--- title: Metals date: 2026-01-01T22:10:39-05:00 draft: true --- "A land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills." Where last we left off, I'd automated Fawogae mushrooms for fuel. Afterwards, I walked away to make dinner, safe in the knowledge that nothing could break down in any way more complicated than running out of fuel or filling up with ash, both of which I was okay with. I came back to find that it had stopped because of the new, smaller container inventories created by Py Hard Mode. Fawogae mushrooms had filled up the four slots I allocated to them, and while that made an excellent start on a fuel stockpile, it wasn't enough to fully alleviate my fuel problems, or to start on iron production. ## Immediate problems We're still working towards the Pyrrhic Victory technology, but it's still _very_ far away. In the immediate future, I'm instead contending with: * My finite supply of starting iron (presently with 511 sheets remaining). * My finite supply of starting copper (presnetly with 422 sheets remaining). * My finite supply of starting lumber (presently with 298 logs). * My accumulating stockpile of ash, from burning raw coal for fuel. The two technologies I recently unlocked provide solutions: Fawogae mushrooms can be atomized to release iron ore, and ash separation can recover copper ore (along with some byproducts) from ash, solving two problems at once. Wood can largely wait, as long as I'm careful about what I use and aggressive about collecting driftwood as it floats near the platform. I'm also dealing with a severe lack of landfill, having blown through my starting stockpile. Making more isn't hard, exactly - it's two sand and one stone each and crafts very quickly - but getting the supplies requires burning coal to make steam, and that makes more ash. There's a limit there eventually, even if it's a ways off, until we get ash separation up and running. ## Cleanup The first order of business is more Fawogae mushrooms. The immediate fix is a larger output box, replacing the four-slot wooden chest I had set up with one of the eight-slot iron chests I have from the game start. That will allow the existing plantation to output up to 400 mushrooms, or about an hour and a half of production, before it jams. That doesn't do anything to improve short-term returns, only long-term ones, but it's a start and it does make it easier to AFK from the game if needed. The second order of business is a second Fawogae plantation. Since we already have mushrooms, the initial setup is very quick. This does eat into our dwindling iron reserve badly, but we've got enough left to get by. I've got a design in mind for an expandable Fawogae plantation system, but it will require a substantial number of belts, inserters, and power poles, and I just don't have the resources to build it yet. The third order of business is to run laps with soil and raw coal, to make more landfill so that I can make room to expand Fawogae production. While that's going on, I've also replaced the outflow behind the muddy water separation washer with a simple tank - which means I now have to empty it by hand periodically, but also means I don't need to relocate the wind turbine to plug it in, at least for now. That also let me reclaim a patch of landfill that was no longer being used. ![A modified version of the soil to stone and sand to muddy water recycling chain, with the water output of the muddy water separation plant fed back into the water input line. The line now has a storage tank on it, which is wired to a pump.](water-recycling.png) The fourth order of business is to wire the water supply for soil, stone, and sand washing to a circuit measuring water in the tank, so that it can automatically recycle the water from the muddy water separation stage. This doesn't matter for resource conservation, as water is free, but it frees me up from having to manually flush the output water or from having to use electricity to automatically dispose of it. ## Iron One of PyBlock's additions to Pyanodons is an early, burner-powered atomizer, which can be used to convert Fawogae mushrooms into iron ore. Since Fawogae mushrooms are very cheap to produce and only produce ash as a byproduct, this is a perfect early-game source of iron, in the absence of any deposits to mine. However, they're relatively expensive, using a substantial portion of my remaining iron and copper; building more than one would be potentially game-ending. Refining iron is relatively cheap, since I already have raw coal automated. At some point I'll need to move the smelting furnace closer to the atomizer to cut down on running around, but for now I can use it where it is. ## Ash and copper I'm already well over one stack of ash, and need to deal with it. It's not pressing yet, let alone a crisis, but it has the potential. Since I need to wait for more Fawogae harvesting anyways before I can do more work on iron, I'm switching gears and doing copper as well, starting with ash separation. Solid separators, like many Pyanodons buildings, get a Mk 00 variant that runs on steam power, so I'm building yet another iteration of the steam boiler plus production building design that's been serving me well so far. The thousand-plus ash I've accumulated quickly sorts down to 78 coal dust (easily burned for fuel), eight iron oxide, and 155 soot - which is further reduced to 120 copper ore, plus a smattering of iron, zinc, aluminum, lead, and