Friday Facts #399 - Trash to Treasure

[Svip]

I think those white blobs on the map are actually hiding the new enemy spawners. They look like they were drawn in paint to cover something up, and not like something in-game. The fff says the small islands have some "special significance", and are surrounded by a moat. That sounds like they could be a challenge for the player to invade and clear out, to claim the rich scrap.

They do look like they were drawn in paint to cover something up. Maybe friendly fulgorans ? with a compilatron face ? the last remains on Fulgora are their mining drones in desperate search for holmium ready to turn the player equipment to scrap or to get repaired ? Maybe they are entrances to some tunnels under fulgora... I was in no need to have my attention even more caught but there you are x)

Considering the fine dots of white around some of the blobs, I suspect that they were not painted over, but simply recoloured from red to white. (That or they will be white on the map. Or another colour.) They must clearly be enemies (or some hazard), but since they are behind a moat, when will they become a threat? Are they flying?

[Agamemnon]

I think the problem is some of us just. can't. ever. throw things away. Everything mined must also be used for higher goals like growing the factory or perforating wildlife... eventually, but not recycled into nothingness. And that means the need to store it until then. It's a Dragon thing...

Anyway... I can imagine how many knots Earendel had to tie his fingers into all week to not spoil a thing, because this FFF elevated the already neat new planet from nice but marginal oddity biome to intriguing planning- and logistics puzzle. Suddenly the recycling machines and the quality modules make a lot more sense and gain a purpose beyond getting slightly better stuff by grinding out excessively more of the same stuff! Maybe thats what those Aliens were doing until they recycled their entire biosphere...

Anyway, the physics nerd in me also can't shut up about how strange it is to have surface liquid heavy oil, ground lightning and rare frozen water exist next to each other... There is certainly no oxygen in that atmosphere and it must be pretty high pressure and density or something even more strange is going on with the temperature.

[mmmPI]

Are they flying?

That would be cool and a nightmare at the same time x), great incentive to go on those plateau and stop the source of the swarm, and it would also make sense to have some 'nest' of flying biters on elevated land but as you can't build in the oily sands, it would be difficult to protect rails.

I had played a game on archipelado map with a mod allowing biters to swim, and had to build defence around every single island, but couldn't protect the rails bridges joining them without landfilling around. In the end i attempted to destroy every nest that could spawn an attack, given their limited area of allowed spawn for new nest of only little islands, it was easier to go on the offensive instead.

It does yield a totally different feel when playing, forces you out of confort zone, which is harsh sometimes, thinking "every game" without some proper means to deal with flying ennemies.

[mmmPI]

I think the problem is some of us just. can't. ever. throw things away. Everything mined must also be used for higher goals like growing the factory or perforating wildlife... eventually, but not recycled into nothingness. And that means the need to store it until then. It's a Dragon thing...

Hey but that's not a problem, you can think of it as growing in the atmosphere of Fulgora some diverse particules which are necessary for the evolution of biters. They are not thrown away, just stored in the atmosphere under the form of smoke for them to inhale later, that's a dragon thing too no ?

Anyway, the physics nerd in me also can't shut up about how strange it is to have surface liquid heavy oil, ground lightning and rare frozen water exist next to each other... There is certainly no oxygen in that atmosphere and it must be pretty high pressure and density or something even more strange is going on with the temperature.

Is it possible that the surface oil is not "heavy oil" but regular surface oil like was used in history to make wooden boat impermeable to water, but it get some residual mixed in during the recycling process and is treated as heavy oil after it ?

Maybe some of the toxic residuals are extracted with liquid carbon dioxyde or something very cold that would condense the few traces of atmospheric water in Fulgora into little ice that need to be dealt with for the recycler maintenance, depending on the weather condition it's not always the case but on average there is a % of "ice" as output ?

The ground lighthing is caused by the sand, it is holmium sand, i just read on wikipedia it has the strongest magnetic permeability, i don't know what it means, but that can't be a coincidence right ?

[Svip]

Are they flying?

That would be cool and a nightmare at the same time x), great incentive to go on those plateau and stop the source of the swarm, and it would also make sense to have some 'nest' of flying biters on elevated land but as you can't build in the oily sands, it would be difficult to protect rails.

I had played a game on archipelado map with a mod allowing biters to swim, and had to build defence around every single island, but couldn't protect the rails bridges joining them without landfilling around. In the end i attempted to destroy every nest that could spawn an attack, given their limited area of allowed spawn for new nest of only little islands, it was easier to go on the offensive instead.

