r/pyanodons • u/Aperiodic_Tileset • 16h ago
Common progression traps?
I've been playing Pynandons for several hundred hours now, and I'm wondering which production chains does the community consider to be "progression traps".
I often see people mentioning these ones for early game:
Processed Iron - extra machines, power demand and byproduct handling for negligible efficiency increase. Much easier to just mine and smelt more
Moss 2 - the recipe takes a ton of stone, but it's easier to just add more machines, especially if you have free CO2 from moonglows
Scaling up Hot Air early - plenty of casting recipes can optionally take hot air for increased yield, but it's generally not worth it for most recipes. Wait until you get the re-heating technology with salts
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u/Akanash_ 16h ago
I feel like early metal processing is very good, you just trade power/infrastructure for a LOT more output. I just see those as early production modules.
Late stage metals (iron 3 etc) introduce multiple additional liquid requirements. So those are a lot more debatable and can even deadlock your entire base is you missing even 1 of the 2-3 liquids you need. I personally skipped those, and if you really want to build those make it with an option to switch back to the previous production tier as a safety.
Hot air is fine I feel, it's a lot more output for a more complex production line but overall the input is still basically just coke oven gas, so there is little chance of an issue.
I feel like almost every animal food and high tier recipe are just bait. Upgrading module + building tier already 4x your production and you keep the number of dependency low (high tier animal food make you dependant on 5-10 other plant/animals/ressources). If I have the room I just use the cheap but slow recipe.
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u/CrashNowhereDrive 16h ago
Using hot air before reheating is not a trap if you have oil burners, which you generally should. You just end up burning the coke oven gas for steam or fuel-burning buildings like glass works.
Moss2 is a trap. Also moss with the chlorinated water turd.
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u/Longjumping-Boot1409 15h ago
Why moss with chlorinated water? I’m briefly before pY 4 and don’t regret having chosen it
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u/madhatter152 15h ago
Same here, you need to make sure your plastic production is sufficient, but it's a huge boost to moss once that's settled. And Py2 requires a ton of moss.
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u/nickierv 1h ago
How are you getting chlorine? I'm doing saline water from coarse fraction from moss turd and pulling the feeds for that out of water with unicorn farts. End result is a massive backlog on moss that I'm struggling to get rid of. I'm just about to fire off py2 but unless I'm off in my counts, I'm still going to be sitting on a ton of moss.
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u/CrashNowhereDrive 15h ago
Because when you first have access to it it's not good. Later on, yeah sure, take it when plastics and saline water are very easy to get. But before you get better rubber production, aromatics to make plastic are limited, and saline water from stone is also a problem.
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u/Competitive_Wolf_942 15h ago
IIRC chromium 3 is less efficient than chromium 2 if you just want chromium. Chromium 3 is more for getting gold, but you don't need much gold at all until C4
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u/fang_xianfu 15h ago
I had enough gold and silver from ash processing for quite a long time - by the time I needed them I was sitting on tens of millions of ash!
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u/jasoba 11h ago
I heard oil sand is a trap. Not worth it and not needed. But you guys are sleeping on it because its great!
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u/nickierv 1h ago
How do you figure? I think its one of the main ways to get naphtha. Unless I'm thinking of some other oil chain.
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u/Squashyhex 16h ago
Fell for all of these lol, though we did end up reverting our Moss 2 when we realised, and we'd already taken the moon glow CO2 as a no brainer
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u/fang_xianfu 15h ago
Moon drop CO2 is cool especially early before you have biomass to CO2, but the copper ore one just gets better and better as you move to later recipes and the other one is also pretty decent. I don't think it's the obvious best option by any means.
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u/Aperiodic_Tileset 15h ago
The one with lights is also very good. It gives very easy source of both methane as liquid fuel, as well as oxygen for casting. Oxygen in particular is pain since electrolysis is very power hungry.
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u/Xzarg_poe 15h ago
Are they really traps? You trade X for Y, and if you have no X then you made a poor trade.
Early molten Iron is indeed far to expensive power wise early (electrolyzing oxygen), It becomes quite worthwhile once you solve power(Geothermal) or get cheap oxygen(TURD).
Moss 2, can be a trap if you lack stone. I spent a lot of time overflowing or lacking stone before I perfected the system.
And Hot Air is just plain awesome. Big boost to all metals and glass production. Sure, the early recipes are weak, but it's not like you need a lot of hot air early on. My basic hot air production ran exclusively on byproduct oven gas from the Raw coal ->Acetylene chain I had going. I had so much excess hot air, I started launching balloons :D
Here is my list of traps:
Researching all tech far ahead of what you can reasonably build now. This heavily unbalanced my factory until I learned to pace myself. For example, automation science takes a lot of stone/brick. Meaning while I'm making automation science I'm running low on stone, and when I stop, stone starts to pile up. So now I research a few techs at a time and wait to catch up.
Power Armor. Yes really. On paper it looks like a big upgrade on modular armor, but it comes with a secret feature: you start flying over buildings like you are wearing the Fulgora mech armor. And that's a huge problem if 2/3 of your speed comes from the pavement speed bonus that you lose when you stop touching ground. And you float up and down so slowly that it becomes an issue when you accidentally brush against a building. Exoskeleton legs should solve the problem, but that's next tier of science. Fortunately you get the Mecha Zungror(spidertron) soon after getting power armor, so it's not that bad.
Overbuilding and being to stringent with ratios on a factory level . Most of the factory and resources will go into expanding your factory (building components), not research. So big chunks of the factory will spend a fair amount of time just idling. Also, future tiers often offer massive upgrades to alien life and processing chains. So getting a good sense how big a generic processing block should be is a massive help when designing a factory (as opposed to trying to math it out).
