Development and Discussion

[Northgate]

I tend to agree, as you said I tend to rush for iron/copper direct smelting as early as possible because it is quite simple to set up if you have easy access to Jiv/Cron.

I agree for the most part. But what I really don't like is the components used to make the catalysts. So for the sorting catalysts you need stuff that is most likely in the petrochem area and then for the petrochem catalysts you need pure ores which means you have to run busses back and forth which to me is kind of pointless and forces you to build all your petrochem stuff next to refining/sorting. I would like catalysts to have their own processing chain but use materials main materials like plates or ingots instead of ores and sludge. That would make more sense and is logistically less tedious.

[mrvn]

It kinds of feels to me like the first ore sorting is useless though. You have no use for slag for a very long time and even then it is hard to convert to ores and has minimal yield. Handling the slag is just so much trouble for no obviously visible gain. You very easily get to mixed ore sorting where you get more yield, no slag and pure ores that don't need to be filtered and balanced. Plus you need way more iron than copper at the start (more than the 2:1 ratio from sorting saphirite). I used the direct sorting and never needed to sort any stiratite at all. But I had to build chest after chest to fill with slag.

As I see it know the only reason to ever use the direct sorting is if you cant find jivonite and crotinium ores without running into too many aliens.

PS: some sorting for bobmonium and rubyte for lead, glass etc makes sense since you only need very little of that to start with.

I use CHMod, which adds a recipe that turns stone into silicon, which means you can feed it back into the iron 1 for 1. I end up short of iron until the silicon/iron recipe is online, then I end up short of copper for a while (usually fixed by adding a small stiratite sorter into the mix). I bascially run my entire starter base off of saphirite sorting. 4 level 3 crushers and level 2 sorters provide about 1.2K iron/minute, which is my goal for the starter base. Lead and tin I usually smelt crushed.

Adding a actual use for stone makes it way less painful.

CHMod add a few recipes that really break the balance, stone to silicon is one, wood to coal is another. Stone is if put through slag processing kind of an omni resource, you are usually starved for stone/slag in the late game.

For me the issue is more that you the first levels of combined sorting are too easy to set up, so I might do some additional changes to what I have already planed: Adding brown catalyst to the pure iron, copper, tin and lead sorting recipes.

Please don't. Even ignoring those two waste products (crushed stone and slag) the balance is still way off. Maybe because I'm also using AAI mods and expensive. You need 4 iron plates for an iron gear wheel in expensive and AAI changes recipes for belts and inserters so they need more iron too. Science packs need a 2:1 ratio of iron to copper but everything else seems to need even more iron.

As mentioned I only sorted saphirite and still had tons of copper left over. There simply is no use for the copper you must produce when sorting Saphirite ore. If you make the combined sorting harder then that means you have to directly smelt crushed saphirite (which would be ok) and mining stiratite is only needed to research ore sorting (which I thing would be bad) until much later.

[The Draf]

Early game up to green science I smelt Hematite and sort stiratite because iron is the clear bottleneck. After I have the necessary green science and enough infrastructure I add pure ore sorting for all level 1 ores, iron, copper, tin and lead.

In order to start producing blue science you need to scale up resin production(unless you cheat and use ungodly amounts of greenhouses ). Now I start sorting bobmonium and rubyte to get the metals necessary for green metal catalyst(aluminium, gold/silver). This could also be done with crushed stone liquification.

The next hurdle is when you have hit blue science and want to use plastic 2. This requires blue metal catalysts which requires titanium ore. For this I prefer using liquification(crushed stone / slag) since the other option is chuck sorting which gives to little titanium for the effort IMO.

Overall I like the currently balance. I would not nerf pure sorting but instead buff the other methods. The main problem with sorting is that many of the products does not get used enough and just end up taking up space in warehouses.

[BlakeMW]

Sometimes the "waste" from sorting can be used in alloying recipes, Silicon, Nickel, Cobalt, and Tungsten can all be dumped into iron/steel: it works well as a priority scheme, where the iron ore is first alloyed with surplus to be dumped, and finally alloyed with manganese or smelted straight.

