I've been busy irl with university, so prepair for a long post
Rue99 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 3:36 pm
... I'd love to see the heavy barreling pump in a mod all of its own - I play all manner of mod packs, not all of which are compatible with Angels, and I've not found anything remotely as aesthetically appealing!
Glad you like the graphics, but as a stand alone, will not happen for the foreseeable future.
danyax wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:22 am
live22morrow wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:13 am
danyax wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 3:40 pm
I wonder why modules research (lvl 1-8) always require basic circuit boards? I think to make modules progression more meaningful tiers 3-5 and 6-8 should use logic and processor boards. It would also perfectly match with B&A play, where new type of crystals are added - splinters/shards/crystal. Now once you set up massive splinter production (quite complex chain), you are god to go for all modules research till level 8. If above ideal is implemented, it would require also massive production of shards and crystals.
The boards themselves require the components. T1-2 require splinters (circuit board), T3-5 require shards (logic board), and T6-8 require crystals (processor board). Unless you're talking about the actual tech research which only requires the circuit boards, but that's more likely so that the module lab doesn't need to have 17 different slots.
I am talking exactly about tech research which only requires the circuit boards. Research is the only thing that requires massive builds if you play on high tech multiplier. Module production itself has very limited consumption of shards and crystals.
The reason why they use currently only the 1st tier for the technology is because of the huge amount of inputs the lab would have, as live22morrow mentioned.
Assuming you don't play with a tech multiplier, the main use for your modules would be in your actual build, so the tech is rather minimal compared to the amount of modules you use. Look for example at a mk8 speed module that requires a full mk7 module + 10 extra processor boards. In total for a mk8 you need 3 circuit boards + 12 logic boards + 24 processing boards. I would call this already quite a lot for a single module, assuming you put 6 modules/beacon and probably another 6 modules/assembler, you'll have quite a count already.
To not clutter your crafting menu with just extra labs that are used for 1 or 2 researches, keeping them all in 1 lab with the basic modules seems fine to me tbf... To account for tech multipliers, we could add some extra module labs for the different tiers, but this will be quite low on the priority list.
Maric wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 4:45 pm
Just tried to play a save where i had a huge self sustaining thing with acres and acres and acres of greenhouses going on. The new sawblades thing completely wrecks that. Soooo i will not be using angels bio stuff anymore ... any one know of a mod where i can have a big investment of space and materials to get a low but steady stream of energy out that does not consume finite ressources?
I am sorry to hear that, they do not use a lot of iron, especially when you go further and make a self sustainable crystal farm, you can even improve your sawblades to use almost no iron at all! If you are concerned about finite resources, you can always play with the infinite ore mod, and in combination with the ore remover mod, you can remove infinite patches that you don't want.
Wildejackson wrote: ↑Tue Apr 14, 2020 5:28 am
I know this is really nit-picky but can the "transistor" component from industries please be renamed to a capacitor? I can ignore that you cant make transistors from just wire and iron plates, but a component with ONLY TWO LEGS?? Insanity //rant-over
Was bugging me as well, is now renamed to capacitor.
Coffee Daemon wrote: ↑Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:32 pm
So perhaps I'm being dumb but I just cant find a way of getting rid of hydrogen. I've just gotten up to steel on an BA playthrough. For steel I need oxygen and water separation seems to be the way to go, except I cant even void hydrogen without a flare stack? And I just cant see a use for it either at this early stage.
EDIT: Turns out fluid boilers can also burn Hydrogen. I hope this is intentional.
You should have access to the small petro tank that you can use to store it, or pick up and replace if you don't want to accumulate it. If I recall correctly, oxygen from air separation (red science) produces less byproducts versus the water electrolysis. That's my comment towards angels only maps. When you play with bobs mods, you can use the fluid boiler, and yes, it is intended that you can burn hydrogen then.
cdowns59 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:23 pm
... The current compost recipe takes any single bio item, be it wood, algae, a crop, etc. Real life composting doesn't work like that - you need a mix of green waste and brown waste. So perhaps:
- the original composting recipes could be nerfed to be low efficiency, probabilistic recipes ("mulching").
