[MOD 0.17] Industrial Revolution

[Deadlock989]

Thanks for that. I gave it a quick try, but it failed upon load, so I just disabled it. It's not a massive problem (so far). For the most part, nanobots are working. They're disassembling things ok, copy/paste works. Upgrade planner does work on other things I've tried. The only problem I've seen so far is with inserters.

Just checked IR. The only thing it touches on burner inserters is that their operating speed is buffed a bit. Default upgrade isn't touched from vanilla. Highly unlikely to be caused by IR. I'd check to see if Nanobots works on vanilla burner inserters, if it doesn't, it's an issue in Nanobots. Otherwise I can see that you do have filters set on that upgrade planner, check that too.

[Deadlock989]

FYI, the most recent update to Krastorio fixes the locomotive recipe, so that IR + Krastorio locomotives are properly Iron Age tech again.

[Deadlock989]

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Version: 0.99.2
Date: 08. 09. 2019

Breaking changes:

- Lamp signal-to-colour-mapping was re-ordered, so that it follows the rainbow order in the IR signals menu, left to right.
- Apologies that the above change might break some lamp set-ups, but this was a mess and did need correcting.

Locale:

- German locale added, many thanks to tiriscef for taking the time and effort to do this.
- French locale updated, thanks again to Redstylt.

Fixes:

- All quickbar shortcuts that are unlocked in vanilla by Construction Robotics are now unlocked by Roboport Equipment instead, as that is the equivalent vanilla unlock in IR.
- The same shortcuts are now additionally unlocked by Clockwork Punkbot research.
- Migration handler added re: the two changes above for existing saves.
- This issue with the construction quickbar shortcuts will not have affected the vast majority of IR players, as the unlocks are stored in player data, not in the game save.
- Smelting/alloying recipes were overloaded by 8x, so that inserters will fill furnace input slots more, a little closer to vanilla inserter/furnace behaviour.
- Fixed that players could receive vanilla items if they respawn. You now get nichts. Don't die.
- Display plate GUI: removed a potential desync issue.
- The research queue is no longer forced to be on. Does not affect existing saves.

Compatibility:

- Dectorio: Lamp signal colour mapping order, and the colour signal icons, both defer to Dectorio if detected.
- Dectorio: Fixed another issue which occurred with IR + Dectorio + Alien Biomes, caused by me not practising what I preach.
- Omnipermute and Omnilib were added to the incompatible mods list.
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[DaleStan]

I'm very much enjoying this mod. I have found a minor oddity in the tech tree, though. The military (grey) science pack research depends only on Military: you can research the science pack as soon as you research all its ingredients. The chemical (blue) science pack research, on the other hand, depends on Ore Crushing 2, Plastics, and Improved Laboratories 1: you can't research it until you research all its ingredients and the building where it is used.

For consistency, it seems to me that either both of those science packs should depend on Improved Laboratories 1, or neither should. If given the option, I'd choose both, for whatever that's worth.

[Deadlock989]

I'm very much enjoying this mod. I have found a minor oddity in the tech tree, though. The military (grey) science pack research depends only on Military: you can research the science pack as soon as you research all its ingredients. The chemical (blue) science pack research, on the other hand, depends on Ore Crushing 2, Plastics, and Improved Laboratories 1: you can't research it until you research all its ingredients and the building where it is used.

For consistency, it seems to me that either both of those science packs should depend on Improved Laboratories 1, or neither should. If given the option, I'd choose both, for whatever that's worth.

You're right. Huh. The real problem there is that it means that military science packs are unlocked before you have a building that can use them - copper labs are restricted to red and green packs only. Thanks for pointing it out.

I will look into this. The two immediate alternatives are: allow copper labs to use grey science, quick fix; make Military Science depend on Improved Labs, which would shift the balance of military tech a fair bit, but that may not be a bad thing, need to look at the consequences. Won't rush this one, have noted it down for balance pass next week.

[kingarthur]

nanobots is definitely bugged as it works with the long handed burner insert just not the regular one. due to that nanobot fix mod being buggy as all hell and having to fix it multiple times to work for myself ive released a patch mod that actually works for nanobots in IR.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nanobotsfix-for-IR

@deadlock can you mark pycoalprocessing as incompatible. it cant even load to to image conflict issues and i haven't even started with trying to determine if they will work together.

