Development and Discussion

[Arch666Angel]

With current fluid mechanics here noone will try to bus fluid unless necessary. It's simply to tricky.
And I don't expect 50% increase from first step.. but I think it's called advanced smelting so there should be some benefit. And speed is not really a benefit in this case since speed to area ratio is still worse and ore to plates efficiency is also worse then basic crushed ore smelting.

At the start of game you are not looking for speed especially if it results in much higher area requirements. If it gave 10-15% gain then it would be worthwile to use - for now it's a novelty until you can get into next stage that will give actual benefits.

From previous longer game it was still much more convenient to run main iron and copper from crushed ore directly. It might be the fact that sorting is currently done in a way thats non viable for mass production. It's required for ore variety and there it will be used but for mass iron/copper ore smelting it's useless due to amount of work and ore required to produce a lot of iron/copper ores. Additional slag can be made into ores so thats a bonus when you are in position that one of materials is hard to obtain.
I did not use the merged crushed ores sorting (like saphirite and jivolite to iron ore) so maybe thats a better way for mass iron/copper production.

I'll give you a hint: You can set recipes for specific ores on the ore processing machines...

The ratio ore to plates is still 1 to 1, if you are referring to the additional materials: Yep I probably need to change it and count them too for the ratio to be correct. Also you can mass produce specific ores with the advanced sorting recipes, it's all a question of effort and scale But as I always emphasize that's is entirely your choice, you can as well stay the whole game with the crushed smelting, it's easier to make by far but you have to get more raw ore in to get the same amount of plates.

[Ratzap]

Getting enough ore out isn't a problem if you process everything. Just from crusher and sorter you get 6 iron and copper per cycle of the machines from 4 ore types.

Using these mods to my mind means taking time to set things up. First base in the starter area is a cramped mess but once you build a decent planned base you can take the space to get as much throughput as you want. Personally I'm using Factorissimo because I like how tidy it makes the place. I've got the railheads in, ore is crushed at the minhead and the crushed stone turned to stone before shipping, 6 factories set one per ore type to do flotation, leaching and sorting. The belt sorter mod makes it fairly simple to get the 14 ores (using uranium power this save) sorted to their respective warehouse (along with slag and geodes).

More Factorissimo blocks will house the processing, pelleting, furnaces and casters which will end up in more warehouses filling with plates. It'll take days to get it all put together even with blueprints and rather slow mk1 robots but who's in a hurry? After that I'll start on the oil/gas side. All the time living out of my crappy start base. I might post pictures if anyone's interested.

[Mooncat]

Hi Angel, I just went back to your mods after making some mods. It took me a while before I realize Angel's Refining requires Angel's Infinite Ores to run or otherwise error occurs on load. Would you mind adding the dependency in Angel's Refining?

BTW, nice picture. Are you making a long-distance transportation system with aircraft?

[aklesey1]

Nice hover flying machine, i like it i want it!

[Arch666Angel]

Hi Angel, I just went back to your mods after making some mods. It took me a while before I realize Angel's Refining requires Angel's Infinite Ores to run or otherwise error occurs on load. Would you mind adding the dependency in Angel's Refining?

BTW, nice picture. Are you making a long-distance transportation system with aircraft?

The problem is that the load order is reversed so I can load configs according to mods present, so the load order is not ore->refining->petro->smelting it actually is refining->petro->ores, so the ores mod can detect which ores configuration to load. I could shift everything up one data-stage, but that would also mean I had to shift the overrides now done in data-updates into data-final-fixes...and then there is no room above that

It's my prototype for the cargo robot: They can carry a whole stack (200 items of one type) but are slow as fuck, they will be available earlier than regular logistic robots. The other point of this is that you can build dedicated cargo bot lines to ferry stuff from a to b with them. It works in a test environment, but still has to be stress tested, because I doubt that they will work as they should (factorio surprise!).

[mexmer]

The smelting steps are faster if going at full throughput, vanilla plates recipes are 1 per 3,5 seconds, casting machines will pump out 2 per 4 seconds. Also yes it's to expand later to make alloys from ingots, so there will be different steel mixtures, another things is you can get interesting setups because of the fact that the metal can go into pipes (casting machines and smelter will cooling water sometime in the future too).

