[Deprecated] Custom deepchem deposits — a Vanilla Chemfuel Expanded patch

This version is now deprecated.

From now on, please use the new one instead.

 

In VCE, one deepchem deposit yields a colony 18000–36000 chemfuel, which is enough fuel to power 66–132 chemfuel generators (66000W–132000W of power) for a year. This mod rebalances the amount of deepchem found using a ground-penetrating scanner to 240–480 chemfuel per deposit and allows it to be changed in the settings. Essentially, a patched deepchem deposit is a researchable infinite chemreactor that scales with a colony’s roster of research specialists (more on that below).

Important notice: this patch won’t change existing deposits, only new ones.

Here’s why it’s (hopefully, better) balanced:

1. A colony has other sources of power or chemfuel.
2. Refineries and pumpjacks are temporary power sinks that work fast.
3. Ground-penetrating scanner becomes very effective at finding deposits when a pawn operating it has high research speed. A pawn with level 10 in intellect finds ~4 random deposits every 10 days (and specifically ~4 deepchem deposits per year); a pawn with level 20 finds ~8 random deposits every 10 days—in other words, while you probably won’t have all that much chemfuel once you get all the necessary research done, your late-game colony eventually will.
4. You can have multiple ground-penetrating scanners.
5. You might be playing a research-centric Ideoligion.
6. You might be using Better Ground-Penetrating Scanner or some other mod that affects the progression curve.
7. Having too much of stuff affects wealth, and wealth attracts unnecessary attention.
8. A colony can profit from less than a thousand chemfuel.

As a side note, storage tanks were also changed: since deepchem to chemfuel conversion is fast, deepchem storage tanks now hold a mean amount of one underground deposit (120) to force an expansion when deepchem is hoarded, and chemfuel tanks were made consistent with vanilla shelves (1350).

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The MIT-licensed source is available on GitHub.