It does yield a totally different feel when playing, forces you out of confort zone, which is harsh sometimes, thinking "every game" without some proper means to deal with flying ennemies.

I would be very surprised if the enemies on Fulgora do not interact in some interesting way with the lightning and the oil sands. Maybe they cannot attack during lightning storms? Or worse, it makes them more powerful? The FFF makes clear that lightning rods cover a larger low-lying area when placed on a plateau. This could also be important for the enemies. Are the moats keeping us out or keeping them in? If the latter, why would we ever break the moat? We also saw no indications of how the moats look, compared to the oil sands and cliffs.

[meganothing]

...
Imagine a scenario where I am deep in the middle of a colossal overhaul project on Nauvis that consumes holmium ore and some stone/concrete.

I spot a few production lines needing more raw material. The bottleneck is at Fulgora. Do I stop the overhaul project halfway through and head to Fulgora now? Or do I finish what I can on Nauvis and then head over to Fulgora later?

I had assumed the spidertrons and the extended map functionalities are the means to work on planets you already colonized and left. So maintaining or extending your base, including fixing unexpected problems on a previous planet should be possible without going back.

...

I would not void stone/concrete or solid fuels since there is a hidden reason why WUBE decided to settle on an 11% chance of concrete/stone and 7% for solid fuels for preliminary game balancing.

Those numbers are unusually high given the most common chance of 2% from four items: battery, processing circuits, steel plates, and copper wires.

The hidden reason why Wube would have added so much stone could simply be to provide the "puzzle" how to get rid of it. Granted it is not much of a puzzle when all one needs is a condition "if storage chest is full, void stone".

[Tertius]

Is it possible that the surface oil is not "heavy oil" but regular surface oil like was used in history to make wooden boat impermeable to water, but it get some residual mixed in during the recycling process and is treated as heavy oil after it ?

May be the surface oil is the bodily remains of the previous population of Fulgora.

[MeduSalem]

Those numbers are unusually high given the most common chance of 2% from four items: battery, processing circuits, steel plates, and copper wires.

All of those are consumed in larger quantities by a 1000 SPM megabase. Stop and think about this briefly and realize that Stone/concrete and solid fuel exist in higher amounts than copper wires (typically, players will have far more assemblers doing copper wires than anything else).

Currently, stone is not required to produce a rocket/satellite. I can't think of anything and don't even use that much wall or anything made with stone. What would require a non-trivial amount of stone?

The idea that we will require far more stones only magnifies my concern because different players use different amounts of each resource and are more likely to run into the buffer storage issue at some point without a proper warehouse (think thousands of inventory slots).

If you cannot rid yourself of your compulsive "hoarding"-habit then that is a you-problem. Void the stuff you know you will never realistically need. And if it means for a huge mega base to build 100 speed-beacon-buffed Recyclers to deal with it, then so be it. It is only a game and not like you are throwing real life gold bars into the trash. I won't go to lengths to repeat myself about that.

And if you eventually can come to the conclusion that there might be an (additional) use for all the stuff like new recipes or endless research, or even recipes that may reduce the need of scrap mining over time, or whatever and that there may be a legitimate reason for why the percentages are like that and that maybe you will not run into such a huge stockpile of stuff if you start using all the provided resource sinks... then we are also back to square 1... where you are raising concerns for no good reason. ^^

[XT-248]

You raised the concern of solid fuel (and stone, and other similar items) causing the system to back up. It was pointed out to you, that barring any other means of properly using the stuff, a backup could still be avoided by voiding it via recycling. This, of course, should be a last resort method, but it's still a valid method.

In the case of solid fuel, though, this shouldn't cause a backup because as you've pointed out, it should always be needed. Yes, you can and most likely will be producing solid fuel from the oil fields, too. But you can very easily give solid fuel from scrap priority on being used. Same goes for any of the products gotten from scrap.

You also asked earlier about a source for whether or not stone and the like actually can be voided. I don't know if someone answered that, or if there is for sure an official source, but look at it like this: it can be taken as fact that (as of now, anyway) stone can be fed into the recyclers. It's shown in the gifs. With this in mind, does it make any sense at all from a design standpoint to allow something to be fed into a recycler, consume energy and time, and then output the same item unchanged 1:1? No, it doesn't. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can feed stone in, then it's going to output ~25% quantity of what you put in, voiding the rest. It also stands to reason, that if you can feed in stone ore which can't be broken down any, then you can feed in other products that can't be broken down further for one reason or another.

