tutorials? lets plays? flowcharts?

[kyranzor]

okay.. so the only thing I haven't done yet is Tin and Titanium.. LOL they seem to be more useful than the ones i've done so far.

The over-production I have of alumina will probably be wasteful then I was hoping heaps of shit used Aluminium.

[bobingabout]

I don't use Aluminium or Brass anywhere near as much as I should. In realism, the 3 most used metals in construction are Steel, Aluminium and Brass, and I tend to use Titanium the most.

Perhaps at some point I should go through everything I've made so far and redesign it all to use more realistic materials.

[cpy]

I don't use Aluminium or Brass anywhere near as much as I should. In realism, the 3 most used metals in construction are Steel, Aluminium and Brass, and I tend to use Titanium the most.

Perhaps at some point I should go through everything I've made so far and redesign it all to use more realistic materials.

Yeah man! I love to use real material for making stuff, also i don't like idea of Elobitch(Eloraam) approach (adding stuff to game and not using it). So yeah, your mod is my all time complexity favorite. There are 2 mods that are kinda awesome, your mod and one promising hardcorio mod. Treefarm is kinda meh but necessary and dytech is first thing that i want gone and replaced by more balanced BOBTECH!

Every alloy, mix, solution, whatever you have should have use, that would be just really cool. I don't think most of your alloys even have use (maybe i havent reached endgame or dytech is changing it? I don't know).

[kyranzor]

I think overriding some of the default game recipes to use your alloys would make it far better integration to the game as well. For instance robot flying frames should be aluminium (aircraft grade lol) rather than steel.

Engines should be using machined aluminium too, right? I guess that can vary.

tungsten is ONLY used for pipes right now it seems.

Brass is only used for pipes right now it seems??

I made titanium really fast, having already been producing carbon and calcium chloride or whatever it is that it also needs.

titanium IS used in all your roboport recipes, and electric mixing furnaces etc.

So yes, it seems you love your titanium

[bobingabout]

Logistic drone MK2 uses Aluminium plates. The general idea behind this is that you're replacing the steel from the robot frame with an aluminium replacement.
Someone sugests I add more Engines, EG, a Ceramic engine as a higher tier for use by the train, and perhaps later cars and tanks.
Tungsten is also used to make Gears, and is used on a couple of buildings, such as the Multi-purpose furnace, and the MK4 boiler.
Bronze and Brass are indeed only currently used by Pipes, but those pipes are also used to make the Liquid and Air pumps, used to create compressed air and Lithia water, as well as bottle and unbottle fluids.

Gunmetal is CURRENTLY not used, it was added as a DyTech compatability thing, so you didn't need to use lava magic, but I plan to use it in the warefare mod.
Lead will also see more uses in the warefare mod.
Tungsten Carbide, and copper tungsten alloy are another dead end material, the copper tungsten being a DyTech thng, but will be used for something. I was thinking the carbide could be used for new high end mining drills.

Electrum is another DyTech import, and although it is used in a few instances, I'm fairly sure that's from before I decided it was unrealistic to use as a building material, though since Silver is the "Most conductive" conductive material, and Gold is the most "Corrosive resistant" conductive material, I suppose Electrum, that combines both properties does have some merit for it's use.

I think another dead end material currently is that Nitric Acid, but as I explained, it's because I split the Nitrogen chain that was in my warefare prototype mod in half, and imported the first half into plates mod.
Cobalt metal is also currently a dead end (the usefulness ends with the un-refined Cobalt Oxide currently) because the Cobalt metal was supposed to be used in an alloying chain, but I havn't made the alloys yet, because those too would currently be dead ends if I did, because I'd need to make something to use them.



Given how materials are currently layed out, we can assign everything a tier. Some rules apply such as a material becomes at least the next tier up than any resources it takes to produce, and the science pack required to research it.
T1 is anything that doesn't require research to be made, these include Iron, Copper, Stone blocks (Yes, I am including non-metal building resources), Tin, Lead(can be made simply by smelting, even though alternate recipes exist), Silver and Glass.
T2 is anything that requires only red science, this includes Steel(since it both requires science, and costs the T1 material Iron to make), Nickel and Bronze(red science and requires Tin and Copper).
T3 is anything that requires Green science, this includes Plastic, Zinc, Brass and Gunmetal (the previous tier rule doesn't apply with Zinc, because it itself isn't a very useful metal, and is unlocked with the alloying recipes that use it), Aluminium, Gold, Silicon, Invar, and Cobalt
T4 is anything that requires Blue science, this includes Titanium, Tungsten, Electrum, and Ceramic(Silicon Nitride)
T5 is anything that requires Alien science, or just T4 materials as a component. This includes Nitinol, Tungsten Carbide and Copper Tungsten Alloy.

