Branches & Dryer - Inappropriate Cost

This is an oddity I noticed when trying to recycle a bunch of extra branches to dry wood.

1 Wood in the Dryer takes 41 seconds (2 bark) for 2 Dry Wood and 1 Resin.
5 Branches in the Dryer takes 41 seconds (2 bark) for 1 Dry Wood.
Note: It takes 41 seconds because the dryer doesn’t give output unless it burns for that extra 1 second even if it’s 100% complete at 40 seconds.

The expenditure of time for resource output is inconsistent. I would never spend the 41 seconds for only 1 Dry Wood when it would take an equal amount of time to have double the output for even less cost in both tool durability and use. The formula should be 5 Branches every 20 seconds in the Dryer for 1 Dry Wood. This would give it a similar ratio for 1 Wood:2 Dry Wood in the Dryer every 41 seconds.

I know this is super nitpicking but I’ve been playing some Satisfactory on the side.

I get your same feeling of not wanting to waste anything, but after a certain point you can just swim in branches, and the only thing you can do is throw them away. Dry wood without resin is totally useless except as fuel, and since you get 2x dry wood when drying normal wood, plus one resin, that means you get one insulated wood plus fuel as a byproduct. Branches are just not worth it at all.

I was doing a fairly massive construction project so any and all dry wood I could get my hands on I viewed as pretty good. I figured recycling 5000 branches sitting around was worth the 2500 dry wood. I changed that view rather quickly once I realized the fuel consumption didn’t make sense.

Like I said, it’s a bit of a silly nitpick but it doesn’t make sense.

It’s that 5 branches take as long as 1 big piece of wood.

It’s how far your fuel goes.

Edit: Another way of saying it: This is an inefficient recipe. It needs adjustment or removal.

Even if it technically takes 2 wood to manufacture 1 insulated wood (4 dry wood and 2 resin for 3 bark; 81 seconds); It’s still more cost and fuel efficient to do so because you end up getting 3 dry wood as a byproduct which is a better fuel source than coal.

i get that no one would ever use it and ideally should be tweaked, i assume that devs wanted this to be a second option, but not a good one to become the default. Like if you only have branches and really need that extra dry wood, the option is there.

I’m honestly at a loss; I never truly understood the niche of this particular recipe. Drying branches doesn’t provide you with resin, so the resulting dry wood is useless. Even if you have a surplus of resin, you’re still better off chopping more wood and drying it, for it will produce a pair of dry wood and resin and a ‘free’ dry wood you can pair with your existing resin. Even if the bark cost was halved, it still wouldn’t be fair, since for double the cost you still get not only double the dry wood, but also resin. And, again, dry wood can’t be used for anything else than crafting insulated wood, other than burning it as fuel.

I understand and appreciate the Devs including an option for the branches as a crafting recipe in the dryer. However, the time investment to gather bark to then waste it on this particular recipe just doesn’t make sense to any player I’ve casually talked to about this. With the hassle to gather bark sometimes, all players I know wouldn’t use it on this.

If we could also use dry wood as a more efficient fuel source for the dryer then maybe it might be worth using the bark to process the branches. I know that sounds a little silly. Use fuel to make better fuel for later, but I’ve seen that before in some other games.

For this to make sense, one dry wood would have to be at least 3x the fuel efficiency.

I hear you on this. I tried to find something else to use the branches on as I usually get them from the random Bearer packs from the T1 or T2 NPCs when I go farming. I tried to find anything else to use the branches on but you can only need so many arrows or other items crafted with them. When you open supply packs and get 500 or more branches I feel like I could and should use them for something instead of just throwing them into a vault labelled “Branches for the Branch-God.”

I just for the life of me can’t find anything else to use the branches for. Sure I could just burn them for fuel at a campfire for cooking or something; which I have done. I just feel like turning them into the most efficient fuel source as an alternative to using oil would be a better use but not with how inefficient it is currently.

Especially with how annoying it can be to get larger quantities of bark depending on where your base is located and where you’re traveling to and from. This does assume you’re not going to use the wood to bark recipe which then adds in a time and resource delay before you can use the bark from that recipe.

I totally get what you mean, and would also preffer its values to be changed. My previous comment was considering that devs aimed this as an optional less efficient recipe (for those in a tough spot, with limited resources), rather than just another recipe that would be used by everyone.

I feel you so much. We have “surplus chests” entirely filled with a single resource, and labeled accordingly. After the sixth or seventh light leather chest, we decided to start throwing it away, and we’ll probably do the same with branches when the time comes.

The problem with arrows is that I am at the “dragonbone arrows only” stage, which only use dragonbone and feathers, not a single stick. For most special effect arrows, a single ironhead arrow does the trick, and those usually drop from NPC, so I hardly craft them anymore.

Using them as fuel would be ok, but considering you still get an excess of dry wood from the dryers (which we ended up using instead of oil or even coal). The fact that you can turn wood into branches as a “reward” for finding a T5 carpenter feels like a prank. WHY in the world would I need more branches, and why would I want to sacrifice wood in order to get them.

Meanwhile, the recipe for getting bark from wood is incompatible with mass production. Taking into account that you need 2 bark to dry 1 wood, you’d need 10k of wood to dry an additional 1k (IF you have a T3 carpenter or better, of course), so it’s clearly there to get a little (very little) extra bark using your extra wood, and not as the main source for bark.

So, I want to propose this: Recipe: branches to bark.

Since a piece of wood yields 2 branches, 5 pieces of wood (the bare minimum to craft 1 bark) would produce 10 branches. An original cost of 20 branches per unit of bark would ensure that, even with a high level carpenter, the cost doesn’t go below 10 branches, preventing you from turning wood into branches and then into bark to miraculously produce extra bark somehow. With 10 branches (after modifiers) per unit of bark, a full stack of branches would yield a meager 100 bark, which isn’t imbalanced at all, and it would be a good way of helping you get rid of your excess branches without making thousands of bug kabobs to power your wheels of pain out of sheer boredom.

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I’m also at the exact same spot and definitely feel this. If enemies never dropped arrows, it might make this a bit better since we’d always have some use for branches as the basic arrow component and not to mention help get rid of trash in the loot tables.

I really like this idea and I do find it a bit funny that one of the more popular mods (Emberlight) added that quality of life change that they felt was necessary. I would absolutely love to see this as an official option.

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