[Solinya]

Normally I prefer to beat a game before providing feedback, as it's hard to see how everything will play out in the parts I haven't reached yet. But my schedule this month means I probably won't be able to finish until after the 1.0 release, and by then it won't really matter anymore. I don't know if you'll find these comments useful. Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

So keep in mind this is from an early-to-mid game perspective. We've just unlocked the steel age and are setting up steel smelting. Gold and oil are on the to-do list. Only red and green science have been automated, no military or blue technologies yet. The base is in the middle of being upgraded from burners to electric, and we're in the process of setting up iron intermediates instead of the hacky "we need a bunch of chassis five minutes ago".

I'm also a big fan of "figure it out as you go, learn how to do it better next time," so this base is inefficient (way too many lower-tier basics, too many burner inserters that need manual attention) since I spend my time building the new stuff instead of ripping up and perfecting the old.

As much of the base as I could fit in one picture: https://imgur.com/a/4JQBeBW

I don't necessarily mind the newer tiers rendering the older tiers obsolete, but it does make some of the early-game intermediates feel wasteful. There's simply less to build with each type compared to iron, and the base is small at the start so the quantity of drills and production machines and turrets is much less than later in the game. For some reason I thought we'd need reinforced bronze plate more, but there's 4000 of it idling in a chest somewhere. Oops.

I don't think I'd go through the effort of automating the lower tier intermediates. For example, large/small copper/bronze chassis. It'd be "good enough" to automate the basic components (rivets, rods, beams, plates), and hand-craft the last few steps. Same with copper and bronze pistons, both of which are used in like two recipes - one you build a lot of (the crusher), and one you build pretty much once (the generator). In contrast, iron pistons are used in all kinds of things and you're going to build a bunch of them, so it's worth the effort of an assembly line to set up iron intermediates. The copper and bronze capped beams also just feel like an extra step on top of the wooden beams and I keep forgetting they're a thing until needing to build something that uses 60 of them.

Some of these opinions might change as we play more. I thought copper bearings had limited use, until I found out we're going to need them for gray science. I can't quite tell how much copper cable I'll need in the future.

The burner phase was a nice touch. Factory patterns set up for electric pole spacing don't work as well in the burner phase, so a better base would use more custom layouts. We figured that out in the last third of the burner phase, which is why the pictured base layout isn't very good. Unfortunately, the parts where I had inserters feeding inserters got torn down when we moved the rubber production and replaced the copper labs.

I liked the option to use crushed ore for walking paths. I am assuming nothing was added that might set all that coal in the ground ablaze.

Punkbots also helped, though don't use them to deconstruct items that have 100 coal inside or it'll take forever.

The monowheel was also a really nice addition. We're just under 15 hours in, but I spent probably a full hour driving around trying to map out the edges of the massive lake next to the base. It also combos well with the early-game shotgun. Drive headfirst into a mass of biters, hop out while it runs over a few, and blast away. (Please don't take away wood as a fuel. In the event I lose my original monowheel and all its stored coal from an unfortunately placed rock trap, wood serves as a nice contingency fuel supply to get back home.)

I thought I would like the display plates more. I can see you put a lot of effort into making a bunch of high-res icons for them, they just didn't support the types of icons I was trying to use. Two examples are I wanted to mark the path that led to the wood production with a log, beam, or tree (especially since I believe you added the two sapling icons) so I could find it when driving around, and I don't think any of those were options for the display plate. The other case was I wanted to indicate where the belt supply chests were, but there wasn't a good choice for that either. Ended up going with the copper gear wheel since it was a major ingredient. Still, they are far better than the tiny odd-shaped Dectorio signs.

I did like the addition of the pollution filters. Vanilla doesn't offer many options for pollution management aside from "turn your base off", whereas here you get to choose between reduced pollution and one of the other modules. I'm looking forward to what this can bring to a Deathworld game after I finish this one.

I don't know if this was changed in a recent update, but a couple technologies unlocked components that weren't really used anywhere (bronze gears), and we couldn't figure out what the yellow ! on them (shown on the Bronze Age technology unlocks) meant, nor where they were in our inventory. I thought it meant an existing recipe got upgraded or something.

FNEI seems to have trouble searching. If I want to look up anything with multiple words it'll fail. I have to limit myself to one word (often the metal name) and pick from a list. Maybe it has something to do with the internal names of all the items. This may be a problem with FNEI and not IR specifically. I haven't used FNEI before, but there were just so many new intermediate products.

Overall, it's been a refreshing change of pace after playing hundreds of hours of vanilla and vanilla base style mods. Thank you for all the work you've put into this.

