Balancing issue: No dedicated way to make aluminum, zinc and nickel ore

[SWeini]

Aluminium, zinc and nickel ore can only be made from the same very inefficient soot separation recipe.

Zinc gets a dedicated recipe via kicalk and zinc-enriched biomass after simple circuit boards, which might be OK.

But aluminium and nickel don't get another recipe until logistic science. This is extremely bad for aluminium, because you need so much of it, and for nickel because you end up with too much nickel ore and don't know what to do with it.

I suggest moving the soot-to-aluminium recipe to very early automation science, similar to what happened to soot-to-lead recipe.

[Eggywontgrow]

Unlocking Nickel Ore from Biomass Pulp /w Ralesia's earlier could be a solution? In addition to you soot-to-aluminium suggestion.

[Luaancz]

I think only aluminium really needs tweaks. The "dedicated" separation recipes aren't that good anyway - I got plenty of byproducts just by using the separation recipe for zinc (before Kicalk). There is never a good way to produce soot, so relying on it so much for so many basic materials is a bad idea, IMO.

It's also a bit same-y. Especially when you consider that aluminium really shouldn't be rare - you should be able to get tons of ore from soil separation (another good use for solid separators?). It would make more sense to make it harder to turn aluminium ore into plates instead; it's weird that you can just chuck it in a furnace. An early, very inefficient process and slow could use just an advanced foundry (though it would be nicer to need an input of saline water in a nod to early aluminium processing in real-life; do we have a good machine for that this early?), until you get to the electrolyser or smelter. At that point, your need for aluminium skyrockets and it would be nice to be able to scale it sensibly. By the time you get to the first aluminium processing technology, you can keep the standard Py recipes.

I'd agree with moving the nickel-enriched biomass close to unlocking Ralesias. It fits the general feel of starting to get easier to get as you start to really need to ramp up production.

Soot sucks. The scale you need to get any meaningful amount is ridiculous. You never really get a good source of it. Even just for copper production (which gets a fairly good recipe early on) it takes 80 Fawogae farms for a single plate of copper per minute. Granted, using a byproduct of burning the coal, rather than using coal directly - but still, that's almost 5 MW worth of raw coal to sink for just a single copper plate per minute (and of course, to get 1 tin plate per minute, you need 17 MW of raw coal just for the copper for the lamps). It's bad enough to need it for early copper. It's reasonable for the trickle of byproducts you need to get to simple circuits... barely. It's not that awful in normal Py, because it's a good sink for ash - but raw coal is a lot harder to get in Pyblock :D