Log

Logs are a basic natural resource and fuel obtained by cutting down trees on planets that have them. They are an early-game energy source for Icarus and are mainly useful before more efficient fuels become available. Logs burn more slowly than the default fuel baseline but have relatively low energy density compared to coal, so they are usually a stopgap rather than a long-term power source.

There is no recipe that produces Logs, and there is no true forestry automation in the normal resource chain. Icarus must cut trees down one by one, and simply placing a building over a tree removes the tree without granting Logs. Cutting trees can also sometimes yield Plant Fuel or Organic Crystal.

Logs have only a few known uses:

• Fuel for Icarus in the early game
• The first level of the Energy Circuit upgrade
• An alternate recipe for making Organic Crystal, together with Plant Fuel and Water

The Organic Crystal recipe using Logs is rarely used in practice, because it depends on manual collection of ingredients. In normal factory play, Organic Crystal is usually made from Plastic, Refined Oil, and Water instead, since that route is fully automatable and better suited to the production of Structure Matrixes for research.