Tracking Issue: Recipe balance megathread.

[notnotmelon]

What is the problem?

This tracking issue exists in order to resolve the following three common complaints when navigating through recipe chains in pY:

"Why does this recipe exist? I would never use this."

or

"This recipe is too strong, I would never use the alternatives"

or

"This TURD upgrade is too weak. Who would choose this?"

Please list the following:

• What is the internal name of the recipe/TURD path? You can find this by hovering the recipe and pressing ctrl+shift+f
• Why do you feel that it is underpowered/overpowered?
• What suggestion would you make to fix the issue?

Reports are intended to be concise. If you find yourself writing an essay, it may be more useful to open a dedicated bug ticket.

[BeaulieuT]

Fawogae recipe using manure seems too expensive to ever justify...fawogae is literally free other than space, and since it stacks to only 50, I always preferred to make it on site instead of shipping. Sometimes I wanted to make it in bulk, but the manure cost seemed expensive for the small extra gains.

I don't remember how much fawogae you get off the top of my head, so maybe it's actually fine and i went too ZI crazy. But it would be nice to see either better output for the manure, or maybe a different fawogae recipe for more options since fawoge is used so much.

[sunrosa]

I don't think you can make one item spoil into multiple items, so the manure would have to spoil into an intermediary, wouldn't it?

[protocol-1903]

Moondrop Co2 TURD is powerful, perhaps too powerful. Making it a moondrop consuming recipe instead would make it more involved and less free, while also allowing for a "sink" for moondrops

[notnotmelon]

Moondrop Co2 TURD is powerful, perhaps too powerful. Making it a moondrop consuming recipe instead would make it more involved and less free, while also allowing for a "sink" for moondrops

I imagine there will be pitchforks if this change is implemented.

[chunkybanana]

Every tholins-to-gas recipe is absurdly underpowered, even deuterium. I could see three interesting ways to fix this:

• Add some unique products only primarily extractible from tholins (maybe from others as a byproduct) - does require significantly changing chains though
• instead of having tholins->single gas recipes, have one/a few tholins->multiple gases recipes, which while quite powerful if using all the gas outputs, are generally worse than regular production chains if you're voiding most of the outputs - i.e. good but only usable as a supplement
• Add more advanced processing recipes for some gases/products that double output at the cost of a small amount of tholins

all of these are going to be a bit tricky to balance, and all three could be involved in a solution.

[EigensheepLambda]

You can throw all/nearly all of the phagnot gas bladder recipes into the pile as well. Not as underpowered as the tholins stuff, but still pretty underpowered. Kill two birds with one stone and have competitive gas-producing recipes that require both somehow? Feed the phagnots tholins to get the bladders in the first place, or require bladders to "process" the tholins (possibly with byproduct gasses, as chunkybanana mentioned, since it's now a gross alien biology process)?

[EigensheepLambda]

The higher tier coal processing chains are terrible in the sense that they can't compete with the basic crushing process. Like quartz, they could produce mandatory intermediate products (purified coal?) that also can produce huge amounts of coal or other useful carbon-y things. Or, they could just be pruned from the tech tree.

[chunkybanana]

Moondrop Co2 TURD is powerful, perhaps too powerful. Making it a moondrop consuming recipe instead would make it more involved and less free, while also allowing for a "sink" for moondrops

I imagine there will be pitchforks if this change is implemented.

I agree that making it not easily ZI would basically remove all of its benefits. Doesn't mean it can't be nerfed, or at least made more interesting though. One thing I thought of was making it output trace amounts of some other (justifiably "extracted") solid that can't as easily be voided, idk what would be both somewhat justifiable and work well balance-wise though, especially considering it's unlocked potentially before the player has green circuits. Alternatively it could be made to require water barrels(and output barrels), although that might be too annoying.

Could also be moved to py science 1 to facilitate this, although that might also annoy people.

[protocol-1903]

Moondrop Co2 TURD is powerful, perhaps too powerful. Making it a moondrop consuming recipe instead would make it more involved and less free, while also allowing for a "sink" for moondrops

I imagine there will be pitchforks if this change is implemented.

I agree that making it not easily ZI would basically remove all of its benefits. Doesn't mean it can't be nerfed, or at least made more interesting though. One thing I thought of was making it output trace amounts of some other (justifiably "extracted") solid that can't as easily be voided, idk what would be both somewhat justifiable and work well balance-wise though, especially considering it's unlocked potentially before the player has green circuits. Alternatively it could be made to require water barrels(and output barrels), although that might be too annoying.

Could also be moved to py science 1 to facilitate this, although that might also annoy people.

Moving it to Py1 or later would be a good solution. Its just way too powerful to get early game so theres no consideration for the alterantive options. I dont know of anyone that picks the other options other than a challenge run, which isnt how it should be.

[notnotmelon]

Have you seen the new buffs to moondrops paths 1 and 2? They are significantly stronger compared to 1.1