- advanced, far more efficient composting recipes added which take multiple inputs, perhaps via an intermediate step to form green and brown waste to reduce the combinations of compost recipes.
Doing this would encourage players to explore the range of farming options rather than on just a few.
Compost isn't meant to become productive, it's meant to be a bio/organic void like the flare is a chemical void and the liquifier a water void, so allowing a single item as input is a must-have. It's not too bad to create farms dedicated for creating compost either, so it feels balanced as it is?
cdowns59 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:23 pm
I found that waiting for desert gardens to produce an extra desert garden in 5% of cases (for seeds for the nut-producing crop with 5% probability for the blazing puffer breeding) was a very slow process (I only had two desert gardens within a large area of my spawn compared to dozens of temperate gardens) and it seems weird that only fertiliser is needed to do this (whereas sand and saline are also needed to grow the individual crops). I don't think the alien plant life samples are used beyond a handful of research technologies and construction of advanced farms, but large amounts of gardens are useful for garden mutations (I can't see any swamp gardens within a large area of my spawn), so perhaps:
- boost the output of the desert gardening but also require a substrate and water (and same for the other gardens too)
- allow gardens to also be made from the constituent crops plus a substrate - this is where the seeds come from initially, and prevents a huge number of mostly unusuable alien plant life samples being stockpiled while gathering gardens for mutations.
- and/or add another use of alien plant life samples (e.g. mutations, breeding)
Thanks
I do like the idea of an alternative way of growing gardens. Here my idea:
- For red science, use 1 plant life samples and some alien goo to grow a random type of garden, at a low rate such that for 32 samples of input you have less than 1 garden output. This way you have some loss, so you're not able to duplicate gardens using this method.
- For green science, use 32 plant life samples fertilizer and alien goo to grow 1 + 5% of the same garden type, the same recipe as there is now
- For endgame (blue+ science), use some plant life samples together with some tree seeds and nuclear fertilizer and lots of alien goo to have a chance of growing the special trees, with no garden output anymore:
- General tree seed gives a X% chance of any special tree
- Specialized tree seeds give 2*X% chance of that single special tree (double the chance, but only 1/3 of trees, so net 2/3 as productive as the general seed)
With this tweak, it will be easier to obtain other gardens other than deserts in seablock, and allow you to mutate gardens early game without duplicating any, while keeping the requirement of exploring for gardens and/or trees.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:22 pm
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 9:41 pm
So which is the intended way to get concrete/reinforced concrete?
There is the vanilla/Bob way and the Angel way based on molted concrete.
Are they meant to coexist and be up to personal choice or is there a "meant to" way to get concrete, like with wood, where the Angel meant to way is to use Bio, but you can "shortcut" it and get Bob's Greenhouse?
Honestly when there is a choice like that (which happens at several places) I usually go with Angel's choice. It kinda is often the better and more interesting/involved choice.
In case of the concrete variants of recipes it seems to be some kind of vanilla override for the sake of probably having concrete tiles early on. Most other concrete products require molten concrete anyway.
Inside of Angel's there is usually a progression path anyway... and the icons with I, II, III, IV in the top left corner, etc usually tell you which one is the best/latest available... and when I need an item I usually look at that icon and then go back from there to establish all necessary ingredients.
Since recent, the concrete bricks have a new tile. So in short:
- Concrete (the vanilla tile) can be obtained using the vanilla recipe, which uses stone and iron. Angel introduces an alternative that has an option (cement 1) to use silicon instead and an option (cement 2) to use a mix of both.
- Hazard concrete and the refined versions come from the concrete mentioned in the above bullet point ^^
- Reinforced Concrete Bricks gives the tutorial grid tile, which has a different look to it, more tile-like looking.
- Concrete Bricks currently give the same tutorial tile as the Reinforced version. If possible, I want to bring back the rough looking square look of concrete tiles as the base game had a while ago, and use the rough looking one as not reinforced version.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:22 pm
...