That hopefully will be a cargo robot when I figure out how to put together the sprite sheet for it

unfortunately that difference is barely noticeable. mind people even now just stacking lot of smelters in line for basic ores (like 10-14 smelters dual line). - not critizing, just saying ... unless there is other purpose for that, it will not be used

liquification of metal sounds good tho', except current fluid system mechanic (and i mean factorio), seems still wonky to me. with proper pumping engine and bombs 20 unit tubes, might work tho'

The 20 unit pipes aren't inherently faster but they do store more per pipe chunk. The casting units use 2 liquid every 4 seconds, you'd need 120 of them to saturate the throughput of 1 normal iron pipe without pumps. If you use small pumps you half that because they are garbage but even then you'd be producing 30 plates a second +/- crafting speed from mk of unit. The size of the gear needed to process, pellet, ingot and cast that would be pretty bloody enourmous - in short, the pipes are not the problem.

I've got a setup at the moment making 280 plates a minute. Not much compared to a 'standard' setup of say 22 steel furnaces getting ore stuffed into them but then you don't add mods like this if you want faster than stock with similar or smaller footprint.

i'm quite aware, that 20 unit pipes are not faster (unless you push them with pump, but then you still need enough input, otherwise it will not work). problem is equalization and balancing of whole fluid network, like i said, it's wonky. you can easily break your whole tube transportation, by placing split on wrong place. done that, been there. equalization of fluid network is much more complex, than belt system and not much straightforward.

as for 20 unit pipes, i mentioned them, because if you want high volume fluid transport, you will eventually need to opt for them (and pumps of course), or (for very long distances) rail tankers. not sure how efficient will be transporting liquified ore, compared to plates, tho', or simple ore.

[orzelek]

With current fluid mechanics here noone will try to bus fluid unless necessary. It's simply to tricky.
And I don't expect 50% increase from first step.. but I think it's called advanced smelting so there should be some benefit. And speed is not really a benefit in this case since speed to area ratio is still worse and ore to plates efficiency is also worse then basic crushed ore smelting.

At the start of game you are not looking for speed especially if it results in much higher area requirements. If it gave 10-15% gain then it would be worthwile to use - for now it's a novelty until you can get into next stage that will give actual benefits.

From previous longer game it was still much more convenient to run main iron and copper from crushed ore directly. It might be the fact that sorting is currently done in a way thats non viable for mass production. It's required for ore variety and there it will be used but for mass iron/copper ore smelting it's useless due to amount of work and ore required to produce a lot of iron/copper ores. Additional slag can be made into ores so thats a bonus when you are in position that one of materials is hard to obtain.
I did not use the merged crushed ores sorting (like saphirite and jivolite to iron ore) so maybe thats a better way for mass iron/copper production.

I'll give you a hint: You can set recipes for specific ores on the ore processing machines...

The ratio ore to plates is still 1 to 1, if you are referring to the additional materials: Yep I probably need to change it and count them too for the ratio to be correct. Also you can mass produce specific ores with the advanced sorting recipes, it's all a question of effort and scale But as I always emphasize that's is entirely your choice, you can as well stay the whole game with the crushed smelting, it's easier to make by far but you have to get more raw ore in to get the same amount of plates.

I'm not sure what do you mean by setting recipes for specific ores.. crushers are crushers and adv ore recipes need for you to have those ores. And thats not something you have when you research red science or start with green one - jivolite and crotinnium are not starting area ores.
So what do you mean exactly by setting specific ore recipes on machines?

Ore to plates ratio is 1:1 only on advanced sorting recipes. Any other way has some reduction and crushed to plates directly is quite superior versus other sorting. And for advanced sorting you need to have the ores and that needs rail and actually having them around (I did have a map without saphirite - no patches in vincinity of 3k tiles or about that. Only starting one and after that it was jivolite for iron only)

[Arch666Angel]

With current fluid mechanics here noone will try to bus fluid unless necessary. It's simply to tricky.
And I don't expect 50% increase from first step.. but I think it's called advanced smelting so there should be some benefit. And speed is not really a benefit in this case since speed to area ratio is still worse and ore to plates efficiency is also worse then basic crushed ore smelting.