[MiiNiPaa]

I don't think I'd go through the effort of automating the lower tier intermediates. For example, large/small copper/bronze chassis. It'd be "good enough" to automate the basic components (rivets, rods, beams, plates), and hand-craft the last few steps. Same with copper and bronze pistons, both of which are used in like two recipes - one you build a lot of (the crusher), and one you build pretty much once (the generator). In contrast, iron pistons are used in all kinds of things and you're going to build a bunch of them, so it's worth the effort of an assembly line to set up iron intermediates. The copper and bronze capped beams also just feel like an extra step on top of the wooden beams and I keep forgetting they're a thing until needing to build something that uses 60 of them.

I feel like this is the part of the game where bots are required. Most of higher tier intermediates have exactly same recipe as lower tier counterpart, adjusted for new materials. So, you can just copy your older setup, change recipes and feed different materials to make it work. Alternatively it is easy to rewire bronze pistons to make iron pistons instead.

I will look into this. The two immediate alternatives are: allow copper labs to use grey science, quick fix; make Military Science depend on Improved Labs, which would shift the balance of military tech a fair bit, but that may not be a bad thing, need to look at the consequences. Won't rush this one, have noted it down for balance pass next week.

How it would shift balance of military compared to current situation when military science de-facto already depends on Improved Laboratories: you cannot use it until you research it?

[Solinya]

I don't think I'd go through the effort of automating the lower tier intermediates. For example, large/small copper/bronze chassis. It'd be "good enough" to automate the basic components (rivets, rods, beams, plates), and hand-craft the last few steps. Same with copper and bronze pistons, both of which are used in like two recipes - one you build a lot of (the crusher), and one you build pretty much once (the generator). In contrast, iron pistons are used in all kinds of things and you're going to build a bunch of them, so it's worth the effort of an assembly line to set up iron intermediates. The copper and bronze capped beams also just feel like an extra step on top of the wooden beams and I keep forgetting they're a thing until needing to build something that uses 60 of them.

I feel like this is the part of the game where bots are required. Most of higher tier intermediates have exactly same recipe as lower tier counterpart, adjusted for new materials. So, you can just copy your older setup, change recipes and feed different materials to make it work. Alternatively it is easy to rewire bronze pistons to make iron pistons instead.

Well, sort of. But my copper/bronze setup is using coal lines that I don't need for iron and steel. It's a simpler layout with electricity (plus you have to adjust spacing for the poles). So I might design for iron and reuse that pattern on later stuff, but I probably wouldn't want to use my copper layout for iron.

[Stimpatch]

Found a minor bug (or inconvinience)

The modded Chests are not in line with the existing ones, somehow. While showing a friedn of mine "the ropes" how to use the upgrade planner, i placed a wooden box on the ground. Selecting wooden boxes in the upgrade planner gives me only the option to upgrade it into a logistic chest of any color, the already researches other ones (like tin and bronze) are not shown. Likewise, if i place a tin box, i can upgrade the tin one to bronze, but not downgrade to wooden. Otherwise boxes are fine.

Also have your loader & stacker mod enabled, i guess this causes some kind of conflict with wooden boxes?

Also, big thx for the mod. Super impressive work. Cant stress how much i like it. BRAVO!

[Bilka]

I did like the addition of the pollution filters. Vanilla doesn't offer many options for pollution management aside from "turn your base off", whereas here you get to choose between reduced pollution and one of the other modules. I'm looking forward to what this can bring to a Deathworld game after I finish this one.

+1. I don't think I ever mentioned during balance testing that I extensively used pollution filters, and still do. Only complaint there is that the third tier (60%) isn't a divisor of 80, so to fully reduce pollution of a machine I either use two tier 3s and waste 40% of the effect, or I use a tier 3 and a tier 1 which is annoying to carry around. So I've just been sticking to 2 tier 2s. I get that they make sense with prod modules, but if I'm using prod modules, I don't really care about pollution.

I don't know if this was changed in a recent update, but a couple technologies unlocked components that weren't really used anywhere (bronze gears), and we couldn't figure out what the yellow ! on them (shown on the Bronze Age technology unlocks) meant, nor where they were in our inventory. I thought it meant an existing recipe got upgraded or something.

Their tooltips in the tech tree explains pretty well what's going on, in my opinion.

[ThreePounds]

Busses are boring. Spaghetti 4 lyfe.

