MOD [ 0.18.x / 1.1 ] Bio-Industries

[d3x0r]

So I implemented a speed limiting(enhancing) mod..

viewtopic.php?f=91&t=51104

Readme: https://github.com/d3x0r/train-speed-li ... /README.md

Nice, I'll definitely add this to my game.

It still needs a little work; kinda of just looking for feedback atm. Trying to make it more dynamic based on what other mods are available...

[Veni]

Another round of feedback:

Cokery Stuff

1. Wood needs to have a one to two ratio with wood pulp; otherwise you are getting free energy. Wood pulp + light oil + steam would be one realistic bioplastic recipe. Cellulose IRL is woodpulp + steam + sulfuric acid.
2. Charcoal and Coke are chemically pretty similar materials. Why not make them the same. (I know its a repeat) You could make the bio-burners require Coke/charcoal. Recipe should be 3 wood to 1 coke or 3 coal to 2 coke. 11 MJ (slight loss for realism otherwise 12MJ) 140% acceleration.

Algae and Syngas
Your biomass can be renamed algae. The biofuel ratios and net algae production just need cleared up. I will come back to this more later but here is a start:
If you have a good model for a raceway, that would be great. Otherwise use the bioreactors or the greenhouses. The product should just be algal biomass; a green colored solid fuel thats 1.5 to 1 comparable. The biomass can be loaded into a reactor with steam to crack it to light oil and solids. (use woodpulp as the solids) One biomass and 1 steam should make 13 light oil and 1 woodpulp. Production of biomass should be pretty fast ~ 10 seconds per unit per facility at the slowest. This would make it a little less space efficient than solar but you could carry the fuel around.

Fischer-tropsch synthesis is the opposite of cracking. I would add a process so you can make lubricant from algae derived light oil. 10 light oil + 10 methane gas = 10 heavy oil. 20 methane gas = 10 light oil. I would also tweak the cracking amounts to balance but that is up to you.

Fun related stuff: http://www.algaeindustrymagazine.com/cc ... -jet-fuel/
http://algaeaviationfuel.com/military-f ... air-force/

[d3x0r]

Nice, I'll definitely add this to my game.

Should be more usable now. Fixed support of RailPowerSystem tweaks (used your concrete rails and bridge rails to make powered cement and powered bridge Oh; but RPS needs updates to work; I increased the train power, but the internal update doesn't transfer enough power.

Re: Coal balance, I concur that you get too much coal from wood.

And - I know it's a bit more work, but concrete rails shouldn't unlock until after you get concrete; maybe just should be added to concrete unlock (even if you haven't done train research?)

[WonderDog]

I have been thinking about what Veni said and saplings.

I believe that Saplings could be created in a 'Nursery' not an assembler which could be the greenhouse or resized green house or other building. I have seen a little 3x3 greenhouse in someones mod (can't remember) which is what I imagine would be a Nursery to go with your greenhouses.

There should be three levels of recipes to balance the three greenhouse wood recipes.

I suggest that level 1 Seedlings require wood pulp, stone and water, level 2 uses fertiliser, crushed stone and water and level 3 uses advanced fertiliser crushed stone and water.

The should be no by-products.

If you use a small building it should be balanced to supply 2 greenhouses with its required saplings exactly to allow direct insertion. If its using greenhouse building it should supply a number of greenhouses so it could be built in line.

[jeron_diovis]

Very nice mod, but badly combined with other global mods, and, which is worse, even with some aspects of original game.

What I like:

1. Coke coal. Early-game fuel to reduce a bit burning of all that tons of raw coal in boilers before you create solid and rocket fuel. Very good idea.

2. Big wooden poles, of course.

3. Changed recipe for concrete, so it does not require iron ore. Finally!

4. Introducing "crushed stone", and adding it to rails recipe. Although it noticeably complicates rails production, it looks very realistic, which is cool. Also, nice graphics for "stone crusher" machine (but it's icon could be better).

5. Bio-garden. Because it looks just amazing. Despite it is much less efficient and more complex to use (because needs water pipes everywhere) than air filtering machines from "Air filtering" mod, I'm going to build alleys of these things all around my base. They really breathe life to all that endless miles of stone and steel, and look so much better than planting natural trees.

