Stone shortage in Py: is ash+sand → stone the intended fix?

[jovial hazel]

Hey all,

I’ve hit a stone bottleneck in Factorio with Pyanodon’s. I’m consistently consuming more stone than kerogen, so my normal stone supply can’t keep up or rather get stuck.

To compensate, I built a stone setup using ash (and sand) — and this seems like the most reasonable option so far, since I already have plenty of ash available and sand is easy to scale.

I re-checked the Ground Borer route, and for what I can see it’s not a byproduct solution at all — it’s just a straight conversion that looks way too expensive compared to using ash + sand. The recipe is basically:
• 1x Drill head
• 100 lubricant
• 100 coal gas
→ 30 stone (3s)

So unless I’m misunderstanding something, Ground Borer stone production is more expensive than the ash/sand route.

Questions:

Is ash + sand → stone the “correct” scalable option here?

Is the Ground Borer recipe meant for a niche case / later stage where those inputs are basically free?

Am I missing another stone source or conversion chain that’s better than both?

Thanks in Advance!

[lapis quarry]

py has its own official discord where questions like these are more likely to be answered
ground borer recipes arent very good
turning ash into rich clay and rich clay into bricks is a great scalable alternative to stone mining, especially since stone patches suck
another eventual source is the seasponge turd, but that depends on where you are in the modpack

in chem sci you unlock sand extractors which let you print stone stuff using iron sticks and its much easier then

[jovial hazel]

yea saw that but wasting iron felt weird lmao

[jovial hazel]

I do agree stone patches suck lmao, also thanks for the Info on the py discord, will check it out

[fast pebble]

I think you are in some sort of intermediate limbo? Eventually most of your stone comes from waste products since most ore refining outputs stone as a biproduct.

[jovial hazel]

ehh totally not

i barely have any stone as a waste

well i do but it's like barely 1k/m and i'm currently using abt 7k/m

[fast pebble]

I assume you are very late game then so your basic resources have huge multipliers? Like 1 iron ore to >8 iron plates.

What is all this stone needed for?

[lapis quarry]

sounds like a mid logi science save at which point the biggest consumers are automation science with bricks, moss with stone and possibly concrete and refined concrete for tiling

iron and copper to plates are at an about 1:1 ratio with the best tech at logi, but auto science is 8 bricks per pack and i have no clue as to how much spm the target is

[fast pebble]

No alternative stone brick recipes?

[jovial hazel]

moss, mostly

[lapis quarry]

its the rich clay and ash thing i mentioned thats an alternative source

[jovial hazel]

ever since i set that up, stone is doing fine

[lapis quarry]

stone patches are rather small in comparison and yield kerogen in addition, which eventually is way more useful than the stone, so they might as well be kerogen patches

[jovial hazel]

aslong as my ash reserves* dont run out

[fast pebble]

Check for other moss recipes, or other bio recipes that can be used instead of moss.

[jovial hazel]

well there is one that doesn't use stone

[lapis quarry]

moss gets a better recipe a bit late sadly and there is no escaping the moss requirements

[jovial hazel]

but first it does half the moss and second, i'd have to redo alot of stuff

[lapis quarry]

stoneless one has a gigantic footprint in comparison, so the stone moss is preferable where you need a lot

[jovial hazel]

averaging at abt 800-1.5k/m

[fast pebble]

It might be a case of needing to use stoneless moss.

[jovial hazel]

well as of now, it's running fine with the ash to stone factory, but will probably do a stoneless moss grid later and set it to higher priority in cybersyn

[fast pebble]

It is my understanding that stone is specifically intended to be a biproduct, hence limited to no true patches of the stuff. Pyanodon is kind of a puzzle that way.

[lapis quarry]

you dont need to go overboard with the ash -> stone route, the mining stone route is enough, but overbuilding or making enough pavement can make the stone patches feel limited

i personally did cause i needed a shit ton of concrete, but direct mining is by far the best when you arent considering the longevity of the patches

[jovial hazel]

considering i already produce alot of ash from power plants and comparing that to mining it (with the kerosen byproduct), ash -> stone is alot easier to deal with aswell aswell as more efficient

although you could burn kerosen to make shale oil, burn the resulting fluids (light, heavy, etc.) to make steam and vent that with some circuitry

Then again i am using electric boilers to make steam in some Grids which take over 2MW so yeah

Maybe if you did it right, you could balance it to use the same amount of kerogen and stone so your patches don't get stuck (although they run out really quickly) but then again

Is it worth the effort? Probably not.

Considering more power used -> more ash -> more stone and the power to ash to stone ratio is bigger than the effort to redesign like 20 grids so yeah

also did a new design for moss without stone, so already using half of it

however now i'm curios so i gotta do some maths, if you produced all your steam via above method (aka kerogen - shale oil - burning all 3 fluids for steam) if then you would get a similiar ratio of stone used and kerogen used aka it not getting stuck

so will be doing that

okay so after considering the amount of steam i use and the according kerogen which would be used to produce this steam via above method would still not balance out with stone (even with moss switched to non-stone)

so