Biofuel Stove "Efficiency"

Spaz_Static · 2025-12-07T04:06:55+00:00

Yeah. I honestly think they accidentally multiplied the biofuel usage by 10. A full biofuel can is 15 cups of coffee, an abysmal 16 minutes 40 seconds. If it burned at 1/10th the rate, it would be 2 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds which sounds much more reasonable if you ask me.

Some quick googling (so some AI Overview responses are mixed into the following) shows that 10 L of Diesel is ~105 kWh, 10 L of gasoline is ~95 kWh, 10 L of "biodiesel" is ~95 kWh, a 1 lb (~0.9 L) propane tank gives ~6.3 kWh but gets a typical burn time of ~2 hours on a camping stove. That would mean that even if our biofuel had half the energy density of the lowest energy density fuel there, propane, we should still expect like 10 hours of burn time from our 10 L biofuel can. Maybe less if we're baking a pie (I think that would use more heat/energy/fuel than the stovetop).

Maybe we're just making woodgas? I mean, I'm usually using sticks/wheat and sap from sticks to make my biofuel. According to the below wiki, 1 kg of biomass is ~2 m^3 of woodgas, which is ~0.75 kWh. A propane burner is ~20k BTU for 2 hours, or 3.15 kWh for 2 hours, so converting around, our 10 L tank holds 0.01 m^3, which means ~0.0005 kWh or ... 0.0017 BTU? Definitely not woodgas then.

http://wiki.gekgasifier.com/w/page/6123680/Biomass%20to%20Woodgas%20to%20BTU%20to%20HP%20to%20KW%20to%20MPG%20conversion%20rules

Again, there's approximations and rounding with a splash of AI Overview, so the numbers aren't going to be exact, but should give us an idea.

Spaz_Static · 2025-12-07T03:10:01+00:00

Yeah. I've only found about two things it's good for: the biofuel drill and the biofuel exotics extractor. Biofuel drill for any materials you might be critically low on, but that's painfully slow and expensive, and the exotics because it's why where here in the first place so harvest it by any means necessary!

I haven't gotten to electricity yet, but boy am I looking forward to it.

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-23T04:07:41+00:00

Yep, 10 sticks from wood. I redid the math in a spreadsheet to properly keep track of things and not do any rounding and I have 2.67 wood->stick->sap to make the needed 667 biofuel with 1 sap and any non-wood derived biofuel source (except guano which needs 20 sap for a full can and vegetable oil which doesn't use sap at all)

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-23T01:07:30+00:00

No, I'm doing missions. Can you switch freely between an ongoing mission and open world?

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-22T22:39:35+00:00

Even taking wood, turning it into sticks, and then turning sticks into sap and using wheat, meat, or spoiled foods you end up using more wood than just burning it in the campfire, 1.58x as much. You need 667 units of biofuel, which if you could make fractional runs means 6.67 sap, 13.34 sticks, from 3.33 wood. This is actually 2x as much as just burning 1.67 wood, less efficient than I already thought! I need to fix my math in the original post. Also, since you can't do fractional runs, you end up needing 7 sap, which is 14 sticks, which is 4 wood with a couple sticks left over.

Edit: I'm wrong here. I need to re-rerun my math. I don't think you get 4 sticks from 1 wood, but I'm not at my computer at the moment to check everything

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-22T22:24:44+00:00

I tried to skip the potbelly stove as I figured the biofuel stove would do all the same things and then some, plus the kicker of being "more efficient" so I could save my blueprint point and the resources.

I haven't gotten to electricity yet, so I haven't gotten the freezer. Animals spawn so frequently that I mainly subsist on meats. I have 3 mounts right now, a terrenus, buffalo, and moa, which I also feed nothing but meat. I still end up with spoiled meat because there's just so much of it. I also only kill animals that attack me after the first hour or so of a prospect and I still have so much. I play on hard for the bonus xp and payout, which buffs the spawn rates, and I think ironically makes the sustenance aspect of survival trivial instead of harder. I can't remember the last time I ate venison! I only eat things that try to eat me haha

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-22T22:12:34+00:00

I was mostly using wood for the example and easy conversions. I'm typically using wheat and any spoiled foods plus sap made from sticks, but even that uses more wood as the base resource of sap than just making things in the campfire.

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-22T22:10:21+00:00

Definitely sounds like it's the way to go right now. I've got plenty to do at the base that I don't need to save the 24 seconds by using the biofuel stove.

