Simple Questions and Short Answers

[Latakia]

Spidertron: Do the exoskeleton speed bonus stack? Are there any diminishing returns?

The bonuses add. The fact that they add instead of multiplying is an implicit diminishing return.

Maybe I don't know the technical, official, mathy meaning of "diminishing return," but when I use it in the context of games, it means that if the first one adds 10 of something, but the next one only adds 5, and the next after that only 3, that's diminishing returns if each gain costs the same.

[Khagan]

Spidertron: Do the exoskeleton speed bonus stack? Are there any diminishing returns?

The bonuses add. The fact that they add instead of multiplying is an implicit diminishing return.

Maybe I don't know the technical, official, mathy meaning of "diminishing return," but when I use it in the context of games, it means that if the first one adds 10 of something, but the next one only adds 5, and the next after that only 3, that's diminishing returns if each gain costs the same.

The first exo increases your speed by 20%. The second increases it by 20% of the original speed, which is only 16% of your current speed. Etc. It's even more apparent if you look at the figure that really matters, which is not "How fast am I moving?", but "How much time does it take to get where I am going?": a trip that takes a minute with none takes 50s with one (10s saved) and 43s with two (only another 7s saved).

[Latakia]

I have never tried using mods with this game. Two quick questions:

1. Should I get them from Steam or somewhere elese? (I bought the game on Steam.)

2. How do I use them for some saved games and keep all mods disabled for other saved games?

[astroshak]

There is no Steam Workshop for this game. As you implied, there is a source other than Steam for this game. Devs built in a nice mod manager to the game.

The downside to the mod manager is that the game has to restart whenever you make a change to the mod load out, or to any mod settings.

Get your mods in game through the mod manager though. They ones you see are the ones updated to work with your current version of the game.

As for the second question, if you are resuming a game with the same mods (including just the Base mod, aka vanilla no-mod game) you can just load the game up from the Load Save menu, or Continue from the very start of the main menu. If, however, you want to load a game that has a different mod configuration than what was loaded during the startup, you can go to the Load Game menu and find the Sync Mods button in the top right. This will bring up a window allowing you to decide which mods in the save to load up, which mods not in the save to keep, and even whether you want to actually load the save after the game reboots with that new mod set loaded up.

All in all despite the downside of automatically quit-and-restart that the game does when changing mod load outs, the mod manager within the game is a good device that allows both Steam users and non-Steam users equal access to the mods published by members of the community.

[eradicator]

2. How do I use them for some saved games and keep all mods disabled for other saved games?

If you plan to frequently change mod layout and don't want to fiddle with the sync-mods button and have free disk space to spare... then another option is: Link your steam account on factorio.com, get the stand-alone zip version, and just use a seperate stand-alone folder for each mod configuration. (Or if you're technically inclined: "factorio.exe --help")