TL;DR
Remove the ability of assemblers to process fruit, and make bacteria from mash unlock together with bacteria from bioflux.What?
Currently, assemblers are able to process fruit into mash and seeds without the productivity bonus, maintaining only probabilistically net neutral seeds. And the kickstarting recipes to produce bacteria from mash and jelly are already unlocked with fruit processing, far before they can be used for their purpose of restarting bacteria breeding loops. I propose that these two things cease to be the case. Make fruit processing biochamber only, and have the bacteria from mash/jelly recipes unlock only with the bacteria cultivation technology.Why?
There is no reason for assemblers to be able to mash fruit. My suspicion is that this is a development artifact from the time when biochambers were crafted from fruit seeds (this was said to have been the case in the original Gleba fff). All it does is make new players, who perhaps fail to look ahead in the tech tree or read machine stats, to make the mistake of using assemblers to process fruit, causing them to severely underproduce seeds due to the lack of productivity bonus.Bacteria are in a similar situation. The recipes to produce a kickstarting amount of bacteria from jelly and mash are unlocked long before the main loop recipes. They’re unlocked at a point where they can’t accomplish anything. And I have seen many new players mistakenly assume that these are the primary recipes for metals on the planet, and start building production lines using them.
I am of the opinion that players should be expected to look ahead in the tech tree, and not just make decisions based on what they’ve just unlocked. But this is a case where there is legitimately 0 reason for the current arrangement. It doesn’t benefit the game in any way, so any minor reason is definitely enough for it to be changed.
