Since I will be a little busy with some unexpected personal stuff I won't get to write a program like proposed by sporefreak in the near future
If someone wants to do that, I would love to see something when I get a chance to play again but if not I will probably do it when I'm back

That would be a possibility
I will look into that once my ISP decides to solve their problems because mobile network isn't very good here...
But given there is a library for one of the programming languages I know that can parse or interpret Lua it should not be that complicated

Now I feel really stupid... :?

In my enthusiasm I overlooked some very important facts
It is actually not possible to make random recipes because Factorio loads recipes on start during the loading screen and it is impossible to actually modify recipes after that :cry:
At least that is what I ...

Values for what? what is the purpose of the values for those items?
You could think of these values like a price when trading with an imaginary NPC using some imaginary currency instead of $, €, ...
Since these "prices" should be derived from the crafting ingredients and the time to craft the item ...

So, here is a little update on the development status:
The core mod is now working but still unbalanced
Since I don't have any experience with balancing it would be nice if someone could help me out there by assigning reasonable values for logs, iron ore, copper ore, coal, stone, alien artifacts ...

I think this is a very cool idea and I will try to write this mod

I have thought about how to do this so that it doesn't destroy the balancing and here is what I got so far:
- Every raw material (uncraftable stuff like logs, ores and oil) get a specific value assigned, this would get some kind of ...