Coal: A not so abundant resource.

1: Find a jungle planet.
2: Equip your stone axe
3: Pick a direction
4: ????
5: WOOD!

Then fly BACK to your home planet, smelt the wood into coal, and viola. You have done no lasting harm to your planet but have all the resources you need.

 

I suppose you missed the part about finding 401 coal from the surface and surface caves without going out of my way to look for it. Right?

Also, if you are honestly that attached to the planet you start the game on, it's your fault; not the game. The game should not conform to your poor decision. You can't sit there and claim the conversion cost is to high when you have a plethora of wood you just won't touch. If it's that big of an issue travel to the two other forest planets in your starting galaxy and deforest them.

 

Wait, you found 401 coal ON THE SURFACE?

Well, you just proved my theory. I only found 28.

 

More like I found a bug if you indeed only found 28. Seeds are supposed to be identical except for some chest contents that are randomized. Thus raising a larger issue than that of the topic at hand.

Now if you'll excuse me... I now have 3.3k Wood I need to find a use for.

 

This needs to be tested. Seriously. If this is the case then the whole notion of a familiar planet can be thrown out the sodding window.

 

Before X sector, yes coal is not so abundant. They could rise a little the spawn on early sectors. As said on this topic, 5:1 wood conversion is ideal... 10:1 is just too much, but if you go to a forest/grassland planet you can easily get 2.000~3.000 raw wood which is enough to one or two travels. Not counting the normal coal...

 

The possibility occurs to me that I could've gotten the pre-updated world. I think I went back to this planet around Irritated Koala. I remember the Developers said something in the changelog about messing around with the ore amounts.

I like how you immediately assume it's a bug, and take full credit for finding it.

Pretentious, much?

 

Assuming there are other habitable planets in the system. That's not always the case.

I think coal needs to be boosted a little bit or fuel costs need to be lowered, but only in alpha.

Changing the wood ratio doesn't help either if you start on a planet without wood.

 

Why not dig drop shafts down? You'll likely strike at least few good deposits before you hit the core, and a few platforms is much easier on the local trees than making coal out of them

 

This. I don't think we need more coal, but I do think uranium should start spawning in sector 1 in a usable quantity to take a little pressure off of coal as a resource. That being said, I didn't find the lack of coal early on to be a huge problem, it just meant I didn't leave the planet until heading to beta sector...and I didn't even have a latern on the stick until I had already solved my coal supply problems with a lot of mining. I re-used torches a bit to conserve fuel, which was annoying, so I didn't do it as much as I should have. A latern on a stick makes using torches while mining optional. It is good to still drop a torch occasionally to scan nearby ores.

If your starting planet sucks (mine did... seemingly low coal/copper) you can jump to another planet in the system for 50 fuel (25 coal)... or much cheaper if it is another planet orbiting the same gas giant as your current planet (technically a moon, but starbound defines 'moon' as cold/barren).

I actually feel the balance is about right for starting out. A little uranium would give an early boost to exploration, but it wouldn't take much.

 

Kind of weird since the character wipe...
My starter planet is full of gold and silver, and ok on iron. Coal though, not so much. So I checked out a few other nearby planets and didnt have much more luck. I mean I can find coal ok, just not as much as silver or even gold. That doesnt really make much sense to me.

 

Trees grow back. If you want to RP and environmentalist you should burn your ship to the ground and use it as a planter bed for crops.

 

I think coal is fine. I have 2 characters at tier 10. Maybe you had problems with planet because you said it was an earlier patch. As of now i think coal is fine. I think it only takes like 1 fuel to go to the planets in the same area as the one you are in, if for some reason the planet is coal less. Destroy 1 or 2 trees top to get to other planet.

 

Well then from the sounds of it the problem is more that variation in the potential amount of coal you can find on a said world in alpha sector. In which case I would think the suggestion someone else made for having there be at least a set amount of coal on alpha level planets(and potentially wood with there being at least enough to allow a jump to another system), would be the best solution to the majority of these problems.

 

That appears to be where the issue resides, as it appears enough people are able to find large amounts of coal easily enough. Specifically, on my first character, which was before the ore patch, I would prioritize getting enough coal (while I could use wood, I quickly decided to not use wood as it was far too easy to clear cut a world and have enough fuel to travel to a dozen planets) to be able to make my next jump, which would not be counting my emergency supply of two hundred or so, which I rarely touched and made sure to recap when needed. This would normally take a trip around the surface of the planet, and possibly, on an unlucky planet, some digging into the ground.

The reason, most surely, that people like me don't have an issue with the conversion ratio and don't run out of coal is that we're actively searching for coal, and we make it a priority to find coal as we know it is a valuable resource. While you may dislike that this game has difficulty in that regard, it would be pretty horrible if that game just kept becoming easier and easier until, come release, there is no difficulty at all.

Now, that said, the energy density of the hypothetical average wood kilogram is 16.2 MJ, while the average energy density for coal would be 24 MJ/kg. And uranium is 83,140,000 MJ/kg. So, if we're looking for logic here, coal should give a very small fraction of a fuel unit, and wood should give half of that (roughly, as a lot of the wood's energy will be lost in the conversion process, which is why it is a two to one ratio as opposed to a fractional ratio), while uranium should continue to give four fuel units.

Thankfully, I don't believe that the dev team is looking for realism, at least in that regard.

In conclusion, I don't support your suggestion for a modification to the fuel production, although if you'd like to know how to make that change on your own, I can assist you there. Good luck!

 

5:1 would be the utmost highest ration for wood to coal I'd use. For finding it is surprisingly annoying.

 

Towards the end of Beta Sector, I had 200 silver bars ... and no coal. I've raced through progression, the biggest block I've hit is a massive coal shortage in the early game. Yet once you hit Delta (or a good Gamma system) then you never worry about fuel again.
I'm at the end of X Sector, I'm still lucky if I hold on to much more than 100 coal at a time - it all gets used making alloys for armour and weapons and furniture.
That doesn't seem right.

They definitely need to work out some way of either increasing the quantities of coal that people can get their paws on or providing an alternative early-game fuel source (like making Uranium available from an earlier stage, or something new altogether).

EDIT: In regards to the suggestion about pillaging jungle planets, I don't think they exist in Alpha Sector and are quite rare in Beta. How are you going to get to one, if you're at that late Alpha stage where you're using more coal making torches than you are mining out of the ground?
Bear in mind that it will take a couple of hundred coal to get from Alpha to Beta, and that's -after- you've made Steel armour, wooden crafting tables a decent shack to keep them in and torches. I struggled :\

 

All planets are not created equal. My home world, for example, is almost completely devoid of or, coal in particular. I can't even scrape enough together to fly to a nearby planet. I even mined down to where I got magma rock and not one hit of ANY ore along the way. Now, I too, am looking as mass deforestation just to move on with the game.

 

RNG is RNG, but maybe a tweak is needed, I've never had to dig long to get a hundred or so coal.

 

You can smelt coal?

:massive facepalm:

EDIT: Wood, I said wood!