That said I feel you there. Sometimes the left-over vanilla/bob's alternative/legacy recipes can be irritating, especially later when there is a ton of recipes in every tab.
It is vanilla and bob's that kinda adds a lot of mess. Nothing against the dev's or bobingabout but it is true somehow. Angel's Mods are a lot more organized and cleaner in structure.
It is also obvious that they haven't decided on the fate of some legacy/alternative items from Vanilla/Bob's yet. If they want to replace/hide them entirely or not.
Like for example bob's distillery doesn't even show a single recipe. Could hide the machine entirely if there is no use for it.
Or bob's barreling pumps when Angel's has its own.
Or why they are keeping the vanilla/bob's furnaces when they have a combined 9 different machines in metallurgy smelting & casting that could probably do absolutely everything.
Don't forget about mod compatibility! Other mods might only use vanilla stuff and not angels. For this reason we try to provide the vanilla recipes as an alternative and make them blend in. For the concrete we came up with adding new tiles as a result, so they are not redundant and/or provide alternative recipes to not require some other ingredient that could be used more useful elsewhere (I mentioned it in my bullet points).
Bobs barreling pumps should be disabled what so ever. Similarly, bobs distillery should be obsolete now (also recently). With the release of
base v0.18.20, we can now hide settings. So we'll add this feature to hide some bob settings in order to hide most of these obsolete parts in the future, once we are sure they are obsolete. We rather have a building that is obsolete than a recipe that is missing a building and preventing you from progressing. It also comes with complications, for example, we cannot just hide vanilla items, for that reason, we'll have to look into reskinning the vanilla chem plant and hide angels version instead.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:49 pm
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:45 pm
Bob' version has the advantage of allowing you to recycle all your stone bricks, which you have hundreds of thousands by now...
Well for some reason I am almost always out of stone in late game BA. It is like my most hated enemy. I don't know exactly why this happens. Probably I am not using enough ores in late game anymore to create crushed stone because at that point I put heavy use to productivity modules to cut back on CPU and resource demand.
So probably I eventually put an arrow to my own knee when it comes to stone production when doing that... eventually the stone usage of later crafting stages doesn't scale down any further while the resource demand of early crafting stages in the cascade still shrinks... eventually the break-even point is not met anymore and I am at net loss of stone... and there not being a viable way to mass-produce more except with some ugly cheating with water electrolysis to get slag... and Speed module the crap out of it to meet the demand.
That said I recently started over and for the first time I am also using Angel's Industries... and it changed a lot in the science production and necessary resources so I still have to see how it turns out this time.
You are correct that you are short on stone late game. I bet you still use slag slurry to make mineral sludge at that point. You should try and look into using some crushed geodes, which produce crushed stone. The Crystal dust you can recycle into crystal slurry and make mineral sludge from that. Of course you have to mix and balance, for example you can create slag slurry from not crushing it to balance out the sulfur consumption on that sulfur loop, and then create some from slag slurry to even out the excess stone when you have that in great quantities. In the end game it's a lot more about using different systems at once, mixing different ways to balance out the byproducts. The setups will grow, and if you don't feel like it's something for you, you can always vent something and make it easier on yourself. There is no right/wrong way to play!
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 9:23 pm
Hmmm, is there no way to get plastic without Bio?
It requires orange science which requires plastic. A loop.
Industries requires bio, so you can't play it without bio, I'm sure you have bio installed. And yes, you require to make an early bio plastic setup for orange science. Mid game you'll move towards a petrochem setup and engame you'll supply some more from bio again. Your setup is not wasted, as you'll divert the build to wood production at that point. Or just keep it as a top up feed of plastic on top of your petrochem build.
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2020 7:50 am
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 9:23 pm
Hmmm, is there no way to get plastic without Bio?
It requires orange science which requires plastic. A loop.
Also bio-plastic from trees is a trap. Don't go for it!
You need 1 swamp tree for one plastic producer, they are limited like swamp gardens, but there is no handy tech to get more with a 5% chance, not at the stage where you need the first plastic.
