3.0.0 balance/content manifesto

[Deadlock989]

Early thoughts:

• [x] The least useful and most frustrating alloys are invar and cupronickel. Invar should be removed completely and replaced with other materials (usually steel, maybe cupronickel if it makes sense).
• [x] It was originally intended that there would be more electroplating (currently there is only chrome, originally copper plating was intended as well but never happened due to lack of use cases). Change cupronickel from an alloy mix to a plating mix. Make the plating tech tiered, leaving chrome roughly where it is but with cupronickel electroplating occurring much earlier (basically as soon as nickel becomes available). Remove all the unnecessary pure cupronickel components (ingot, scrap, molten at least). Cupronickel alloy has now been replaced with nickel electroplating.
• [x] Tellurium has very limited uses, as foil in the top tier of electronics and also solar panels. Tellurium ingots therefore only serve a single purpose. Remove tellurium ingots and use a non-smelting process for variety (e.g. chemistry) to produce tellurium foil directly from the mineral. This feels OK given that real life tellurium is a metalloid rather than a true metal. No ingots also means no molten tellurium. Tellurium was replaced with platinum and a special alloy, "electrum".
• [x] There is a bit of a drag in achieving mid-game military power. Given that cupronickel plated parts will be a bit more commonly used due to them sometimes replacing invar, remove cupronickel plates from steel magazine ammo. Mid-tier ammo was simplified and turret frames were moved out of generalised military techs, making Military 2 more accessible.
• [x] Limit the intermediate electronics parts (gates) to a max of 2 item components for ease of belting, i.e. move the gold foil out of blue chips to somewhere else - maybe just double up the gold that goes into the blue board. Electronics components were simplified - boards, solder and disks are gone; however blue electronics involves new materials.
• [x] Given that we have lost several molten metals, take the opportunity to get rid of molten glass - it's just clutter and the numbers are hacked, doesn't sit well with "arc melting".
• [x] An intention way back from IR1 that I never got around to was having smaller footprint assemblers, i.e. 2x2 or 1x1, to make more compact assembly structures for intermediates with a lot of single-material parts that are mostly derived from ingots (e.g. pistons, beams, frames). There is no time for lots of new graphics now but a quick 1x1 electric assembler is doable. It should be limited to low level component recipes with one ingredient and one result, e.g. plates, gears, rods, rivets, wire.
• [x] Incinerators are resource hogs in the sense that they generate hundreds of recipes, slowing down any other process that has to parse them (including the furnace recipe selection process and any third party "planner" type mod). There was a need for them in IR1 but IR2 is less wasteful and you can launch a rocket without incinerating a single item. Since then infinity chests were added to the base game which is a much more UPS/RAM friendly way of voiding items - the one drawback is that chests can't be powered so it would be free. I think it is now worth it. Remove incinerators and replace with a "disposal pit" or some such, a GUI-less infinity chest which looks like a literal hole in the ground, made of stone and unlocked without research. Set them as consuming non-filtered items in the entity built events.
• [x] Other basic components with very few uses are iron powder and lead rods. Review if they are really needed. (Pellets were added later as a general "catalyst" style replacement for powders, also used in cartridge ammo.)
• [x] Import hydrogen and oxygen from IR2G (gas only). Check that they can be vented.
• [x] Repurpose the unused air compressor as Added air compressors and a cryogenic separation tower for obtaining oxygen and nitrogen.
• [x] Import coal/petcoke gasification from IR2G.
• [x] Rename vanilla rocket fuel as "high octane fuel".
• [x] Adapt the hydrogen fuel cells from IR2G into a third tier of replenishable battery fuel (requires hydrogen instead of electric charge, does not ever "fizzle" on filling like the other two tiers).
• [x] Figure out a relatively high cost process for the hydrogen-based IR2G rocket fuel.
• [x] Allow productivity for arc furnace recipes that have ore, crushed ore or minerals as inputs.
• [x] Allow productivity for gasification recipes.
• [x] Test speed modules in foundries. Foundries were replaced with casts.
• [x] Reconfigure battery generators to allow the IR2 entity toggle key to switch between tertiary and secondary output priority (so that they can be optionally set up as main generators rather than backup power).
• [x] Battery generator graphics: remove non-standard lights and replace with a visual switch to show toggle state. Fix missing rivets. Battery generators were redesigned from scratch and are now 3x3.
• [x] Investigate importing water electrolysis from IR2G. It turns out that as in real life, it's just not worth it. It's even worse given the lack of an "advanced chem plant" - the power input to chem plants is so low that you would need a screenful of electrolysis plants to keep up with just one liquid hydrogen plant. Shelve for now.
• [x] Investigate requiring oxygen gas for arc furnace recipes, and incentives for using molten metals in general.
• [x] Ethanol (fuel, electroplating, check for anything else).
• [x] Improved high octane fuel, replaces old rocket fuel.
• [x] Gas fissures, gas derricks.
• [x] Geothermal exchange (polluted steam + water > polluted water + steam).
• [x] 4-output 1x1 air separator tower can actually work (two modes: 1 input 1 output NS vs. 2 outputs EW) so we can have the full range of gases - finish this tower and add crafting tint animation. Cryo tower is now 3x3 for quality of my specific life, vapo tower remains 1x1.
• [x] All three pure gases have cold liquid version. Switch specific recipes to liquid gas (canisters, rocket parts). Figure out compression ratio.
• [x] Ambient gas vaporisation tower - turns liquified gases back to gas for free.
• [x] Review the entire oil / cracking chains: natural gas; hydrogen; bitumen; tarmac.
• [x] Turn laser assemblers into "assembler 4", i.e. delay the gating of things behind rubies. Add a re-skinned steel tier assembler 3 where the laser one used to be in the tech tree. Laser assemblers now reserved for high end electronics and exotic materials.
• [x] Kill stainless steel? There just isn't enough late-game content to justify so many materials for machines. If stainless steel does go, since we've already turned cupronickel into another plating thing, it means that neither chromium nor nickel ingots really need to exist - their only purpose would be to make electroplating solutions and there is no ore form so the plating solutions could be made directly from the mineral. No ingots, no molten either. Would reduce menu clutter and belt spaghetti. This was dialled back a bit but stainless steel is still gone. A new alloy "brass", technically leaded bronze, is used in a few cases to add material diversity to some high tier items without having to electroplate everything in sight.

