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Thunder Stone - Basic Thorium and Rare Earth Mod (Initial Alpha)

I saw that there was a uranium mod already out there, and since thorium > uranium in every way bar atomic number, I decided to make a thorium mod.

Features

New ore: monazite, rarer than copper but not as rare as oil. Bright green in Factorio. Not bright green in real life (proving that, if there is a Creator, he/she/it can be boring sometimes).
Two new metals: Thorium and Rare Earth, both obtained by combining monazite ore and sulphuric acid in a chemical plant. Note: monazite cannot be smelted.
Thorium reactor: specifically a liquid fuel thorium reactor. Acts as a boiler by converting liquid thorium fuel (made from thorium metal and water) and normal water to produce boiling water, which can then be used in steam engines. Thorium reactors do not produce any pollution.
Rare earth: Advanced Circuits and Processor Units now require 1 rare earth metal plate each.

The thorium reactor, along with the monazite/thorium processing recipes, are unlocked with the Thorium Processing technology, which requires 100 red and green science packs and prior knowledge of Fluid Handling.



Credit to Klonan for the oil steam boiler that forms the basis of the thorium reactor, and to DaveMcW for pointing me in the direction of Klonan's resource at the crucial moment.

If you're having problems with the download (as of 6/4/16) it's because this is my first mod and factoriomods.com requires an authorisation process for new users, so try again in a few hours. I'll delete this message once it's officially up.

Looks very interesting, will have to give it a try.

You said the reactor produces "no pollution", which is a warning sign for me: Unless the remaining production cycle requires good amounts of energy, complexity and/or pollution, that is.
Most energy mods have difficulties finding a balance between power, "difficulty of production" and pollution, but I'm always interested in sensible alternatives.

Senshi wrote:You said the reactor produces "no pollution", which is a warning sign for me: Unless the remaining production cycle requires good amounts of energy, complexity and/or pollution, that is.
Most energy mods have difficulties finding a balance between power, "difficulty of production" and pollution, but I'm always interested in sensible alternatives.

The production cycle does slow down quite a lot when the electricity supply goes down, but it doesn't involve an electric furnace or anything like that (well, it could, but still...)

Here's the production cycle:

10 Crude oil -> 4 Petroleum gas
3 Petroleum gas + 3 Water -> 2 Sulphur
5 Sulphur + 1 Iron + 10 Water -> 5 Sulphuric acid
2 Sulphuric acid + 8 Monazite -> 1 Thorium metal + 1 Rare earth metal
2 Thorium metal + 10 Water -> 2 Liquid thorium fuel (note: not a "fuel" in the Factorio sense, because it can only be used in thorium reactors)

I managed to set the process up without too many problems, although some trial and error was required when I kept running out of electricity because the monazite train was at the wrong end of the line or because oil supplies were changing.

Unfortunately the mod still doesn't seem to be up. If it's like this tomorrow I'll post a direct link on this forum.

Here's the direct link... I won't be updating this when the Factorio Mods link finally starts to work, just saying.

EDIT: the aforementioned FM link has now started to work properly AFAIK.

I would like to point out that this mod does not load with RSO installed, so I created a small script to make it do so.

Hi Homusubi,
Just trying out your mod. It would be great if you rename the zip file to "Thorium Mod_0.1.0" basically the same as the folder is named. Thereby we can just place the zip file into the mods folder and don't have to extract it first
Thanks a lot!

Hi Homusubi

I have installed the thunder stone mod, it works very well.
So far I have only found one minor issue with it, which is that the water exiting the reactor drops in temperature whenever it runs the heating cycle. This is not much of a problem, apart from the fact that the water temperature now averages to 95 degrees, which means that the steam engines are not running at 100% effective output.

Otherwise it is a great mod

Inox_Xion wrote:Hi Homusubi

I have installed the thunder stone mod, it works very well.
So far I have only found one minor issue with it, which is that the water exiting the reactor drops in temperature whenever it runs the heating cycle. This is not much of a problem, apart from the fact that the water temperature now averages to 95 degrees, which means that the steam engines are not running at 100% effective output.

Otherwise it is a great mod

Hi, thanks for letting me know about the 95 degrees thing. I'm not really sure how to fix this, apart from putting one traditional boiler next to the reactor for that extra five degrees. Glad to hear that you're enjoying the mod anyway!

Is this mod compatible with Bob's Mods?

Bizobinator wrote:Is this mod compatible with Bob's Mods?