Okay, you have something. Can you elaborate on where and which GIF that stone ends up in recyclers? I asked for a source several pages ago.

Even if I assume that the recycler indeed does consume stone, there is a good chance that I will go with a different approach because having more raw materials is always 'better' than sinking them.

I'm not sure i can, at this point you might need a specialist.

I came here to give constructive criticism, and you responded with an awkward phrase.

I gave you some feedback on how to improve the phrase. If you disagree with that advice, fine. Please don't make it personal and weird by suggesting I see a specialist for something unknown.

look =>

if you look at the receipe for recycling ,you can see 5% stone 1% holmium and this is fixed, this is not going to change over time if you keep using that receipe so yes it is FIXED.

*snipped for brevity*

( say you have an animal that has 4 leg, this is a four legged animal, four refers to legs, which takes ed because 4-legged is used as adjective on the word animal, maybe it's my english that is wrong, how do you call an income that has a ratio of X and Y that is fix over time ? )

I have played with mods with similar mechanic of "fixed income ratio" it has never been a problem when you have means to recycle material or turn the excess into other things, and here you can just use the recycler to make material disapear, so there is :
1) no reason for them to block, just route the blocking material as input of the recycler, problem solved. (like the setup on the FFF )
2) no reason to scale storage of anything, since no material will acumulate, since you use the recycler on those.

I wish i could help you understand better, but when i see we are still there i think it's not working, Factorio is a "difficult" game, maybe it's the kind of things you will understand after a bit of time when you can actually use the recycler to prevent your holmium production to stall it would make more sense ?

What you just described sounds like percent, a 50% chance of head, or a 50% chance of tail, by flipping a coin.

Also, pay attention that this is going to my last post on this subject: If you count the percentages of all byproducts from scrap processing up to a total percentile, It is far less than 100%.

That means a significant percentage of processing scrap will produce no 'income' for your factory.

I had assumed the spidertrons and the extended map functionalities are the means to work on planets you already colonized and left. So maintaining or extending your base, including fixing unexpected problems on a previous planet should be possible without going back.

The last time I checked, Spidertron is a late-game technology, as of Factorio 1.1 that is, and rocket silo is available after red/green/blue science in Space Age. That means people can select Fulgora as the first destination and have a significant factory on Fulgora for some time without access to Spidertron.

Obviously, I will not do that: select Fulgora as the first destination.

If you cannot rid yourself of your compulsive "hoarding"-habit then that is a "you"-problem. Void the stuff you know you will never realistically need. And if it means for a huge mega base to build 100 speed-beacon-buffed Recyclers to deal with it, then so be it. It is only a game and not like you are throwing real life gold bars into the trash. I won't go to lengths to repeat myself about that.

And if you eventually can come to the conclusion that there might be an (additional) use for all the stuff like new recipes or endless research or whatever and that there may be a legitimate reason for why the percentages are like that and that maybe you will not run into such a huge stockpile of stuff if you start using all the provided resource sinks... then we are also back to square 1... where you are raising concerns for no good reason. ^^

I am not interested in your 'opinion' about my approach to problems since this is a video game about finding your solutions.


Now, we are circling back to my experience of dealing with recipes like this, and they have an unhealthy tendency to backfill up.

Even assuming there will be a 'sink' recipe for all these extra stones. I use a different amount of stone in Factorio than others because I found a different solution; there is nothing wrong with that.

[MeduSalem]

I am not interested in your 'opinion' about my approach to problems since this is a video game about finding your solutions.

Good. Now I know you are an absolute troll arguing for the sake of it; or helpless fool. Maybe even both. ^^

[aka13]

I am not interested in your 'opinion' about my approach to problems since this is a video game about finding your solutions.

Good. Now I know you are an absolute troll. Have fun with your "immeasurable suffering" because of overflowing virtual items. There are psychologists who may be able to help you with your compulsive disorder tho. :>

"Everyone I don't like is mentally ill and a troll", very healthy and constructive attitude.

[MeduSalem]

"Everyone I don't like is mentally ill and a troll", very healthy and constructive attitude.

In this regard... yes. Because there were several people who suggested solutions to this concerns and when they were legit and he had no arguments left he went on "I am not interested in your opinion".

That is baiting people into arguing for the sake of it. Also known as trolling.

