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---
title: Research
date: 2026-01-19T15:23:35-05:00
---
Welcome to the Mushroom Kingdom.
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When last I left off, I'd built a workable, if slow, supply of iron and copper, and completed the initial series of trigger technologies. I had mentioned that there wasn't a clear winner for technology, but, in hindsight, there is: I need a renewable source of wood before the 293 logs I'm carrying run out. If I blow through my log supply, then my only option to recover is to scour the ocean's surface for driftwood - a process which is very slow, is very manual, and which demands a huge amount of landfill.
Lumber cultivation comes with the Wood processing technology. It's quite a ways down the tech tree, and I'll need to complete six other research targets first:
* Coal processing 1;
* Steel processing;
* Mining with fluid;
* Glass technologies;
* Botany - Stage 1; and
* Moss - Stage 1.
That will require a total of 172 Automation science packs, assuming that I don't also research things like Assembly (which I will). Automation science packs require wood, which is, as mentioned above, a limited resource. I have plenty for this research plan, and I can afford to spend some extras, but that's the ultimate limit.
However, before I can do that, I also need power. Labs run on electricity, and I'm going to need power to run some of the other buildings needed along the way. Building a serious power plant, in turn, will require more copper and iron than I have on hand. I need to scale up what I have.
## Chores
An increasing proportion of my time is already being taken up running things back and forth between parts of the platform, manually delivering fuel and resources and removing ash. Now that I'm settled on a plan, I need to cut that work down, by adding belts and inserters to do the running for me. My starting stock of 100 belts is going to be put to work, and the iron and copper coming out of the factory gives me the materials to make more.
First, I've set up a belt to carry soil to the stone and sand washers. While I was there, I also added a furnace (manually fuelled) to turn excess stone into stone brick - paving the platform will help with running-around time, and I need brick as a material for some equipment, as well.
Second, I've routed Fawogae mushrooms directly to the distillation columns, to make raw coal without manual intervention. I also reconfigured the raw coal output to make the distillation column self-fuelling, so that I don't need to tend it - though I do need to remove ash from it periodically. I routed excess Fawogae mushrooms through to the atomizer making iron ore, to mostly-automate that, as well.
Third, I rigged up the outputs from both ash processing (for copper) and the Fawogae mushroom atomizer (for iron) to go directly into furnaces, to make plates for me.
And then I ran out of fuel.
## Mushrooms for days
This whole platform runs on raw coal, and it burns quite a bit of it when everything is running at the same time. When I was manually delivering fuel, that wasn't a huge deal: bits of the platform would regularly shut down, and then start up again when supplied with more coal. However, now that I'm automatically delivering coal to just two processes, I don't have enough left over to fuel anything else.
Raw coal comes from Fawogae mushrooms, and making more mushrooms isn't terribly difficult. Fawogae plantations are cheap to feed, requiring only a few spores every minute and a half and a small amount of electric power. The main barrier to scaling up is the capital investment: Fawogae plantations require wood. I can afford to scale up the number of mushroom plantations without dangerously straining our wood supply, but I do have to keep it modest.
That's about as many as I can get away with, though. I'm starting to butt up against the limited power output of a single wind turbine, especially when the wind dies down.
## Steam power
To deal with the wind dropping out, I'm going to build a small steam plant. This will be a prototype - a more capable and more permanent steam plant will require some resources, like wood, that I don't have in bulk yet.
Steam in Pyanodons is interesting. The ratio is exactly the reverse of the base game - two boilers to one steam generator, versus vanilla's one boiler to two generators. Each boiler consumes 3.7 MW worth of fuel, which, given raw coal's 1.5 MJ fuel value, means that they eat a bit less than 2.5 raw coal per second and generate an equivalent amount of ash. One steam generator can consume steam from two boilers - nearly 5 raw coal per second converted into ash - under full load. That's far more fuel than I can make right now, but I'm not planning on running it under full load right away. I just need something to prop up power generation when the wind is calm.
This is a somewhat expensive design. Underground belts require a whopping ten belts plus ten additional iron plates each, making them dramatically more expensive than surface belts of similar length. Pyanodons does give them a bit of extra reach, which is convenient with some of Py's larger buildings, but in this case, I'm using them for throughput, instead. Those underground belts allow me to easily fit bent inserters, and bent inserters have to travel through a much shorter arc than a normal straight inserter. This lets the inserters move more than twice as many items per second - meaning that two inserters is more than adequate to hit the 2.5 items/sec needed to fully fuel and de-ash these boilers.
It also uses loaders. I used them more as an experiment than because they're strictly necessary. These are belt connections added by Pyanodons Hard Mode, and pass items into or out of a building, and off of or onto a conveyor belt, balancing the lanes and operating at a fixed speed. In return, they burn fuel. These shunt loaders consume 0.1 steam per minute each, cutting into the boiler output a little, and move 3.75 items/sec, which works out to a quarter of a yellow belt. It's enough to run both boilers at full capacity if need be, though the fuel supply and ash bins will limit how long it can run without refuelling.