At the start of game you are not looking for speed especially if it results in much higher area requirements. If it gave 10-15% gain then it would be worthwile to use - for now it's a novelty until you can get into next stage that will give actual benefits.

From previous longer game it was still much more convenient to run main iron and copper from crushed ore directly. It might be the fact that sorting is currently done in a way thats non viable for mass production. It's required for ore variety and there it will be used but for mass iron/copper ore smelting it's useless due to amount of work and ore required to produce a lot of iron/copper ores. Additional slag can be made into ores so thats a bonus when you are in position that one of materials is hard to obtain.
I did not use the merged crushed ores sorting (like saphirite and jivolite to iron ore) so maybe thats a better way for mass iron/copper production.

I'll give you a hint: You can set recipes for specific ores on the ore processing machines...

The ratio ore to plates is still 1 to 1, if you are referring to the additional materials: Yep I probably need to change it and count them too for the ratio to be correct. Also you can mass produce specific ores with the advanced sorting recipes, it's all a question of effort and scale But as I always emphasize that's is entirely your choice, you can as well stay the whole game with the crushed smelting, it's easier to make by far but you have to get more raw ore in to get the same amount of plates.

I'm not sure what do you mean by setting recipes for specific ores.. crushers are crushers and adv ore recipes need for you to have those ores. And thats not something you have when you research red science or start with green one - jivolite and crotinnium are not starting area ores.
So what do you mean exactly by setting specific ore recipes on machines?

Ore to plates ratio is 1:1 only on advanced sorting recipes. Any other way has some reduction and crushed to plates directly is quite superior versus other sorting. And for advanced sorting you need to have the ores and that needs rail and actually having them around (I did have a map without saphirite - no patches in vincinity of 3k tiles or about that. Only starting one and after that it was jivolite for iron only)

That you can filter out the ores from the sorter with the ore processing machines

The crushed to plates are at a 3 ore to 2 plates ratio, while every sorting recipes has a 1 to almost 1 ratio if you process everything to ores, if you count in the useful byproducts the ratio is even better. With the advanced recipes it's the same because you need catalysts for the higher ones. I don't say that you should change from smelting crushed plates, I do this myself for quiet some time everytime I play.


---
So this is a cargo robot test rig with 3 separate lines:

cargo-bot-test-1.png (1.87 MiB) Viewed 5982 times

And in motion https://youtu.be/yJ6Q_omGrZk

[mexmer]

what is that test about?

[orzelek]

There are two separate topics:
1. Advanced iron/coppper smelting - atm I think it's only a stepping point and not really useful when you get it.
2. How to most efficiently get large quantities of iron/copper for mass smelting. This is a bit tricky currently and for what it seems it's like that:
a) advanced sorting - more of a later game tech and you need high availability of certain ore pairs
b) direct crushed to plate smelting - this one has a preset 3:2 ratio but also disables any further processing
c) other sorting recipes - starting ones are the best since they get 2 and 1 ore from 4 crushed. So you get 2:1 on main ore with addition of 4:1 on secondary ore.
Currently it seems that route b is the best at the start with a being possibly most useful if conditions allow. Route c is really tricky but might be workable given big ore buffers to make sure that it doesn't stall.

[Arch666Angel]

There are two separate topics:
1. Advanced iron/coppper smelting - atm I think it's only a stepping point and not really useful when you get it.
2. How to most efficiently get large quantities of iron/copper for mass smelting. This is a bit tricky currently and for what it seems it's like that:
a) advanced sorting - more of a later game tech and you need high availability of certain ore pairs
b) direct crushed to plate smelting - this one has a preset 3:2 ratio but also disables any further processing
c) other sorting recipes - starting ones are the best since they get 2 and 1 ore from 4 crushed. So you get 2:1 on main ore with addition of 4:1 on secondary ore.
Currently it seems that route b is the best at the start with a being possibly most useful if conditions allow. Route c is really tricky but might be workable given big ore buffers to make sure that it doesn't stall.

