Voidedfactory wrote: ↑Sat Aug 22, 2020 4:59 am
Why the hell are certain prerequisites not properly connected?
There are several reasons for that. Primarily because Angel's mods don't follow the vanilla recipe design philosophy.
In vanilla there is typically 1 and only 1 way of making a specific item. When the recipe is set in stone, the "from raw" is unique for every recipe and you can conjure up a tech tree that resembles these facts very nicely – thus guiding the players to finding that one way of making the item. The only exception that comes to mind is oil processing: Basic oil processing, Advanced oil processing and Coal liquefaction have very similar output fluids, be it with different ratios.
Furthermore,
in vanilla, most recipes have 1 and only 1 output, and therefore no undesired by-product. The notable exception, again, being oil refining – and in addition uranium processing. But in both cases you could argue that none of the outputs is really undesired.
In
Angel's mods there is often multiple ways of getting to a desired item. You just found one of these cases: sulfur.
Furthermore, in
Angel's mods many recipes have multiple products. Usually only one of these is what you actually need. The rest is undesired by-products that you can often not handle at a given tech level. So many by-products get flared off or clarified initially. In order to process them appropriately, you need additional technologies. Sulfur is one of these cases that appears as by-products in the form of sulfuric waste water and acid gas. Each having about 15 to 20 (or even more, depending on exact mod composition) ways of being generated.
I don't know why you are convinced that hydrogen sulfide gas is
strictly necessary to make sulfur. It is not. There are several optional ways of getting to solid sulfur that don't require hydrogen sulfide gas at all. The simplest ones that come to mind are:
1. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← <ore> hydro-refining ← <ore> crushing
2. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← Clean coal to coke and sulfuric waste water ← Coal crushing
3. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← Oil separation
4. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← Natural gas separation
I usually start out with the coal to coke route to produce the first sulfur. But that's just my choice.
As you found, there is other ways: From acid gas, which itself has a dozen different sources, then there are options via polluted artificial fish water from fish breeding. Or, once you have some sulfuric acid, you can jump-start sulfur production via coal filtering of slag slurry – which gives back more sulfur than you put in.
After unlocking chemical science, I would argue that the most reliable way of getting sulfur is via sulfur processing 3: sulfur air scrubbing produces both sulfuric waste, as well as acid gas (by processing the used lime filter), and has essentially only lime and water as an input to the process. In pretty much all other cases, sulfur is just a by-product of a different process.
Depending on the recipe or production chain you want to use, you will require a different set of technologies. Hardly any one of them is
strictly necessary for cliff explosives, so gating cliff explosives behind them all is undesired – and gating cliff explosives behind a specific production chain is neither.
Additionally, as kingarthur already said: Angel's mods are not one mod that you can optimize until everyone is happy. They are a combinations of mods that do different things in different combinations. In many cases, compatibilities with external mods need to be taken into account, and different mod settings (overhauls) within Angel's mods change up some production chains entirely. The tech tree sometimes just makes compromises so as to not always being a completely different beast. It does not always change up the dependencies between different technologies. This may or may not be a good way of dealing with dependencies.
But no matter how you try to do it, a tree is never able to represent options between vastly different production chains.
None of the things I said imply that I am happy with the tech tree. There are issues that can and should be addressed at some point. But I hope that you understand that things are not as simple as they are in vanilla.
Currently, Angel's mods are heavily being worked on (component mode and tech overhaul) – and once these are more or less done, the tech tree might get some more love to iron out some of the issues that can be addressed. Fluid handling for barrels being necessary for cliff explosives for example