And a compulsive hoarding disorder is a mental illness by definition, and one that can be helped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_disorder

[FuryoftheStars]

You raised the concern of solid fuel (and stone, and other similar items) causing the system to back up. It was pointed out to you, that barring any other means of properly using the stuff, a backup could still be avoided by voiding it via recycling. This, of course, should be a last resort method, but it's still a valid method.

In the case of solid fuel, though, this shouldn't cause a backup because as you've pointed out, it should always be needed. Yes, you can and most likely will be producing solid fuel from the oil fields, too. But you can very easily give solid fuel from scrap priority on being used. Same goes for any of the products gotten from scrap.

You also asked earlier about a source for whether or not stone and the like actually can be voided. I don't know if someone answered that, or if there is for sure an official source, but look at it like this: it can be taken as fact that (as of now, anyway) stone can be fed into the recyclers. It's shown in the gifs. With this in mind, does it make any sense at all from a design standpoint to allow something to be fed into a recycler, consume energy and time, and then output the same item unchanged 1:1? No, it doesn't. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can feed stone in, then it's going to output ~25% quantity of what you put in, voiding the rest. It also stands to reason, that if you can feed in stone ore which can't be broken down any, then you can feed in other products that can't be broken down further for one reason or another.

Okay, you have something. Can you elaborate on where and which GIF that stone ends up in recyclers? I asked for a source several pages ago.

This was pointed out quite a few pages back, and by at least one or two other people besides:

The last time I checked, you can not recycle solid fuel (liquid) or stone (already in its rawest form and can not be processed further).

[...]

None of the visible belts in this footage have a stone outlet through inserters or splitters for the main loop. The secondary row of the recycler on the right area doesn't count, as none of them grabbed or consumed stone. The bottom splitter does not have an outlet and is used to merge incoming items into the main loop.

So, actually, you can, and it is visible in that video. Watch the third inserter from the bottom, middle row. It grabs and inserts some stone ore at one point.

Even if I assume that the recycler indeed does consume stone, there is a good chance that I will go with a different approach because having more raw materials is always 'better' than sinking them.

This is, of course, your choice, and I completely respect that. But it doesn't mean that the balance should be changed so that voiding never has to be done.


Edit: And here was someone else's response where they also mention seeing ice being trashed, which further supports (at least) solid fuel being trashable (if needed/desired):

The last time I checked, you can not recycle solid fuel (liquid) or stone (already in its rawest form and can not be processed further).
...
None of the visible belts in this footage have a stone outlet through inserters or splitters for the main loop. The secondary row of the recycler on the right area doesn't count, as none of them grabbed or consumed stone. The bottom splitter does not have an outlet and is used to merge incoming items into the main loop.

According to the gif you posted, stone can be trashed in that recycler. Look closer at the second row, third inserter from the bottom. I didn't see solid fuel being trashed, but I did see ice being thrown to that recycler, so solid fuel can be, too, I suppose.

[Tertius]

not like you are throwing real life gold bars into the trash.

But it feels like it!

You're right of course. I am also one of the guys who try to painstakingly use up all given resources, even useless junk, and not to throw anything away. One man's junk may be the most precious resource for another man.

However, I get it when it's time to throw something away, and then I will throw it away. I'm completely open to all the recycling mechanics, because I can only judge the feeling of it, when I get hands on the game and try it myself. The current argument is something I don't understand. Nobody can currently know how all this actually works out. In general, I appreciate new mechanics as addition instead of more of the same mechanics. Higher entertainment value. The recycler mechanics is definitely something new and worth exploring.

The only thing I hope doesn't happen is that new mechanics completely obsolete and replace old mechanics by just being better/more efficient. I would like to have a rock/paper/scissors challenge where every mechanics has its pro and contra and in some situation this mechanics is better and in another situation that mechanics - and both achieving the same result in the end.

[MeduSalem]

not like you are throwing real life gold bars into the trash.

But it feels like it!

You're right of course. I am also one of the guys who try to painstakingly use up all given resources, even useless junk, and not to throw anything away. One man's junk may be the most precious resource for another man.

However, I get it when it's time to throw something away, and then I will throw it away.

