Batteries Not Included is a different take on electric vehicle mods. Rather than using equipment grids and/or wireless charging, it operates on the premise of quickly-swappable batteries that can be recharged at a dedicated charging station.
This internally uses a similar mechanism to that of uranium fuel cells and nuclear reactors. You insert battery packs into electric trains and -- when they're drained -- they produce empty battery packs which can then be removed and brought to a charging station.
The end goal for this mod is to provide alternatives to solid fuel and rocket fuel in trains which take advantage of capabilities commonly found in electric engines (such as rapid acceleration). These benefits are intended to be balanced out by both production costs and the logistics overhead of setting up a charging infrastructure.
All of the art in this mod is currently placeholder graphics and/or my terrible paint.net skills. Contributions to making it less ugly are welcome.
Discussions about balance are also welcome! Find me on Discord or the forums.
To get started, you'll need to make at least one battery pack (probably much more). Begin by researching "Heavy-Duty Battery Packs", which requires research in batteries, electric energy accumulators and electric energy distribution 2.
After that, you can create drained battery packs. Wait, drained? Yes. Before you can actually use your shiny new battery pack, you'll need to charge it. This requires a Charging Station (which currently looks suspiciously like a blue accumulator -- did you see HELP WANTED?) -- insert a drained battery pack into a charging station, wait for awhile, and a charged battery pack comes out.
Note: Other than drain, the power usage for charge stations (both types!) actually matches up with how power is going into a battery being charged.
You'll need Electric Locomotives to be able to use Battery Packs. Note that they only hold 20 battery packs (batteries have far worse energy density than fossil fuels). You can insert battery packs into locomotives just like fuel in a regular locomotive, and remove empty battery packs as well. Inserters won't remove full battery packs.
These fancy gold-label batteries hold more power and offer substantially increased vehicle performance. Of course, this means more charging time...
Charge batteries, faster.
Placeholder graphics are terrible. Did you read HELP WANTED?
Balance needs work. Did you read HELP WANTED?!
Found a bug? Please visit the Issues page to see if it has already been reported, and report it if not.
Blueprint Extensions 0.4.0 released, with new auto-landfill features
I don't normally toot my own horn as a mod author here, but every now and then I feel like I should share something. So, without further ado:
It's no joke, I've just released version 0.4.0 of Blueprint Extensions for Factorio 0.17.23+. The main new feature in this version is the ability to automatically add landfill to blueprints, along with some revamped GUI functionality.
For those new to the mod, Blueprint Extensions has a number of other useful quality-of-life tools related to blueprints:
Mirror: Mirror most blueprints. (Rails may not mirror cleanly). This correctly adjusts splitter priorities. If Gah!DarnItWater! is installed, refinery and chemical plant recipes will be mirrored as well.
Snap: Snap a blueprint so a specific corner or edge of it is under your mouse rather than the middle. Handy for lining up those large nuclear power plants and tileable solar blueprints you might have.
Update: Quickly create a brand new blueprint using the same name and icons as an existing one, optionally with an auto-incrementing version number.
Wireswap: Swap between red and green wires in your blueprint.
Rotate: Rotate an actual blueprint (rather than just your hand). Useful if you have a family of related blueprints and want them all facing the same direction in the library.
You can find the new version of Blueprint Extensions on the mod portal, or in game as usual.
Also feel free to check out Rail Tools for rail signal placement and error checking, GhostBuster to prevent mods from tearing up belts only to put the same belt back down, or the rest of my quality-of-life mods.