Change recipe for furnaces

[planetmaker]

Most items with different tiers have an upgrade path which includes the lesser items in the higher tier items. For furnaces this sadly is not the case which leaves one with unusable items. I'm sure this has been suggested before but my search-foo failed to uncover a corresponding thread.

So my suggestion is to modify the furnace recipe to use the previous tier furnace.

I see two set of recipe changes without modifying the overall costs:

1. without bricks being used:
   • stone furnace: 5 stone
   • steel furnace: 4 stone furnace, 6 steel
   • electric furnace: 1 steel furnace, 4 steel, 5 red circuits
2. with bricks, but slightly more complicated steel furnace:
   • stone furnace: 5 stone
   • steel furnace: 2 stone furnace, 5 bricks, 6 steel
   • electric furnace: 1 steel furnace, 4 steel, 5 red circuits

And there's an option to slightly increase (or decrease) costs of the stone furnace but using bricks from the beginning. It might complicate the beginning too much, though:

• • stone furnace: 3 bricks (2 bricks)
  • steel furnace: 4 stone furnace, 6 steel
  • electric furnace: 1 steel furnace, 4 steel, 5 red circuits

Personally I think (B) is the nicest solution.

[Pi-C]

And there's an option to slightly increase (or decrease) costs of the stone furnace but using bricks from the beginning. It might complicate the beginning too much, though:

• • stone furnace: 3 bricks (2 bricks)
  • steel furnace: 4 stone furnace, 6 steel
  • electric furnace: 1 steel furnace, 4 steel, 5 red circuits

Could lead to impossible situations, even if the player starts with some bricks in his inventory: Burner miners and boilers require stone furnaces, so if you waste all bricks on furnaces as intermediate products for those, you might have no bricks left to build a furnace to make new bricks to make more furnaces.

[Deadlock989]

I mean, it doesn't bother me in the least what vanilla recipes are because after 3000+ hours logged the chances of me playing vanilla again are as near to zero as butters no parsnips, but I have to say I detest this kind of thing completely.

Why should I have to craft 4 stone furnaces every time I make a brand new electric furnace? I might want hundreds of electric furnaces, so I have to craft multiple hundreds of caveman bollocks to do it? It's not fun, it's not interesting, it makes no sense on either the world-reference or gameplay levels, it adds nothing to the game except a really convoluted and annoying way to get rid of a paltry handful of early-game items made of literally rubble off the ground with no value whatosever that you can very, very easily put in a chest somewhere and forget about, and the need to manage this very small pile of old tech happens just once in a game that might last 100 hours or more.

I mean, imagine the sheer hell of opening up your washing machine and finding out it had four Victorian mangles inside it. A world where a laptop is made of 128 Atari consoles stitched together. A world where a Rayon T-shirt is made of 16 hemp togas. A world where a nuclear reactor is made of 64 coal plants, each of which is made of 1024 hamsters running on treadmills.

From a game play point of view, this Russian doll crafting makes some kind of sense for belts or anything you end up with literal thousands of and have no further use for. For a stack or two of stone furnaces, it's a total irrelevance. Unless there's a serious inventory management issue from four figure numbers of useless items stacking up, this mentality should stay in idle/clicker games where it belongs.

[5thHorseman]

I think if you shift the problem a bit to "Stone furnaces are annoying because after a while you don't need them anymore" then you can imagine a recipe, say 1 stone furnace -> 3 stone or something like that. There is a mod that allows recycling of pretty much everything, and I used it in the deep dark past for just such a purpose.

You don't need such a recipe for everything, just those few items that tend to lose their value and become useless. Stone furnaces come to mind, as do pistols and all armor types. Just have them break down to half of their inputs and I think that'd be fine.

And yes I know you can put them in a box and shoot them, and the stone from a couple hundred stone furnaces is not going to make or break any factory of any size whatsoever. It's the principle of it though. I don't like intentionally destroying anything.

Except trees. When I don't grenade them, I put all the (robot-collected) wood in a wooden box in the middle of the road, and eventually I'll hit it with my car as I drive through.