[MOD 0.14.x] Realistic steam-engine

[Darkas]

Type: Mod
Name: Realistic steam-engine
Description: Makes steam-engines more realistic by decreasing their water consumption
License: LGPL
Version: 0.1
Release: 2016-10-20
Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.14
Category: Balance, Gameplay
Tags: Power

The main point of this mod is to force the player to make meaningful decisions, which thankfully also makes is more realistic.

Long description

Long description
This is one of a series of mods (right now with my enemy overhaul mod) which is about decisions, which are kind of absent in the vanilla gameplay. Decisions are here meant in the 'which part of the tech tree will I use?' way instead of in the 'where does this belt go?' kind. In this mod, the decision will be: how do I generate power? Steam engines are notoriously bad in the lategame, mainly because they don't scale well, steam engine power plants can usually grow in only one direction. For example, my biggest factory would need around 3000 steam engines, which would then need 300 pumps which is just impractical. The same logic also applies to way smaller factories, 30 pumps also also have the impression of being impractical, even with landfill. To combat this, this mod changes the ratio from 1 : 14 : 10 to 1 : ? : 1000 (I didn't compute the amount of boilers needed, maybe it's still 14) while leaving coal consumption untouched. This was because I couldn't find a way for them to consume no water (weird fluid dynamics) as it would be in reality. Solar panels have been slightly nerfed to generate 50kW to make the infinite power thing slightly harder (as it is in reality). Assembling machines and electric furnaces don't generate pollution anymore to make clean energy even cleaner.

Together with my enemy overhaul mod this generates another level of depth for the power issue, because it makes (tries to make) pollution more important which should hopefully give another serious disadvantage to steam engines.

This mod should be compatible with bobs mods, but this is untested for now.

Version history

Version history
Version 0.1 (Date): First release

[SuwinTzi]

Found an issue with your mod:

At max power draw, the first boiler will attempt to continuously heat to 100 degrees, unlike normally capping at some range around 28-32 degrees, and then increment with each boiler.

Your mod some how modifies the boiler behavior, into requiring having only two boilers, three at most.

However, during the early game, it may be impossible to provide the required amount of coal to maintain the first boiler, without massive numbers of dedicated miners and fast belts at the very least.

A 40 steam engine setup requires nearly 4 coal/s at the first boiler to maintain.