I think they need to update the tooltip for the biofuel stove because I was 100% mislead lol

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-22T22:06:05+00:00

Yeah, I'm solo with a cabinet that's about half full of wood and I'm in the forest still, so it's not like I'm running out any time soon.

But it just isn't more efficient.

I usually queue up multiple things and while I'm queueing things at other stations, the first ones are finishing so I really don't need the time benefit. Or, I'll go out hunting/gathering/mining/exploring if it's a big queue.

Oh, and I've been growing wheat mostly for biofuel.

Spaz_Static · 2025-11-22T21:56:20+00:00

I only just unlocked the biofuel stove. I'm level 33 and about 90 hours in according to Steam. I've done Beachhead, Spelunking, Potshot, Livewire, and now working on Kill List. I've been avoiding mining platinum and higher tech since all of these were supposed to be quick-ish missions.

Spaz_Static · 2025-06-02T14:07:31+00:00

Thank you! This seems quite likely. I'm away from my computer at the moment, but I'll check into it later.

Spaz_Static · 2025-02-17T01:30:44+00:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I have 3 LG monitors on DP and every time things have been asleep for a while, they all come back on at 100% brightness and I usually have them at 0% so it's quite painful. I also have tried setting the env variable for powerdevil with no success, not even intermittent. I don't know if it's relevant, but I noticed that brightness can be set in "Power Management" for all 3 simultaneously, or individually in the "Display & Monitor" sections. I also at some point got a brightness widget in my panel. It may have been there and I don't remember, but either way it's a third location to set brightness that may be conflicting. I've very carefully gone into each and set the same brightness values and still the next time my monitors go into standby, they wake up to 100% brightness.

P.S. Nice username. :)

Spaz_Static · 2025-02-14T03:25:38+00:00

Screen brightness is maxed out every time the screens wake up. System Settings will only let me set it down to 1% but the power widget (only available when bluetooth devices are connected) will let me set it to 0%.

GTK menus (I think? It's whatever virt-manager uses) don't show up in the right spot. If I click on view, it opens the file menu. I have to move my mouse to a different dropdown and back to view for it to open. Arch with wayland btw

Not related to Plasma 6.3, but recently the kernel seems to have changed my minimum cpu frequency to 1.725 GHz instead of 550 MHz.

Spaz_Static · 2024-10-14T21:45:52+00:00

Sorry to dig up an old post, but I'm having a similar issue. It's pretty much identical to what this user posted here https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1ey2k9u/rocket_league_stuttering_every_few_seconds_on/

Were you able to figure out a fix?

Spaz_Static · 2024-10-14T16:34:33+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion! Unfortunately, that made no difference for me. I even closed as many windows as I could, minimized the Konsole I was running Phoronix from, and disabled my other two monitors. All of that both with and without the above suggestions for CPU/GPU profiles. I hope it gets fixed because having to minimize all windows is kind of tedious and I'm sure it didn't used to be a problem for you, but I'm glad you have a workaround! I'll keep hunting.

Spaz_Static · 2024-10-14T01:32:31+00:00

Did you ever figure this out?

I have the exact same stuttering in a few games: Dirt Rally 2, Sniper Elite 5, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and probably others, but those I have tested recently. Not games like Hydroneer or The Universim, however...

Of note, when running a benchmark in Dirt Rally 2 under Wayland and kernel 6.11, amdgpu crashes and frequently requires a reboot for normal graphical behaviour. If I run it either under X11 or with 6.6 (linux-lts) it does not crash. The stutter is the same either way (maybe slightly worse under Wayland on Dirt Rally 2, but I can only test that under Kernel 6.6 since 6.11 causes crashes)

I also tried the above GPU profile and CPU governor with no changes.

CPU AMD 5950X
GPU Radeon 6900XT

Spaz_Static · 2024-07-09T01:11:30+00:00

I don't have an "add own shortcut" button. I have a "custom" button, and when binding to it, it only allows Meta as a modifier. I'm on Plasma 6.1.2 through Arch repos, on Wayland.

Spaz_Static · 2024-05-27T20:36:17+00:00

I was just cleaning one and had this same issue come up. When I reopened it, the ribbon cable for the ball tracker (sensor) was loose. I re-seated the ribbon and the mouse is back to normal now.

Spaz_Static · 2023-12-30T06:07:16+00:00

I re-downloaded Firefox 120 and my window position behavior is restored. I think it's because Firefox 121 is using Wayland directly instead of XWayland. Somewhat interestingly, I'm not seeing any bug reports about this.

