coal setback

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+---
+title: Setback
+date: 2026-01-28T12:20:44-05:00
+---
+
+Mistakes were made.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Situation
+
+As of the last writeup, I felt confident that I was no longer at risk of running out of resources and failing. I had said that the next thing I was going to need was power.
+
+I have a slowly-accumulating pile of zinc, aluminum, nickel, and lead ores, which I can't process and which will eventually block copper production. My current solution is storage; the ores are produced very slowly and I have enough iron to make a lot of boxes if I need to.
+
+Copper, iron, wood, native flora, and energy are all technically available in unlimited quantities, as are several downstream products, but the production of any of them is slow. The limiting factor is my starter Fawogae mushroom patch, and the time it takes to manually run resources around the platform to where they're needed.
+
+## The plan
+
+I've unlocked electrically-powered versions of the soil extractor, washing plant, solid separator, and destructive distillation column, which are all useful for processing Fawogae mushrooms into fuel. I can burn that fuel in steam boilers, and use the steam to make electricity.
+
+One raw coal per second is 1.5 MW of fuel. When burned, that produces one ash per second, and for handling reasons, I want to sort down to 0.1 soot per second. Using Mk1 buildings throughout, takes 594 KW of electricity to produce that 1.5 MW of output, plus the idle draw of the machines involved. That leaves a bit less than a megawatt of spare capacity, which would be tons. By designing it to be tiled, I could generate as much electricity as I need, taking the problem off my plate and letting me focus on other matters.
+
+So I built that - or, rather, I built a version scaled to 5 raw coal per second (7.5 MW of gross output), designed to be tiled horizontally as needed. With that hooked up, I started switching power production over to it, only to find that my power problems were slowly getting worse. Everything I did to try to improve the situation, including adding more fuel, made it worse.
+
+You see, when I did the math, I missed something. Can you see it?
+
+![The info card for steam engines. "Consumes steam to create electric energy." Working; 400/400 health. Consuming 7.5/s of 15/s steam. Contains 0.1 units of 250° steam, out of a maximum of 200 units of 500° steam. Generating 1.9 MW out of 7.6 MW. Efficiency: 50%.](steam-engine-info.png)
+
+Here, let me zoom in a little.
+
+![The last line of the info card, in isolation: "Efficiency: 50%."](steam-engine-efficiency.png)
+
+Steam generators only capture _half_ of the thermal energy from the steam they consume. The rest is wasted. Since that energy ultimately comes from the raw coal I'm burning in the boilers, that means that every joule of electrical power costs me two joules of coal. I'd done the math wrong.
+
+## The reality
+
+The corrected math for this design works out badly. One raw coal per second is 1.5 MW of fuel. When burned, that produces one ash. Using Mk1 buildings throughout, it takes 1.2 MW of fuel energy to generate the 600 kW of electric energy needed to produce that 1.5 MW of fuel, plus the idle draw of the machines involved. That leaves a bit less than 300 kW of spare capacity, which isn't much at all. The idle power draw of the power plant shown above totals out to 99.34 kW, meaning that the whole setup provides a thin 200 kW of usable electrical energy.
+
+This problem also means I've been mis-estimating the tradeoffs involved in upgrading fuel-burning buildings to electrical equivalents. For example, the Mk0 solid separator burns 800 kW of steam to process five ash per second, while the Mk1 solid separator uses a combined 1.6 MW of electric energy to process ten ash per second. I had been estimating as if the two buildings use approximately the same amount of energy per ash processed. That model is wrong: the efficiency losses in generating electrical power mean that the Mk1 solid separator burns twice as much fuel per ash.
+
+I'm going to have to re-think a lot of decisions I've made. This does, however, explain why I was having a creeping fuel consumption problem while upgrading buildings.
+
+It cost me more than a thousand plates to build this power plant and to learn this lesson in practice. While it might be possible in principle, the tiny returns mean that it's not practical to build enough Fawogae plantations and other infrastructure to generate useful electrical power this way. If I want to electrify my platform, I'll have to look elsewhere.
