that is up and running I start looking for coal.

Answer 1

Disagree. The fact that you have to manually feed biomatter is great motivation to push players forward to research coal. (But the game should definitely do a better job of letting players know how to access that research option!)

Keep manual feeding in.

Comments

Do you honestly think people wouldn't make the move to coal gen's with miners getting coal automatically and instead decide they want to run around the world and gather plant and wood material instead and dump it into a container for a partial automation?  

I think everyone would gladly make the move to coal regardless of if biomass is automated or not

Answer 2

Keep on, on Tier 4 you will unlocked Coal Powerplant where you can put Coal into Coal Powerplant to get energy. :D I'm was too like Eww... is there no other ways to make automatic Energy? Then i found out at Tier 4 its coal powerplant. >_< Maybe they should reduce the Coal powerplant to Tier 3.

Comments

Although coal power is automated later as you said, it would be nice if somewhere in teir 2 we had some automation around Biofuel. An Auto-Farm and the ability to belt into Biomass Generators would help teach the whole "automate everything, manually do nothing" alot more.

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It actually already is on Tier 3 (if you don't count the Hub building-phase(Tier 0))

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My solution was to put leaves and wood in separate containers to make a biogas manufacturing plant but there is no reason the biogas can't be fed to the power plants. I would love to see them like a container too where there is an in belt and an out belt to chain 4 or 5 together otherwise you get into splitter hell really quick. This also adds the challenge of figuring out how many biogas plants a single full conveyor can supply before the throughput is too low to power the last one.

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Coal is sometimes the answer, but in my main world all my coal deposits are way hard to get access to. I feel like a hopper system would be ok, so we still need to make a decision to stay on biofuel or go for the hard coal. Biofuel would still require multiple constructors to make, then a hand feed to multiple hoppers that take up space along with the multiple biomass burners. Or we choose to go for the hard coal. It becomes a non-linear choice, great for the game.

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Maybe some kind of farm system between manual bio and coal (or the lawn mower/tree cutter idea admiralrem had below)...Right now coal is the only answer. With a handful of resources you can run a power line to any coal mine on the map and it immediately solves all your power problems.

Answer 3

I am not per-se against manually feeding the generators. It is tedious yes, but will also give you more of a push to go for coal.

However the whole biomass production is a bit weird. I either have to use 2 containers for input (leaves and wood), which results in two constructors for biomass, which is a bit odd. I'd like to see just putting leaves and wood in one constructor to convert it to biomass. That would make handling easier. There is no "fun" in having to distinguish between them. And you want to process both, even if one is less optimal, as you have a ton of leaves.

Comments

This is the one early thing that I didn't build constructors for. It processes so fast manually I think I would have wasted a lot more time trying to automate it. But, I rushed to complete tiers as fast as possible. I think the manual biomass stuff will really punish players that want to explore a lot, unless there's a bit of automation between biomass and coal.

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+1 But, biofuel generators are still a primary power for a long while. At least couple upgrades for capacity would be nice to have.

Answer 4

Yes, I think this is rediculous, having to manually put BioMass into the Feeder, when you already have everything completly automated, including Mining, processing to all the ores and all machines to get plates, rod, wire, everithing, and the production of BioMass you can automate... The feeder is the only machine at this stage impossible to automate... (It's ok to having to cut trees or getting enough leaves, but, having to always feed manually, this is just anoying)

Answer 5

Coal generators are in Tier 3, so its not dificult to get there around 5-6 hours of gameplay and they can be automaticly loaded with coal, but i agree, game about automation things should have something like this

Answer 6

I'll try to summarize this as well as I can. I agree with this 100% Grabbing leaves for my 4 generators that ran out of fuel every x-minutes or so was by far my least favorite thing in the Alpha. Someone else said it and ill reiterate, for a game of automation, not having a way to automate this is odd. Someone else mentioned just skip over to coal power, which I did because I could not take grabbing leaves like a crackhead lost in the jungle. BUT if i'm skipping over stuff to get to coal... there is probably a progression issue?

I'm perfectly fine with the biomass burners on paper, they just need to be automated somehow. Seems like the easiest thing would to just be able to make a small rover/lawnmower that could collect junk and dump it into a constructor for processing. Problem solved! Automation!

Don't make me run around so much!

Comments

I like the idea of a mower between biomass and coal.

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actually, giving the biomass burners lets say 16 inventory slots would make them more fun to play with

Answer 7

coal is the way to go!!! with the consumption rates on the coal power plants, you can run several off one mine!

Answer 8

Player should have an option - automate or hop around and gather leaves.

It would be ok if you didnt have belts, for example, in place. But you, most probably, have belts and they automate ore delivery to smelters. Why is it any different to biomass and burners?

At least make some burner inputs to connect a container via belts where you can put gathered fuel.

Answer 9

This is the stupidest load of crock idea I've read yet on the forums. The entire reason to manually load the biomass burners is to make it a chore. It's supposed to be hard and annoying to do because it makes it so much more rewarding when you finally build automated coal power. It makes coal feel like a milestone achievement in the game's progression. Adding automation to the biomass burner would "Cheapen" the feeling of getting coal when you get it. By then it will just feel like "Another automated power source" not "The first automated power source we get". The game is perfect as it is right now. Don't change anything and definitely do -NOT- ever automate biomass burners. It's perfect as it right now.

Answer 10

I feel they force you to do it manually so you have the will to go get coal power instead of just skipping to oil especially that (I think) coal is not to close to starting locations. The only starting location I have not tried is Jungle and coal was always at least 1 Km away from where I was. You can automate the production of Biofuel but still need to manually feed it.

Comments

there is coal pretty close to the normal start, only 600 meters, i hooked up a miner and the conveyor it nearby to a huge coal power platform then ran wire to my main factory. the hardest one was doing the geyser power which is over 1k meters away from my main factory i have a wire that goes all the way to it. My factory is producing over 1500 MW and on average i use about half of that, much more when i decide to automate supercomputer construction.