Most of my current material chains skip at least one stage though, EG, the Iron, Steel, Titanium, Nitinol chain skips over T3, which could be Brass or Aluminium.
The other popular chain I've used, usually in the "it gets hot" catagories, like Furnaces and Boilers is Iron, Steel, Invar, Tungsten, which stops before the T5 stage of Copper Tungsten Alloy, or Tungsten Carbide. The chain also often only has 3 tiers and mixes Invar with Tungsten. if you look at the reality of industrial cutting tools, the chain would go Toughened Steel, Tungsten Carbide, Tungsten Cobalt Carbide, yes Tungsten Cobalt (Carbide) was one of the extra alloys I was thinking of making using Cobalt.

[Degraine]

For that T3 slot between steel and tungsten, how about Tempered Steel, made in an alloying furnace with...I don't know, four steel/eight iron and one carbon to make four ingots.

For the furnace/boiler chain refractory bricks could be a good substitute for steel. Stone mixed with alumina to make fire bricks which are used for the midlevel boilers, perhaps in the electric/electric chemical/electric alloying furnaces too now that I think about it. Ceramic plus alumina at the next tier for refractory bricks?

[cpy]

I think overriding some of the default game recipes to use your alloys would make it far better integration to the game as well. For instance robot flying frames should be aluminium (aircraft grade lol) rather than steel.

Engines should be using machined aluminium too, right? I guess that can vary.

tungsten is ONLY used for pipes right now it seems.

Brass is only used for pipes right now it seems??

I made titanium really fast, having already been producing carbon and calcium chloride or whatever it is that it also needs.

titanium IS used in all your roboport recipes, and electric mixing furnaces etc.

So yes, it seems you love your titanium

Yes for aluminum robot frames. I like this guy's ideas. Replacing vanilla recipes is what makes it interesting.

[bobingabout]

Although using Aluminium for the robot frame does sound like a realistic thing to do, I decided a while ago I wanted to keep replacing/changing base game stuff to a minimum. Electronics is one of those exceptions, and as you might have noticed I made it completely optional. Modules is also in it's own mod, and therefore also optional. Same with assembly machines where I effectively redefine the recipe for Assembly machine 3.

[cpy]

Although using Aluminium for the robot frame does sound like a realistic thing to do, I decided a while ago I wanted to keep replacing/changing base game stuff to a minimum. Electronics is one of those exceptions, and as you might have noticed I made it completely optional. Modules is also in it's own mod, and therefore also optional. Same with assembly machines where I effectively redefine the recipe for Assembly machine 3.

Well then make it optional and add poll. You'll see that people playing mods like to change things. Why else would we be playing mods if we didn't want to change things?

Time to get dirty! Changing base recipes is good way to balance things and create challenge. It's recommended to reorganize things you do routinely to keep dementia away, train your brain.

[kyranzor]

There can be some reasonably innocent (and perhaps just medium->high tier) changes to base recipes that users of your mod will go along with, and appreciate. I understand what you mean about avoiding too much adjustment to the base game, but i'm up to alien science now and had zero need to look at or mine the new ores and explore your mod's processes. I would like like to have been forced to explore and work towards using your added content much earlier, and the way it's done can also support and ease people into your new process chains.

Dytech certainly did not hold back with pillaging the core game recipes, making the stone gears and that is a T1 invasion right there!

People are okay with it, because it's "believable" even though, honestly, I do not think it's realistic at all. Stone is far too brittle to be used in machinery, in fact even iron is not that good (unless it's cast iron, but then it's brittle like stone.. ) So often gears in real life are made from brass alloys because the copper allows "work hardening" and the alloy is quite strong and resistant to corrosion.

[bobingabout]

Yup, well, I should definitely use the progression Iron, Steel, Brass, Titanium/Tungsten, Nitinol then.
But yeah, I'll look into the recipe updates a bit more, though if you want to be forced into the new stuff... use the electronic overides mod, that forces you to use wood in the T1 electronics, and T2 (what would be advanced) is such a big change it can be quite some shock to the system. Are these the kinds of changes you're thinking? I can definitely see myself replacing a lot of the iron gears in recipes with steel for example.

[kyranzor]

Yup, well, I should definitely use the progression Iron, Steel, Brass, Titanium/Tungsten, Nitinol then.
But yeah, I'll look into the recipe updates a bit more, though if you want to be forced into the new stuff... use the electronic overides mod, that forces you to use wood in the T1 electronics, and T2 (what would be advanced) is such a big change it can be quite some shock to the system. Are these the kinds of changes you're thinking? I can definitely see myself replacing a lot of the iron gears in recipes with steel for example.

Yeah sure, iron gears in Robotports for example, which are high tech buildings to begin with, should be using steel gears/bearings etc.