It is not like I do not know the feeling. As I wrote in an earlier post, I am also one to refrain from trashing items (no matter the game) when I know there will be a reasonable future use for them. Sometimes keeping stuff around for unnecessarily long time periods where the things have long since outlived their usefulness. ^^

But yea, when I realize I have so much I will never use it... and when I running out of space or has other side effects... I mean... what is the point of keeping it. It is likely I will eventually abandon a playthrough before I ever get to use it all up. And even if I need more, more can be mined beyond the horizon. ^^


I remember in one of my playthroughs I was like "I need to mine absolutely everything before I am allowed to build there".
So I mined out everything. And eventually I had this huuuuge array of like 50x50 of logistics chests or something (that barely fit between max-distance roboports) filled wtih Stone as a result.
First I started to pave the factory with concrete. Then I used landfill to fill entire lakes up. Still it was sooo much stone.
Eventually I was annoyed by it because I couldn't walk through it and every time I had to go around it. And I wanted to use that area for something else. I wanted to transfer it to another place (where I also started stockpiling stuff already), but the bots would have been busy for forever.

Eventually I was like "Meh, this is pointless". So I eventually grabbed my shotgun and blasted all the chests away. And that was the end of like 5mil stone or whatever was left in the chests. Plus whatever the chests cost in raw materials to craft. Plus all the electrical energy and other effort that went into mining the stuff out in the first place. ^^
I did not cry after it.


If having to be wasteful like that as a last resort because the game provides no better, more valuable resource sink... is "nice" game design or not... is a whole different topic altogether.

But at no point it is really that much of a reason to be concerned or sentimental about it.

I mean on the contrary, the game basically throws you sooo much stuff in your face that you don't have to be stingy about it. You can do with it whatever you want.

Blast it all off into space in the expansion and just to dump it off the space platforms into the space, becoming the systems biggest space litterer. Seed the materials for it become an artificial moon in aeons from now. Because why the hell not. xD

There totally should be an achievement for that for launching ungodly amounts Stone into orbit and dumping it to space. ^^

I'm completely open to all the recycling mechanics, because I can only judge the feeling of it, when I get hands on the game and try it myself. The current argument is something I don't understand. Nobody can currently know how all this actually works out. In general, I appreciate new mechanics as addition instead of more of the same mechanics. Higher entertainment value. The recycler mechanics is definitely something new and worth exploring.

I am looking forward to it as well because there sure are a lot of things we still not know yet.


And I agree that some people are unnecessarily concerned.

I have confidence in the devs, I mean they have been working on this game for over 10 years and I have been watching the game since the early days in EA. They playtest the game a lot, so I am sure they will have reasons for why they picked that ratio. And if not, well at least we have a way to get rid of excess without having to blast the chests. xP

At least I doubt there will be scenarios were one runs into a hard deadlock by game-design because one overproduces something. If there is temporary deadlock, then because the player wasn't pro-active enough about preventing it with the tools provided. And that is then rather more a "player"-problem rather than a game-design-problem. Because one could have done something about it. And that is already true for some of the other processes in the game where you might run into a temporary deadlock.

And also not like the scrap recipe has unpredictable behavior. The ratio is fixed. There is nothing random about it. Because of the way it has also to work with Multiplayer, by it is an algorithm with a replicate-able pattern, so eventually you will get that ratio of items over certain time period which averages out to the ratio. Which means one can reliabily predict how much stuff it will be and how much of it one might not use... hence scale the "auto trash" accordingly, if even necessary. ^^

[Tertius]

And also not like the scrap recipe has unpredictable behavior. The ratio is fixed. There is nothing random about it. Because of the way it has also to work with Multiplayer, by it is an algorithm with a replicate-able pattern

Definitely. The only thing that can go wrong is if the random number generator doesn't produce equally distributed numbers. But since this is a decades old mathematical challenge, I assume current game developers have properly working random number generators in their library.

[FuryoftheStars]

I had assumed the spidertrons and the extended map functionalities are the means to work on planets you already colonized and left. So maintaining or extending your base, including fixing unexpected problems on a previous planet should be possible without going back.

The last time I checked, Spidertron is a late-game technology, as of Factorio 1.1 that is, and rocket silo is available after red/green/blue science in Space Age. That means people can select Fulgora as the first destination and have a significant factory on Fulgora for some time without access to Spidertron.

As rocket tech has been moved, it's possible a lot of other techs have been moved. Though we won't know, yet. That aside, simply replace "spidertron" with "bots". The same concept would apply to any planet, really, though.

[mmmPI]

I would be very surprised if the enemies on Fulgora do not interact in some interesting way with the lightning and the oil sands. Maybe they cannot attack during lightning storms? Or worse, it makes them more powerful?