6. Musk's floor. I'm impressed by this idea. I'm sure Musk himself would be happy to see this. This is truly innovative and cool technology. Although I don't like the fact that with it there is no more need to upgrade electric network to get new poles with bigger area (because you don't need that network at all!) – but it's a lot of work and resources to really cover everything with this floor, so if one decided to go this way, it's only his choice. And anyway you will need big poles along railways to mining outposts, so upgrades still needed.
The only thing I'm really complain about musk's floor – it seems to be the only thing in entire mod with ugly graphics. Eyes bleeding when looking on that crazy mess of white stripes and red wires. Something more neutral, more monotonous would be better, on my view.

7. Technology chain for producing coal from wood. My favourite one. In combination with late-game "Coal liquefaction" technology, it allows to build complex enough chain for producing infinite oil from nothing. And it does not matter that oil wells in game are infinite by their nature (always considered it a cheat) – just ideologically, it is so cool that so important resource as oil becomes renewable. The true win of bio-industry!

What I don't like:

1. Bio-farm. Although it looks visually impressive, and has a couple of realism in recipe (with flashlights required) – if you ever played with "Bob's greenhouse" mod, you will understand how ridiculously useless bio-farm is.
Just a few numbers:

(basic recipe)
Bio-farm: 450 s -> 40 wood
Greenhouse: 60 s -> 15 wood

(with fertilizer)
Bio-farm: 260 s -> 75 wood
Greenhouse: 45 s -> 30 wood

(with advanced fertilizer)
Bio-farm: 150 s -> 150 wood
Greenhouse: (n/a)

It's easy to see that greenhouse is 2.5+ times more effective. With advanced fertilizer bio-farm wins one-to-one duel, but here is a fatality: one bio-farm takes same place as SIX greenhouses with their pipes, belts and inserters. No way. Just no way.

Maybe, it was also done in favour of realism – i.e., growing trees is obviously not a fast process, and requires a lot of space – but for those who plays with bob's mod (for me, for example, it looks as a standard must-have addon at all) the only reason to ever build bio-farm is a desire to add more difficulty to game.

Also, here is another important problem, which is....

2. Requirement of alien artifacts in recipes.
Factorio is all about automation, ok? Anything that can't be automated should be abandoned and removed from the game. The only exception is producing ammo, like poisoned or shock bullets from "bob's warfare" mod. "Kill some aliens – gather artifacts – craft some empowered bullets – kill aliens more effective" – it's ok, war itself is not an automatic process. Let these unpleasant bugs to be killed by their own weapon.

But my god, for the holy science – using artifacts to produce fertilizer?? Seriously?
The earth's own genetics is so poor that can't invent a new fast-growing sort of trees, or smth like that?

Ok, ok, wild and aggressive zerg's biology, combined with plants, allows to speed up tree growth, I can imagine that – but we are still in the game about automation. Where so important part, as producing wood, can't be automated to use it at full power.
Maybe, there are some mods which allows to craft artifacts somehow, I don't know – but search, install and build up all that stuff for... fertilizer? Too much. A huge dislike from me to advanced fertilizer recipe, and yet another solid reason to build greenhouses instead of bio-farms.

Also, basic fertilizer in this mod requires crushed stone – for what? I'm not an expert in fertilizers, but STONES? Why? Why not smth more organic?

3. Bio-fuel
First of all, bio-fuel also requires artifacts. So this technology branch is already dead. But, also – the only purpose of bio-fuel is to crack it into oil fractions. Just why do we ever need this, when we already have technologies for producing coal and liquefaction it into oil?
Looks like absolutely pointless thing with no reason to use.

4. New machines for electricity (Solar Farm and Huge Accumulator).
Simply – because they are cheat. A clear uncovered cheat.
I understand the idea behind them, but they are TOO MUCH overpowered.

Recipes requires a lot of items, and have a long crafting time – but it is still very easy to automate and build a lot of these things.

Solar Farm looks very cool (although it would be much better to have some visible border around it, it's so hard to place it properly), but how this nice thing produces more energy than thermal-based sources? More energy, than 6 MK1 steam engines? Damn, it's only 800kW less efficient than NUCLEAR REACTOR! How??
When I see all those endless fields of solar panels, I can believe that together they all can beat a single nuclear station. When I see a single 9x9 solar farm – I can't believe that. Doesn't matter how cool it looks.

