I'm in total agreement that it's not really a practical way forward for the general case.

I like the "service pack" concept rather more, as it provides a lot of options for various workflows (e.g. total tool loss, tool calibration, cleaning, wear rates etc), allows multiple recipe pathways and ...

If you did this, wouldn't you also set 'fuel_category' to be 'spanner' or something, so that normal entities like boilers and stone furnaces (with fuel_category=chemical) can't burn spanners? E.g. pyCoalProc uses 'drill' for the drill head "fuel".

Stopping the machine using electrical power is a ...

I suppose the service pack concept at least allows you to avoid too much waste by allowing you to amortise tool "capital" across machines and time.

It's then on the player to generate and distribute tools and packs effectively and not, say, end up spending a million ores and MWhs filling chests ...

Deadlock989 wrote: Wed Mar 11, 2020 3:44 pm The closest I got was having a catalyst product...

And using the keyword catalyst, I found viewtopic.php?t=69070, which is very related.

Yeah, it's a pity, as it would open quite a lot of more realistic "multi-rate" processes (e.g. you need to feed an assembly line with (say) 1k iron per minute, but only 1 tool per minute.

It seems to me that if only an assembler which has the same item in input and output could automatically ...

I have a plan for a mod that involves "tooling" to make certain items. The tooling can be consumed/damaged by the process.

It seems like the way to do it is have a recipe something like either:

(1 tool + X ingredients -> Y% tool + Z products). This is how it works for Angels Bio wood: 1 saw blade ...

This is my current thoughts on an ore-sorting setup in creative mode.

Basically it flows from top to bottom, right-to-left. From top to bottom, crushing, floating, leaching, purification and finally purified sorting (these are the five blocks on the right).

At the end of each stage, the crushed ...

I'm using Bobs + Angels (inc. Bob's Electronics and Angels Biochem) 0.17, and I'm trying to avoid using the Bob's recipe for resin (1 wood -> 1 resin in an assembler), as it seems a bit cheaty and not really in the "spirit" of B+A. Since I will have as much wood as I'll ever need from an arboretum ...