It was not in the updated patch notes but @DreamEvil noticed this in the files so finally was able to do some testing today…
It appears to be the changes to support this:
“TODO : Updates to Portals to allow longer fuelled portals” from the original Testing Update Post
Portals on testing now allow you insert compact oortstone as fuel retaining a 1 to 1 ratio with the equivalent amount of oort shards… i.e. you do not gain or lose any fuel by using compact oortstone in the portal based on mass craft amounts of rough oort to oort shards or rough oort to compact oort.
What it does allow is a very large amount of oort based fuel to be placed in the portal at once (which has been a request for a while now), by using compact oortstone instead of shards.
A 1x2 portal with 900 compact oortstone now lasts an insane 535 weeks.
And for comparison, here is a 2x2
and a 2x3
and a 2x4
and a huge portal (not sure how many conduits this was, but I am pretty sure I hit max size for the blinksec limit)
Along with this addition, it appears that the amalgams got a change to make them a bit more worth using. Prior to this change, you effectively “lost” oort shards by converting to oort amalgam since it took 324 oort shards to make 100 amalgam and those had a fuel value in a portal that was the same as 300 normal oort shards.
Now on testing, the 100 amalgams you get from a mass craft are equivalent to 400 oort shards, so you are getting some bonus fuel time for going through the effort of changing them to amalgams (which makes amalgams somewhat more useful)… basically you are getting 76 oort shards of bonus by converting to amalgams now when doing mass crafts.
All in all these are exciting changes to portal fueling to me, and I am sure to many others (especially @DKPuncherello)