Yeah directly smelting stacks would be "cheaty" but I think if it just took the same amount of time, just didn't need a beltbox, it's just a throughput advantage - i.e. gives you bigger smelting columns, not more plates from the same number of furnaces.

Did the loaders stop working for anyone else with the latest update?

Yeah I assumed that you could just do it by writing recipes for the smelters: stacked ore produces stacked plates - should be 5 times the time to keep with the spirit of the mod. I am sure someone clever could figure out a programmatic way to do it but writing 3 new recipes (copper, iron, stone) wou...

I used to really like the vacuum belts mod but it hasn't been touched for a year. Would anyone be able to update it to 0.17? I don't know enough about modding to know what needs to change?

https://github.com/FlipskiZ/Factorio-Mod-Vacuum-Belts

Auto unstacking for me only works on direct pickup anyway. If I pick up a belt with stacks on it, I get stacks in my inventory. If I pick up off the belt, they unstack. One thing that did occur to me: I've noticed you can use stacks of coal or solid fuel directly, which is quite nice. I don't see an...

What rational justification is there for someone else to spend their time and energy doing what you want? This is an alpha game in development, and this campaign is specifically out here wanting input. I've no idea why you are so utterly, implacably hostile to this concept, but I'm just gonna let y...

Again, how does knowing that change the way you play? Once you know the game is using pollution to scale attacks, does the campaign become better and more fun? It means you can alter the way you play. "I'm producing more things, which means I should expect more biter attacks, which means I nee...

Then why doesn't the campaign tell you about power? When the player is told to put up a steam engine, surely he should be told about how the fluid system works, and how the offshore pump puts water in the boiler through a pipe which is then heated up to produce steam which is converted into electri...

Here's the problem we're looking to solve here. Veteran players know about the pollution mechanic. New players don't know about the pollution mechanic. It's a very important mechanic, especially in this campaign, so we're trying to find a way to tell them. Is it a problem, though? Yes. The campaign...

Oh something else, something in the way the "paint" is coded means biters really really really really hate it. I had a couple of cases where the biters would swarm through my base and systematically deconstruct every Logicarts paint marker before hitting anything else.

+1 on this post

A few thoughts on balance etc after playing: The paint recipes seem too complicated to me, even though I know why you wanted to do it that way, it adds a lot of cruft to an inventory that's already filled up with the various markers. I think it would make more sense to have the "paint" ins...

There are various ways you could find out. Someone also suggested Compilatron could run an "experiment" getting you to do more pollution and then saying "oops, turns out you're gonna lose this base." Why would that experiment make sense, though? It's one thing to ask where you g...

I tend to agree that making it explicit that *pollution* is the mechanic to be aware of is really key to guiding expectations here. It's just giving the player the information about what's going on. Does the player have that information, though? You've just crashed. How do you know it's the polluti...

In the mod portal there's a construction drones mod by Klonan, but it feels a bit buggy and I can't get it to work. Is there any info as to how you're supposed to use it and what it's not compatible with?

This mod could be updated with the new liquid-as-fuel mechanics now, couldn't it?

Alternative suggestion: burner assembler machine unlocked at the start?

I would like to stress that it is tutorial. A tutorial. Fundamentally, it's futile to argue with the playerbase about what something is, so this is going to end up being right. Once enough people insist that this is what this part of the game is, and it can either do a good job or a bad one, but it...

Watching that guy was definitely interesting. Simple things like "use F to pickup things from the ground," and more of an introduction to things like "this is an assembler and this is what it does, this is an inserter and this is what it does" would seem to be useful. Also "...

Just want to say that whatever you did here fixed a big performance issue on the Mac version. 17.1 was running really sluggishly and 17.2 fixed it. Just thought I'd mention it as there's nothing in the changenotes that related to that issue, so it was probably a second-order effect of something.