Development and Discussion

[OxCD]

Hello Sire

First, thank you so much for your mods, as I got already many hundreds of hours spent on B&A runs. Really loving it!

Lastly, I went deeper into ressources optimizations as I'm expanding in a larger scale with full tech tree.
I noticed something about the Lead Ingot receipes that doesn't really make sense.

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There you get the 2nd tier of receipe for Lead Ingot, and the 3rd tier, which is unlocked later.
Comparing to most of the others "last tier" receipes, this is one doesn't really help.
As you can see circled in red, the increase in term of buildings is insane (and I didn't go further into the hydrofluoric acid need). More buildings, and way more electricity.
The noticable highlight is less cost in lead ore (circled in yellow), but instead you got almost the same amount of ore you saved to add as silicone ore (circled in green).
If you're still working on ore sorting, you can't really rely on that lead consumption to reduce any silicone because they are often not tied into intermediate product. And if you are working with catalyst (as I am), silicone is more building expensive than lead, as lead ore needs crushed raw ore, but silicone needs chuncked raw ore.

All intermediate products into the refining process are dedicated to lead refining only, so you can't really even plan using those factory for something else anyway. Including this Hexafluorosilicic Acid.

Adding to that, also circled in green there's a few other things to bring into the process for 3rd tier refining (Limestone, Hydrofluoric Acid...), which make the receipe even heavier.

The oxygen you save in the process in not worth noticing in my opinion as there's plenty of easy way to make Oxygen, and it's often from nothing.

Last point, you get slag from 3rd tier. You need to deal with this to avoid any bottleneck as compared to gas/liquid, you can't vent "as it is". Yes I know, slag means landfill, but the amount it produces is too small to be significant, but it's still there so you have to include the logistic as you can't let it bottleneck.

I don't mind going into more complex receipes for higher-tier, and I usually like it, even if the ressource saving is still minimal, and even if it costs more Watts, but as it stands I really feel the ressource cost is probably worse for the 3rd tier receipe...

So my suggestion would be revisiting the ressources needed into this! I really like the complexity of the receipe, but I really don't see any benefit from using it as it is.

Have a very good day!
OxCD

[lovely_santa]

Hi all,

Small issue on a recent run. As part of Angels Exploration, I see that the biters and their respective evolution and expansion are off by default. I have changed the settings so they now spawn and expand, but no matter what I do, the evolution is always off.

Is their any interaction with Rampant that would cause this or am I just missing something obvious?

(First post on the forums, so sorry if it shouldn't be in this thread)

My suspicion is that you changed the settings bars, but did not enable the checkbox itself?

[leeux]

How do you research this?

Tech tree showing a tech that I don't know how to research

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AFAICT, there are no labs that accept those artifacts as research items, and I already have ~150 of them in my storage from biters I killed, but I can't find a way of marking that tech as researched. I probably got those from before the mod updated, perhaps?

I'm closer to end game now and I want to make bullets and I'd want to have access to the piercing bullets, so researching this is a must before I can get to that.

These type of techs, they were not there last time I played through the mod, so it's something new for me... It must have been added in one of the recent updates, right? I normally pay attention to patch notes, etc. but I honestly don't remember any of this being mentioned :/

I don't want to go around killing biters for no reason, if that's what it takes... there must be a non-tedious way to get this researched, right?

I'm playing a game where I focus mostly on controlling pollution so biters don't attack me unless I bother them, and I pushed them out sufficiently far away that in order to make them attack I'd have to generate an humongous amount of pollution first, and I'd prefer not to have to do that.

[TruePoosh]

this item is insanely overpowered

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so little cost for eternal, infinite 15MW of energy generation

this can be an eternal 15MW generator, that's just insane for the cost

that's the equivalent of 38 burner generators for a few pieces of iron and a few orange circuits

the one from the base game below seems a little bit more balanced, high cost, 20x less energy generated, but since we have the C.A.B, I don't think we should have any infinite source of energy for vehicles, as this will be effectively an infinite generator

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[KiwiHawk]

How do you research this?

AFAICT, there are no labs that accept those artifacts as research items, and I already have ~150 of them in my storage from biters I killed, but I can't find a way of marking that tech as researched. I probably got those from before the mod updated, perhaps?

These type of techs, they were not there last time I played through the mod, so it's something new for me... It must have been added in one of the recent updates, right? I normally pay attention to patch notes, etc. but I honestly don't remember any of this being mentioned :/

I don't want to go around killing biters for no reason, if that's what it takes... there must be a non-tedious way to get this researched, right?

I'm playing a game where I focus mostly on controlling pollution so biters don't attack me unless I bother them, and I pushed them out sufficiently far away that in order to make them attack I'd have to generate an humongous amount of pollution first, and I'd prefer not to have to do that.

You research these techs by killing something that drops one of the artifacts. Yes, these techs have been added recently.

There are recipes for automating production of these artifacts. That really should unlock the techs too! I'll pass on that feedback to the dev who implemented this.

[leeux]

<snip>There are recipes for automating production of these artifacts. That really should unlock the techs too! I'll pass on that feedback to the dev who implemented this.

Thank you! I'll try that, I was half-expecting for that not to work, that's why I didn't went that route yet in my base, or else I'd have probably found out!

