Explain your idea

Create recipes to treat wooden items where it makes sense.

We can treat planks, and it seems sensible that things made out planks could also be treated ex post facto. This would allow players to use found wooden items to created treated items.

Example, I often dismantle villages and rebuild them with darker wood, but don't often use Oak fences, slabs or stairs, in builds, but definitely would use treated versions of those in builds.

The suggestion isn't really about conserving resources like creosote, more as it's a way to make disparate wood types placed into storage useful (I would totally setup an Assembler to treat all the different wood items to creosote so they stack neatly in storage and can be used to build IE things.)

Tags already exist for c:slabs/wooden, c:stairs/wooden, c:fences/wooden, etc, so only one recipe for each type of item would be needed.

Since trap doors and doors often have a different look than their treated analog, I recommend against including them as it might be silly for treating a door to change it's shape/look.

Is your suggestion specifically to use the assembler? Because that would only be able to use full buckets of creosote oil

I certainly initially imagined it initially to use a crafting recipe with buckets, but the bottler might be more flexible for matching the creosote use to the exact ratios of planks used to make each wood item.

3 planks makes 6 slabs.
6 planks makes 4 stairs.
5 planks makes 3 fence (1 plank is sticks)

This means that if the recipe were simply 8 items surrounding the bucket of creosote that they'd be much more expensive than making treated wood first then crafting the item, but you can't fit more than 8 items and the bucket so a crafting recipe would always be less efficient.

EDIT: My math is wrong here (wrote it on the train). If the intent is to match the amount of creosote to make planks then the item, slabs would be a loss always because 8 slabs is 4 planks, 5 stairs would 7.5 planks, so close to even, and 4 fence 8.33... planks and would be close to even. (Thinking about this now and how inconsistent the crafting recipes would be, maybe it makes less sense, see below where I think the bottler is a better alternative after thinking it through.)

But the intent isn't for this to be an alternative to crafting items from treated planks. The intent is for the player to have a way to make use of excess creosote and found wooden items in a useful way (making treated fences to use for poles, slabs for some multiblocks, and stairs for decoration).

In nearly every save I play, I have a ton of excess Creosote, even when I'm making Phenolic Resin, making faux leather, and making planks for decorating, so I don't think it's an issue that it wastes creosote and in any case from a Wataonian perspective, coating wood in shapes that are not flat is hard so maybe it makes sense it costs more.

The real value of a bucket recipe is that players could use it early game without any multiblock machine. It also matches the expectations of players who are used to making treated planks in this same manner. Basically, I'm dipping the planks in a bucket.

To argue the other point, using bottler recipes lets us match the ratio perfectly, and doesn't require the player to configure recipes like you would with the Assembler so the player could just hopper every wooden thing with a recipe to a bottler with creosote. This is much simpler to grok and matches changes made in the recent versions where the bottler has been extended to doing things with items that are not bottles or buckets. (Maybe the bottler needs a new name to be honest given how many non bottle things it now does.)

My biggest problem with this solution is that I don't like the Bottler, because of how much of pain it is to use with recipes involving metal press plates and how slow it is per item compared to an assembler but that's not a valid criticism given that this conceivably simpler recipe (only one item and fluid).

I'd say either solution is fine, but after typing this out I'm leaning towards bottler making most sense given the amount of other non bucket things it does now.

Addendum. Sticks, gates, and signs also probably make sense. Although I wouldn't go out of my way to do sticks, trees drop sticks and players could dump them into an input crate for treated sticks when they chop. More reason to do bottler for matching ratios more closely.

Okay, I had a little more time to actually think this through (which I probably should have done before opening the issue). Actual exact mB values for each bottler recipe based on the amount of treated planks it would normally require and included with suggested values. We can't do fractional mB, and it looks like you use const in the builder for values, so these would have to be rounded to the closest const. Suggested values are included. (As I stated before I think it's fine for these to be slightly less efficient than crafting from planks which would also help to not incentivize the player to craft non-treated items first and then treat them.)

I like this idea.

Most of the time player have surplus creosote. It would be better if there are ways to use them.

I would argue that having a crafting recipe for this, rather than the bottler, is the best idea.

I think that a lot of the time, players will be most enamored with using this when they're early on in their worlds; when wood is in shorter supply and using up older materials is of more importance.

By the point a player can reasonably construct and automate the bottler fast enough to use it effectively, they can likely also get wood en masse via the buzzsaw. That means that there's less (not none, but less) of a reason for this to apply.

Additionally, I think it's reasonable to roughly match creosote costs in the crafting table and just deal with some specific recipes taking extra creosote. Most of the time creosote is not in short supply.

Please note that the following is with effective "stonecutter" style recipes, because I think stairs being more expensive than a block is a little bit silly, and a lot of mods add woodcutters that let you do more efficient cutting. It is also rounded to whole numbers per bucket, because that is the easiest to work with.

If people are interested, we could further add in bottling machine recipes which are more efficient (essentially direct consumption) but slower, because I could see people sometimes wanting to spend less creosote if they're making a lot of phenolic resin from it, or producing backup power via stored creosote.

There is another benefit that players often use AE to do the crafting, a craft recipe would be easier for players to consume ther sulplus creosote (often stored in AE disks).

Players can use the bottling machine with AE regardless. The only benefit is minor because it's not like AE cannot put the creosote to use without a crafting recipe here.

Additionally, I would expect the number of players storing creosote in AE disks to be smaller than you think, I don't think that AE fluid storage is as commonly used as it could be, especially when paired with IE.

Players can use the bottling machine with AE regardless. The only benefit is minor because it's not like AE cannot put the creosote to use without a crafting recipe here.

Additionally, I would expect the number of players storing creosote in AE disks to be smaller than you think, I don't think that AE fluid storage is as commonly used as it could be, especially when paired with IE.

The problem is bottling machine is SLOW. Most of IE machines are SLOW.

But yes a crafting recipe only benefits extreme speed-hungry players like me. I'm glad to see creosote has more use no matter what the way is.

(Off-topic: I have no idea why players don't use AE storages if it exists in the modpack)

Totally wasn't enamored with the idea of using the bottler, but I wasn't certain how crafting recipes would work given the different amount of planks each item would take when you have to use 1 bucket for each recipe, but I really like the proposed crafting recipes. Definitely happy with any way that would get implemented. Thank you!

EDIT: And I agree with also adding the bottler recipes if possible, because it gives players options later.