Arch666Angel wrote:
There are two routes to get oxygen: one from electrolysis, the other from compressed air. If you want solid fuel and oxygen so badly I suggest you setup a hydrazine plant to process your excess hydrogen and nitrogen, which you then can turn into solid fuel. The point is that you should not rely on a single process to produce all your oxygen for example, because of this and this is the same in a few other cases, where you are expected to do a mix of processes or suffer the consequence of having to much of one byproduct. But I will look into it and maybe move a solid fuel recipe up to be available earlier in the game.
I don't want solid fuel at all. I just need oxygen. Have you created a setup using Smelting that creates steel? It eats up oxygen like free candy! And there is a lot of byproduct, be it hydrogen or nitrogen.
Converting it to solid fuel was just a quick hack to prevent the machines from getting stuck that also solved a non-issue: how to feed things that need fuel. There are tons of ways of feeding them, but solid fuel resulting from hydrogen was a "free" solution.
But I guess I found a better way: I ideologically (like to RP my bases) find it objectionable to burn hydrogen in a flare stack. But there are vents I think in Bob's. I'll just vent the extra hydrogen into the atmosphere.
Also, the liquid dispenser buildings are good, but, for RP reasons, I need to get my hands on a reverse offshore pump mod: one that only consumes water based products when connected to a lake. This would be a nice circle of life thing, taking impure water with a pump and giving back extra purified water.
Arch666Angel wrote:
The same is true for refining, slag is the main source for mineral sludge, if you do processing with only the non-slag recipe you either have to produce crushed stone in large quantities or bring in huge amounts of mineral water to keep it running. For the mineral catalyst problem: fissures and thermal water conversion to mineral sludge, or geode processing and convert that to mineral sludge.
Thanks! Didn't know about that recipe. I'm starting to see a pattern here for successful bases with you mods. Have setups that make use of 100% of waste products, but sometimes that is not enough. You need to add a backup system for each and use circuit network to keep things in balance.
Arch666Angel wrote:
I have yet to come up with a system to make the smelting mod more interesting and variable, at the moment you do the one thing I do not like: You setup things in the same way over and over again, without any options to do it differently or match it to your situation.
The problems is that Smelting is big! It has inherent around 85% productivity bonus (not my math), which I like again from RP point of view, but they are about 4 time larger than vanilla smelting setups. In the same space, I could get not a 85% bonus, but 200-300% bonus, albeit with 200-300% raw ore use too.
It is an issue of infinite map with infinite resources. With RSO, you'll have trains anyway. Setting up 1 extra train is easier that setting up Smelting. Smelting is huge, power inefficient, a pain without bots, and worse for all, I think ratios change slightly as you upgrade from T1 to T4.
Personally, I would make setups at least 25% smaller, make sure ratios are the same as you upgrade from T1 to T4 (I'll do the math once, but once per upgrade tier is too much), make T1 to T4 unlock at the same rate (now you can get T2 with ease for most things, but T2 of one of the buildings, the one with 0.75% crafting speed is one tier behind for a while), make higher tiers use less fuel and secondary resources and somehow diversify recipes. That will be hard, but weird and diverse recipes maybe are better that huge chunks of straight lines of smelting buildings?
Arch666Angel wrote:
And yes that is the goal, to provide processes that can be combined in different ways to get the same result, but the way to get there is different depending on your preferences and playstyle. There are some patterns in setting up a refining factory but each time I see screenshots the creator would do something different.
Well, I want to create a base that goes on forever (barring you running out of raw ore under your miners). This is not very conductive to Refining, where sorting gives multiple outputs and getting backed up in one output, possible one you don't need, will stop the production for something you need.
The other point is that of course it's nice to have a higher compression per tile with chests, but there is a limit to that set by the game engine, if you want to see that in action try the "Warehousing mod" and place down a couple of storage warehouses, they have 2k inventory slots and then watch your UPS drop when a few hundred bots and inserter interact with them. Also warehouses have the big advantage of having an unified storage with can be accessed from 6 tiles per side, so it will make some tricks like equalized loading/unloading of a row of chest superfluous.