Huge accumulator is even bigger cheat. Being 50 times more powerful than accumulator it's built from, and taking place of 4 normal accumulators, it is 12.5 times more efficient. Which means that same place which kept 1GW before, keeps 12.5 GW now – which is effectively enough almost for the rest of the game to don't fallback to steam engines at night. Area 20x20, which forever removes the need to care about upgrading and extending your accumulators? This spoils the game.

And the worst thing about these machines is that they are incredibly low-tech. If you have mod's providing higher tiers machines (like all the same bob's mod), still just MK1 items required. With such a huge power it means that all technologies for improved solar panels and accumulators, for electrum and lithium – all that stuff becomes absolutely useless. A big part of the game is just thrown out. I can believe that something very high-tech could be so much efficient, but THIS – this is very bad balance, nothing more.

Compare with "Omega-drill" mod. Idea is the same: tired of building dosens of drills and connecting them with belts on each new mining outpost – let's build our HUGE MOTHERFUCKING SUPERDRILL which alone will cover the entire mining site and instantly produce a full belt of ore. But to build it, we need a lot of electric motors, MK3 belts (blue ones), and MK2 circuits (which are goddamn pain in bob's mod). It takes a lot of time before you automate producing of all these components – so it is HARD to build your first Omega-drill. It's huge power is justified. And even then – when mining some special hard ores like rutile even this monster produces not so much ore to make a belt constantly full (when loading a train), so you still may need to build standard drills to assist it. Small drills never become useless, and it still makes sense to upgrade them. This is good balance.

---

So, in general: nice mod, and I definitely want to have it installed – but some things here are totally broken, which doesn't allow me to call it a true masterpiece.

[d3x0r]

2. Requirement of alien artifacts in recipes.
Factorio is all about automation, ok? Anything that can't be automated should be abandoned and removed from the game. The only exception is producing ammo, like poisoned or shock bullets from "bob's warfare" mod. "Kill some aliens – gather artifacts – craft some empowered bullets – kill aliens more effective" – it's ok, war itself is not an automatic process. Let these unpleasant bugs to be killed by their own weapon.

0.15.x - there are no alien artifacts to get.

Compare with "Omega-drill" mod. Idea is the same: tired of building dosens of drills and connecting them with belts on each new mining outpost – let's build our HUGE MOTHERFUCKING SUPERDRILL which alone will cover the entire mining site and instantly produce a full belt of ore. But to build it, we need a lot of electric motors, MK3 belts (blue ones), and MK2 circuits (which are goddamn pain in bob's mod). It takes a lot of time before you automate producing of all these components – so it is HARD to build your first Omega-drill. It's huge power is justified. And even then – when mining some special hard ores like rutile even this monster produces not so much ore to make a belt constantly full (when loading a train), so you still may need to build standard drills to assist it. Small drills never become useless, and it still makes sense to upgrade them. This is good balance.

not sure how much of bob's mods you're using, but between modules and drill upgrades 2 regular drills outperform an omega.

[Veni]

I do tend to agree that the solar farm is a little overpowered. 1 MW is more reasonable. Same for the musk floor, though I am not sure where I would balance it right now. The accumulator is fine. I understand the concern at the seemingly massive performance boost; but it takes a lot of work to get the materials to make one of either. Nor are they the type of thing you are likely to fully automate the production of. You just don't need thousands.

[TheSAguy]

Another round of feedback:

Cokery Stuff

1. Wood needs to have a one to two ratio with wood pulp; otherwise you are getting free energy. Wood pulp + light oil + steam would be one realistic bioplastic recipe. Cellulose IRL is woodpulp + steam + sulfuric acid.

Veni, thanks, I'll update those in a future release.

Algae and Syngas
Your biomass can be renamed algae. The biofuel ratios and net algae production just need cleared up. I will come back to this more later but here is a start:
If you have a good model for a raceway, that would be great. Otherwise use the bioreactors or the greenhouses. The product should just be algal biomass; a green colored solid fuel thats 1.5 to 1 comparable. The biomass can be loaded into a reactor with steam to crack it to light oil and solids. (use woodpulp as the solids) One biomass and 1 steam should make 13 light oil and 1 woodpulp. Production of biomass should be pretty fast ~ 10 seconds per unit per facility at the slowest. This would make it a little less space efficient than solar but you could carry the fuel around.