I'm not sure because I've never used them (I'm still pretty new to Factorio and am sticking quite close to vanilla for the moment). If they just add extra items (including ores), there's no reason why they wouldn't be. If they add a thorium ore, it probably wouldn't work with my thorium reactors. If they change ore parameter definitions, then this mod is probably incompatible, but please do try it and see.

If it turns out that it's incompatible, but can be fixed without e.g. learning Lua, I'll make a bugfix.

I fired up the game with bob's and your mod and there were no visible problems - I didn't play it much so something might get messy later.
I see you are modifying electronics rescipes - depending on how are you doing it there might be some issues since bob's electronics mod does that too.

orzelek wrote:I fired up the game with bob's and your mod and there were no visible problems - I didn't play it much so something might get messy later.
I see you are modifying electronics rescipes - depending on how are you doing it there might be some issues since bob's electronics mod does that too.

Glad to see there's no immediate problem. With the electronics, the mod simply adds one rare earth metal to each recipe. Take it from there.

Inox_Xion wrote:Hi Homusubi

I have installed the thunder stone mod, it works very well.
So far I have only found one minor issue with it, which is that the water exiting the reactor drops in temperature whenever it runs the heating cycle. This is not much of a problem, apart from the fact that the water temperature now averages to 95 degrees, which means that the steam engines are not running at 100% effective output.

This is a general problem with all mods dealing with non-boiler water heating, the only modder workaround is to create a hot fluid type (i.e. "steam").

There are a couple of player workarounds. The first is to place the machine generating hot water after the outlet pipe is placed (i.e. first place the pipe it's outputting into, then place the machine, or build your setup, then deconstruct the water heater and rebuild it), the order of placement has a big effect on fluid dynamics in factorio and this can result in 100 degree water. The second workaround is to place a storage tank right in front of the water outlet, this should result in 99 degree water. The reason why the water is at less than 100 degrees is because it can escape the machine's fluidBox before the script has a chance to heat it. The placement order manipulation or the storage tank acts to keep the water in the fluidBox long enough for the script to heat it.

I just checked the source code and noticed there's a deeper problem: Heating the water in the fluidBox is only done every 50 ticks, this doesn't work. Water heating has to be done every tick otherwise performance will badly degrade under load.

Questions

who is Rare earth metal in use process recipe?
in bob mod not use

Hello,

Rare Earth is from Crafted Artifacts - viewtopic.php?f=93&t=14258.
With this you can craft Alien Artifacts instead of killing natives aka peaceful mode.

Greetings steinio

Airat9000 wrote:Questions

who is Rare earth metal in use process recipe?
in bob mod not use

steinio wrote:Hello,

Rare Earth is from Crafted Artifacts - viewtopic.php?f=93&t=14258.
With this you can craft Alien Artifacts instead of killing natives aka peaceful mode.

Greetings steinio

Incorrect. There are also rare earths in this mod and they are used for processing units. They tend to be used a lot in advanced electronics IRL. If it makes you feel any better, I've played two games with this enabled, and rare earth supply has never been a limiting factor for anything.

I have an issue, when I put it into the file, after converting it to a zip file it says "Error info.json not found." And then crashes the game. Help?

Doe's the file need to remain in its default format or am I stupid?

Homusubi wrote:Factorio Mods link

Thunder Stone - Basic Thorium and Rare Earth Mod (Initial Alpha)

I saw that there was a uranium mod already out there, and since thorium > uranium in every way bar atomic number, I decided to make a thorium mod.

Features

New ore: monazite, rarer than copper but not as rare as oil. Bright green in Factorio. Not bright green in real life (proving that, if there is a Creator, he/she/it can be boring sometimes).
Two new metals: Thorium and Rare Earth, both obtained by combining monazite ore and sulphuric acid in a chemical plant. Note: monazite cannot be smelted.
Thorium reactor: specifically a liquid fuel thorium reactor. Acts as a boiler by converting liquid thorium fuel (made from thorium metal and water) and normal water to produce boiling water, which can then be used in steam engines. Thorium reactors do not produce any pollution.
Rare earth: Advanced Circuits and Processor Units now require 1 rare earth metal plate each.

The thorium reactor, along with the monazite/thorium processing recipes, are unlocked with the Thorium Processing technology, which requires 100 red and green science packs and prior knowledge of Fluid Handling.



Credit to Klonan for the oil steam boiler that forms the basis of the thorium reactor, and to DaveMcW for pointing me in the direction of Klonan's resource at the crucial moment.

Will you be uploading the mod to the new Mod site and update it? Please!