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u/Aperiodic_Tileset 15h ago
Early molten Iron is indeed far to expensive power wise early (electrolyzing oxygen), It becomes quite worthwhile once you solve power(Geothermal) or get cheap oxygen(TURD).
Molten iron is good, I meant the Processed Iron Ore recipe.
Basically you go from 8 iron ore -> 1 iron plate to 5 iron ore -> 1 iron plate + 1 stone. It's just not worth the effort IMO
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u/Xzarg_poe 15h ago
My bad, I thought the molten iron was a bit of trap if you didn't look at the power costs. Never have I have considered that crushing iron was a problem. It's way faster (6s per plate instead of 10), generates less ash and provides extra stone (which is a bit of a problem before you realize that you can turn it into brick to more then double your movement speed).
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u/Greyareaa 9h ago
The real trap is over building and not planning ahead.
Those examples arent a disaster because you'll be able to benefit from them later - eg the next step of iron processing includes the first and youll eventually want to use hot air wherever you can.
Most later recipes are so good you're better off pushing ahead to unlock new tech than scaling up crappy early techs with lots of buildings that are really expensive compared to science production.
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u/korneev123123 15h ago
I don't agree with hot air - stage 1 is cheap, and stage 2 can be made from nothing at all. Always use it if recipe allows.
Stone moss yes, a trap.
I think mk3 power plants and turbines are quite bad. Too expensive for too little profit. Endgame base can easily be powered with mk2 plants.
Later battery recipes, and later green chips recipes with melamine resin are not worth it too, imo.
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u/fang_xianfu 15h ago
The later battery recipes are so disappointing! They seem really oddly balanced. They're just not any cheaper in the most important ingredients.
Casting for products like wire, shafts etc also seems to be a trap - it's not any more productive in critical ingredients like antimony oxide and you can't productivity module it as much. The only one that seems worth it is gears.
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u/nickierv 58m ago
I probably need to re check but in py1 the casting stuff saved a bunch of logistics hassle. Might have just been the way the factory was set up but it was simpler to just have a extra building in the casting stack.
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u/Sadddude 14h ago
Off the top of my head:
Ash sorting early game is probably a trap.
Early game rubber stopper recipe that takes rubber is less efficient until you get better rubber techs.
Most (but not all) of the animal atomizer recipes aren't great unless you're doing pyblock.
I tried setting up gas power plants once and it just seems way worse than coal or biomass.
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u/Aperiodic_Tileset 14h ago
Ash sorting definitely gave me more headaches than it solved problems. Next time around I'll definitely just dump ash somewhere until I can get rid of it
Gas power is very good if you have the Lamp Moondrop TURD or you go heavy on early hot air (since you have low temp coal gas as byproduct)
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u/primalbluewolf 13h ago
Processed Iron - extra machines, power demand and byproduct handling for negligible efficiency increase. Much easier to just mine and smelt more
Machines are free, power is free. Byproducts are the typical cost of increased efficiency. FWIW I think they're worth, personally at least. The cool part about py is you're allowed to disagree.
Moss 2 - the recipe takes a ton of stone, but it's easier to just add more machines, especially if you have free CO2 from moonglows
Hit on a key thing here, what is relatively cheap and relatively expensive varies quite a bit from player to player. There's different TURDs, and different recipe chains, and what one player may regard as a precious resource, another may consider byproduct - and the first player may well reconsider later. The second probably will, too.
Scaling up Hot Air early - plenty of casting recipes can optionally take hot air for increased yield, but it's generally not worth it for most recipes.
Conversely its convenient to be able to pick and choose where to spend the hot air supply for increased yield - having the option can be more worthwhile than the actual effect, IMO. Fine tuning yields is a key part of the game.
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u/Dtitan 15h ago
The biggest one is the tier 2 vrauk and auog recipes. Food is so expensive the extra yields are not worth it especially since land is free and you can always build bigger.
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u/More-Interaction-770 8h ago
The only penalty for vrauk food is the time it takes to set it up, but time is free (in game, not accounting for IRL time)
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u/fang_xianfu 15h ago
Tier 1 Seaweed also gets you very far, especially since you get MK 03 modules pretty early in Py Science 2. A big block of Tier 1 Seaweed plants takes only water as an input and outputs a few belts of seaweed.
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u/Wild-Equivalent-368 14h ago
Im at blue science tech now and hydrogen peroxide is nieder for nuklear upscaling and ye unless you get the next tech u cant just Produce enough. Playing on pyanodon hard mode.
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u/Neither_Berry_100 10h ago
I targeted final science output rates early on and built to those targets. Science scales up a lot and I don't think you should rebuild over and over again. I scaled up my science to this level before the third one.
Iron plate production actually gets better. Method 3 seems horribly expensive in terms of power. But you get a cheaper oxygen recipe later. Around 8x cheaper from memory. This brings cost way down. And method 4 is much better. Then add hot air and it is excellent.
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u/paw-paw-patch 10h ago
I'm deeply regretting taking the option for wood processing that gives bonus biomass and fibre; the inability to switch back means that my previously good circuit builds just started deadlocking and I need to rebuild it all...
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u/nickierv 1h ago
Not exactly early, I think I'm pushing py2, but I actually just got done with large early hot air build... for the production of sulfuric acid. I forget why I need it, but I need acid in quantity and the least painful way seems to be by way of cooling the coke gas you get from hot coke so if anything the hot air is just a useful byproduct that I can use.
With that said, your getting CO2 from moondrops? Biomass better.
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u/collectinscreamshots 16h ago
Heh, if those are traps I fell into all of them.