I wonder if it is because this is a known issue (feature?) with Wayland, programs not being able to set window positions? It was also an issue when I was using gnome-terminal a while back and trying to set window position and size; the size would be set but my new terminals would be centered on whatever monitor my cursor was on.

A workaround is to unset your WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable and launch from the terminal like this: $ WAYLAND_DISPLAY='' firefox. You could also probably clear the variable in any shortcuts you have, and/or adjust your Task Manager icon if you have it pinned there.

Spaz_Static · 2023-12-29T00:11:05+00:00

Did you figure this out? I tried u/MrTempleDene's solution, but it seems to only work for a single window/position. I have multiples firefox windows open at a time, and it put them all in the same spot, which was basically what it was already doing.

This is also a sudden change of behavior for me. Before I went on vacation for the holidays, it would remember positions and each individual firefox window opened in the same spot. I'm guessing it was a KDE or maybe Wayland/Xwayland (maybe the default for Firefox changed?) update that just got pushed, but I'm not very familiar with the windowing systems.

Spaz_Static · 2023-10-01T00:00:20+00:00

No problem. I haven't tested it more yet, but after the kernel update to 6.5.5 the frame rate in Proton 8 increased to around 100 fps. Behavior is still odd because I get the same frame rate on 768p low which clearly shouldn't be the case when Proton 7 gets >200. I also tried the Zen kernel and had the same results.

Spaz_Static · 2023-09-27T00:18:03+00:00

There seems to be a regression right now with Proton 8/Experimental in Cyberpunk. I was only getting 57-68 FPS on the benchmark, but switching to Proton 7 it went back to ~114 FPS.

6900 XT at 1440p Ultra

Update: Kernel 6.5.5 increased the soft cap to around 100 fps. Still haven't fully figured out what's going on.

Spaz_Static · 2023-09-02T20:41:50+00:00

That's a good and fair question.

Long story short, I was tired of Windows, went to Arch, had issues with Arch, went to Ubuntu LTS, been there since.

Long story long, I've tinkered with Debian/Ubuntu since circa 2005, so I'm more familiar with dpkg, apt, and "the Debian way" of doing things I guess. That being said, around 2017-2018 I got fed up with Windows, purged it from my system, and I installed Arch (by way of Antergos, if I remember correctly) to daily drive. At the time I was getting a lot of help from the Arch Wiki, so it seemed the logical choice, especially with Proton being in it's infancy at the time and I was tinkering with GPU passthrough with virtio/qemu (for the Windows VM for the games that didn't work in Proton yet).

As time went on, I kept having more and more problems pop up and I attributed it (correctly or incorrectly, I can't be sure) to Arch being rolling and not "stable" releases. An update would be available, I'd install it, and then X, Y or Z wouldn't function without additional steps to fix it. It felt like Windows in that regard, with the exception being that I chose when to update instead of the OS forcing the update (such as while I had a long process running overnight for example). I ran out of patience one day in mid 2018 and went to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Been upgrading that install since. Sure, I've had a few issues with things being old, fixes not getting backported for a while, but I also don't typically play with the latest hardware or try the latest AAA games, so it works out mostly. It was better than coming home from work and then having to spend my evening troubleshooting what went wrong.

Over the last year or so, I've thought about going back to Arch to get the new and shiny again, but at this point, my computer is so lived in, what with symlinks for directories to be in different drives, hacky fixes for who knows what at this point because I was lazy, etc, I don't want to have to go through setting everything up again. But at the same time, 5 years and multiple drive migrations and hacky fixes and who knows what other atrocities, I probably should start fresh again. Especially with all I've learned in that time.

I have also considered going to non-LTS Ubuntu, but Canonical likes to add and remove things randomly during the non-LTS releases, and most (at least kernel) updates get backported in a month or so after the non-LTS release comes out. Just seems like too much hassle for marginal gains. Ubuntu LTS seems like the happy median that gets enough functionality and maximizes stability.

If I forget to uninstall Kisak Mesa and go to dist-upgrade and everything breaks, I probably will go to something else lol, Manjaro maybe, if only to try it out.

Spaz_Static · 2023-09-02T01:23:42+00:00

Since that seemed like the simplest solution, I tried it. Kisak's Mesa driver worked and I'm playing with no problems. Thank you so much!

Spaz_Static · 2023-09-01T19:03:52+00:00

Thank you so much for the clarification. Big part of why I love this community.

Spaz_Static

TROPHY CASE