[rlundy]

Do you envision this as a new version number of IR2, or as a new-named mod (say, IR2.4 or IR3) that would be completely separate? I'm wondering how much rebuilding would be necessary if this were to update in place.

[Deadlock989]

I think it will pretty much wreck any saved game that has progressed past the steel milestone, unfortunately.

I had been assuming it would go out as 2.4.0 with a warning in the changelog that this version has breaking changes and existing saves should persist with 2.3.2 until done, but you make a good point that it could go out as a differently named mod, which would soften the impact, especially for folks that don't read changelogs - I will give it some thought.

[rlundy]

Yeah, the trouble is that it's easy to click "Update All" in the Factorio mod update interface, so I think someone wanting not to update would be going against the grain in the interface, and they'd have to "just remember" every time to uncheck that one.

If the new version had a different name but somebody did want to upgrade, it would simply be a matter of adding the new version of the mod, unchecking the old version, and then the migration would happen automatically, right? Or maybe a mod can't do that with items from a different mod?

[Deadlock989]

If the new version had a different name but somebody did want to upgrade, it would simply be a matter of adding the new version of the mod, unchecking the old version, and then the migration would happen automatically, right?

Yes, pretty much, although technically it's not even a migration. The game doesn't really care which mod provides any specific item, recipe, etc. - if the saved game with mod set A records instances of cheese rods and the current mod set B provides cheese rods then it just gets on with placing cheese rods into the reconstructed world.

It's a shame that the in-game mod browser makes it very easy to upgrade but provides absolutely no way of "downgrading" to previous versions at all - for that you need to visit the mod portal and manually download a file to your mod folder - at which point, weirdly, the game has pretty nice handling for switching between multiple installed versions of a mod. 🤷

[Deadlock989]

Have decided not to release this as a new mod, but as an update with a warning. Changing the mod name would break all of the third party mods that have made the effort to be compatible with IR2.

[Deadlock989]

Arc furnaces got some love - built in production benefits for ore processing (but only ore processing) at the cost of even more gas management. They have also had the full range of modules enabled (productivity for ore products only).