Fischer-tropsch synthesis is the opposite of cracking. I would add a process so you can make lubricant from algae derived light oil. 10 light oil + 10 methane gas = 10 heavy oil. 20 methane gas = 10 light oil. I would also tweak the cracking amounts to balance but that is up to you.

I'm having a little hard time following you here for some reason.
Could you possibly summarize what recipes I'm removing and what I'm adding and what I'm changing...

I have been thinking about what Veni said and saplings.

I believe that Saplings could be created in a 'Nursery' not an assembler which could be the greenhouse or resized green house or other building. I have seen a little 3x3 greenhouse in someones mod (can't remember) which is what I imagine would be a Nursery to go with your greenhouses.

There should be three levels of recipes to balance the three greenhouse wood recipes.

I suggest that level 1 Seedlings require wood pulp, stone and water, level 2 uses fertiliser, crushed stone and water and level 3 uses advanced fertiliser crushed stone and water.

The should be no by-products.

If you use a small building it should be balanced to supply 2 greenhouses with its required saplings exactly to allow direct insertion. If its using greenhouse building it should supply a number of greenhouses so it could be built in line.

I definitely like the 'seed' idea... though it is just adding in another step.
I was thinking that chopping down a tree will give you a 20% of getting you a 'seed'
Once would put these seeds in greenhouses to get saplings. then saplings into the bio-farms to get wood.
There would be a new recipe for the bio-farm to get seed vs. wood. if you need to create more seed for the greenhouses...

Very nice mod, but badly combined with other global mods, and, which is worse, even with some aspects of original game.

First off, thanks for the feedback jeron_diovis, this is what I like

What I like:

1. Coke coal. Early-game fuel to reduce a bit burning of all that tons of raw coal in boilers before you create solid and rocket fuel. Very good idea.

2. Big wooden poles, of course.

3. Changed recipe for concrete, so it does not require iron ore. Finally!

4. Introducing "crushed stone", and adding it to rails recipe. Although it noticeably complicates rails production, it looks very realistic, which is cool. Also, nice graphics for "stone crusher" machine (but it's icon could be better).

5. Bio-garden. Because it looks just amazing. Despite it is much less efficient and more complex to use (because needs water pipes everywhere) than air filtering machines from "Air filtering" mod, I'm going to build alleys of these things all around my base. They really breathe life to all that endless miles of stone and steel, and look so much better than planting natural trees.

6. Musk's floor. I'm impressed by this idea. I'm sure Musk himself would be happy to see this. This is truly innovative and cool technology. Although I don't like the fact that with it there is no more need to upgrade electric network to get new poles with bigger area (because you don't need that network at all!) – but it's a lot of work and resources to really cover everything with this floor, so if one decided to go this way, it's only his choice. And anyway you will need big poles along railways to mining outposts, so upgrades still needed.
The only thing I'm really complain about musk's floor – it seems to be the only thing in entire mod with ugly graphics. Eyes bleeding when looking on that crazy mess of white stripes and red wires. Something more neutral, more monotonous would be better, on my view.

7. Technology chain for producing coal from wood. My favourite one. In combination with late-game "Coal liquefaction" technology, it allows to build complex enough chain for producing infinite oil from nothing. And it does not matter that oil wells in game are infinite by their nature (always considered it a cheat) – just ideologically, it is so cool that so important resource as oil becomes renewable. The true win of bio-industry!

Thanks,About the Musk-floor. The graphics look bad because of the wires. There is currently no way to hide those in-game.

What I don't like:

1. Bio-farm. Although it looks visually impressive, and has a couple of realism in recipe (with flashlights required) – if you ever played with "Bob's greenhouse" mod, you will understand how ridiculously useless bio-farm is.
Just a few numbers:

(basic recipe)
Bio-farm: 450 s -> 40 wood
Greenhouse: 60 s -> 15 wood

(with fertilizer)
Bio-farm: 260 s -> 75 wood
Greenhouse: 45 s -> 30 wood

(with advanced fertilizer)
Bio-farm: 150 s -> 150 wood
Greenhouse: (n/a)

It's easy to see that greenhouse is 2.5+ times more effective. With advanced fertilizer bio-farm wins one-to-one duel, but here is a fatality: one bio-farm takes same place as SIX greenhouses with their pipes, belts and inserters. No way. Just no way.

