I’m always frustrated by the amount of Vital Essence recipes clogging up my extractor, and I’m currently building a cost/price analysis utility that will quickly allow me to set prices for various items even if recipes shift.
That lead me to ponder how to price out the cost of Vital and Ancient Vital Essence in recipes, since there are many different sources. I decided to treat it similarly to how I price out spark and heat costs, and that made me realize it should just be treated like heat and spark!
Let us plop all our gross bio-mass in to either a new machine or the extractor to ferment over time and generate bio-essence that we pipe to machines through a block that maybe can co-occupy a space with a spark link.
Ancient Vital Essence could even be a spooky ghost like resource that needs it’s own pipe. You could end up with three pipes all running together which would have it’s own fun implications to builds.
It’d be fun to be able to then extract and compact that essence in to something that can be sold. Maybe the recipe involves a sponge block or a glass block to store the compacted essence and either it’s the exact same efficiency as the essence that went in to it, or with some power, it’s more efficient.
I imagine these compacted blocks would either be goopy gross looking blocks or maybe swirling souls in a glass container kind of thing.
Anyway, idea over!