Organic Crystal

Organic Crystals are a crafting material used to produce Titanium Crystals, and that is their only direct use. They can be obtained in small amounts by manually harvesting certain plants, crafted in an Assembler from Plant Fuel and Log, or synthesized more efficiently from Plastic in a Chemical Plant. In the early and mid game, Plastic-based production is the standard route, since bulk collection from plants is too limited for sustained use.

The Plastic route is still expensive and fairly involved. It consumes 5 Refined Oil per Organic Crystal, and while each crystal requires 2 Plastic, the processing time balances out so the production line is effectively a 1:1 ratio of Plastic production to Organic Crystal production. This makes Organic Crystal one of the materials that often slows down oil-based expansion, especially when scaling up research support and Titanium Crystal output.

• Organic Crystal can be manually harvested from some plants, with purple plants yielding higher concentrations.
• It can also be made from Plant Fuel and Log, but this method has no practical value for large-scale production.
• After interstellar travel is unlocked, the easiest large-scale source is direct mining from resource veins on exotic planets outside the starting star system.
• Before version 0.7.18.6914, unlimited Organic Crystal production was possible through indefinitely renewable Crude Oil, but this is no longer the case.

Because it feeds directly into Titanium Crystals, Organic Crystal is usually treated as a bottleneck material rather than a final product. Once off-world mining becomes available, that method greatly reduces the need to maintain a complicated oil-processing chain.