Or do it the cool kids way and put all of the complicated stuff on a trains and just build micro bases everywhere.

Preach brother!

I'm about to go electric. I'm so exited! Electric inserters are a huge milestone as it means I can finally use both sides of the belt for ingredients. The current paradigm has been to always have fuel on one side as it makes powering machines and input inserters trivial. With electricity I can have independent out- and inputs. Electric Assemblers are next.

Maybe there should be a second thread for IR creations? To keep this thread focused on design and balancing?

[Deadlock989]

@deadlock can you mark pycoalprocessing as incompatible. it cant even load to to image conflict issues and i haven't even started with trying to determine if they will work together.

Will do, next version.

... I thought I would like the display plates more. I can see you put a lot of effort into making a bunch of high-res icons for them, they just didn't support the types of icons I was trying to use. Two examples are ...

FNEI seems to have trouble searching. If I want to look up anything with multiple words it'll fail. I have to limit myself to one word (often the metal name) and pick from a list. Maybe it has something to do with the internal names of all the items. This may be a problem with FNEI and not IR specifically. I haven't used FNEI before, but there were just so many new intermediate products.

Thanks for taking the time with all that feedback, it's appreciated. Just to pick up on a couple of things.

One of the reasons that the display plates have that specific limited set of icons is that it was effectively no extra effort at all. IR currently provides 579 "medium res" 64x64 icons, and it is zero effort for me to script Blender to spit out a 128x128 version as well if it's something I modelled myself. It would keep me busy until Christmas to reskin the entire set of vanilla icons even if I worked 9 to 5 on it, and that is something that is currently being worked on by Wube. Yes, it would be nice to have a high-res belt icon, but, essentially that's someone else's actual job ... Other reasons for the limitations are GUI size, VRAM usage, file download size, length of prototype definition ... All technical reasons, they didn't just come out of a hat. The display plate "palette" can and probably will change a bit as time goes on, I managed to figure out a way to be able to add or take stuff away without screwing up backwards compatibility and still preserve the menu order as well.

I can't speak for the author of FNEI but I can speak as someone who knows a bit about Factorio modding. It does indeed have to do with the internal names of items. Mods can't access the "locale" name of items, i.e. the name displayed on-screen in whichever of the many languages people play the game in, and there are good technical reasons for that apparently and it's unlikely to ever change. IR takes a bit of a different view to vanilla and most other modders on how things should be named internally, I wrote up some of the technical reasons here if you're actually interested, but at the end of the day it's a trade off: saved me absolutely shedloads of time and effort in exchange for the occasional minor inconvenience to players using rich text and third party mods. In hundreds of hours of using FNEI, I've never used the search function once, I just go visually - but as a modder I'm probably not using FNEI the way a player would.

How it would shift balance of military compared to current situation when military science de-facto already depends on Improved Laboratories: you cannot use it until you research it?

Fair point, hadn't really thought it through yet, it was just an off-the-cuff response.

The modded Chests are not in line with the existing ones, somehow. While showing a friedn of mine "the ropes" how to use the upgrade planner ...

Will look into this (eventually), default upgrades for entities are a relatively new addition to the game, I always forget about them. Thanks for the compliments.

+1. I don't think I ever mentioned during balance testing that I extensively used pollution filters, and still do. Only complaint there is that the third tier (60%) isn't a divisor of 80 ...

I'm hearing "nerf tier 3 pollution filters to 40%"

[ThreePounds]

I want to highlight something that this mod does exceedingly well even when compared to professionally produced games with crafting elements.

I have no clue about game design but I've come to realise that a good crafting recipe strikes a balance between components that are thematically appropriate, anchor the item in a certain tier and it's relationship to other recipes in the game. Unfortunately with many games the first aspect usually gets the shaft making the recipe feel arbitrary and ultimately make the components themselves feel meaningless beyond ratios and tiers.

Let's make an example with another popular game, which in my opinion falls into this category: Satifactory. I want to compare the recipes of IR's Monowheel and Car to Satisfactory's Tractor (a slow hauling vehicle) and Explorer (a type of fast buggy).

Monowheels are made from a small copper chasis, a burner motor, tin and copper rods. Those components make sense thematically and I imagine the various rods are bent to make the circular frame and tracks. Cars are made from two iron chasis, iron rods and gears, rubber and a combustion engine. This recipie fits thematically with a car with the rubber belonging to the tires. Since this recipe uses iron and rubber it's clear that it's a tier up from the Monowheel.