Also, I'm in a desert bordering on temperate areas. I drove around for more than 1h trying to find a single swamp tree. My map setting allow for this but forget about it with bitter expansion or a death world.
Next, I'll try plastic from plants...
I've had the feedback after the balancing update that plastic from gardens is quite good, and they are competing as alternative to petrochem. I do know gardens are hard to get, so see some earlier responses I've made in this post for some ideas to obtain all garden types early game.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:27 pm
...
Tbh currently with Angel's industries enabled I am more annoyed about the Bob's legacy tiered items like Tungsten-Carbide plates and Nitinol Plates/Gears and Bearing Rings etc. The longer I play with Angel's industries enabled the more I really start to hate those bob's legacy tiered ingredients. I had to put extra legacy machinery there to get the stuff and they stick out like a sore thumb from the other production lines... because all lower tiered items/machinery recipes are already updated to need Angel's Industries blocks as ingredients, but the high tier bob items like Assembler 5-6 etc and all that still need what is left of the Bob's plates and intermediates.
The Tungsten-Carbide plates could perfectly be just normal Angel's Tungsten plates. And the Nitinol stuff just normal Titanium plates... and use Titanium-themed items for Tier 5 and Tungsten themed items for Tier 6 bob's items or whatever they consider higher-tier. And scrap the Nitinol gears/bearings etc. And/or update to use Angel's blocks entirely even for late tier bob's machinery/items... because there are T5 blocks of most blocks anyway.
But not only that... every time I deconstruct something I get a crap ton of those bob's items back into inventory/logistic network... and there is not that much use for them unlike the angel's blocks which eventually get used by science production or something entirely different.
In my opinion the alloys (nitinol, ...) are not that bad to make, they just need some better usage. I do agree that bob bearings etc are quite obsolete, and I do want to remove them in the long run. Also keep in mind that there are still hidden advanced production blocks that are not yet introduced into the game (from tier 3 and higher). I plan on having those blocks require more dedicated recipes, which I do not know the ingredients of just yet. I do know I want to use more of the exotic bars on them where possible. Mainly waiting a bit on balancing how the playthroughs are going now and seeing what could be used more in the future.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:27 pm
Also since most bob's high tier items/machinery requires a lower tier variant of the same item to be crafted... I always get the lower tier items back on deconstruction. For example yesterday I deconstructed a ton of T4 Power poles because I moved an entire production line somewhere else on the map and I got a ton of T3 power poles as a result... and then I accidentally placed those T3 power poles all over the factory instead of T4 ones and eventually wondered why they don't reach that far only to realize my mistake two hours later and then I couldn't remember every instance where I placed the wrong poles. I think that is another reason why I think that using angel's blocks entirely would be the better option.
The re-usability of the angel's blocks is what I like the most about Angel's industries. It is similar and more sophisticated to one of the ideas/concepts I suggested a few years back with modularity of machines in the suggestions board for vanilla game but the devs obviously never picked it up because it probably and understandably seemed too complex for the standard game.
But it still is alpha, so I can't be mad about it.
The issue about returning the earlier tiers is, if I disassemble the lower tiers as well, then your inventory could explode, just because of the huge amount of blocks you would get in return (imagine picking up a tier 6 that would return all ingredients of a tier 6,5,4,3,2 and 1! That would just mean you have to keep your inventory half full all the time while deconstructing/designing something new...
brysamo wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2020 11:41 pm
So I'm experiencing a weird issue with transporting molten glass by train (and honestly I'm not sure if the issue lies within Angel's or Bob's).
1 - Only molten fluids are affected
I thought this was just an issue with molten glass but it was the only molten fluid I was transporting. tried it with a few others and same deal.