I think it's a bit silly that there is even wood in the circuit chains at all, because they should be fibreglass and copper, and some etching acid/solutions.

[cpy]

I love alloys! And having alloys as T1 for even things like gears would be kinda cool. But yeah higher tier things need change also isn't metal mixing quite cheap? You just mine and smelt tin so bronze is quite easy to get.

[bobingabout]

if you look back at that post I did a few posts ago where I catagorise each material, I said Bronze was T2, because it requires only T1 metals (tin and copper) and requires only red science, so it's effectively the same level as Steel.

Sounds kind of expensive and high end when I put it like that though, since steel is quite an expensive high end material in the base game I suppose that has more to do with the fact that it costs 5 iron though, rather than actually being high end. Also the fact that there's nothing higher end, so it's used in the high end things.

[kyranzor]

if you look back at that post I did a few posts ago where I catagorise each material, I said Bronze was T2, because it requires only T1 metals (tin and copper) and requires only red science, so it's effectively the same level as Steel.

Sounds kind of expensive and high end when I put it like that though, since steel is quite an expensive high end material in the base game I suppose that has more to do with the fact that it costs 5 iron though, rather than actually being high end. Also the fact that there's nothing higher end, so it's used in the high end things.

Yeah I think the base game uses steel too much, but even then it's too easy to get. In my current 25 hour factory where i'm playing around with your stuff, I have 30K steel just sitting in buffer storage because it's so useless. The issue with steel is when you are pumping out stuff, the supply of steel can be hard to set up, you need a whole second set of furnaces and sometimes an auxiliary input/supply of iron plates to feed it further down the line than your earlier T1 assembly lines that need iron plates still.

[bobingabout]

my mod does make steel a fair bit cheeper though, dropping the required ammount of iron from 5 plates too 2. but even then, due to the fact that one steel producing furnace takes the entire supply of one iron producing furnace per cycle, you really need to set up a second iron producing chain just to produce the steel.

[kyranzor]

my mod does make steel a fair bit cheeper though, dropping the required ammount of iron from 5 plates too 2. but even then, due to the fact that one steel producing furnace takes the entire supply of one iron producing furnace per cycle, you really need to set up a second iron producing chain just to produce the steel.

I had exactly that haha, a second iron plate line going into steel. I did not notice your mod making the steel cheaper, that is pretty cool. Steel should be iron + carbon/coal though, and if we could get Chromium/Molybdenum to make the "steel" as "stainless steel" is more realistic.

[bobingabout]

I knew about chromium to make stainless steel. I am reluctant to add new materials/metals/elements if they're going to only be used for one alloy. Nickel is a good example of something I was willing to add, not only is the metal a viable building material on its own, but it is also used to make Tungsten plates, as well as a few alloys, Nitinol and Invar. there was also Constantan as an idea, but I decided not to use it. Even then I added it as a secodary ore of Galena, Lead ore, rather than an ore of its own, the dedicated ore came later when I was adding optional ores to the ores mod.

Cobalt was one of those which was debated heavilly. the sole reason to add cobalt was to make lithium ion batteries harder to make, and more realistic. The only reason why Cobalt ore was created was because, well, I already had blue ore from back before I recoloured my ores, blue used to be Lead ore. Second point being I wanted some ideas for optional ores that you could turn on if you wanted to, but weren't a key component for my mod to work. Since I had already decided at that point that yes, I wanted Cobalt to be part of the Lithium Ion battery formula, I had already added a method of obtaining it outside of ore, so the ore became the easy way, with the original intended method being an Advanced smelting recipe of copper.


Besides, no real plans to use Stainless steel as a product, I'd probably end up either using steel, or skipping over it to use the next one up, like Titanium (since I'm already skipping over a T3 material in that chain as it is)

Anyway, the main 2 reason why I didn't change steel recipe to use Carbon... Steel IRL actually has less than 2% carbon in it, reading up on the process, they actually make it from "Pig iron" which is about half iron half carbon, and REMOVE carbon from it! Secondly, as it stands, steel is a base game material, able to be produced in the standard furnace, to change the recipe to use carbon as well would mean it would need to be made in the mixing furnace, and I didn't want to mess with the base game too much, that would be crossing the line I drew for myself.

[kyranzor]

okay, that is true. So what are your plans next? You going to shuffle the mod around a bit, or are you going to make us some guides/flowcharts? - so I dont keep hitting dead-ends lol.

[bobingabout]

Hopefully, by the end of the week, I'll have time to actually do things.

I've been doing tweaks, and bug fixes, and thats about it recently. Even my update to MCI that I posted at weekend was basically just tweaks.

I'll do a bit of both, draw some diagrams, charts etc, and add new content too. People have been waiting for me to get back to work on my warfare mod for quite some time now, I kind of skipped it to do Logistics.