Crematory
Produces ash and lime. Requires 100 wood and a maximum load of 20 dried papyrus, 20 dried flax, 20 leeks, 20 limestone.
To build:
Costs:- 80 Concrete
- 4 Sun Steel
- 14 Brass
- 400 Small Quartz
- 210 Grayish Raeli Tiles (color must be spelled "gray", not "grey")
- 7 Thermometer
Skill/Tech required: Advanced Chemistry
Quizzical's 'secret' crematory guide
Before starting a run, you must load the crematory with 100 wood, and can load it with up to 20 each of leeks, dried flax, dried papyrus, and limestone. As with firepits, the first three of those will burn into ash, while limestone burns into lime.
A crematory has five buttons and seven dots. Three buttons each control one dot, and the other two buttons each control two dots. Each dot is associated with a unique button. If a button controls one dot, then that dot either will go up when the button is black and down when the button is white or vice versa. Which buttons control which dots will not vary from one run to the next, but the rate at which the dots go up and down will vary. Furthermore, sometimes a dot may go up very fast and down very slowly in one run, and then up slowly and down quickly the next.
Once you start a run, a red timer bar will start out full and slowly disappear from the right. Once the timer bar is gone, the run ends, and you can remove the resulting ash and lime from the crematory.
Calibrate time such that it starts at time 0 and ends at time 1. The maximum output due to filling the crematory with the maximum of 20 of an item is:
leeks: 5 ash
dried flax: 10 ash
dried papyrus: 15 ash
limestone: 20 lime
Maximum output is additive, so a full run has a maximum output of 30 ash, 20 lime. I haven't done meaningful testing with less than the maximum of any ingredient.
The goal in running the crematory is to keep all the dots near the center line. This usually isn't entirely possible, because one button can control two dots, with one of the dots inclined to drift upward more than the other, meaning that one of the dots must be well above the other, so that they can't simultaneously both be on the center line.
The further the dots are away from the center, the more output you lose from both lime and ash, with the exception that they cannot go below zero. For example, if your dots are positioned such that you should lose 12 output, then for a full run, you'd get 18 ash, 8 lime. Drop the leeks so that the max is 25 ash and you'd only get 13 ash, 8 lime. Because some straight amount is subtracted, rather than a fraction, it is extremely wasteful to use any ash materials unless you're going to use all three of them.
At time t (with 0 <= t <= 1), if you would have an output of A ash and L lime if the crematory were done, the game will display an output of tA ash and tL lime. This is useful only in getting the hang of how a crematory works, and doesn't affect final output. Where the dots go early in a run doesn't matter, with the exception that if any dot goes off its bar entirely, you lose the whole run right then and don't get a chance to finish it.
Under certain conditions, your ash output will be cut in half. This occurs when all but one dot are to one side of the center. If all of the dots are to one side of the center, the ash output will be zero.
The net result of this is that to make ash and lime, using a crematory takes less input materials but more wood than a firepit. Whether it takes more time or less depends on how much you would have stoked the firepit and how many firepits you run at a time. While firepits aren't that hard to run several at a time, crematories require you to be paying close attention when one ends, so it probably isn't practical to run several at a time.
In order to figure out how to use a particular crematory, you must figure out which buttons control which dots. The way to do this is to start a run with 100 wood and 1 leek or dried flax and leave all buttons on black most of the time for a while. Watch the first dot, toggle the first button, and see if that changes its direction. If not, switch the first button back to black and toggle the second button instead. Repeat until you find which button controls the first dot, write it down, and repeat the process with the second dot.
At some point in a testing run, switch all the buttons from black to white. Don't do this until the dots have drifted a ways, but this will have them all tend to head back to center, so that a dot doesn't go off its bar entirely and end the run prematurely. You can continue testing dots with most buttons on white by toggling a button and seeing if it changes the direction of a dot as before.
In theory, you could also try to figure out how a crematory works one button at a time rather than one dot at a time. In practice, that doesn't work as well.
This is what you're trying to do:
Usage Notes
When a crematory is operational, the pips on the pips on the sliders seen above are in constant movement. The buttons at the bottom control the direction of the movement of the pips. Each button has an effect on 1 or 2 sliders at most, and will always affect the same sliders (defined when the crematory is created). For example on pip control, my leftmost crematory button toggles the movement of my 2nd to left pip for every batch.
The goal is to keep the pips as close to the center as possible, and to not let any pip reach the upper or lower extreme (doing so destroys the batch).
The easiest way to do this is to map out what buttons: First, start the crematory with 100 wood and say 1 limestone. Start it up, and note which direction all of the pips move when you don't click on any buttons at all. Let the crematory die, but next time you start it up click on the first button and look for which pip(s) move in a different direction. Repeat the last step for each button. During operation, when you see a pip drifting from the centerline, just toggle its controlling button.
The trickiest parts of the crematory are when 2 pips that are controlled by 1 slider can't meet in the middle. Just compromise as best as possible without letting either pip reach an extreme and thus ruin the batch.
Highest yield to date is 27 ash 17 lime while running with 20 lime, 20 dried flax, 20 dried papyrus, 20 leeks. I highly recommend when seeking ash to run with all ingredients at their full capacity, or running it by only using the cheapest ingredients. When running at full capacity the normal formula for yield is n lime n+10 ash, while running it without leeks gave n lime n+5 ash.
Other Notes
Sedelyan's simplistic notes...
- A crematory's output is determined by the materials you put in. Output is a fractional amount of the materials' maximum; lime will tend to stay 10 below ash if you're doing it with a full load. Limestone provides a maximum of 20 lime; papyrus provides 15 ash; flax provides 10 ash; leeks provide 5 ash.
- A crematory uses 300 more wood than a full firepit, assuming all materials are being used in proportion. Therefore, it's best to run with as many materials as you can provide.
- Each button controls either one or two sliders; if it controls two, those sliders will always move opposite to one another. It is best to map out a crematory on a spare chest, from left to right; whether you use buttons or sliders to map doesn't really matter.
- The goal of a crematory is to move all the sliders near the center.
- If all the sliders are either above or below the center point, then you will have no return. If all but one are, then you will have halved return.
- The maximum attainable for 100 of each material (and 500 wood) is 150 ash and 100 lime. More lime is, of course, always better.
- While a very lucky runner can attain that maximum output consistently, more often than not a decent user will wind up with 70-100 ash and 30-50 lime for a given 'firepit's worth'.
Questions
- What are the maximum and minimum amounts that a dot will move per tick? (having the amount moved in number of times the size of the dot would be nice)