This gives me some good insights into the cost and design of a more permanent and more capable power plant, and it handily fills in the gap in my existing power network when the wind dies down. Wind turbines have the same priority as vanilla solar panels, so steam power is only used when there isn't enough wind power to meet demand. Future iterations will probably be a bit more compact. Rather than loaders, I'd like to connect this to a constant supply of coal - but that's a major capital project.
The trouble with prototypes, of course, is that if they work, they become permanent infrastructure. I fully expect that, over the course of the next few builds, my platform will become dependent on this generator for electrical power. The ability of a single wind turbine to meet demand is very obviously limited.
## Native flora
It's time to make science packs, so that I can start working my way through the research tree. There's only one pre-requisite I can't make yet: native flora. Everything else, I can hand-craft.
In Pyanodons, native flora comes from deposits, like an ore. Pyblock doesn't have any resource patches, so the mod adds flora cultivators as an alternative. These run a catalytic recipe, which requires some native flora as input. As with Fawogae mushrooms, this requires a separate process to kickstart production, but unlike Fawogae mushrooms, that starter recipe can't be hand-crafted. It needs a cultivator.
The catalytic native flora recipe takes soil and water, along with the input flora, and produces flora and soil as outputs. The bootstrap recipe, instead, takes Fawogae mushrooms, soil, and water, and has a 2% chance of producing a single native flora as output. The catalytic recipe needs a minimum of 5 native flora to run. The expected number of runs of the bootstrap recipe to make five flora is around 250, so I'll need to let this run for a while unless I get lucky. I rig it to stop immediately once it makes five flora so that I don't waste too many mushrooms.
Native flora also spoils. It's the first item to do so. It first spoils, after a bit more than three hours, into floraspoilinin, which then spoils after an additional three hours into biomass. Biomass is stable, and both floraspoilinin and biomass can be burned or processed further, but only native flora can be used to run native flora production or to make science packs. I'll need to keep native flora cycling, or it'll all rot away. This also means that making the initial five flora is a priority: if I make four, and then one rots, that's one extra I need to replace before I can switch to normal production.
Since these need soil, it gets its own soil extractor. This is a good time to upgrade, too: the Automation science research unlock also unlocked electrically-powered Mk 1 soil extractors. These have the same footprint and connections as the Mk 0 soil extractor I've been using for sand and rocks, but run on electricity instead of steam. They use 417 kW to a Mk 0 extractor's 200 kW, but also produce soil twice as fast, making them only a little more energy-intensive per soil produced. They also factor out fuel and ash disposal, by drawing their power over the electrical network.
I get lucky, and grow the necessary five native flora within half an hour. I switch the cultivator over to production, and add a tiny steam boiler setup to dispose of floraspoilinin as it's generated. This should keep the output bin clear for fresh native flora as flora spoil.
## Science
And with that, I can start cranking out science packs. They need nearly every resource I have access to: iron and copper for small parts; wood, stone bricks, soil, and ash for planter boxes, and native flora for the final science pack. They're expensive compared to my current resources, but I make enough right away to complete several technologies in quick succession.
I need several technologies, before I can start building what I have planned.
Digging around in the tech tree has shown that I will need steel and glass for wood cultivation. Steel requires coke, which comes very early in the research process, but making coke also produces coal gas and tar as byproducts. Pyanodons Hard Mode prevents me from casually voiding coal gas or tar, meaning that I need to find a use for tar and coal gas.
Dealing with coal is easy, as it can be burned to make more ash without any other byproducts. Tar, on the other hand, is meant to be processed further, through a complex production chain with a huge array of its own byproducts, and which requires substantial research to unlock.
However, tar can also be burned as a liquid fuel. So can coal gas. Glass furnances are the first building I can find that will consume liquid fuels when operating. So, my plan is to set up glassmaking and steel production in parallel, so that glass manufacturing eats the spare tar created by the coke needed for steel. I don't have a specific plan in mind for the glass, so this will be at best a temporary solution, but it should allow me to make enough steel to get to tree farming.
### Coal processing 1
The first batch of artisinal, handmade science packs go into unlocking Coal processing 1, which gets me:
* The Mk1 high pressure furnace;
* The Mk1 destructive distillation column;
* The coke chain, which includes coal, coke, carbolic oil, and carbon dioxide recipes,
* Limestone extraction from water; and
* Ash to biomass conversion.
Mk1 destructive distillation columns are an electrical version of the Mk0 columns I've been using to convert Fawogae mushrooms into raw coal. The Mk1 version runs on electrical power instead of an internal burner power supply, and operates twice as quickly for slightly more than double the energy cost. They're much larger than the burner version, so it's not a drop-in replacement.
The coke chain, other than carbolic oil production, spits out tar and coal gas as byproducts at most steps, along with some iron oxide. As mentioned above, this means I'm not going to rush out and set up a coking plant just yet.
### Steel
The second batch also unlocks steel, which comes with:
* Steel refining;
* Steel chests;
* Mk1 foundries;
* Outflows;
* Wind turbines;
* Mk1 solid separators; and
* Burners.
The Mk1 foundry can make all of the recipes that stone furnaces can make, at least up to this point. However, they're serious power hogs, requiring over a megawatt each to operate at full capacity. My tiny prototype power plant can't sustain too many of them. I will need at least one, though, as stone furnaces aren't hot enough to make steel.
