Cement Mix

Experiment 52B is the resin-producing tree found on the Marshy Asteroid. It is a hostile plant that attacks nearby Duplicants and critters, but it is also a unique renewable source of Liquid Resin, which can later be heated into Isoresin. It eats the same foods Duplicants can eat, and it is immune to Food Poisoning.

The tree consumes food at a fixed rate of 50 g/s while it is not venting Resin. For every 200 kcal of food it eats, it produces 1 kg of Liquid Resin. Once it has accumulated 5 kg of Resin, it vents that Resin at 1.5 kg/s and stops eating during the venting period. Because venting takes time, foods with higher calorie density improve its effective output per cycle by reducing how often the tree has to interrupt feeding.

Only food placed in the center-bottom block area can be picked up and consumed. The tree exchanges heat with the cell directly below its bottom middle cell, so a conductive tile placed there is the easiest way to control its temperature, especially in vacuum. The output Resin is created at the tree’s internal temperature, and the tree can be heated up to 99.9 °C to reduce the energy needed to boil it later. Resin must be heated above 125 °C to become usable Isoresin.

A few practical points matter when using Experiment 52B as a resource sink:

• It accepts any food with calorie ratings, so prepared food is usually best when importing resources from other asteroids.
• Since food has a much higher mass density than the ingredients used to make it, shipping finished meals is generally more efficient than shipping raw inputs.
• A single 200 kg payload can keep the tree fed for most of 7 cycles, assuming the food does not spoil.
• Feeding it high-calorie foods such as Frost Burgers or Surf’n’Turf produces far more Resin per cycle than low-calorie foods such as Meal Lice.
• The small amount of steam produced when Resin is heated does not significantly offset the food cost of resin production.

Because it is a single fixed tree, total per-cycle output cannot be scaled by building more of them. The only way to increase production efficiency is to feed it denser food. This makes it especially valuable for turning otherwise excess byproducts into high-end materials, such as converted meat, sulfur-based foods, or other surplus resources from meteor output and geysers.