2 - My train only fills if I put it to manual. I've tried every auto condition, only manual makes it actually fill. When on auto, it will fill with 400 units, and then stop
3 - The first time I did this it just showed the train as 1 single tank (i, displayed 400k units when full). Now it shows each wagon separately
https://i.imgur.com/Suf17WT.jpg
4 - Destroying the train and rebuilding it didn't work
5 - Making a brand new train didn't work
6 - Destroying the whole station and all fluid didn't work
7 - The casters on the bottom making glass panes work fine
8 - Getting rid of the petrochem mod didn't work (but before i did that I tried the petrochem wagon, didn't work)
I should also add I'm not running the latest update of Angel's or Bob's because I don't want to reconfigure my factory to deal with RTGs that Bob's added for satellites this late in the game, but to troubleshoot I did update and the issue remained.
This was working perfectly fine when I first built it. I transported millions of units with no issues (there have been a bunch of updates to both Angel's and Bob's since then).
My best bet, with keeping the past updates in mind... Are the different fluids in the tanks for example, are they the same temperature? My guess would be they are a bit too cold, and when the train starts filling up, the tank is draining, so new hot fluid enters and the temperature can rise, when it bumps the temperature, the train stops filling? If this is the case, you should report this to the base game, as it is meant to equalize the temperature, so the fluid in the fluid wagon should rise as well, instead of stop filling. I did change the temperature on the smelting fluids to represent real life melting points, as requested on /r/factorio a while back.
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:46 pm
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:27 pm
...snip...
Wow, there is a lot to unpack there,
...
Problem 1: The build everything
One of the big problems of A+B is the building hell. If you want to set up a build everything, making most of the buildings, and you do need most, since they upgrade, you end up with 120+ assemblers. I had several bases with two huge grids, each 8x8 or 9x9 assemblers, one for buildings, one for logistics and misc.
This is bad because:
- it is big but not particularly interesting
- it takes a lot of time to build and I personally found that I'm tweaking and upgrading my build everything constantly
- it is hard to navigate and find one particular item
- you end up with ton of junk in you inventory and need a huge inventory, otherwise every 5 minutes you are returning to base
- it becomes at least twice as large and total chaos if you do it with belts, so you are strong armed a bit into bots, otherwise you end up with an un-aesthetic un-symmetrical.
Solution: Blocks
How far should we go: all the way!
Basically, in Angel's Industries, one could have easily designed the mod to have a few blocks and otherwise use random bits of pieces, like circuits and pipes to craft buildings. So if a building took 10 construction block and 10 electronics blocks, one could have approximated that as 20+ construction blocks and 10 circuits.
This is not what we got, but instead got specialized blocks.
So I'm thinking that most items (if not all) that you construct to place down in you base should be made out of blocks exclusivelly.
This way, you can keep a stack of each on hand and hand craft everything.
Don't want to hand craft and want to make a build everything? As and example, let's say that you have 30 buildings in a tier of tech (5 general production,5 sorting 5 smelting, etc). All you need to do is put down 30 assemblers in a row. Or a more manageable 5x5 or something.
This has the advantages:
- it is small
- it is easy to navigate and find stuff
- if you then want to upgrade to the next tier, all you need to do is clear the belts, feed them to the next tier of blocks and funnel them to you original assemblers after you changed the recipes. The build everything does not grow too fast, you add anew building once in a while.
In my last update I did (before uni kicked in) I did make construction robots red science so you can already use them for early construction purposes and the mk1 logistics robots are green science. So it should be fairly trivial to start progressing through red science faster and already have a logistics network up and running by green science. This feels an appropriate time to set up building automation. I do not see blocks as part of the mall, as you'll use them for science, so they should have a dedicated build, and use them as in put to your mall.
The goal is to let all buildings use blocks. If you look at the angel buildings this is already the case, since those have a custom override build into them. We cannot do that for bobs mods. We do however have a replacement script that replaces the ingredients of those recipes with equivalent blocks (and components). The goal is to get this script more or less working for all (vanilla+bobs) ingredients, such that it is compatible to other mods.
One exception on this rule are belts and inserters. These will only use components, as most players have a dedicated build for these anyway that feed 1 tier into another. In this case it is acceptable for them to use components instead of different blocks. This has also to do with blocks are quite expensive and would be too costly for belts and/or inserters. For this reason we see those as not buildings for now. I do however plan to have a replacement script for them. Of course we cannot do that before the general script is in more or less a finished state.
