What is the optimal way to fuel a beehive kiln?

[williams_482]

According to the wiki and my limited experience, beehive kilns are somewhat less fuel efficient than pit kilns if operated conventionally. However, the wiki notes that fuel inefficiency can be increased with micromanagement, but doesn't elaborate further. 

I assume this is referring to adding enough fuel to fire the kiln and then pulling some of the fuel back out once it's burning, leaving just enough to heat the kiln to 950C and remain at or above that temp for 9 hours with minimal wasted heat. Has anyone experimented with exactly how much firewood or peat is the right amount for this?

From reading other forum posts it seems that the kiln will behave identically regardless of what or how much stuff is inside it, and outside temps don't appear to affect firepits or ovens in a noticeable way, so I'd expect a rule of thumb about how much fuel to use to apply pretty universally. 

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

Has anyone experimented with exactly how much firewood or peat is the right amount for this?

I don't know about firewood, but nine full stacks of peat underneath has proven sufficient to fire it, in my experience. Any less than that and you'll need to light a few extra bricks and wait. It's not really possible to exceed nine full stacks, as there isn't room and the kiln will be finished firing by the time the fuel runs out anyway.

[williams_482]

I was able to fire a pit kiln with the minimum 9 x 24 stacks of peat, and even pulled three per stack out after the kiln finished. Clearly less than that is possible, I'm curious where the line is. 

[MKMoose]

19 hours ago, williams_482 said:

I was able to fire a pit kiln with the minimum 9 x 24 stacks of peat, and even pulled three per stack out after the kiln finished. Clearly less than that is possible, I'm curious where the line is. 

I'm not sure if less than 21 peat is possible. While I haven't tested it personally, I've looked it up recently as I had the same question and found this Reddit post which states that 21 is the minimum. I don't think that the entire post is up to date (the piles ignite each other much more easily), but at least the minimum required fuel should be correct.

What's interesting is that the JSON definition for peat says burnHoursPerItem: 0.5 (equal to 60 s), which would suggest that 22 peat is the minimum. Clearly, you've managed to only use 21, which requires an average burn time of ~63-66 s and ends up consistent with that Reddit post. I wasn't able to find the cause for this discrepancy.

 

20 hours ago, williams_482 said:

However, the wiki notes that fuel inefficiency can be increased with micromanagement, but doesn't elaborate further. 

I assume this is referring to adding enough fuel to fire the kiln and then pulling some of the fuel back out once it's burning, leaving just enough to heat the kiln to 950C and remain at or above that temp for 9 hours with minimal wasted heat.

Oddly enough, the temperature of the items inside the beehive kiln is for all practical purposes entirely irrelevant. As fuel burns, an internal progress value gets incremented linearly based only on burn time. If the fuel stops burning or the kiln door is opened, progress is simply retained. Redram has mentioned that they may revise the beehive kiln's mechanics whenever a larger temperature overhaul comes around:

Quote

We do hope to revisit the mechanic again in the future, once the temperature system as a whole is reworked. We can consider bringing more nuance then. But for now the system accomplishes what we wanted: many finished product colors without having a ridiculous number of colors of clay spawning, or exotic material gating, in a simple to understand and execute system.

Generally, it's not possible to optimize the fuel consumption in "normal" ways, because the "normal" minimum is simply dictated by the burn time necessary to complete the process. If you want to optimize it further, it requires to basically exploit some flaws in the code.

The simplest thing that should work is to pull out the remaining fuel as soon as the process finishes, before the last unit of fuel is consumed, saving you one item of fuel per tile. There's even a horribly named bug report for it.

Or, if you're interested in this kind of exploit, it seems to me based on the code that it's possible to fire the kiln while spending zero fuel by simply removing the fuel (all of the full piles) before an individual item of fuel gets consumed, then readding and reigniting it. It should be easy enough to test in creative (I might do just that at some point later), and it would warrant a bug report if it ends up working.

Edited Thursday at 02:53 PM by MKMoose

[williams_482]

Ahh, so pulling out he fuel when the kiln is not yet finished but everything inside is at 1200C (and thus will remain over 900C for some time) will actually stop the firing process? That's a little weird, but answers the question pretty definitively.