1. What do you think would make it more useful?
2. You are supposed to use a mix of your choice of all the ways and recipes to get the ores you need, which is of course tricky because you have to decide for yourself, also this differ a lot from the way the game is played in base/vanilla or even bobs, the most bobs does is to invent advanced smelting recipes which are superior to the simple ones. With refining the different ways of refining should be on the same level, the only difference is in difficulty and how close you get to the desired output.

[Arch666Angel]

what is that test about?

To see if there are any issues, with the bots and the zone expander. The zone expander for example have some quirks as they are now, you can place them above anything, but if you place an inserter on top of them the inserter wont work, if you build the inserter first and then the zone expander on top the inserter works.

[Mooncat]

The problem is that the load order is reversed so I can load configs according to mods present, so the load order is not ore->refining->petro->smelting it actually is refining->petro->ores, so the ores mod can detect which ores configuration to load. I could shift everything up one data-stage, but that would also mean I had to shift the overrides now done in data-updates into data-final-fixes...and then there is no room above that

I see. Thanks for your response.

So this is a cargo robot test rig with 3 separate lines:

And in motion https://youtu.be/yJ6Q_omGrZk

Woops, I thought it will be a big flying monster. hm... if it is that slow, we will have to separate the logistic networks carefully. We will definitely not want to mix these slow robots with the standard ones.

[orzelek]

There are two separate topics:
1. Advanced iron/coppper smelting - atm I think it's only a stepping point and not really useful when you get it.
2. How to most efficiently get large quantities of iron/copper for mass smelting. This is a bit tricky currently and for what it seems it's like that:
a) advanced sorting - more of a later game tech and you need high availability of certain ore pairs
b) direct crushed to plate smelting - this one has a preset 3:2 ratio but also disables any further processing
c) other sorting recipes - starting ones are the best since they get 2 and 1 ore from 4 crushed. So you get 2:1 on main ore with addition of 4:1 on secondary ore.
Currently it seems that route b is the best at the start with a being possibly most useful if conditions allow. Route c is really tricky but might be workable given big ore buffers to make sure that it doesn't stall.

1. What do you think would make it more useful?
2. You are supposed to use a mix of your choice of all the ways and recipes to get the ores you need, which is of course tricky because you have to decide for yourself, also this differ a lot from the way the game is played in base/vanilla or even bobs, the most bobs does is to invent advanced smelting recipes which are superior to the simple ones. With refining the different ways of refining should be on the same level, the only difference is in difficulty and how close you get to the desired output.

1. One of two things:
a) Give it some actual bonus other then speed
b) Allow to use crushed ore directly for it

2. I think that currently refining is trying to do really a lot. There are few refining stages and from what I understand they are not supposed to give you any additional efficiency. They reduce the inefficiency while drastically increasing handling complexity. If thats the goal for the system then it works as intended Personally I think that there are simply to many combinations - it could work better if ores would have tiers and you would be unable to sort each of them into a lot of ores but you would have ore tiers mapped to possible outputs. I think that advanced refining tries to do that and it's main drawback being that you really need very specific combination of ores to get desired result.

[Adil]

Hey there, playing around with Refining, and here's tiny bit of feedback: recipes that transform stuff one to one, like spent-ceramic-filter to ceramic-filter and that one with water, should have warning in their description, that they aren't actually 1 to 1.

[mexmer]

what is that test about?

To see if there are any issues, with the bots and the zone expander. The zone expander for example have some quirks as they are now, you can place them above anything, but if you place an inserter on top of them the inserter wont work, if you build the inserter first and then the zone expander on top the inserter works.

inserters have wonky interaction with lot of things that can "block" their reach.

anyways, if you talking about zone expander quirks you forgot the major one (unless it was fixed, but i think it was not yet), and that they work without power. as soon, as you place zone expander, robots react to expanded zone regardless it's powered or not. it's also fun to watch their interaction with personal or vehicle roboport (bobs mods)

[Arch666Angel]

what is that test about?