Zyrconia wrote: ↑Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:46 pm
This works well but I'm having some problems:
- inventory can still be a mess. I think these blocks should stack to 1000, or at least have the option to. This way you could walk around with under 10 slots in you inventory and be able to hand craft everything.
- I think the time to craft the building should be factored into the block. There is no good reason to make people build a large block assembly only to have to wait 5 seconds for a building. Maybe even 0.5 is too much. Alternatively one can use Crafting speed research for a similar bonus.
- the Bob's buildings
When talking about the Bob's building, I for one like Bob's mods and I think it adds a few great ideas which should be preserved. I can get to this in a later post detailing what they do well and what should be preserved.
But here is the good part: Bob only ads a relatively low amount of buildings: with assemblers, circuit assemblers, miners and poles you covered most of what is needed.
I do like the idea of blocks stacking to 1000, I might make that even a default and adding a setting, similar like with tiles to stack between 200 and maybe 10K? That could also mean I could disassemble recipes fully, so that mk4 power pole mentioned above could return ingredients from the mk4, mk3, mk2 and mk1! As well as the idea to let buildings only have a crafting time of 0.5 or even 0.1 second. I do want to scale up the construction time on the higher tier blocks, so it's not 5 seconds for all tiers, but more like 1 second for the mk0 blocks, 2.5s for the mk1, 5s for mk2, 8s for mk3, 15s for mk4 and 25s maybe for the mk5.
As mentioned above, bobs blocks are lower priority, but still on the list, we want the replacement script working first before going more in detail into bob buildings. For sure give ideas of what should be preserved!
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:39 pm
Yeah, the upgrade stages of Bob's is what kinda interferes with Angel's Blocks (next to the left-over intermediate items like Nitinol and Tungsten Carbide stuff that Angel's Industry doesn't incorporate in the Blocks). So that is something that eventually should be addressed by Angel.
Remove the need to upgrade tiers and some of those late tier Bob's intermediate for Bob's buildings/items to slipstream the experience into something more consistent and use Angel's Blocks exclusively and most of my concerns/problems would be gone in an instant.
I didn't mention this explicit in this post yet, but removing the need to upgrade machines from tier to tier and only use the intermediates as upgrades only works for buildings. This is our goal in the long run. However, as already mentioned, stuff like belts, inserters, power poles etc that do not use blocks, only use intermediates, those will still require upgrade to upgrade. The big question is still, should they return components or not... inserters and belts do not, but we're still debating if power poles, especially the big ones and substations are buildings or rather high quantity items that should not drop ingredients.
MeduSalem wrote: ↑Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:39 pm
That said I don't know what Angel eventually has planned concerning his intermediate/finished items. If he plans to add his own set of themed assemblers/buildings eventually with Angel's Industries like in the Resource Refining, Metal Smelting&Casting and replace the default assemblers/bob's assemblers anyway. Would be cool but I don't know if there is something planned like it.
The main difference between Bob's and Angel's is that Bob's resource savings come from additonal tiers of productivity modules and upgradeable tiers of buildings, while Angel tries to make the recipes and crafting stages more complex to get the most out of them. Those different design philosophies kinda don't stack very well in late game. I can see it with being constantly out of stone because I don't consume enough intermediate items since I put too many Productivity modules in them. And I don't really know what to do about it. I kinda find the concepts of using modules nice, but there is this obvious conflict there.
As far as I am aware there are no plans to add assemblers like bob does to angels. If you don't like to play with bobs, you can always add other mods like factorio extended, which do similar things. Since the tiered buildings is a big footprint in bobs, we don't want to replace bobs, but rather let both mods work together, similar as wel already (try to) do.
There are a few ways to make more stone, one of them is consume less stone, by using alternative methods or by combining a more productive method with a less productive one as I mentioned earlier in this post.
After all this, congratz for those who have read it all to the end
Stay safe and happy automating. Hotfix releases will stay to come out as needed, depending mainly about how the base game changes while we work on the next update of mainly industry and fixes all over the place.