[rlundy]

Interesting... Where does oxygen gas come from?

Edit: Actually, never mind, I read the full original text in more detail and now I see where. Will the cryogenic separation tower require some kind of input in order to create oxygen? I could see it needing filters similar to the air purification tower. (Hey, maybe this could be another use for tellurium foil?)

More sulfurous gas is definitely a good thing. Early on in IR2 I have too much and usually have to vent it out, but later I'm scrambling for it, to the point where I even send raw non-crushed ore to the arc furnaces just because of the amount of sulfurous gas they produce.

[Deadlock989]

Air separation doesn't currently require any input except for a fairly sizeable power requirement. I looked at having them consume something but I'm not wild about it - the building is 1x1 in the same style as the flare stack, I don't have much time to make anything bigger/fancier (pipe-connected buildings are a nightmare), and wiring/piping/belting up arc furnace clusters is already quite spaghettified without having to belt in another product. The real life cryogenic application doesn't consume anything apart from power and air, except possibly coolant which is cycled without being consumed - it would be nice to have high tech coolants beyond water (could possibly tie into Factorio's heat pipe mechanics) but that would definitely require a bigger building for all the inputs and outputs. There is another real life process (oxygen adsorption) that uses up things like activated carbon, but I'd prefer to keep it as cryogenics because a side product of the tech is the liquified gas canisters now required for rocket launches.

I did actually reduce the amount of sulphur gas from arc furnaces recipes. I've now halved the sulphur gas requirement for making acid to compensate. I've also added ethanol which does use up some acid but replaces more acid than that in a handful of other recipes (electroplating, plastiglass).

[Deadlock989]

Have decided not to release this as a new mod, but as an update with a warning. Changing the mod name would break all of the third party mods that have made the effort to be compatible with IR2.

So much has changed now that this is almost moot - there is no guarantee the mod will work even with mods that have adapted to it ... maybe it is IR3 after all.

Things are looking closer to finished - I need to do some playthroughs, which will take many many hours.

Here is the current changelog (changes since 2.3.2).

(removed - out of date)

[rlundy]

Wow. 🤯

Are you interested in anyone else beta testing? I'd be happy to do so.

[Deadlock989]

Definitely. It will be a couple of weeks and then I'll organise it.

[Fuzzician]

Very happy to see that there is still gas in the tank for this mod.
Apologies if some of these have been mentioned, but here are some thoughts I had:

Regarding the "too many components/intermediates", I think this is fine, if there was more of a way to combine them. The mod already does this very well with the Large Frames, which are difficult to make, but are used for nearly all buildings. The only thing that was missing was something similar (let's call it "components") for the other things. Say, you could have a stack of, say, 10 "components", and you make them out of some combinations of rivets, rods, gears, etc....., and have a copper, iron, and steel (chromed), versions of these. Then, once you have automated their production, making structures could just require the large frame, and some number of components. The game Captain of Industry uses this idea, by having most things require only "construction parts" to build, but the actual process of making those parts is decently challenging (considering how early you have to do it).

Definitely felt like there was one too many material tiers. Copper, Iron, and Steel are fine, but Stainless Steel felt just unneeded. Chromed Steel was cool, because making Chromed components was a different process from making previous materials. So maybe toss Stainless, and just make Chromed larger (could even rename it to Stainless) part of the game. Some of the other materials, like Bronze, and especially Invar and Cuprenickel, were a bit too narrowly used.

One other thing that bugged me was that I could not use Steel to make machines that normally need Iron. Many machines did have Steel upgraded versions, but not all.

Best of luck. Honestly, if the factorio expansion doesn't improve sprites to at least this level of quality, I will be very disappointed. These sprites make the base feel "alive".

[Deadlock989]

Dyson Sphere Program is another example of a factory game with a series of "major components" used in nearly everything, that you incremental add to (components -> gubbins, gubbins + more components -> supergubbins, etc.) There are pros and cons to it, it certainly makes recipe design easier, I'm not convinced it is always the best gameplay. I have added a couple more tiered intermediates that (sort of) have this spirit (rotor units which include motors and small frames, radio units which are a sort of side branch of circuits - circuits were simplified). The addition of 1x1 assemblers (handling 1 ingredient component recipes only) really changes the layouts for intermediates production as well, making them more compact without really losing much complexity. Pistons and motors were supposed to have this kind of role originally and they used to be more complex, but people complained about handcrafting times for all the components they were made from and I made the mistake of listening.

