Are additional 'step' nodes, especially neolithic, a welcome addition?

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

At the moment, there's only a couple steps added in the neolithic area. Do you want to keep this mod very 'slim', and basically only restrict what's already restricted, or would you accept PRs that add 'weight'?

In particular, while addressing #2, there's:

1. A lot of Vanilla Furniture Expanded - Art content, and simply branching it all off of 'Crafting facilities' feels a little silly. I'm tempted to add an additional stepping-stone of 'Artistry', lock the vanilla Art Bench behind that, and then use that stone to also lock all the modded artistic/neolithic/medieval content. Similarly, maybe an 'Protective clothing' node, move some of the vanilla neolithic armor into it, then lock some of the Factions Expanded: Classical content behind that.

2. In a slightly different vein, some of the mods avoid adding any tech at all - for instance, all the absurd variety of Vanilla Cooking Expanded foods are available in the neolithic era (I'm sorry? Gourmet chocolate desserts? When you can't even build a campfire? Uhhhhhh,). I'm planning to add separate 'Luxurious food' (locking fine/lavish meals) node, which is fine because there's some vanilla content to lock behind that ... but I'm also tempted to add a 'Desserts' technology, which would have no content if I added it to Stepping Stones instead of to my patch-mod. I could add it to my patch-mod, but then others patching Stepping Stones might not use the same tech ... not sure which approach is best.

Would you accept such changes in a PR? Is that within scope for your vision of this mod?

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

Further node additions:

• 'Fire' or similar, for torches, campfires, and prereq for prepared food, smithing

Also, I'd like to lock additional vanilla things behind techs that already exist:

• Some ideology structures behind, well, 'Structures'
• Ditto for vanilla's wooden bridges (I can then add VFE: Architect's bridges behind the same thing)
• pen markers, egg boxes, plant pots go in, idk, 'Agriculture'?
• spike traps and sandbags probably belong in 'Structure' although i'm a little less sure of that one

[PeteTimesSix]

Oh, I meant to reply to this.

I'd rather keep things lean. There are other mods that aim for adding an entire neolithic research tree - the ones I added mostly exist for the purposes of the main mod generating ancestor research opportunities. As a rule, Id like to only add research projects if code can be written to automatically assign relevant defs to it (though Ive personally broken that rule a bit already, so a compelling argument otherwise would convince me).

Similarly, Id like to avoid potentially empty nodes. The main mod deals poorly with them, anyway. Possibly I could come up with some checker that would autoremove them when empty? The issue with that would be that unless I hardcode it (which I try to avoid), it would also end up removing modded empty techs that might be empty intentionally as unlock triggers for mod functionality. Its something to consider.