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diff --git a/content/pyblock/glass/index.md b/content/pyblock/glass/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..04c9a49 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/glass/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ +--- +title: Glass +date: 2026-01-22T13:39:57-05:00 +--- + +Tar: the renewable energy source of tomorrow. + +<!--more--> + +I'm still chasing renewable lumber. My starting resources, otherwise, are now long exhausted, though I'm holding steady on logs because of lucky driftwood finds. To make logs myself, I'm going to need steel and glass for the buildings involved, and I now have those technologies unlocked. Let's get steel going. + +As with so many things in Pyanodons, the processing chain for steel involves several byproducts, which have to be handled one way or another to prevent steel production from clogging. Those byproducts come from coke processing, rather than from steel directly, and consist of coal gas and tar. + +Either one can be burned as fuel, and glassmaking requires fluid fuel to power it, so making steel in parallel with glass seems like the ideal option for preventing steel from backing up. Glass production is relatively energy-hungry, so it can sink a large amount of those fluids, and I'll need the glass later to get tree farming started. Coal gas can also be burned to make more ash, which can then be fed into my existing separation infrastructure to extract more copper. + +## Minimum viable infrastructure + + + +For glass, I need: + +* A source of sand. +* An automatic screener, to turn sand into quartz. +* Two glassworks, to process quartz into glass via molten glass. +* A liquid fuel supply for the glassworks. +* A solid fuel supply and ash return for the screener. + +Sand can come from the same soil-washing process that I've been using for landfill and other purposes. Giving the glassworks its own sand source will let it run unattended, other than fuel delivery and ash removal, saving my time in running resources around the platform. Separating sand into quartz is a simple process with no byproducts, though it does run slowly. Feeding the results into a buffer decouples the throughput enough to let quartz build up while glass processing is paused. + + + +As for fuel, that's going to come from coking raw coal. That process needs: + +* A destructive distillation column for converting raw coal into coal. This also outputs iron oxide, coal gas, and tar. +* A second destructive distillation column for converting coal into coke. This also outputs iron oxide, coal gas, and tar. +* A high-pressure furnace to burn off the excess coal gas. + +For now, I'll collect the coke in a chest, and send the tar out to supply the gas furnaces. This whole process will be hand-fed with excess raw coal on an as-needed basis, when I expect to need either coke or glass. If I run long on coke, that's fine - it's a burnable fuel, though it's net negative on energy to manufacture it. If I run long on glass, though, my factory will clog, so I'll need to be careful there. + +I did briefly consider using a [combined pipe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLc6usad-vw), so that the coal gas could also contribute to glassmaking instead of being burned. However, I don't have access to pumps yet, and without pumps, sushi pipe setups are prone to clogging on whichever fluid is produced the most. So, for now, I'm just burning the coal gas. At least the ash is valuable. + + + +Steel is almost trivial by comparison. It needs limestone, which means I need to build another soil extractor, plus iron ore and coke, both of which I have. I build it as a small hand-fed factory, both because belts are still a significant expense and because continuous operation would overstress my power generation capacity. + +Pyanodons Hard Mode adds a wrinkle, however. I was mistaken when I wrote [in an earlier instalment](../research/) that foundries require a megawatt of electricity. Foundries require a megawatt of _heat_. Heat, at least for now, comes from burners, which consume various biological fuels - wood, native flora, and floraspolinin. I do not have access to heat pipes, so the burner has to be connected directly to the foundry to supply it with heat. Of the usable fuels, floraspoilinin would provide the best energy density, but it takes 200 minutes for native flora to spoil into it, and it's just not practical. I'll be running native flora over to warm a foundry for steelmaking for a while. + +Foundries have a very narrow operating range. The temperature reaches its maximum at 500°C, at which point any additional energy extracted from the fuel is wasted. Foundries must be heated to 450°C before they can operate. One burner produces 2.5 MW of heat, and neither foundries nor burners can be directly monitored for temperature, so any automatic heating mechanism at this stage will necessarily either waste fuel or run intermittently. Manual fuelling does the latter. + +## Capital expenses + +As in vanilla Factorio, iron is by far the most heavily used metal in the early game. With the iron production chain I have right now: + +* 1 iron plate takes 8 iron ore. +* 8 iron ore takes 8.88 Fawogae mushrooms directly, plus 2.66 raw coal. +* 2.66 raw coal takes 1.06 Fawogae mushrooms, plus an inconsequential amount of additional raw coal. +* 9.84 Fawogae mushrooms takes 128.57 seconds of plantation time. +* 128.57 seconds of plantation time takes 8.03 seconds of wall time, since I have 16 plantations running. + +Iron, without iron patches, is much, much slower than in vanilla Factorio. + +Mk1 destructive distillation columns cost a whopping 140 iron plates each, or nearly 20 minutes of production. Pyanodons, and Pyblock in particular, makes it considerably more expensive to build out infrastructure. In practice, generating that much iron takes even longer, because the same mushroom plantations are also feeding my raw coal production, and raw coal is needed all over the platform. Under full fuel demand, only 10% of mushroom production is available to make iron with. + +Copper is harder to estimate, but the upper bound on copper production is rooted in raw coal. Each piece of raw coal burned produces one ash; it takes ten ash to make one soot and ten soot to separate out enough copper ore to smelt one copper plate. Pyanodons Hard Mode's reduced fuel values are a continual help here, as it means that everything burns nearly triple the raw coal it otherwise might, and produces nearly triple the ash. + +For steel and glass, I think the cost of going with more expensive buildings is worthwhile. The alternative is to use Mk0 destructive distillation columns as much as possible, as well as Mk0 soil extractors, which are all considerably cheaper to build. The more expensive options serve to improve throughput, and ensure that ash generation is consolidated into my power plant as much as possible rather than being spread all over the platform. + +Coking raw coal outputs a significant amount of iron oxide, which smelts to iron plates at a generous 2:1 ratio, so the capital investment will be offset by operating recovery over the long term. + +## Power + + + +This setup runs very close to the generating capacity of my wind turbine and prototype coal power plant. I don't have the infrastructure to expand power, so I'm keeping the coking and glassmaking processes disconnected and running them only intermittently. I won't be able to fix this properly until I have renewable wood with which to build much larger mushroom farms. + +## Final situation + + + +The resource situation from my previous writeup is still accurate. However, we now have a very small quantity of glass and steel available. Spent carefully, this will be enough to start wood production. + + + +While I've been waiting for resources to accumulate, I built out a landfill platform under the crashed ship. It looks a bit nicer now that the graphics don't show thrown-up sand resting on top of open water. + + + +My initial batch of steel unlocked the Steel axe trigger technology. This gives me access to light armour, which, in Pyanodons, has an equipment grid and a 20-slot inventory bonus. The damage resistances are irrelevant to me without enemies, but the utility might be useful in the future. The technology also doubles the speed at which I can pick up buildings and tiles by hand. |