In Satisfactory things aren't so clear. Tractors are made from modular frames, beacons and rotors (one half of an eletric engine). I have no clue how one would make something drive-able from these components. They are only here to check of the player can craft / has automated those components. Later in the game we get the Explorer which is made from Modular Frames, Motors, Crystal Oscillators and Beacons. Crystal Oscillators are once again here to lock this vehicle behind a crafting tier and have nothing to do with fast moving one-man vehicles.

In conclusion: Because of the thought put into crafting recipes components in IR feel meaningful and fun to play with. A assembling line pumping out Iron Pistons feels just like exactly that and not "assembly line for component #3-A".

[Stimpatch]

In Satisfactory things aren't so clear. Tractors are made from modular frames, beacons and rotors (one half of an eletric engine). I have no clue how one would make something drive-able from these components. They are only here to check of the player can craft / has automated those components. Later in the game we get the Explorer which is made from Modular Frames, Motors, Crystal Oscillators and Beacons. Crystal Oscillators are once again here to lock this vehicle behind a crafting tier and have nothing to do with fast moving one-man vehicles.

in Defense of Satisfactory: They are pretty new to the playfield. They lack in terms of number design, but first they aim to get a technical grip on the game. Numbers are kinda easier to change than game mechanics. Also, a comparison to Factorio is kinda fair, because Factorio is much longer in developement.

But to stay on topic:Yes, Deadlock is very good at finding the middle ground between keeping the components thematically in line and balancing them gamewise. In the end, you must have fun first and everything else second.

(only the steampunk constructobots.... i love and hate these. So sloooow, soooo sloooooow WORK GODDAMMIT! )

[Deadlock989]

I was pretty disappointed with Satisfactory during that freebie weekend, but to be fair, that probably says more about how exceptional Factorio is. Evidence, if any were needed, that game and fun win over graphics engine every time. If Satisfactory had arrived on the scene five years ago it would probably have blown my socks off.

The "just stick an Uber Power Crystal 9000 in it" problem ThreePounds mentions was exactly the problem I had with so many Minecraft mods. I think relatively few of the good mods did a really good job on it, the one that sticks out in my memory was Immersive Engineering, that mod is pure class. I mean, like, jeez, yet another massive modpack with Draconic Evolution grafted into it pointlessly just because it has an enormous power reactor but also, oddly, magical blood axes or whatever.

[mrvn]

Going to try moving away from early burner spaghetti to a bus. What do people reckon are good bus lanes? (Late Bronze/Early Iron)

If you haven't gone electric then I would start with a single coal lane, then repeating 2 spaces and 4 lanes. You will have to split the coal lane every time you build something and keeping it on it's own means it doesn't get in your way. The 4 lanes thing allow for underground belts to cross them which is pretty standard. So far pretty boring, nothing new.

The big question is what order the lanes should have. Splitting 2 adjacent lanes it more complex than separated lanes. So do you put copper plates next to tin plates? Sticks next to gears? Whats a good order of things so that you get fewer places where you need goods from adjacent lanes?


I'm also not sure an only bus concept is the way to go. There seems to be a repeating pattern for ore crushing. I would keep each smelter net to the ore field as a separate complex that produces ingots. Then the ingots can be turned into plates, sticks, gears, foils, ... Again a repeating setup for each ore. Put that next to the smelter. And then build a bus from all the intermediates you just produced. That's my thought.

[mrvn]

Busses are boring. Spaghetti 4 lyfe.

Or do it the cool kids way and put all of the complicated stuff on a trains and just build micro bases everywhere.

Preach brother!

I'm about to go electric. I'm so exited! Electric inserters are a huge milestone as it means I can finally use both sides of the belt for ingredients. The current paradigm has been to always have fuel on one side as it makes powering machines and input inserters trivial. With electricity I can have independent out- and inputs. Electric Assemblers are next.

Maybe there should be a second thread for IR creations? To keep this thread focused on design and balancing?

Since there are long burner inserters you can power them from the input belt if you put input and output belts on the same side.

[ThreePounds]

Since there are long burner inserters you can power them from the input belt if you put input and output belts on the same side.

Sounds interesting but I don't quite understand just by your description. Could you make an example for me, please?

[Philip017]

i know it says incompatible with squeak through, but i mainly use squeak through because trees are such a pain to walk through, i dont suppose there is an alternative mod that will work but fix the tree issues? thanks for the mod.