To see if there are any issues, with the bots and the zone expander. The zone expander for example have some quirks as they are now, you can place them above anything, but if you place an inserter on top of them the inserter wont work, if you build the inserter first and then the zone expander on top the inserter works.

inserters have wonky interaction with lot of things that can "block" their reach.

anyways, if you talking about zone expander quirks you forgot the major one (unless it was fixed, but i think it was not yet), and that they work without power. as soon, as you place zone expander, robots react to expanded zone regardless it's powered or not. it's also fun to watch their interaction with personal or vehicle roboport (bobs mods)

I actually intended that you can use them without power, but annoyingly you cannot get rid of the "lacks power" blinking signal by editing the entity. Not sure if I should leave it like it is, or make it more like the bobs extender and actually have a pole indicating the logistic path somehow

[Mooncat]

Hi Angel, I think you may thing this topic interesting: Always show recipe product(s) on tooltip.

This can help implementing the suggestion of:

Guys, u know, I want to show the icon of a single product even if the prescription 1 final product, it would be very convenient - there are many recipes with 2 final products and that's convenient, but when i use recipe with 1 final product i need to read description, and the icon doesn't always show the meaning of the recipe

Basically, I requested the devs for the same thing, and it turns out we can already do that. Simply adds

Code: Select all

main_product = ""

in the recipe prototype, and maybe also change "result" to "results", then the product will be visible.

Edit: oh, you will need to set the recipe icon explicitly.
Edit2: looks like it requires more things than I thought. I am making a mod for displaying all recipe products. Will let you know the result.

what is that test about?

To see if there are any issues, with the bots and the zone expander. The zone expander for example have some quirks as they are now, you can place them above anything, but if you place an inserter on top of them the inserter wont work, if you build the inserter first and then the zone expander on top the inserter works.

inserters have wonky interaction with lot of things that can "block" their reach.

anyways, if you talking about zone expander quirks you forgot the major one (unless it was fixed, but i think it was not yet), and that they work without power. as soon, as you place zone expander, robots react to expanded zone regardless it's powered or not. it's also fun to watch their interaction with personal or vehicle roboport (bobs mods)

I actually intended that you can use them without power, but annoyingly you cannot get rid of the "lacks power" blinking signal by editing the entity. Not sure if I should leave it like it is, or make it more like the bobs extender and actually have a pole indicating the logistic path somehow

Have you tried using burner energy and give them energy by script after they are built?

[arbarbonif]

The smelting steps are faster if going at full throughput, vanilla plates recipes are 1 per 3,5 seconds, casting machines will pump out 2 per 4 seconds. Also yes it's to expand later to make alloys from ingots, so there will be different steel mixtures, another things is you can get interesting setups because of the fact that the metal can go into pipes (casting machines and smelter will cooling water sometime in the future too).

Fundamentally this isn't true though, the smeltery is flat out worse. In the same space with the same power/coal/input, stone furnaces beat the new smelting hands down. Using the new smeltery, in 13.3 seconds (4+4+2 / .75) 300kw of coal and 4 ore produce 4 plates (worse for iron with the coke requirement and not including the 450kw electricity requirement), so 1 per 3.3 seconds. With 300 kw of coal 1.6 stone furnaces would produce 4 plates in 9 seconds. Each 2 blast furnaces (300kw) can be replaced by 3 stone furances (180kw) with a lower coal cost. Once you get to steel furnaces the smeltery is utterly outclassed unless you are desperate for the added return from the purifying/pelletting, since the speed jumps straight to 2, where the smeltery just goes to 1.25.

If the blast furnaces were electrically powered and the iron recipe didn't need coke it would be far more interesting. Slower production without the need for coal but with lots of electricity cost would be an interesting trade off. By the time you got to electric furnaces you would have the pelletting, so the added resource return could keep it interesting. And then you get the power of modules where having more steps makes the process more powerful since you could have productivity at each step.

[aklesey1]

Any news about plans to rework bio processing chain of processing mod - if smelting mod is a separate mod, so procsesing mod is possible to be separated too?