Saphirite hydro refining produces 2 iron, 1 copper, 1 silicon, 1 nickel: the iron and silicon, and iron and nickel + chrome, make 5 iron plates per 1 copper plate. Also it produces a surplus of both mineral sludge and crystal catalyst. Stiratite hydro refining (and leeching refining) are also highly dumpable as the non copper/iron byproducts are cobalt and tin (and uranium), cobalt can be disposed of into iron (and other things) and tin is in great demand.

Manganese is very useful as a filler metal, Manganese production only requires water and a small amount of sulphuric acid, it is entirely self-sufficient in terms of mineral sludge (in fact produces a minuscule surplus) so basically producing manganese doesn't require any connections with the rest of the factory (other than the sulphuric acid). Manangese alloy simply doubles the output of iron, so saphirite and jivolite basic sorting becomes 4:1 iron:copper.

I think the main problem with brown catalyst pure-sorting would be silver and zinc, because there's no real use for silver (you can dump it into solder, but then what are you going to do with your lead?), so the sorting recipes which produce silver are kind of meh. Zinc is also of rather limited usefulness, again can be dumped into solder which competes with silver. Aluminum has no role to play in science packs, some can be dumped into titanium which ends up as logistic science packs. This ultimately limits hydro refining+ for all but saphirite and stiratite - if you're willing to largely forgo exploitation of rubyte then bobmonium hydro refining is also viable, cobalt and zinc are both useful and both dumpable.

Anyway I think that with brown catalyst as a requirement for all recipes, you could easily make a balanced output. The idea would be to produce say, Iron, Tin and Lead as a primary product of hydro refining and basic sorting - if there are a surplus of byproduct metals they are dumped into iron production (which is otherwise stretched using manganese), if there is a deficit of byproduct metals the shortfall is made up for by pure recipes.

[Northgate]

Zinc is also of rather limited usefulness

Zinc is used to make brass which you need a ton of to make the higher tier buildings.

[mrvn]

What do you want the end game balanced setup to be:

1) the most complex merged recipes are used in some ratio so all products are provided and used
2) the most complex merged recipes are used with some pure recipes to make up shortfalls
3) a mixture of all (or most) ore processing methods is used to provide all products and all are used

Option 1 is probably impossible to balance. Too much depends on the players game style.
Option 2 is certainly possible depending on how much shortfall you accept.
Option 3 I find most interesting. I don't like building stuff just to tear it down again. Would be much cooler to just keep adding as you research better ore processing to get system that can be balanced better and better.

[BlakeMW]

Zinc is also of rather limited usefulness

Zinc is used to make brass which you need a ton of to make the higher tier buildings.

Sorry what I mean is in terms of making research packs, like you also need a heap of aluminium to make logistic bots, but aluminium, zinc and silver don't have any real sustained consumption - if your storage chests are full there's nowhere for them to go (other than more storage chests...) so they'll block production. In contrast basically limitless amounts of nickel can be dumped into iron/steel which disappears into research packs, nickel as a byproduct will thus never block primary production regardless of how little you need to make research packs. The undumpables are like process-poisons - in the long run your only option is to use void chests or incinerators, or not rely on sorting recipes that produce them as a byproduct (you can of course use a sorting recipe to get them as a primary product - like if you use bobmonium hydro refining to make zinc, there's no problem at all getting rid of the tin, silicon or cobalt - you just can't rely on that process for those other ores)

[mrvn]

Zinc is also of rather limited usefulness

Zinc is used to make brass which you need a ton of to make the higher tier buildings.