Stainless steel is gone. Invar went away, then came back as nickel steel used in military applications only, but it might go away again, I keep wavering on it because I really want multiple alloys (carbon steel barely counts, leaving just bronze now that cupronickel is an electroplating thing) but there isn't really enough scope to support more than a couple.

[rlundy]

So far as the intermediates, I'll mention that the first time I ever got the Lazy Bastard achievement in Factorio was while playing IR2 (with the starter pack option, obviously). Given how long it takes to craft anything by hand in IR2, it makes more sense to automate everything, and IR2 makes it much easier with those nice time ratios: 0.4 seconds, 0.8 seconds, 1.6 seconds... So it's easy to set up an assembly-to-assembly production chain. With IR2 I've never seen the need for a big bus full of stuff because it's so straightforward to calculate exactly how many of a given product I need.

[Fuzzician]

IR is also less intense on resources. Higher tiers of materials are harder to make, but not actually that much more expensive. Compared to vanilla, where they just stack resource cost to a, frankly, absurd degree (T3 module costs are downright comical).

By the way, Deadlock, I will also be happy to help beta-test.

[aeosynth]

Will waterfill make shallow water? Otherwise waterfill mods are OP versus biters.

[Deadlock989]

Will waterfill make shallow water? Otherwise waterfill mods are OP versus biters.

It uses the vanilla tile "water-mud" which is traversable by players at a walking speed of 70% and can be landfilled but not built on with object layer entities except for special cases like offshore pumps. AFAIK this tile isn't used in vanilla map generation and I haven't tested biter behaviour with it, I assume if players can cross it then biters can pathfind across it.

[Deadlock989]

So I am largely done with a couple of playthroughs. The first was abandoned at early purple science due to making too many changes and being too distracted by biter attacks. The second was on a Rail World with biter expansion off, which let me build in peace for the second half of the game. I launched a rocket at 63 hours (although it was rushed and quite painful) and had most non-space science done by 77 hours. I didn't have to vent any gas apart from sulphurous gas and nitrogen, didn't flare any oils. I didn't void a single item except one time when I accidentally rotated a belt and had a nasty case of belt contamination.

Generally it's in a pretty good state now, I had fun, and I am quite happy with it.

I will be organising a beta this weekend most likely, not sure how to do that right now, I don't want to post download links publicly, I might make a private repository for it.

The remaining niggles:

• Nickel was a big problem for a while, especially when you hit yellow science. Until you're routinely making low density structures for science and rockets, it's very hard to use up enough copper to get enough nickel. It was made even worse by trying to get sapphire pressing going at the same time because I was rushing for field effectors (even though the mineral requirement for gem pressing recipes was reduced by a factor of 10!) I had to resort to acid-washing very early, and it was pretty challenging to slot that in to a non-endgame base. Chromium was never a problem. I am wondering if nickel and chromium should be swapped, i.e. have nickel in iron ore and chromium in copper ore (the former feels realistic, the latter really doesn't, but fuck it, it's an alien planet). Looking at production stats, iron ore is still the most used, but copper goes up to over half of iron in the late game.
• Ethanol always lags behind all the other hydocarbon fluids. With forestry being harder/bigger, it's tough to get enough wood to make ethanol for the mid-game. "Tough" might be fine though, and I have added a way of getting ethanol from natural gas in the late game. The only real problem recipe remaining which currently uses ethanol is plastiglass, it's a bit random to have it in there, I just wanted to avoid yet more acid. So I'm particularly interested in a recommendation for a better plastiglass recipe, must include plastic but I'm open about anything else.
• I feel like with the early ore 1.5x bonus from crushing and then the 2x bonus from washing, the current ore generation is incredibly easy at default settings. I was still using the starter patch copper and tin patches on reaching yellow science. I have added a mapgen preset for the mod as a recommendation but I can't make it default because the game engine doesn't allow the default map preset to make any changes to slider values. So I may tinker with the ore generation and knock down the richness a bit for all the metals.
• Even aside from the generous ores, it felt too easy to me but then I do know the mod inside out and I wasn't having to deal with evolved biters. In particular I feel like rocket launches are too cheap - the main bottleneck for them currently is getting enough hydrogen. Rockets are still following the IR1 philosophy of no/few rare metals in the actual rocket launch, but more exotic materials for satellites - maybe that needs to be looked at.
• With the addition of petroleum/ethanol/natural gas-burning fluid generators, flare stacks are now entirely redundant. Question is whether leaving them in is a nice option to have (and I spent some time on a nicer flame animation for them) or whether they constitute a "noob trap".

