Altfurnaces usefullnes

[DarthPointer]

IR3 keeps the "vanilla" electric furnaces to smelt things. IR3 provides alternative furnaces to smelt these same things with different benefits and drawbacks. However, both Gas and Blast Furnaces are configured in a way that they both are too finicky to work with and don't really provide any actual benefit (aside from recipes that directly improve productivity by cutting inputs).

Gas Furnace

• 50kW vs 250kW, same speed as Electric Furnace = x5 less power required per product. Which is great... until you consider the next 2 points.
• Ele Furnace has 2 module slots which can be used for T1/T2 greens throughout the entire midgame before you get the beacons. With T2's, the Eles only use 1/6 extra power and are flexible with the primary energy source you use (coal, oil, charcoal, solar, nuclear).
• Can't be beaconed and can't use red modules. Which means that in beaconed late game they are completely phased out by the Ele Furnaces.
• Burns gas directly. Saves on the power plant space a lil bit, but in turn it is a huge logistics strain to also supply them with the fuel, and can only be fed processed/synthed oil products. Which means when you switch to nuclear power, electric furnaces won't be a problem, but gas furnaces will still require you to mine oil or coal for them.
• Built purely of mid-tier processed materials with no computers involved. An interesting feature but I don't see it be an actual benefit to balance out any possible drawback.

Blast Furnace

• Same power as Ele, but twice as fast = x2 less power per product baseline.
• And yet again the same problem but worse: Ele Furnace fitted with greens will operate cheaper in terms of power.
• Yet again can't be beaconed.
• Now the logistics are even more strained with coke, air and CO2.
• Copper and iron recipes are meaningless gameplay-wise.
• Silicon recipe pre-beacon is good, even without the Ele furnace power
• Steel recipe pre-beacon also is good.
• With beacons and T3 modules available these recipes no longer are clean winners with prod modules providing the decrease to silica/iron consumption, although iron and stone still are likely to be more expendable than oil or coal, so beaconed Ele vs Blast for steel and silicon is a matter of what resource you want to save more. If you want to save on space, you want electric furnace beaconed for speed anyway.

Conclusion

• Gas and Blast Furnaces are meaningless for the exact recipes already available to the Electric ones. Gas Furnaces will provide decent fuel consumption reduction in midgame, but are inflexible with fuel and in case you at least partially use renewable charcoal or solar for, their benefit is irrelevant.
• Blast Furnace is good to both save on power and coal/oil in steel and silicon production, with the disadvantage of being unable to save x1.2 on iron or stone input due to the lack of module slots.
• All the existing 3 module types revolve around machinery consuming grid power and can't be applied to furnaces burning fuel, thus leaving them handicapped when running exact same recipes.

Factorio version, IR version base 1.1.94, IR3 3.1.3.

[Deadlock989]

I didn't reply to this yesterday due to lack of available time.

These issues have been raised before but again, are missing a crucial point: gas furnaces and blast furnaces are not intended to be upgrades to electric furnaces and the help page for furnaces states clearly that they are not. If min-maxed module/beaconing is your preferred playstyle then yes, electric furnaces will probably equal their performance at the very least and probably better it, and that is completely fine, but it is not everyone's preferred playstyle and it's not mine. Neither furnace is ever going to get module compatibility because they are not electric furnaces, and in IR3, only electronic machines work with modules.

Gas furnaces in particular are extremely niche but if the RNG gods smile on you then it's possible to pull significant quantities of natural gas directly out of the ground from fissures, with no other processing required. If you don't have a glut of natural gas then no, you shouldn't be using gas furnaces, and that seems very obvious to me. Likewise with blast furnaces: if you have a glut of coal and/or oil, then the minor saving on coke with blast furnaces is probably going to be outweighed by spamming down modules or beacons. If your maps settings make those resources very scarce and/or you don't enjoy micromanaging module upgrades then the coke saving and built-in speed bonus might be of more interest.

If people want to make third party tweak mods that turn these furnaces into absolute upgrades, I have no problem with them doing that. But if people want me to make balance changes to anything in IR3, then they need to suggest actual alternatives, i.e. give me hard numbers about what properties the machines should have instead. That said, I'm basically opposed to changing balance in any overt way at this late stage of IR3's life: it would be me that has to field the complaints if a thousand saved games are broken.