Salt Nerf Options

This page documents the options of the Salt balance-changes from the GitHub discussion.

Background

Salt is used for several things in-pack. Early game, it is needed for cooking Pam's foods. Later on, it is electrolyzed for the Chlorine or Sodium, which are used for many different recipes. Pam's has a simple recipe to turn water+bucket into a salt pile. This was felt to be un-greg-like, and so the recipe was removed. This left the only source for salt to be salt veins. The concern is that for high tier players, their high rates of chlorine consumption required access to large sources of chlorine.

Options

1. L2P - Examine the recipes, discover the formulations that allow using less Chlorine.
   1. Pro: Requires little to no changes.
   2. Con: Alternate recipes will push the pressure to other resources. Also, it restricts gameplay to force only one option (ie, why play when there is only one "best" setup) Even alternate recipes may still not provide enough Chlorine.
2. L2L - Use Lapis to create Chlorine
   1. Pro: No changes needed. Various infinite lapis sources available.
   2. Con: Will require enormous amounts of lapis to create 1 B of chlorine.
3. Ghast tears - Use Ghast tears to make salt water. Already planned for next release.
   1. Pro: "Magical" way to create more salt. Additional use for ghast tears. Already implemented.
   2. Con: Will require large mob farms, or bee farms, or IC2 farms to generate tears. Needs distillation towers. Feels more "magical" than "greggy". Doesn't scale well, going up a tier would mean you need 4x the spawners, or use 4x the power to accelerate bees or crops.
4. Mining - Increase the output from the salt and rock salt ores. Salt is one of the largest mined ore by volume. Currently they are 4x. This can be easily changed to 12x or more.
   1. Pro: Fairly simple change. Keeps salt ore relevant. Very good for lower tiers, means you don't need to supplement mining with anything. With GT miners giving extra output, this could work for longer.
   2. Con: More pressure on post-macerator machines to process the ores. Oreveins will need to be found and exploited by hand or using automated mining. Very low tier solution, doesn't scale well. Maybe add salt veins to the DD or other high tier planets.
5. Underground liquids - Add salt water as an underground liquid to various planets/dimensions. Brine is often exploited for salt on Earth. Easy change to worldgen, does not effect chunk times.
   1. Pro: Large quantities can be pumped from underground with tiered oil drills. Can be added to chunks already generated if they have not been prospected. Can be added to planets/moons to keep them relevant. Feels like a better GT related solution.
   2. Con: Requires a good distillation tower recipe to make it worthwhile, which either is OP at low tiers, or doesn't scale up to high tiers well. Oil drills will need chunkloaders and remote power generation or delivery. Servers with limited per-player chunk loading allocation.
6. Fusion - Fusion recipe that allows creating Chlorine
   1. Pro: Single machine, no chain required. Can all be done within an existing base. Scales better for high tiers because of how overclocking reactors works. Also gates the recipe behind LuV+ tier.
   2. Con: Feels more "black box" than really gregtech type solution. If Chlorine plasma recipe is power-positive, the large amounts of Chlorine needed for recipes means lots of "free" EU. Does not provide any Sodium.
7. Lava/water mixing - Lava + salt water makes highly acidic clouds. This would emulate that with gregtech to solve this issue. Lava + water => HCl + NaOh + obsidian dust
   1. Pro: Can be put in an LCR recipe. Sink for lava and water. Recipe could be tuned for lava input and certain amount of HCl output. LCR overclocks very well, so most tiers would benefit from this solution.
   2. Con: Everburn urn currently doesn't have a super high output for Lava. Would also have side effects on H production due to large quantity of Chlorine needed. Tuning for UV+ will make it less attractive for lower tiers.
8. Salt bee - Could require an Oceanic bee, which would need breeding in the Twilight Forest or changing a biome in the overworld to Ocean
   1. Pro: Moar bees!
   2. Con: Moar bees! Also, would require enormous amounts of beehives to get reasonable rates.
9. GT++ Dehydrator - Take in water, gives back salt
   1. Pro: Recipe could give other minor salts from the water as well as NaCl. It's basically the same as the removed Pam's recipe.
   2. Con: It's basically the same as the removed Pam's recipe.