Current changelog:

Version: 3.0.0 Date: xx.xx.2022 New:

• Gas and steam fissures: a new kind of resource, relatively rare, but with rich output that ebbs and peaks.
• Derricks: two tiers of rig for harnessing gas fissures.
• Five-stage oil processing: continue cracking oil down to natural gas and hydrogen; bitumen; ethanol.
• Cryogenics tech: access to pure liquid oxygen and nitrogen via air separation; liquefy or boil elemental gases.
• Hydrogen cell tech: a new tier of renewable battery which never fizzles.
• Gas furnaces: steel tier version of the electric furnace, modified to run on natural gas.
• Gasification tech: convert solid fuels for an additional source of natural gas.
• Liquid fuel generator: get power directly from flammable fluids.
• Geothermal exchange tech: use hot polluted steam from fissures to boil water.
• Small assemblers: 1x1 crafting machines that can handle a subset of small component recipes.
• Bronze telescope: steam-powered radar; same sector scanning range as electric radar but smaller area reveal.
• Waterfill explosives: extend existing water tiles.
• Bottomless pit: free item voiding; can be filtered; replaces incinerators. Changes from IR2:
• Previous versions of IR made whole even numbers of machines compress belts perfectly (12 machines : 15 items/s) by setting recipe speeds to multiples of 0.8.
• IR3 achieves the same result by adjusting machine speeds to the inverse ratio instead, allowing recipes to be more readable.
• Stainless steel alloy was removed.
• Cupronickel alloy was removed and replaced by nickel electroplating.
• Invar alloy was removed and indirectly replaced by "brass" alloy.
• Tellurium was removed and replaced with platinum metal and "electrum" alloy.
• Electroplating mix items were replaced with plating solutions.
• Paper and gunpowder were removed.
• Gems are no longer mined with drills.
• The "ore multiplying" bonus from crushing and washing is now reflected in the final ingot output rather than in each processing stage.
• Forestry buildings shrank to 3x3 but they now work with entire chunks, managing local trees (see Manifesto).
• Tree beds allow trees to be "built" by hand, bot or blueprint.
• Arc furnaces were substantially reworked and now form the last part of the completely optional ore tripling chain (see Manifesto).
• Arc furnaces are smarter about configuring their input/output connectors to fit the recipe.
• Arc furnaces now accept productivity and speed modules as well as efficiency. Productivity only works for mineral recipes.
• Foundries were replaced with metal casts. These are simple unpowered 1x1 dispensers which form solid components from molten metals.
• Rods are now castable as well as ingots, plates and gears.
• Metal casts are crafted as a single item. These become ingot casts by default when placed manually. The type can then be changed in the world using the entity toggle key.
• The casting type of a placed cast is preserved in blueprints and copy-paste (but not pipetting, game engine issue).
• Oil processing was completely overhauled and has five main stages with several side branches. Refineries are back to having different recipes.
• Natural gas is the fourth fluid product of the main cracking chain. Pure hydrogen is the fifth and final product.
• Natural gas is also available in the world from fissures (very rarely).
• Ethanol can be produced by fermenting wood chips or converting natural gas.
• Lubricant is back to being produced without having to make any other liquid oils.
• Vanilla "solid fuel", which was called "petroleum coke" in IR2, is referred to as just "coke" in IR3.
• Coke is still a byproduct of petroleum processing, but can now also be made via pyrolysis of coal in electric or gas furnaces.
• Coke has half the fuel value of vanilla solid fuel (150% that of coal).
• Coke replaces carbon powder in reduction recipes (e.g. steel, silicon) and polymerisation (plastic bars).
• Graphite replaces carbon powder elsewhere (e.g. air purification, diamond pressing).
• Graphite is still made from coke, but there is also the option of converting bitumen as well (slower and dirtier).
• The beige gravel floor covering was removed. The dark gravel was replaced with tarmac (bitumen and gravel).
• Sulphurous gas is produced in the middle cracking stages. There are also sulphurous gas fissures. The sulphur chain is no longer reversible.