That would be fun, at night you have heavy lightning and during the day flying ennemies spitting fire on the oil sands and attacking trains ?

May be the surface oil is the bodily remains of the previous population of Fulgora.

Woah that's so dark i like it x) Though that would have to be a population even more ancient than those who built the ruins. Since it would take millions years for that oil to form and the ruins would have fully dismantled to dust. Like Fulgorans dinosaurs.

Definitely. The only thing that can go wrong is if the random number generator doesn't produce equally distributed numbers. But since this is a decades old mathematical challenge, I assume current game developers have properly working random number generators in their library.

Dealing with unknown or rigged ratios is a nice puzzle too ! Say every game or day has a biais and you don't know it, it should be possible to make different contraptions to identifiy such biais by repeating tests up to a certain high number to get significant stats, and then abuse the uneven distribution a PID controller properly configured could do that no ?

Can you elaborate on where and which GIF that stone ends up in recyclers? I asked for a source several pages ago.

If you look carefully on the video from this FFF =>https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sy ... ycling.mp4
The 3rd recycler from the bottom on the right side has an inserter putting stone in it sometimes.

Even if I assume that the recycler indeed does consume stone there is a good chance that I will go with a different approach because having more raw materials is always 'better' than sinking them.

Let's make this wild assumption, then i wish you good luck on your different approach, you can use recycler, or stone in rails or furnace for science, or export in other planet, or store it, or use ligthning to destroy it. And you will find some more , that's great ! Really no reason to complain then x).

Now, we are circling back to my experience of dealing with recipes like this, and they have an unhealthy tendency to backfill up.

Yes but it is self-inflicting if it is because your different approach is not working though. ( this is what i called an arbitrary restriction you put on yourself) There are workings ones too, which you could use as fallback in case.

I am not interested in your 'opinion' about my approach to problems since this is a video game about finding your solutions.

You can see it as feedback to improve your different approach so as to avoid the tendancy to backfill up !

I gave you some feedback on how to improve the phrase. If you disagree with that advice, fine. Please don't make it personal and weird by suggesting I see a specialist for something unknown.

The thing i asked is how to call an income with a ratio of X and Y that stay fix overtime so that i could make you understood better why the recycler bloking because of material that they could recycle is a player mistake and not a game design flaw imo but you didn't answer with alternatives that made sense to me that would be as easy to use as "income of fixed ratio" or something along those lines.

When you asked me specifically for help to understand and i provided with a disclaimer, because i'm no english native you may need to see someone more specialized than me to explain you the words. I provided more details on what i meant because you asked and seemed to have difficulty to understand,but since you're good now there's no need for me to rephrase it, you got it eventually that you could compare recycling scrap and refining oil, at a different scale. It took some time, and several players to explain, so maybe it was not far fetched to say you needed special attention/ explanation. Like a specialist would do. Yes this is a personnal answer adressed to you specifically because you quoted me asking the question.

What you just described sounds like percent, a 50% chance of head, or a 50% chance of tail, by flipping a coin.

And at the end you have 100% chance to have answer, either one or the other, but having a result is guarantee ! Thanks to this it is possible to use the law of large number and with repetition on average you achieve 50% head and 50% tails ! with increasing certainty, that's a whole branch of mathematics. It's good you have some reference it should help understanding that if you repeat a lot the recycling process you will get closer and closer to achieve exactly the ratio of the receipe.

Also, pay attention that this is going to my last post on this subject: If you count the percentages of all byproducts from scrap processing up to a total percentile, It is far less than 100%.

Attention paid,i agree, nothing i would want to contradict.

[juh9870]

gap that's larger than (basic quality) big electric poles

This remark scares me a lot. If the gap is small enough to be crossed with better quality electric poles, then people will do exactly that. This is no longer about modules being """optional""" improvements to your factory, now it entirely changes how you build on the planet, since you can basically ignore the "isolated islands" gimmick, and just join the islands together. You don't even need that many upgraded poles, 1-2 per moat connection.

[S3bulon]

Some kind of preprocessing would be nice to control the output:
Scrap -> Crusher (Space Platform) -> higher ore yield
Scrap -> Electromagnetic plant -> higher circuit yield
Scrap + heavy oil -> Chemical Plant -> higher fuel yield

And the lightning also inspires some other interesting gameplay variations.
It could be necessary to "bake" some resources by lightning, so you could produce these resources only at night, and you need to expand your base to catch lightning not only for power, but also for processing.