Fuel chains

The problem#

Coal is fine until a base gets big. The Ignition Engine and the Kettle Engine need fluid fuel, and Enthalpy makes it from the things its other machines already produce: fish, crops, water and lava. Each chain is a handful of machines in a row. This guide lays them out one at a time, with the real recipes, then compares what each is worth.

Two of the steps need lava, which Enthalpy does not make. A lava lake, a bucket or a pump from another mod fills the Vortex Separator's lava tank.

Chain 1: Slick Eel to gasoline#

1. Breed a Slick Eel. Cross a Slime Goby with a Sooty Char in a Spawning Basin, with an Ink Sac as the catalyst. It succeeds 3% of the time per breeding. The breeding explorer shows the whole line from the base game's fish.
2. Farm it in an Ecotone. About 11.11% of breedings make another eel; every other breeding gives an Oil Glob 50% of the time. A surplus eel is worth grinding too: the Triturator turns it into 2 globs and a Fish Meal.
3. Press the globs into crude oil. In the Vortex Separator in its normal item mode, each glob gives 100 mB of crude oil.
4. Refine it. Switch a Separator to Fluid mode, pipe the crude oil and some lava in, and it makes gasoline: 100 mB of crude oil and 50 mB of lava give 100 mB of gasoline, for 4,000 FE.
5. Burn it. Pipe the gasoline into an Ignition Engine.

2,000 FE

100 mB

What one base-tier Ecotone of Slick Eels makes, with four rows of pairs and the crops in balance: 0.89 mB of crude oil every tick. Burned as it is, that is 89 FE/t. Refined to gasoline it is 356 FE/t, enough to run 3.6 Ignition Engines at the base tier. The surplus eels you grind add to that.

A base Separator refines 0.5 mB of gasoline each tick, so an Ecotone's crude oil keeps about two of them busy. The lava it takes is 0.25 mB every tick.

Chain 2: seeds and fish to biodiesel#

Biodiesel is the best return on farming, because it combines three cheap things: a plant oil, ethanol and Fish Meal.

1. Make oil. In the Vortex Separator's item mode, every seed gives 50 mB of vegetable oil. Raw fish press into fish oil, and the fish matters: a Candlefish gives 100 mB, an oily fish such as a salmon 50 mB, and any other raw fish 25 mB. Half the time the press also gives a Fish Meal.
2. Make ethanol. Distil sugar cane, apples or potatoes in a Distiller; see Chain 3.
3. Get Fish Meal. The Reaction Vat uses one per batch as its catalyst. The Triturator grinds a cod, salmon, pufferfish or tropical fish into 2 of it, and so does a candlefish.
4. React them. Pipe the oil and the ethanol into a Reaction Vat and put the Fish Meal in its slot. Every batch uses 100 mB of oil and 50 mB of ethanol and gives 150 mB of biodiesel, for 4,000 FE. 25% of batches also give a Glycerin.
5. Burn it in an Ignition Engine.

2,000 FE

50%100 mB

#100 mB#50 mB

4,000 FE

150 mB25%

One batch of biodiesel is worth 60,000 FE in an Ignition Engine. The oil and ethanol that went in would have been worth 20,000 FE on their own.

A base Ecotone of Candlefish, which only breeds more of itself, makes 2 mB of oil every tick once the spare fish are pressed. With the ethanol and meal supplied, that becomes 3 mB of biodiesel every tick, or 1,200 FE/t. It needs 1 mB of ethanol every tick to keep up, and a Fish Meal for every batch. Pressing a fish returns half a meal, so grind some extra fish for the rest.

Chain 3: crops to ethanol#

1. Grow the crops. A sugar cane bed in an Ecotone is the steadiest source: it is a stalk crop, so every harvest gives 2 and keeps none back. Potatoes and apples work too, from a farm of your own.
2. Distil. Put the crops in any of a Distiller's three input slots, with a cauldron on top. Sugar cane, apples and potatoes give 80 mB of ethanol each; melon slices give 20 mB, so leave them out.
3. Burn it in the Ignition Engine, or send it to the Reaction Vat for biodiesel.

3,200 FE

80 mB

Each item costs 3,200 FE of power and gives 16,000 FE of fuel. A base Distiller finishes one every 8 s, a little faster with all three slots stocked and faster again with lava in its tank.

An Ecotone with four sugar cane beds makes 1.33 mB of ethanol every tick at the base tier, worth 267 FE/t, and keeps about 3 Distillers busy.

Chain 4: water and lava to steam#

1. Make water. An Aquifer makes it for nothing, at far more than this chain needs.
2. Boil it. In a Vortex Separator in Fluid mode, 100 mB of water and 25 mB of lava make 500 mB of steam, for 4,000 FE. Water makes five times its volume in steam.
3. Burn it. Pipe the steam straight into a Kettle Engine beside the Separator. Steam cannot be put in a bucket, so it only ever moves through pipes and tanks.

A batch makes 12,500 FE of steam. The Separator spends 4,000 FE to make it, so the chain nets 8,500 FE. The same 25 mB of lava is worth 5,000 FE in an Igneous Engine, so steam gets more from each drop of lava while using water you have in abundance.

A base Separator makes 2.5 mB of steam every tick. A Kettle Engine burns 3.2 mB every tick at its base output, so one Separator keeps about 78% of one engine running. Use a second Separator, a tier kit or a Celerity module on it for the rest.

What each chain gives#

And what one base-tier Ecotone, set up for each chain, adds up to:

For scale, an Ignition Engine at its base output burns 100 FE/t, so a farm making a few hundred FE/t of fuel feeds a handful of engines. The farm's own machines draw power too, and the figures leave that out. A higher tier kit on the Ecotone scales every figure up.

Pitfalls#

• Crude oil in a Separator that is in the wrong mode. Item mode does not refine; switch to Fluid mode for gasoline and steam. If the wrong fluid is stuck in the input tank, use Void Tanks on the Configuration tab.
• No lava, no gasoline. The Separator waits, keeping its progress, until its lava tank holds enough.
• The Distiller needs a cauldron on top, and so does the Reaction Vat. Both set an empty cauldron into themselves; empty one that holds water first.
• Steam has no bucket. It moves only through pipes and tanks, so put the Kettle Engine against the Separator.
• Burning oil you could refine. A bucket of crude oil is worth 25% of a bucket of gasoline. If the engine is starved, refine first.

Related#

• Choosing an engine and fuel
• Vortex Separator, Distiller and Reaction Vat
• Fuel tables
• Breeding toward a resource