• "Rocket fuel" is now referred to as "high octane fuel" and is an optimal mix of petroleum and ethanol, only useful as vehicle and locomotive fuel.
• Rocket launches require liquid hydrogen and oxygen canisters instead of rocket fuel.
• Barrelled petroleum and ethanol can be used in vehicles and locomotives, returning an empty barrel.
• "Nuclear fuel" (the chemical fuel, not the reactor fuel) is not unlockable in IR3.
• Battery chargers and generators are now 3x3 buildings; a higher tier of each is now available with double the power rating.
• Battery generators can have their output priority raised and lowered using the entity toggle key.
• The laser assembler is now a specialist high energy crafting device, reserved for specific kinds of late-game recipe.
• A more conventional "advanced assembler" now fills the steel tier gap where the laser assembler used to be.
• Blank circuit boards, tin solder and optical discs were all removed. Circuit ingredients were reorganised.
• Some of the highest tech items require super-cooling with liquid nitrogen during crafting; the nitrogen is returned as gas for venting or re-liquifying.
• Rocket control unit tech was disabled; rocket control units are now unlocked by rocket silo tech.
• Transmat GUI: a map marker toggle was added; the map label is auto-updated when the transmat name is edited or the transmat is removed.
• Transmat GUI: clicking on the destination minimap opens your main map at that location.
• Transmat GUI: transmat list is sorted by name order rather than distance.
• Wooden and tin pallets are containers with 1 and 3 slots respectively, for use as small, cheap buffers without the trouble of slot barring.
• Air filters, made from gold foil and graphite, are required by air purification towers and for atmospheric distillation in cryogenic towers.
• Pollution was completely rebalanced from scratch.
• Pollution spills were reworked and now have accurate equivalence to venting or flaring the same amount of fluid.
• Magazine ammo ingredients generally use lower tier materials, and turret frames are unlocked by turret techs, making Military 2 a bit more accessible.
• Entity hit points were (mostly) standardised, based on size and material tier.
• Many other recipe changes and some new intermediate parts.
• Added a per-player setting to display a flying text notification when research completes (default is off).
• Added a per-player setting to nudge vehicle direction towards the nearest compass point while driving on artificial tiles (default is off).
• Added a mod setting which can change the map colour of belts/undergrounds/splitters to indicate their tier (default is vanilla).
• Added a recommended map generation preset.
• Manifesto updates. Assets:
• Graphics and sound were split out into several asset packs.
• A bunch of new entity sprites and item icons, and some older sprites were improved.
• New transmat ring sequence and intro cutscene.
• Improved gas venting and flaring animations.
• Improved render layer and tile alignment issues with the drop points on all three drills. Compatibility:
• IR3 is not compatible with IR2 saved games.
• "Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes" is not currently compatible: support might be added at a later date.
• "AAI Vehicles: Hauler" is no longer specially supported (replaced some time ago with the heavy roller).
• Added a remote interface for disabling the IR3 intro cutscene.
• Added a remote interface for setting per surface whether or not fissures are randomly spawned in new chunks (default is Nauvis only).
• Added a remote interface for setting per surface the radius from coordinate origin within which gem-bearing rocks are excluded (if enabled).
• The IR2 remote interface which enabled the spawning of gem-bearing ores per surface now enables the new rocks instead.
• Added a remote interface for setting or overwriting the spilled pollution value of a fluid.

[tburrows13]

• I feel like with the early ore 1.5x bonus from crushing and then the 2x bonus from washing, the current ore generation is incredibly easy at default settings. I was still using the starter patch copper and tin patches on reaching yellow science. I have added a mapgen preset for the mod as a recommendation but I can't make it default because the game engine doesn't allow the default map preset to make any changes to slider values. So I may tinker with the ore generation and knock down the richness a bit for all the metals.

