Dissolved Silica

Dissolved Silica is an intermediate liquid crafting component used exclusively in alternate recipes.

Both recipes Dissolved Silica appears in are unlocked from a single  Hard Drive. They have to be used in conjuction in a 2:1 ratio, as Dissolved Silica cannot be packaged or processed in any other way.

Obtaining

Crafting

Recipe	Ingredients	Produced in	Products	Unlocked by
Quartz Purification Alternate As byproduct	24 × Raw Quartz120 / min 2 × Nitric Acid10 / min	Refinery 12 sec	15 × Quartz Crystal75 / min 12 × Dissolved Silica60 / min	Tier 7 - Control System Development

Usage

Crafting

Recipe	Ingredients	Produced in	Products	Unlocked by
Distilled Silica Alternate	12 × Dissolved Silica120 / min 5 × Limestone50 / min 10 × Water100 / min	Blender 6 sec	27 × Silica270 / min 8 × Water80 / min	Tier 7 - Control System Development

Tips

• The Quartz Purification recipe chain is much more efficient at producing both  Quartz Crystal and  Silica simultaneously from the same amount of  Raw Quartz as the corresponding standard recipes in Constructors.
  • 120 Raw Quartz per minute can be divided among two Quartz Crystal constructors (consuming 75 Raw Quartz per minute) and two Silica constructors (consuming 45 Raw Quartz per minute) at 100% Clock Speed to yield 45 Quartz Crystal per minute and 75 Silica per minute.
  • The same amount of Raw Quartz per minute, when processed via the Quartz Purification chain, yields 75 Quartz Crystal (a 66% increase) per minute and 135 Silica (an 80% increase) per minute.
  • This gap is lessened when using the most Quartz-efficient alternate recipes for the individual ingredients; By assigning the same amount of Raw Quartz per minute as before to be processed via the Pure Quartz Crystal and Cheap Silica alternate recipes, 120 Raw Quartz per minute is converted into 58.3 Quartz Crystal per minute and 105 Silica per minute, with Quartz Purification remaining modestly more efficient.
• However, if the player is only interested in acquiring a single product from a Raw Quartz node, the Quartz Purification recipes are notably less efficient than their standard counterparts.
  • 120 Raw Quartz per minute converted solely into Quartz Crystal via the standard recipe yields 72 Quartz Crystal per minute, which is only slightly less efficient than the Quartz Purification recipe. If the player has no use for the extra Silica, the added complexity and ingredient cost of the Quartz Purification chain is unlikely to be worth it.
  • 120 Raw Quartz per minute converted solely into Silica via the standard recipe yields 200 Silica per minute, an approximately 50% net gain compared to Quartz Purification. If the player wants to maximize Silica production from a given node, Quartz Purification is actively counterproductive.
• If the blender processing the Dissolved Silica is amplified, the yield will be 270 Silica per minute, a 35% improvement over simply turning Raw Quartz into Silica. At this point, it becomes strictly advantageous (in terms of Raw Quartz utilization efficiency) to use Quartz Purification over standard recipes, as the factory will produce more each of both Quartz Crystal and Silica than they could create using their standard recipes, essentially doubling the amount of product obtained from the Quartz node. If absolute maximum efficiency is still required, Cheap Silica or Pure Quartz Crystal will still yield the optimal amount of their respective product, but produce none of the other product.
  • If both the Quartz Purification refinery and the Distilled Silica blender are amplified, the resulting output will be superior to a fully amplified series of Quartz Crystal constructors (150 vs 144 per minute) and to a fully amplified series of Silica constructors (540 vs 400 per minute), while using half the Raw Quartz and considerably fewer Somersloops.
  • Conveniently, amplifying the Quartz Purification refinery will also output enough Dissolved Silica to fuel a single Distilled Silica blender at 100%, allowing the machines to be run in a straight line without needing to merge pipes.

History

• Patch 1.0: Introduced