Sorry what I mean is in terms of making research packs, like you also need a heap of aluminium to make logistic bots, but aluminium, zinc and silver don't have any real sustained consumption - if your storage chests are full there's nowhere for them to go (other than more storage chests...) so they'll block production. In contrast basically limitless amounts of nickel can be dumped into iron/steel which disappears into research packs, nickel as a byproduct will thus never block primary production regardless of how little you need to make research packs. The undumpables are like process-poisons - in the long run your only option is to use void chests or incinerators, or not rely on sorting recipes that produce them as a byproduct (you can of course use a sorting recipe to get them as a primary product - like if you use bobmonium hydro refining to make zinc, there's no problem at all getting rid of the tin, silicon or cobalt - you just can't rely on that process for those other ores)

In the multiplayer game I'm in we have all the recipes impemented. All ores are curshed, hydro refined, chunked, ... and the amount of all products in buffer chests are put on a wire. We have a matrix of combinators that computes a score for each recipe based on how much of each item we want (constant combinator setting), how much is in the buffer chests and what the recipe produces. The more efficient recipes get a higher score (positive or negative) simply because they have more output products contributing to it. Things we have too much get a negative score, things we need a positive. Recipes with negative scores are ignored. Then the average of the remaining scores is computed and all recipes scoring above the average have their output belts enabled.(Alternatively filter inserters with set filter could be used to activate only the recipe(s) with highest score. But we wanted multiple recipes to run for more throughput.)

It's fun to watch. If we need iron and copper then recipes producing iron and copper and other stuff get activated unless the waste products don't get used up. Then their score drops till the pure ore recipes have a higher score and production switches to that. It picks the best way to produce what is needed tick by tick.

We also added a little hysteresis in there. Because when a train arrives and loads up 8000 iron ore then the pure iron recipe should not start right of. Because the next train loads up 8000 copper and then some mixed recipe has a better score. So we start production only if at least one item is below the minimum.

[foodfactorio]

What do you want the end game balanced setup to be:

1) the most complex merged recipes are used in some ratio so all products are provided and used
2) the most complex merged recipes are used with some pure recipes to make up shortfalls
3) a mixture of all (or most) ore processing methods is used to provide all products and all are used

Option 1 is probably impossible to balance. Too much depends on the players game style.
Option 2 is certainly possible depending on how much shortfall you accept.
Option 3 I find most interesting. I don't like building stuff just to tear it down again. Would be much cooler to just keep adding as you research better ore processing to get system that can be balanced better and better.

hi, i enjoyed the way angels refining worked when i used arumbas AngelBob modpack a fair while ago...
but, in general i think option 3 is good, in the sense that i believe there is more player satisfaction, when everything they have made (or are accumulating), is able to be used in some way.

what i found with slag in earlier angel mods, and crushed stone, and mineralised/waste water, was that i was needing to hoard it all up since i didnt want to waste any waste (no pun intended), and for a while, i was struggling to get enough main resources to be able to build all the storage necessary...
but, in the late game, pretty much every last drop of such waste sludges were used up and i actually gained many a cool resource, especially gold and lead

i actually set up all full chains of ore processing, (from ore crushing, to chunking, to crystals and purifying), and used crystal slurry as a catalyst for more sludge.. BUT, i dont believe i ever tried the Sorting processes (mixing different ores with other ores, and Catalysts etc)... and was still able to complete the rocket.....and many more so added SpaceX

maybe it makes sense that some items will end up needing to be made and not used as much as others (eg real life byproducts), needing to be buried in steel drums and concrete lol, but if there is a way to find "some" kind of use for certain spare items, it could add more fun.

(that is what actually made me think up a mod idea, linked in my sig below, after adding the SpaceX mod to the AngelBobs , which adds some fun requirements to use up lots of spare resources sitting in silos viewtopic.php?f=97&t=34176&start=20#p294780 (pictures 3 & 4 mainly)

sig with idea is below:

[mrvn]

What do you want the end game balanced setup to be:

1) the most complex merged recipes are used in some ratio so all products are provided and used
2) the most complex merged recipes are used with some pure recipes to make up shortfalls
3) a mixture of all (or most) ore processing methods is used to provide all products and all are used