+
+The most promising option, right now, is to switch back to fuel-burning devices where possible. That's not possible universally - high-pressure furnaces require electricity, as do forestries, moss farms, and botanical nurseries - but many of the things I need here and now have Mk0 versions that either run on fuel, or run on steam, either of which provides 100% efficiency with respect to the fuel's energy value.
+
+The electrified buildings, constructed at significant expense, will have to go into storage.
+
+## Raw coal
+
+![A schematic of the cycle described below, producing raw coal.](raw-coal-cycle.png)
+
+Using Mk0 buildings, the power math works out to a substantial energy gain. Producing one raw coal per second of net output requires:
+
+* 1 raw coal per second of output,
+* 0.11 raw coal per second to run Mk0 distillation columns, and
+* 0.26 raw coal per second to generate electricity to run the plantations.
+
+27% overhead isn't fantastic, but it's a lot better than the electrified version's 86% overhead. The downside is that it means I'll have to route coal all over my platform, and deal with ash. Fawogae plantations and the associated raw coal machinery are bulky enough that I'm inclined to centralize them, but that then means I'll have to run belts of coal from there to everywhere that needs fuel, and belts of ash or soot returnning to an ash-handling facility.
+
+The first step in that cycle is raw coal.
+
+![A factory making raw coal and soot. The upper section is six columns of Fawogae plantations. The lower section passes the resulting Fawogae mushrooms into distillation columns to reduce them to raw coal, then sends the ash to a separator.](raw-coal.png)
+
+This facility is designed around a goal of 15 raw coal per second. However, it will produce less, for two reasons. First, the coal production process itself consumes some of the output. Second, I've only built half the Fawogae plantations needed to run coal processing at full speed, to conserve idle power and to save on construction resources. I'll scale it up to full capacity if and when I need it.
+
+For now, until I have soot and ash handling built up, the production columns are capped by ash separators that sort their output into bins, along with the coal. These bins will eventually be replaced with belt connections, but for now they mean I can use the output to power the existing infrastructure, so long as I don't mind making the occasional fuel and ash run. I do mind, but it's still better than the starter infrastructure I've built.
+
+## Final situation
+
+![The final map situation. There is a large blank area to the east. On the west, there are three columns of raw coal production, as described above.](final-platform.png)
+
+The empty space off to the west is where the electric Fawogae-to-raw-coal setup was. I'm sure I'll find a use for the space eventually.
+
+At this point, my most immediate problems are all about throughput. I could probably automate the first science pack, but making the facilities involved will require a lot of iron and copper plates. Copper, surprisingly, is now relatively plentiful; all the raw coal I'm making and burning means I have mountains of ash to sort through, and Pyanodons Hard Mode ensures that I'm going to burn huge amounts of the stuff. What I need more of, rather, is iron.
+
+I also need a more permanent facility for dealing with ash. Since my plan is now to use raw coal and coal dust as fuels wherever possible, that means that nearly every facility I build will output ash, alongside its primary products. Since I aimed for most of a belt of raw coal, I also need to plan for a full belt of ash.
+
+The ores from soot separation have, as expected, overflowed. Building more storage for them is trivial for now, though.
+
+I had intended to unlock the technologies needed for cadaveric arum plants next. These are basically space onions, and their description suggests that they accumulate sulfur compounds. Critically, however, they can also be atomized to produce copper ore, much as Fawogae mushrooms can be atomized to make iron ore. I still think that's probably the best target, but the amount of copper I'm making from ash separation makes it less urgent than I was expecting. Other alternatives include more efficient Fawogae production, fish and tin processing, or electronics.
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diff --git a/content/pyblock/sorters/index.md b/content/pyblock/sorters/index.md
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+---
+title: Sorters
+date: 2026-01-25T15:22:19-05:00
+draft: true
+---