nickel, plus six ash to put back into the separator. I've played a bit of Pyanodons without the Py Hard Mode mod, and there's a thing going on here where Py Hard Mode makes PyBlock, and specifically only PyBlock, easier. Py Hard Mode reduces raw coal's fuel value from 4 MJ per item to 1.5 MJ per item, meaning that raw coal-powered devices consume nearly three times as much fuel and make nearly three times as much ash. The ash is annoying, but it's also PyBlock's first source of copper ore, and increasing ash production actually saves a bit of time and complexity in expanding early facilities. Smelting the copper ore from our first ash run produces enough copper plates to unlock the Automation science pack research. However, it creates new byproducts - four metal ores - that I have no use for and, currently, no way to get rid of. For now, I'll store them in per-product output boxes, but the extremely limited sizes of storage chests means that this is a temporary solution at best. ## Unlocks ![The automation science pack research screen, described below.](automation-science-pack.png) This is Pyanodons' answer to vanilla Factorio's automation science. Like the original, it's an early game research. _Unlike_ the original, it takes four raw materials, an entirely new product, and several intermediates that, for now, can only be hand-crafted. Unlocking automation science and actually automating it are two very separate milestones. The Automation science pack technology unlocks a several new buildings: * Mk 00 wood processors, which run on steam and can automatically cut logs into wood. * Flora collectors and Flora cultivators. Flora collectors are used in normal maps, while PyBlock relies on Flora cultivators. Both do the same thing: produce native flora, a spoilable item needed to make automation science packs. * Labs, which are needed for research. * Electrically-powered Mk 01 soil extractors, replacing the steam-powered Mk 00 extractors I've been relying on. * Shunt loaders, which run on steam and allow belts to feed directly into or out of buildings. It also provides the recipes for making filled planter boxes and science packs, and for bootstrapping native flora synthesis from Fawogae mushrooms. At this point, there are no more trigger technologies immediately available. I have a few directed research options instead, depending on my goals and needs, but as I haven't fully implemented the technologies I have, none stick outs. The cheapest technologies lead in a clear path, however, through coal processing to steel to assembly, and assembly is needed to automate intermediates and science packs, so that's where I'll head next. Making any actual science packs will have to wait until I can start up native flora production. The first unlock in that chain, Coal processing 1, requires 12 automation science packs plus a lab to research them in. A lab requires electrical power, and the science packs require native flora. My main concern along the way is running out of logs, as both science packs and power poles require them. ## Waiting At this point, there's not much left to do but wait. Resources are too limited to build anything else, for now. Which is surprisingly, actually. Pyanodons has a well-deserved reputation of being a trap for people who overbuild (a habit I have been trying to break as well), but the pace of PyBlock is set up so that if you're standing around waiting, it's usually because of some small number of process bottlenecks that you can invest in, at least in the early game. Py Hard Mode actually makes this more prominent, because of the decreased chest sizes: with smaller buffers, more things fill up if you wait around for too long, so it's usually worth keeping at least your key processes churning if you can. In this case, I'm ultimately bottlenecked by Fawoagae mushroom production. With two plantations making 0.14 mushrooms per second, raw coal and iron production are painfully slow. However, I have now automated the resources needed to make more plantations (stone, iron, and copper), leaving only wood as the last limited resource needed to supply them with power. So, it's time to double that again - using the last of my iron chests, in the process. This new throughput is still well below the rate at which I can process mushrooms into either raw coal or iron ore, but it helps, and even without waiting, there's still a lot of downtime. ## Final situation ![The final platform for this entry, with an enlarged Fawoage farm on the left, iron ore in the lower middle, new ash separation buildings on the right, and the modified soil loop at the top.](final-platform.png) At this point, I'm no longer at risk of running out of iron or copper. However, exhausting my stockpile would still be a nuisance, as restocking them is a slow process due to the low rates of Fawoage production and limited storage options. Logs are still a limited resource. I have 277 left, and there are very few pieces of driftwood left within easy reach. Projects to expand the platform would likely recover a fair bit of additional wood, but even so, I'll have to be careful with my supplies. I'm starting to - slowly - accumulate ore for zinc, nickel, lead, and aluminium. I can't process those ores yet, so I'll eventually have to make more space for them. Nearly no matter what I want to do next, I will need a source of electricity that's more substantial and more reliable than my solitary wind turbine.