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Mod concept: ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) exist in the real world as a purpose built piece of hardware that can only ever do exactly one thing, but it can do that one thing *very* efficiently. Bitcoin miners are the primary thing that made people remember ASICs were a thing. Switching into Factorio terms, as factories grow, you end up needing literally thousands of assemblers all making the same thing. This limits how far your megabase can go purely because you end up have 2500 green circuit assemblers, and all their beacons/inserters/etc sucking up CPU time. The Assembler UPSgrade mod seeks to fix this by creating a single, monolithic building which consumes the same power/creates the same pollution as a fully beaconed assembler, but produces the output of some multiple (10-1000 for green circuits, configurable in settings) of that single assembler. The building is physically massive, and the challenge becomes feeding it raw materials, because an ASIF (application specific integrated factory) can only take in tier-1 materials (copper plate, iron plate, steel, plastic bars, etc). The part that makes an ASIF an ASIF is that it has a fixed recipe, like the rocket silo. It will only ever build the one thing it was designed to build.

What artwork is needed:

• Icon for 'Beaconed Assembler Block'

  

  asif-ass-blk.PNG (775.74 KiB) Viewed 3147 times

  is fundamentally what this is (except it's only 6 beacons instead of 12 because they are meant to be stacked next to each other)
• Icon for 'Beaconed Chemical Plant Block' which is the same thing as above, but with a chemical plant and pipework instead of an assembly building.
• Icon for 'ASIF Logistics Block' Literally just a red and blue chest, done because I needed to get the number of items in the recipe for the ASIF down. I'd have needed 7 items in the recipe (IE: must build by hand) if I didn't have this.

  

  asif-logi-block.PNG (102.91 KiB) Viewed 3147 times

The rest of the artwork I can do myself, but those three...I'm kinda scratching my head on what I will do for them. My normal tactic is to just make existing Factorio icons smaller and tile them in, but that doesn't work for so many entities at once. I don't really care how you do this so long as if you look at it you think "Yea, that one is a assembler block component and this other one is a chemical block component." I care more that they are distinct than about any particular visual style. If you want to see just what I mean by that, download the 'Nuclear Rebalance' mod I made and look at all the various artwork in that. None of it has the same theme or anything like that, outside of 'yes, this is a turbine blade'. 'This is a turbine disc with blades on it', etc.

Icon size: 64 or 128, but I don't really have a preference. If you can do it in 32, go for it.

Bonus points:

For the ASIFs I was just going to overlay the icon of the thing being produced on top of the assembler 3 icon. Similar to how it looks in the current alt-view. If you have a better idea, then I'd need icons for: Green chips, Red Chips, Blue Chips, Low Density Structures, Engines, Speed 3 Modules, and Prod 3 Modules. I'm also considering a line of chemical plant based ASIFs that would do PG (so, Heavy/light oil in, PG out), and another for plastic bars (PG + coal in, plastic bars out).

Fun note: Good luck with the Prod/Speed 3 module ASIFs. They only allow 10-100:1 compression, because even at 10:1 you need to feed it 1120 copper plate per second and 810 iron plate per second. A normal stack inserter can only move ~27.5 items/sec. Good luck! :p

Update: I went ahead and made my own art. Not that I would turn down better stuff, but meh; something is better than grayboxing. The mod itself is here: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AssemblerUPSGrade One snag I hit though: The Chemical Plant just looks plain stupid when scaled up. Why? Well, the primary reason is that you can't scale the pipe connections up with it. This is what it looks like scaled up: Really dumb right? Even if I moved the actual pipe connections into the center of the pipe displays and fixed the model so it fit inside the collision box, it'd still look really dumb. I'd love a new chem plant model. This chem plant specifically makes plastic bars and plastic bars only. And to be clear, there are no restrictions on what it looks like. Make it from unicorns and rainbows for all I care. Other notes for the design:

The building will always be square, but it may be of a variable size between 31x31 and ~3000x3000. I can handle scaling the image myself, but I'd say 103x103 is the size I'd actually make the building. I can explain how to create such large buildings (it's easy; just use this very mod!; setting for fixed-size output buildings in the mod settings) this if you'd like to test on your end. As long as the model fits inside the bounding box and is visually fairly easy to see where the edges of the building are I'm happy. I think it'd actually be kind of funny to have animated unicorns and rainbows moving around. That would be kinda hilarious (as long as it was obvious where the pipes were supposed to go :p) I am crazy, why do you ask?