Thank you kovarex for sharing your struggles with us.
It's very heartwarming to see your son giving you the motivation to work on the game once more.

Placing blueprints from the map is really nice.
Will save lots of running around while also avoiding the frustration of mispositioning things by one ...

Bit late to the party but here's my opinion.

Inserters should not chase items
I don't mind either way personally. However, if there's big performance gains to be made, I lean more on the side of making inserters not chase items as long as the picking up motion still looks natural, which it seems ...

Cliff explosives are not a weapon at all IIRC. They don't have any damage statistics to boost.

I was thinking more along the lines of boosting up its radius. With a few clicks you can clear off a whole screen of cliffs.

It's more of a request for convenience and I know it does clash with the ...

Military upgrade technologies...
"Stronger explosives - Grenades, Rockets, Land mines "

What do you think about adding Cliff explosives to the list?
Would that deviate from the goal of the Military Science Pack?

The FFF says "pipes to ground won’t help you with throughput anymore"

Correct me if i'm wrong, but there is still argument for using pipe-to-ground as much as possible from a megabase performance perspective right?
I'm not sure about the exact number in vanilla anymore, but one pipe-to-ground is ...

I think the biter looks unbalanced.

Based on body shape, its weight should be more towards the front, so it would look more natural with the legs positioned more towards the front.

I found more bugs i think:

Bug 1:
If you set the "Max items per slot" to something bigger than the maximum stack size of the item and max items per inventory is uncapped, the fuel loader chest keeps deleting items from the game.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Start a fresh game.
2) Set "Max items per ...

Ok, there's a new version out that should hopefully fix the issue. I was never able to reproduce the problem on my end, but I think I identified the missing nil check, so hopefully that fixes things. Let me know if it doesn't work and we'll go from there.

That crash doesn't happen anymore it ...

Try using ALT mode, helps a lot when you are learning what goes where

Also the ability to selectively enable specific mods on specific saves without having manually enable/disable mods each time you switch saves (and restart the game).

Please correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think this is possible atm.

Initially I was against excessive drone usage, because I prefer to see items on belts, to see supply/demand.
Try Stacking Beltboxes . Basically turns one belt into 5, so instead of running like crazy 20 parallel lanes of iron, you just run 4 instead. Should help somewhat but eventually belts still ...

Imo it should download from the server instead of the mod portal. If the server admin makes some changes to the mod, like editing some config files or something, you would run into issues where the mod on the client isn't exactly the same as the mod the server is running.

I was wondering if it is actually possible to override vanilla machine (e.g assembling machine / electric furnace) behaviour and do something different with them.

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Examples to illustrate what I'm thinking about:

1) Fixing productivity modules leading to wrong consumption / production at ...

I placed down a fuel loader chest, dropped some fuel in it and the game crashed with the following message:
Error while running event ammo-loader::on_tick (ID 0)
__ammo-loader__/lib/TrackedChest.lua:265: attempt to compare number with nil

The crash only happens when "Include burner structures" is ...

This one is probably a better screenshot. The labs are working but the research UI is not visible above the minimap. EDIT: My mistake, i hit CTRL T by mistake which actually hid the UI. The functionality was from Auto Research and i didn't know about that

I don't know what happened but the Research UI above the minimap disappeared as you can see:
Minimap research.png

This problem seems to only happen on this particular save file. Other saves or a fresh new game have the Research UI working properly.

I tried saving and reloading in place ...

Obviously rewriting the engine is just a waste of time since mostly this is not a problem unless pushed to their limits like i tried to there. I just thought it would be a good idea to point out that machines can produce incorrect results when pushed to the limit.

Also, would it be possible to ...

Well i know that vanilla factorio would never reach those types of speed bonuses but what i wanted to point out is how the consumption is actually lower than expected. I might be wrong but if the logic was correctly written, that should never happen.

I don't think that part is on the mod author ...

So i was playing around with Fast Furnaces mod which gives you t5 speed and productivity modules with improved beacons along with the Advanced Furnace it provides. I set up the test area as shown below
TestArea.png
Furnace.png
As you can see above, the productivity bonus was +400%. Thus, when ...

It would be REALLY nice to have a hotkey(holding shift) to enable or disable quick replace (underground/splitter -> belt at least).

I HOPE very much that there will be a toggle-off option

I agree that dragging long lines of belts can get annoying at times with fast replace. I actually use the ...