Mylon wrote:Prospector Mk2s are meant to take a while so it is recommended you use multiple of them.
i only had a single prospector MK2 and let it run for many hours realtime while i went afk, and nothing happened.
after some detailed tests, i found the reason why i thought that nothing happened :
when the prospector has found and converted some ore, the drills don't mine that new ore.
first you need to setup the drills again, even if you already built the MK3 drills.
as a result, you have to do a lot of work :
to get the next level of ore, you can start prospecting at any time, but after an ore field is completely(!) depleted and prospected, you need to setup all drills again (even if you already have placed MK2 or MK3 drills). if you do this earlier to already get ore from veins, you'll have to repeat this several times.
to go from veins to seams, the same has to be done again, but only after all ore is completely gone or you might skip some veins (converting depleted ore directly to seams)
since you only get few ore per minute when a field is almost depleted, you already need a new field earlier anyway, and then can prospect (and update all drills) to get a little "late bonus" on the field, using the existing belts and train stations, etc.
on an ore field that gave 45k iron ore, i got some small amount of additional ore from veins and 7k from seams.
when looking at the time (see below for prospecting time) and work (see below for ore types and refreshing all drills) that is needed to get maybe 20% or even 50% extra from an ore field, is it really worth this work ?
about my problem with the ore types: ore turns into depleted ore and when prospected it turns into veins. if veins are depleted they turn into depleted veins and when prospected they turn into seams. BUT: when you start mining veins while the prospector is still working, you'll get more ore types at the same time, and (this is probably a bug) when you have a prospector working on an ore field and another MK2 prospector on the same area (to immediately turn depleted veins into seams), the MK2 prospector will (at least sometimes immediately, and after a long time for all ore) turn the entire field from ore(!) and veins directly into seams.
thus you really need to do the above steps one after the other:
1. mine an ore field until it is depleted. a prospector probably can be used already during this time.
2. when the ore field is completely depleted, wait for the prospector to finish its work.
(when done, it takes only one cycle to set it up again and test whether some depleted ore might have been skipped)
3. when the prospector is completly done (stops rotating), update all drills.
4. mine a vein field until it is depleted. a prospector MK2 probably can be used already during this time.
5. when the vein field is completely depleted, wait for the prospector MK2 to finish its work.
(when done, it takes only one cycle to set it up again and test whether some depleted vein might have been skipped)
6. when the prospector MK2 is completly done (stops rotating), update all drills.
7. mine the seam field until it is depleted
about the speed of prospecting: MK1 takes around 30 sec, and MK2 more than 2 minutes (and no modules allowed)
even when you cover the entire field with prospectors, each of them has to prospect 9 tiles, for a total minimum time of 4.5 minutes for MK1 (more than half a gameday), and for MK2 it even takes at least 20 minutes (more than 3 ingame days).
prospecting veins to seams for the whole coverage area of a prospector with a single prospector MK2 will probably take more than 20 realtime hours (or 1+ hours when using 20 prospectors).
together with the above limits of only doing one step after the other for the entire field,
for me it's not worth it:
although the idea and most of it are very nice and would improve "the mining experience", I'll stop using the prospector mod until handling the prospecting is a bit easier (let both levels of prospectors work nicely at the same time, never convert all ore directly to seams, and automatically start drilling upgraded tiles; then the prospecting speed might be ok too).
Mylon wrote:Re Textplates. I'm still unsure of how the code works. ...
Overall this seems like a very niche case and I've already got my hands full developing other mods.
someone just reported that he has similar problems with bobsinserters (i didn't test that myself). "private data" of items needs to be stored somehow in the items when making blueprints. if you only revive items without handling that "private data", the items are built only as their base form and not adjusted (for textplates only one type of plate is built, and for bobsinserters only the default inserter is built without the desired and needed modifications). when robots build those items from a blueprint, this special handling is done, but not when you only revive them. similar probably will also apply to many other mods which build additional and/or invisible items when you place one of their items.
(temporary?) fix : since textplates and bobsinserters might be considered mid to late game, I'll enjoy using bluebuild in the early game before i get robots and those advanced inserters, and as soon as i have the personal bots, I'll disable your autobuild functionality and let the bots do the work.
the autodeconstruct should still be useful, eg when all personal bots pickup items to place and some obstacles need to be removed first which causes a deadlock on the bots since they want to place their items first before going back and removing the obstacles.