Have you seen https://forums.factorio.com/88702? Even though you can't change the default sliders, Rseding seems to be claiming that you can get the effect you want by changing the prototypes. I'm not entirely sure how it all works though.

The update is looking great so far!

[Deadlock989]

Have you seen https://forums.factorio.com/88702? Even though you can't change the default sliders, Rseding seems to be claiming that you can get the effect you want by changing the prototypes. I'm not entirely sure how it all works though.

In this case the prototypes to change would be the resource prototypes, specifically their autoplace schemes. In fact IR already overwrites them, but for copper, iron and coal the values were picked to be very close to vanilla's (for IR1 I think). I am reluctant to fiddle with it because resource autoplace stuff is so unforgiving and difficult to tune - this is why gem rocks and fissures don't use autoplace but on_chunk_generated, because it's 50x easier to get balance right with that than letting map generation handle it - but I haven't ruled out doing it if necessary.

[Raymond26]

This is looking great. If you'd like another beta tester, I'd love to help!

[tuhe]

Hi deadlock!

I am very happy to see this mod is getting an update. It was my first modded play-through after vanilla and I had a lot of fun -- I especially love the soundscape, in particular walking through my old copper base, and that the design and intermediates made a bus infeasible. For the longest time I felt my base was a spaghetti mall which build a bit of science on the side.

I was considering writing these observations on the forum a long time ago, but then I saw you were stepping down from development so I didn't do it. I don't know how relevant it is with the changes, but it might still be.

Basically these are observations from my playthrough which I checked with Helmod (I.e., what happens if you want to produce all sciences including space at a stable rate using the highest-tier recipes). Sorry that I am writing this from memory.

1) The first observations is that sulfuric gas is way to easy to come by; even when selecting recipes to minimize the production, you still have to void it -- there seem to be no stable production loop of the final-tier tech that does not dramatically overproduce it. Especially one of the molten steel paths (I think it was chromed) produced a lot of excess sulfur gas. I would nerf how much sulfur gas you get across the board, but keep the option to melt raw ore for extra sulfur gas so it is easy to supplement the sulfur gas production if a player is in a pinch, or need to do a lot of acid washing for gems.

2) More importantly, I found that you need very little of the secondary ores (by secondary I mean those you get with water/acid washing) for science production, i.e. I think it is was 4% tellurium and far less of the other resources. This means water washing of ores is sufficient by a wide margin, and there is no reason to set up acid washing. I would propose two things. First, to boost the base requirement of the secondary ores in the sciencepacks to the point where you need about around 5-10% of the total mined ores to be secondary. Then secondly, I think it is fine to keep acid washing as is, but water-washing should return around 1-3% of the secondary ore. These changes combined would mean a mixed acid/water washing setup becomes necessary.

3) I think acid and water washing needs a bit more separation in the tech tree as I had them at the same time (IIRC). I would lock acid washing behind a science which needs just a little bit of a secondary-ore metal. One way to do this is to let blue science require just a single plate of lead per pack. That means a player must set up basic water washing to progress to acid washing.

[kchmielinski]

I love the idea of mini assemblers! Just recently I was thinking about what if Factorio would allow you to extend existing building to improve their usability. So instead of upgrading electric assembler to electric assembler 2, you could attach smaller buildings to it. For example something called 'module interpreter' that would essentially let you have one more module slot in the assembler with a cost of extra tile around it. The idea came from Tiberian Sun power plants.

So thank you for the mini assemblers, this will change the way we can design factories so much! btw. I know there are mods that already did it, but I just can't watch resized/tinted sprites on my screen and IR graphics are so in line with Factorio style.

[Deadlock989]

I love the idea of mini assemblers! Just recently I was thinking about what if Factorio would allow you to extend existing building to improve their usability. So instead of upgrading electric assembler to electric assembler 2, you could attach smaller buildings to it. For example something called 'module interpreter' that would essentially let you have one more module slot in the assembler with a cost of extra tile around it. The idea came from Tiberian Sun power plants.

This is exactly what I would have preferred modules and beacons to be like in vanilla. Unfortunately the game engine does not support non-square or off-centre beacon areas or I would do it in a heartbeat.

