Topic
Fuel cell cost of building a complete tower.
Continuing from Palindrome's excellent post over here, I worked out how much fuel it costs to make all the materials you need to build a complete tower. Here's what I got--let me know if I made a mistake! (You can also just skip the reasoning and scroll down to the answers in bold.)
I'm ignoring work units, permits, and strings, because none of those cost fuel to make. That leaves us with these things to spend fuel on:
700 urth blocks
140 girders
140 metal bars
70 beams, and
56 wall segments
We also need 168 snails, which don't themselves cost any fuel, but the bars to feed sloths for them do. I respectfully disagree with Palindrome's calculation for this; I estimate we'll need 20 metal rods (8.5 average snails per rod), rather than 21.
Let's start with the wood.
1 plank costs 0 fuel to make.
4 planks -> 1 board costs 1 fuel.
4 boards -> 1 post costs 2 fuel, plus 4 for the boards makes 6.
4 posts -> 1 beam costs 8 fuel, plus 24 for the posts makes 32.
So our 70 beams alone will cost 70*32 = 2240 fuel units (about 45 cells).
A wall segment is made up of 12 boards, 1 beam, and 4 posts (plus some barnacles which don't cost us any fuel). Plugging in our numbers from before, we get:
(12*1) + 32 + (4*6) = 12 + 32 + 24 = 68 fuel units per wall segment.
So our 56 wall segments will cost 3808 fuel units (about 76 cells).
So far so good. The rest is comparatively simple:
1 metal bar costs 6 fuel to make. 140 bars = 840 fuel (about 17 cells).
1 metal rod costs 1 fuel to make. 20 rods = 20 fuel (less than a cell).
1 girder costs 12 fuel to make. 140 girders = 1680 fuel (about 33 cells).
1 urth block costs 3 fuel to make. 700 blocks = 2100 fuel (42 cells).
Our total fuel use, then, is as follows. I've split it up by machine, since they can't share fuel cells--if you need 25 in your woodworker and 25 in your blockmaker, one cell won't help you. For similar reasons, the fuel cell numbers are all rounded up to the next whole cell.
Subtotals:
2240 for beams and
3808 for walls, or
6048 woodmaker fuel units: 121 fuel cells.
20 for rods,
840 for bars, and
1680 for girders, or
2540 metal machine fuel units: 51 fuel cells.
2100 for blocks: 42 fuel cells for the blockmaker.
121 + 51 + 42 = 214 fuel cells ...
... but wait! What about making those?!
1 fuel cell costs 1 fuel to make, so 214 cells cost 214 fuel units.
214 fuel units are 5 cells (rounding up again).
And you can make those five with the fuel your fuelmaker comes with. ;)
Final total: 214 + 5 = 219 fuel cells. To make those, add to your shopping (or harvesting) list 2628 jellisac, 1752 peat, and 438 white gas (3504 general vapour).
Happy building!
P.S. If this seems too intimidating to even get started on your tower, know that you only need 24 fuel cells to build the tower base itself. I'll leave the arithmetic for that one as an exercise for the reader.