Option 1 is probably impossible to balance. Too much depends on the players game style.
Option 2 is certainly possible depending on how much shortfall you accept.
Option 3 I find most interesting. I don't like building stuff just to tear it down again. Would be much cooler to just keep adding as you research better ore processing to get system that can be balanced better and better.

hi, i enjoyed the way angels refining worked when i used arumbas AngelBob modpack a fair while ago...
but, in general i think option 3 is good, in the sense that i believe there is more player satisfaction, when everything they have made (or are accumulating), is able to be used in some way.

what i found with slag in earlier angel mods, and crushed stone, and mineralised/waste water, was that i was needing to hoard it all up since i didnt want to waste any waste (no pun intended), and for a while, i was struggling to get enough main resources to be able to build all the storage necessary...
but, in the late game, pretty much every last drop of such waste sludges were used up and i actually gained many a cool resource, especially gold and lead

i actually set up all full chains of ore processing, (from ore crushing, to chunking, to crystals and purifying), and used crystal slurry as a catalyst for more sludge.. BUT, i dont believe i ever tried the Sorting processes (mixing different ores with other ores, and Catalysts etc)... and was still able to complete the rocket.....and many more so added SpaceX

maybe it makes sense that some items will end up needing to be made and not used as much as others (eg real life byproducts), needing to be buried in steel drums and concrete lol, but if there is a way to find "some" kind of use for certain spare items, it could add more fun.

(that is what actually made me think up a mod idea, linked in my sig below, after adding the SpaceX mod to the AngelBobs , which adds some fun requirements to use up lots of spare resources sitting in silos viewtopic.php?f=97&t=34176&start=20#p294780 (pictures 3 & 4 mainly)

sig with idea is below:

Finding storage space for all the crushed stone is a real problem for me. I'm playing in marathon mode and had 2.5 million liters of mineralized water and nearly 2 million crushed stoned stored before I set up green algae refining. The crushed stone is just from 2 warehouses per ore crusher setup, so just buffer "chests" and not extra storage. And iron ore production is constantly blocked because of the crushed stone. Now I just about managed to use up all the stored mineralized water and starting to use crushed stone. Still not sure I have the right amount of green algae farms because all that backlog makes it impossible to see if you use up enough crushed stone or way too much. Don't want to build another green algae farm if that will be unused once the backlog is gone.

Don't have much slag anymore since I used the mixed ore sorting this time.

[jodokus31]

There are existing many ways to useup crushed stone:
- Landfill (This can be used as emergency sink, even if you dont use so much)
- Stone-Bricks
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin
- Slag slurry

[mrvn]

There are existing many ways to useup crushed stone:
- Landfill (This can be used as emergency sink, even if you dont use so much)
- Stone-Bricks
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin
- Slag slurry

- Got a train station with buffer chests full of landfill. Good for now.
- Got a train station with buffer chests full of stone, stone brick and stone wall each. I've used quite a bit of stone to make roads. Easy way to store 16k stone, build a 8 wide road 2000m long
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel: tried that but somehow the yield is too low. Can't burn just wood bricks in the boilers and using mixed fuel sources is just harder. Great sink though as you need a lot of crushed stone to fill a warehouse with wood bricks.
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin: That's what I'm doing at the moment. But what to do with the synthesis gas (or was it residual)? Some purplish gas thingy. Already filled 2 large gas tanks with it (250k gas) for ~20k plastic.
- Slag slurry: haven't researched that yet this game since I avoided slag so far, needs some sulfuric acid to bootstrap and is not that simple to setup. Needs a number of steps to build a loop. Also not that big a consumer of slag or crushed stone, needs a lot of machines to keep up with the ore crushers.

