Bioreactor runs on live fish - should it?

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• DrownedOut Habitat Join Date: 2016-05-26 Member: 217559Members

  June 2016

  Judging you alright.
  
  I'm not a big bioreactor user and I don't know what to make of "power the reactor infinitelly", but mostly your situation seems about right. You can feed live fish to the bioreactor (where they won't remain live for long), as well as anything else organic with the current exception of the nutrition blocks. You could, for instance, breed stalkers for the express purpose of bioreactor fuel.
  
  The reason the egg disappears well before the peepers is that there's only 50 energy points in eggs, while peepers are good for 150 energy points. Hence, it takes longer for them to be processed.

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• scubamatt Georgia, USA Join Date: 2016-05-22 Member: 217295Members

  June 2016 edited June 2016

  What DrownedOut said. Each thing (fuel) that you put in the reactor has a certain amount of energy value. The reactor consumes the fuel to generate power until your base reaches its maximum energy value and then it pauses. So if you have just a Bioreactor, your max energy for the base is 100. The reactor will use up fuel making energy until it has 100 of it stored, then stops. When you use the Fabricator or otherwise drain energy from the base (recharging a Seamoth in the Moon Pool, etc) the reactor wil return to consuming fuel and making energy. Once a piece of fuel is used up, it disappears from the reactors inventory. Different fuels produce different amounts of energy, and it is related to how dense/complex they are. Simple plant samples generate little energy before being consumed, while large, heavy creatures generate much more before being exhausted as fuel.
  
  http://subnautica.wikia.com/wiki/Bioreactor
  
  If you don't enjoy roleplaying their little screams as you stuff them into the...er...I mean...if you prefer to avoid using living creatures as fuel, you can use plants you raise in a grow bed. The best plant choice is Marblemelon, followed by the Lantern Fruit. The former lasts longer per fruit, while the latter is less hassle to harvest (you don't have to replant all the time).
  
  With four Marblemelons in there, the reactor has potentially 440 power stored. Since using the Fabricator uses 5 energy per item converted, it will certainly seem like the bioreactor fuel lasts forever, but it really is using it up, just very slowly. You'll see the fuel used up faster if you do a lot of Seamoth/Moon Pool work or using a Recharger to recharge your Batteries and Power Cells.

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• werner339 Warsaw Join Date: 2016-02-24 Member: 213389Members

  June 2016

  Thanks for the answers. OK, lets assume that live fish can be processed directly as well, however
  
  1) I had impression that the powering was infinite, i.e. the bioreactor was active for ca 1 hour gameplay, constantly powering battery chargers, water distillation machine, fabrications etc. The peepers were still there, in the same amount, none of them disappeared during this time.
  
  2) The egg which I added to the peepers, disappeared *immediatelly*, it was not just a shorter burn-time. It looked to me as if the reactor entered a strange state and locked itself, unable to do any changes to the materials buffer.
  
  Regards,
  Werner

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• scubamatt Georgia, USA Join Date: 2016-05-22 Member: 217295Members

  June 2016 edited June 2016

  The items only disappear when the total energy from the Bioreactor reaches a benchmark, enough to remove an item from its fuel supply. It checks its fuel supply every ten or fifteen energy points it creates, to see if anything can be removed from the fuel supply. This is why you get power generation as soon as you start the reactor by adding a fish (etc) but it doesn't vanish as soon as you put in the first piece of fuel. They are only removed as they are used up.
  
  So this is how it probably happened:
  
  You added 3 Peepers to the reactor fuel and it started generating power. As batteries were being recharged elsewhere (etc) the power drain was counted against the base supply, which the reactor was slowly refilling. You didn't see any change in the fuel supplies (Peepers) because it had only generated about 45 power so far, and the Peepers are worth more than that (150 power each). Remember time doesn't matter at all to energy stored, only actual consumption. The reactor makes power at about 5 points per minute of real time. If I power a base up with a reactor but never use the fabricator or other energy draining items, it never runs out of fuel. Later, you added an egg to the fuel bin, and a moment later the reactor generated its 50th point of power. That is a benchmark, it checks and sees it can remove the egg (a 50 point item), does so, and resets its internal fuel counter as it continues generating power. If you add nothing more to its fuel, when it reaches 150 more points of power generated, a Peeper will vanish from the fuel supply.
  
  If you hadn't added the egg, when the reactor generated its 150th point of power, one of the Peepers would have vanished, and the internal counter would have reset to zero while it continued to generate power as needed.

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