Mods like Space Exploration enforce less beacon spam by making machines shut down if more than one beacon overlaps them, I considered adding something similar to IR but there are standalone mods for that if desired ("Beacon Rebalance" by wreltaw120 and "Beacon Overhaul" by notnotmelon).

[tburrows13]

Unfortunately the game engine does not support non-square or off-centre beacon areas or I would do it in a heartbeat.

True, although I managed to work around this limitation for electric pole supply areas fairly well with the “High energy interface” in my mod Power Overload. Instead of shifting the supply area position, I just shift all the collision boxes and graphics, which works as long as the supply area position center is still within the collision box (https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=568252#p568252).

I then had to implement rotation myself by adding a separate prototype for each direction and swapping between them when the rotate button is pressed (and translating them to the new actual position so that it stays in the same visual position: https://github.com/tburrows13/PowerOverload/blob/master/scripts/power-interface.lua).

[Deadlock989]

I then had to implement rotation myself by adding a separate prototype for each direction and swapping between them when the rotate button is pressed (and translating them to the new actual position so that it stays in the same visual position: https://github.com/tburrows13/PowerOverload/blob/master/scripts/power-interface.lua).

How does that work out with rotating a blueprint? I nearly did something like this for copper labs in IR2 (labs don't support direction so for a fluid power source you have to have four symmetrical fluidboxes or nothing) but working with blueprint events is a hassle so I took the easy road.

[tburrows13]

How does that work out with rotating a blueprint? I nearly did something like this for copper labs in IR2 (labs don't support direction so for a fluid power source you have to have four symmetrical fluidboxes or nothing) but working with blueprint events is a hassle so I took the easy road.

Yeah it wouldn’t work at all for that. And the blueprint APIs are so lacking that I doubt it would be possible.

[Deadlock989]

I was considering writing these observations on the forum a long time ago, but then I saw you were stepping down from development so I didn't do it. I don't know how relevant it is with the changes, but it might still be.

Thanks for the feedback. The sulphurous gas issues you mention are, I think, somewhat better in IR3. You probably still need to vent it, but less gas is produced from fewer recipes, and pollution was also completely rebalanced - it is considerably less harsh now, for venting and everything else (fewer machines produce pollution and those that do produce less). I think it is still impossible to avoid voiding any sulphurous gas in an entire playthrough but it is now the only fluid or item in the mod where that's the case, and the penalty for venting it is now much easier to mitigate. Flare stacks have also now been removed because you can burn excess liquid fuels for energy in a generator, so I don't count that as voiding. Sulphurous gas is supposed to represent excess waste/pollution from intrinsically nasty processes: the value of venting it is is that you can choose where the pollution is emitted if you want to manage pollution spread to that extent, rather than having it all in one big hotspot where your refineries and high tech furnaces are.

With acid washing - it was never intended to be compulsory and in fact it's supposed to be a wasteful emergency measure. I did consider reducing the byproduct ratios, especially for lead and platinum (replacement for tellurium), but the 1-3% figure you mention is much too low. There is already something of a "nickel hump" in IR3 as you progress through mid-game technologies - essentially you can barely use up enough copper to get a satisfying supply of nickel until you start producing low density structures, which doesn't arrive until you're almost ready for yellow science - and that's at 25% nickel. If it were 3% you would need fields of chemplants churning out acid and have to destroy massive quantities of copper and iron just to be able to produce yellow science. Chromium is balanced similarly but since steel is in almost everything from purple science onwards, it's much less of a problem to use up enough iron. Blue science can't contain any secondary metals because washing is itself a blue science technology. I'm very wary about putting any secondary metals into anything earlier than yellow science, and doubly wary about having lead or platinum involved. Ore is so plentiful from the 1.5x bonus of ore crushing alone that you could probably launch a hundred rockets using the ore patches within 3km of your base just by alternating between crushed and washed ores as the byproduct levels ebb and flow once you have LDSs in regular production. However I'm not ruling out changing the byproduct chances, just not by that extreme amount; I am also still pondering swapping nickel and chromium's source ores since nickel is needed first and iron is always used more heavily.

[Dommedonder]

Hi deadlock. Really looking forward to IR3, played a ton of IR2. Do you have any idea on when you'll make it available?

[Deadlock989]

The mod is now live on the mod portal.