[jodokus31]

There are existing many ways to useup crushed stone:
- Landfill (This can be used as emergency sink, even if you dont use so much)
- Stone-Bricks
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin
- Slag slurry

- Got a train station with buffer chests full of landfill. Good for now.
- Got a train station with buffer chests full of stone, stone brick and stone wall each. I've used quite a bit of stone to make roads. Easy way to store 16k stone, build a 8 wide road 2000m long
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel: tried that but somehow the yield is too low. Can't burn just wood bricks in the boilers and using mixed fuel sources is just harder. Great sink though as you need a lot of crushed stone to fill a warehouse with wood bricks.
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin: That's what I'm doing at the moment. But what to do with the synthesis gas (or was it residual)? Some purplish gas thingy. Already filled 2 large gas tanks with it (250k gas) for ~20k plastic.
- Slag slurry: haven't researched that yet this game since I avoided slag so far, needs some sulfuric acid to bootstrap and is not that simple to setup. Needs a number of steps to build a loop. Also not that big a consumer of slag or crushed stone, needs a lot of machines to keep up with the ore crushers.

If you could use the wood bricks, you can make a priority belt. First burn wood bricks, then coke pellets. My steam engines run from wood bricks, enriched fuel blocks (great fuel value) and coke pellets.
The residual gas can be converted to syn gas (i think its blue science), which can be converted to many other oil products. I usually create naphta to create propene or wood or resin.
If you have a greenhouse, you problably have enough wood and resin, but if not, this should help.
As last resort, there is also the possiblity to void gas or water, which can also prevent you from to much logistic hassle

For Sulfuric Acid: You can setup clean coal washing: coal + purified water -> coke + sulfuric waste water -> sulfur + oxygen -> sulfur dioxide + purified water -> sulfuric acid.
I recently played seablock and crushed stone and sulfuric acid is the bread & butter

[hoho]

Zinc is also of rather limited usefulness

Zinc is used to make brass which you need a ton of to make the higher tier buildings.

Sorry what I mean is in terms of making research packs, like you also need a heap of aluminium to make logistic bots, but aluminium, zinc and silver don't have any real sustained consumption

Higher tiers of smelting recipes can use different metals to boost production of basic metals. E.g molten iron smelting #5 takes 12 of each iron, nickel and chrome ingots to make 360 molten iron.
12 of each tin, copper and silver make 360 molten solder.

Pretty much all of the "extras" can be used to create basic stuff

[BlakeMW]

Higher tiers of smelting recipes can use different metals to boost production of basic metals.

)

That's nor right. Higher tiers of smelting recipes can be used to boost production of iron, steel, aluminum, titanium and tungsten. Most basic metals; that is to say copper, lead, tin and silicon cannot be boosted - you simply have to produce enough of the basic ore with no option of stretching.

Of those metals which can be boosted aluminum and tungsten have no role in research, and titanium only an extremely limited role. Tungsten can be alloyed into steel so you can dispose of unlimited quantities of it even if you don't need it. Aluminum can only be alloyed into titanium so you can only dispose of aluminum that way if you're not producing a surplus of titanium and in any case the low requirements of titanium make it still very limited.

A number of metals can basically only be disposed of into solder: being zinc, silver, lead and to a lesser degree copper. This limits the disposability of those ores. In particular any rubyte sorting recipe produces lead, if you use solder to dispose of anything other than lead this severely limits the ability to exploit rubyte sorting (for zinc and silver you can always use lower tier sorting recipes that don't produce the offending ore, with rubyte you lack that option). You can't even use solder to dispose of zinc, silver or lead together - you've always got to throw away more useful ores (like copper or tin) to get rid of the ore you want to get rid of, it'd be a different matter if you could chuck away silver with the lead.