Vanilla Factorio's steel recipe takes iron plates in and makes steel with them. Pyanodons' steel recipe, on the other hand, takes iron _ore_, along with coke and limestone, to make steel.
It's very funny to me that steel chests are unlocked _before_ iron chests, but as a practical matter there's no good way to make steel chests this early on. They take a lot of steel, and each piece of steel plate in turn demands a great deal of resources. I'd have to fully stop iron production to make enough steel to make this practical - and that's after dealing with the coal gas and tar byproducts from making coke.
The wind turbine unlocked at this technology is the same "Fish" turbine that I started with. Making more of them to cover my power needs is an alternative to more fuel-burning power plants. However, I need ash to make copper, so I'm not inclined to make a bunch of wind turbines just yet.
Similarly, the outflow building is the same outflow that I started with. Being able to make more will help if I ever find a design where voiding liquids is practical.
Burners allow me to burn organic matter for heat, much as the vanilla heating tower building does. I haven't tested yet whether they burn things when already at maximum temperature; if they do, then that might be a good alternative for getting rid of floraspoilinin and other unwanted organic waste. However, I have nothing that consumes heat, so the heat generation itself is mostly academic for now.
Unlocking this technology also unlocks another trigger technology, which will unlock automatically once I've made 50 steel plates.
### Assembly
I have the wood to spare, so I make a brief detour and research Assembly. This technology provides burner assemblers, as well as iron chests.
I want this specifically for iron chests, which are eight slots to a wooden chest's four and don't depend on a finite resource. I immediately upgrade several fuel buffers around the platform to use iron chests, so that I don't have to feed them as often.
Burner assemblers will allow me to automate intermediate products, up to and including automation science packs. They do consume fuel and produce ash, but their power demand is tiny and they can run for a very long time with a modest fuel buffer. I'm not going to set these up right away for resource-exhaustion reasons, but this is a major step forwards in terms of automation capability.
This technology also unlocks the check valve, which allows the circuit network to monitor fluid levels in the attached pipe.
### Mining with fluid
Back on the path to wood processing, the next step is Mining with fluid. While the "mining" part is less useful, this does unlock some key intermediate products:
* Fluid drills;
* Tin plate and tinned wire;
* Aluminum plate;
* Fish to tin ore; and
* Another soot separation recipe, this time for extracting bauxite.
Fluid drills are meant for land-based Pyanodons runs, and are used to extract several minerals. Since Pyblock has no resource patches, I don't expect I'll be making many of these.
Aluminum plate gives me something to do with the accumulated aluminum ore from ash separation. I'm not setting that up right away, as my aluminum ore stockpile isn't at risk of overloading its container, but it is good to know it's there.
Converting fish to tin and making tin plate with the results would let me use up the fish I've been quietly accumulating, and it'd save some storage space, but I'll hold off. Stop me if you've heard this one before: the renewable recipe for farming fish, which is still quite a ways down the tech tree, requires live fish as a pre-requisite. Rather than processing the fish I have for tin I don't presently need, I'm keeping the fish I can catch in storage, so that I can make infinite tin later on.
### Glass technologies
This is the final research needed before I can stand up steel processing. It provides:
* Mk1 glass furnaces;
* Mk0 automated screeners;
* Crystal mines; and
* The glassmaking product chain.
As with most other Mk0 buildings, the Mk0 automated screener runs on fuel directly, and runs slowly. It's meant to be an early-game alternative to something Pyanodons normally introduces much later. It's used, initially, to separate sand into quartz. Quartz can then be fed into a glass furnace to liquify it, and into a second glass furnace to freeze it into the finished glass. Glass itself is a required material for moss and tree production buildings, so we'll need a bit, and it's also much more compact than the tar used to power the production process.
Crystal mines are another building which is meant for ore patches. In base Pyanodons, they're used for quartz and borax mines. In Pyblock, without islands, they're pretty useless.
## Final state
The platform is now a bit too large to capture in a screenshot. I'll be posting these as map screenshots, instead, with production icons turned on to try to improve legibility.
This research has exhausted my supply of iron, which makes for a good stopping point. I'll need more metal before I can make any further progress, and I have the technology unlocks needed to set up two major product chains.
I still have a limited supply of logs, with 208 logs remaining.
Fawogae mushroom processing is slowly replenishing my iron supply, and the resulting ash is also replenishing my copper supply. Mushrooms also provide me with the raw coal needed for power generation. Soil processing, on the other hand, provides me with a supply of stone, bricks, and landfill.
I was right: the lower fuel values in Pyanodons Hard Mode make it easier to obtain copper in the early game; I haven't had to set up a dedicated ash-generating factory just to make enough ash to supply my copper needs.
The other ash byproducts - ores of lead, aluminum, nickel, and zinc - are starting to build up. With iron chests, I still have ample time to find a use for them, but they will set limits on my ability to make copper if not dealt with eventually.
I've been able to pave a significant fraction of my platform in stone bricks.
I have enough electrical generation to run a small number of electrically-powered buildings, but it requires manual tending to keep it fuelled and to remove ash from it.
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