If I may, perhaps a suggestion I'd give would be to count artifacts on the player inventory at any given time towards what's needed to unlock it. I realize that it may be harder than it sounds, and I don't know what kind of tools you have scripting wise to do this without creating a loophole that'd allow to break this counting. But, I'd think that if you at any point have in your inventory more artifacts than needed to unlock this kind of techs, they should mark as researched, no matter from where you got them! I realize that only matters now during transitions from old bases to new bases... but, you never know.

Best wishes o/

[KiwiHawk]

<snip>There are recipes for automating production of these artifacts. That really should unlock the techs too! I'll pass on that feedback to the dev who implemented this.

Thank you! I'll try that, I was half-expecting for that not to work, that's why I didn't went that route yet in my base, or else I'd have probably found out!

To clarify: the only gameplay way to unlock the techs is killing something. Automating production of the artifacts should unlock the techs but currently does not.

[leeux]

<snip>There are recipes for automating production of these artifacts. That really should unlock the techs too! I'll pass on that feedback to the dev who implemented this.

Thank you! I'll try that, I was half-expecting for that not to work, that's why I didn't went that route yet in my base, or else I'd have probably found out!

To clarify: the only gameplay way to unlock the techs is killing something. Automating production of the artifacts should unlock the techs but currently does not.

Ah gotcha! Thank you, I misunderstood that! No worries, I'm almost done with the game atm. I was expecting I'd need to expand and create walls, and wanted to rush better ammo before doing that just to avoid having to upgrade the ammo later, but in the end I was able to scale up science and launch several rockets without too much more pollution being created, so there was no need for walls or defense at all. The tree farms absorbing pollution around the base worked much better than I thought at first!

[Marisa]

Let me know if this is the wrong place to post this, I'm playing through the sea block mod at the moment but this is more specifically about the buildings that come from Angel's mods so I'm bringing it up here. And sorry if this has been brought up already but there's hundreds of pages of posts so I can't check.

Some of the buildings such as the hydro plants from Angel's Refining have the fluid/gas outputs offset from the corner of the building by 1 tile, this allows you to place the multiple copies of the buildings next to each other without mixing the fluid/gas outputs from the next building along. Example:

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However some of the buildings from Angel's Petrochemical Processing, such as the electrolyser have the fluid/gas outputs right on the corner of the building. In this case if the recipe has two fluid/gas outputs then placing two of these next to each other will mean the fluid/gas will mix with the building next to it, forcing you to place them one tile apart. Example:

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I know you can still place them directly next to each other if you just use underground pipes directly from the output so no fluid/gas ever mixes, but that's a different pipe design paradigm and I just thought it's odd that some buildings have the output placements offset from the corner and others don't. Is this an intentional design decision?
Some buildings being able to be placed directly next to each other and others not seems inconsistent to me, so I thought I'd ask if about it. Again if this is something unique to sea block let me know and I can post this over there instead.

[KiwiHawk]

Some buildings being able to be placed directly next to each other and others not seems inconsistent to me, so I thought I'd ask if about it. Again if this is something unique to sea block let me know and I can post this over there instead.

Yes, posting here about this is fine. I believe it was a deliberate design choice. However, when Factorio 2.0 comes out, you will be able to place electrolysers directly next to each other without issue as you will be able to flip the outputs of every second one!

[Marisa]

However, when Factorio 2.0 comes out, you will be able to place electrolysers directly next to each other without issue as you will be able to flip the outputs of every second one!

I had thought about that, and many other incoming QoL improvements. I just wanted to check if there was something I'm missing regarding these buildings because some outputs are easier to tile than others. Speaking of Factorio 2.0 do you foresee any compatibility issues between these mods and all the upcoming QoL stuff? Mainly the base game improvements and not SE. I imagine things like placing blueprints should be pretty seamless but I've also seen things like red and green wires becoming free when crafting them is an essential part of sea block science. Do we get to place red and green wires for circuit networks for free (which we can already do via blueprints) but still need to craft them for science? I think most QoL stuff should be part of the base game rather than the SE expansion, so disabling SE will only avoid the biggest changes like quality.

I don't know if I'll be able to complete my sea block playthrough before the expansion so I don't want to accidentally break my save file by loading into it after the update.

[KiwiHawk]

Speaking of Factorio 2.0 do you foresee any compatibility issues between these mods and all the upcoming QoL stuff? Mainly the base game improvements and not SE. I imagine things like placing blueprints should be pretty seamless but I've also seen things like red and green wires becoming free when crafting them is an essential part of sea block science. Do we get to place red and green wires for circuit networks for free (which we can already do via blueprints) but still need to craft them for science? I think most QoL stuff should be part of the base game rather than the SE expansion, so disabling SE will only avoid the biggest changes like quality.

I don't know if I'll be able to complete my sea block playthrough before the expansion so I don't want to accidentally break my save file by loading into it after the update.

I've already started making lists of things I'll need to update for 2.0. I'll do my best to make sure everything transfers over seamlessly! Yes, I the wires for science in Sea Block (actually from Science Cost Tweaker) will become separate items from the circuit network wires.

At least initially, I expect most of Angel's and several of Bob's mods will be incompatible with Space Age.

If you're interested in Sea Block specific discussions, come join us on the Sea Block discord! https://discord.gg/veAEAbGSaB