[mrvn]

There are existing many ways to useup crushed stone:
- Landfill (This can be used as emergency sink, even if you dont use so much)
- Stone-Bricks
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin
- Slag slurry

- Got a train station with buffer chests full of landfill. Good for now.
- Got a train station with buffer chests full of stone, stone brick and stone wall each. I've used quite a bit of stone to make roads. Easy way to store 16k stone, build a 8 wide road 2000m long
- Mineralized water -> Wood Bricks for fuel: tried that but somehow the yield is too low. Can't burn just wood bricks in the boilers and using mixed fuel sources is just harder. Great sink though as you need a lot of crushed stone to fill a warehouse with wood bricks.
- Mineralized water -> Methanol for plastic/resin: That's what I'm doing at the moment. But what to do with the synthesis gas (or was it residual)? Some purplish gas thingy. Already filled 2 large gas tanks with it (250k gas) for ~20k plastic.
- Slag slurry: haven't researched that yet this game since I avoided slag so far, needs some sulfuric acid to bootstrap and is not that simple to setup. Needs a number of steps to build a loop. Also not that big a consumer of slag or crushed stone, needs a lot of machines to keep up with the ore crushers.

If you could use the wood bricks, you can make a priority belt. First burn wood bricks, then coke pellets. My steam engines run from wood bricks, enriched fuel blocks (great fuel value) and coke pellets.
The residual gas can be converted to syn gas (i think its blue science), which can be converted to many other oil products. I usually create naphta to create propene or wood or resin.
If you have a greenhouse, you problably have enough wood and resin, but if not, this should help.
As last resort, there is also the possiblity to void gas or water, which can also prevent you from to much logistic hassle

For Sulfuric Acid: You can setup clean coal washing: coal + purified water -> coke + sulfuric waste water -> sulfur + oxygen -> sulfur dioxide + purified water -> sulfuric acid.
I recently played seablock and crushed stone and sulfuric acid is the bread & butter

Sure you can do something with residual gas. Going through 20 steps and 200 machines involving 40 other products and 5 feedback loops. It just gets way way way to complex just to use up crushed stone so you can produce some much needed iron plates. And hey, all those machines to use up the residual gas need a ton of iron plates to build first.

So many options and they all need to be researched first. I keep finding new ways to do something all the time. And hey, research needs iron plates and copper too, tons of it. So even more crushed stone to get rid of. It's a catch 22. At the moment my main problem is time though. I simply can build all the infrastructure fast enough to use or get rid of the extra products. So I either store stuff or vent it. Like hydrogen. I need oxygen for steel and lead but I'm worlds away from making use of the hydrogen from splitting water.

[jodokus31]

OK, i understand, the complex stuff is often not neccessary, in order to progress fast, its even better to avoid it.
I had the imagination, you want to use up everything, without clarifiers and flarestacks...
the easiest way is: crushed stone -> mineralized water -> clarifier
I also played marathon and didn't had to go that route. But i also used many stone pathways and started early with wood bricks and have tons of landfill.

[BlakeMW]

I also use clarifier a lot to get rid of mineralized water and ocasionally crushed stone.

I've used bioprocessing but I don't think it's really worth using because gas and oil gives you all the petroleum products you need while not being dependent on byproducts of other production chains (technically you can make infinite mineralized water by using dirt water electrolysis and crushing the slag, but it's not efficient)

[mrvn]

I'm trying not to throw away useful things needlessly, not things I won't get back (at a decent speed). That's why I buffered all the crushed stone (well and I didn't have mineralised water and clarifier at the start . Getting crushed stone back from water electrolysis when you later find out you desperately need crushed stone would be painful. But for some things you get basically for free (water + power = hydrogen for example) and at such an rate that if you later need it you can just make more. I simply can't keep up with adding storage tanks to store some hydrogen.

So I try not to waste anything but am practical about it.

[hoho]

Higher tiers of smelting recipes can use different metals to boost production of basic metals.

)

That's nor right. Higher tiers of smelting recipes can be used to boost production of iron, steel, aluminum, titanium and tungsten. Most basic metals; that is to say copper, lead, tin and silicon cannot be boosted - you simply have to produce enough of the basic ore with no option of stretching.

Pretty sure the stuff on these screenshots is coming from angel's mods.

[edit]

That's what I get for not paying attention. Yes, you are correct that copper, lead and tin can't (currently?) be boosted. Though the point I was replying to was to show there is a sink for the less used stuff. It's just that the sink only boosts some of the lower-tier metals.