Trying to use advanced smelting for the first time.. shouldn't you be able to barrel used coolant? Very hot fluids (300 C) are hardly barrelable, used coolant needs to be cooled; But I can barrel 500°C hot steam? That's inconsistent. I agree; it's inconsistent. Steam shouldn't be barrelable either....

You need to account for boiler max temp as well as the hidden effectivity multiplier on higher level engines. MK4 boilers and MK3 Engines match up perfectly at 1:2 just like MK1's do. For the ones in between it gets a bit trickier. I made a google doc because I got tired of doing all the math everyt...

There are a few high level recipes that require artifacts, like the high level power armors and some of the gear for them. I'm not sure if turning off alien artifact drops will change those recipes or not. If it does then you wouldn't have any use for them and you could effectively ignore red algae ...

Ah yea, I guess it's not technically required to play angels/bobs but to me it makes the endgame feel better. Without it titanium and aluminium would pretty much just be "use this to upgrade buildings". I've been mulling over the idea of attempting to build a base that uses no pure sorting...

I was curious so i looked at it. Bob's revamp mod( https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Bobingabout/bobrevamp ) changes the rocket to use Aluminium, Titanium, and Plastic for the Low Density structure as well as adding a 4th part for rockets called heat shielding which uses tungsten carbide and Silicon Ni...

I have always felt that the combination smelting for iron and aluminium and such were pretty pointless, as they essentially just convert one ore type to another, but you can already do that much more easily with the combination sorting of the ores themselves. I think that the combination smelting s...

For me the issue is more that you the first levels of combined sorting are too easy to set up, so I might do some additional changes to what I have already planed: Adding brown catalyst to the pure iron, copper, tin and lead sorting recipes. I tend to agree, as you said I tend to rush for iron/copp...