Maybe, it was also done in favour of realism – i.e., growing trees is obviously not a fast process, and requires a lot of space – but for those who plays with bob's mod (for me, for example, it looks as a standard must-have addon at all) the only reason to ever build bio-farm is a desire to add more difficulty to game.

Okay, I've not played with out Bob's since 0.12, and love his work. But the one mod I don't play with is his greenhouse mod. Not because it directly clashes with this one , but because I feel like his tree growing is way to fast... A tree takes a long time to grow.
Basically one is creating a resource out of thin air. In theory one does no longer need coal or oil in the game with the ability to grow trees and turn coal into oil...
So I made it that you have to work for it! This is something I will probably not change and if someone want's it easy, go use Bob's greenhouse.

Also, here is another important problem, which is....
2. Requirement of alien artifacts in recipes.
Factorio is all about automation, ok? Anything that can't be automated should be abandoned and removed from the game. The only exception is producing ammo, like poisoned or shock bullets from "bob's warfare" mod. "Kill some aliens – gather artifacts – craft some empowered bullets – kill aliens more effective" – it's ok, war itself is not an automatic process. Let these unpleasant bugs to be killed by their own weapon.

But my god, for the holy science – using artifacts to produce fertilizer?? Seriously?
The earth's own genetics is so poor that can't invent a new fast-growing sort of trees, or smth like that?

Ok, ok, wild and aggressive zerg's biology, combined with plants, allows to speed up tree growth, I can imagine that – but we are still in the game about automation. Where so important part, as producing wood, can't be automated to use it at full power.
Maybe, there are some mods which allows to craft artifacts somehow, I don't know – but search, install and build up all that stuff for... fertilizer? Too much. A huge dislike from me to advanced fertilizer recipe, and yet another solid reason to build greenhouses instead of bio-farms.

Also, basic fertilizer in this mod requires crushed stone – for what? I'm not an expert in fertilizers, but STONES? Why? Why not smth more organic?

As you know Alien artifacts is not in base game, but added by a few mods now, including Bob's Enemies and my other mod Natural Evolution.
I like the idea of having an advanced form of something use this rare ingredient. It's totally optional, you could always stick with regular fertilizer.
And you can automate the artifact harvesting process, with NE. Build a few thumpers and artifact collectors and you're set!

As for the stone. Think of it as a base material. I could probably replace it with wood-pulp?

3. Bio-fuel
First of all, bio-fuel also requires artifacts. So this technology branch is already dead. But, also – the only purpose of bio-fuel is to crack it into oil fractions. Just why do we ever need this, when we already have technologies for producing coal and liquefaction it into oil?
Looks like absolutely pointless thing with no reason to use.

I agree, bio fuel needs work. Veni is helping me here. It was better before 0.15 added coal cracking, that changed a lot, since it's far more efficient to just use that.
Like to get your input on making this better...

4. New machines for electricity (Solar Farm and Huge Accumulator).
Simply – because they are cheat. A clear uncovered cheat.
I understand the idea behind them, but they are TOO MUCH overpowered.

Recipes requires a lot of items, and have a long crafting time – but it is still very easy to automate and build a lot of these things.

Solar Farm looks very cool (although it would be much better to have some visible border around it, it's so hard to place it properly), but how this nice thing produces more energy than thermal-based sources? More energy, than 6 MK1 steam engines? Damn, it's only 800kW less efficient than NUCLEAR REACTOR! How??
When I see all those endless fields of solar panels, I can believe that together they all can beat a single nuclear station. When I see a single 9x9 solar farm – I can't believe that. Doesn't matter how cool it looks.

Huge accumulator is even bigger cheat. Being 50 times more powerful than accumulator it's built from, and taking place of 4 normal accumulators, it is 12.5 times more efficient. Which means that same place which kept 1GW before, keeps 12.5 GW now – which is effectively enough almost for the rest of the game to don't fallback to steam engines at night. Area 20x20, which forever removes the need to care about upgrading and extending your accumulators? This spoils the game.

And the worst thing about these machines is that they are incredibly low-tech. If you have mod's providing higher tiers machines (like all the same bob's mod), still just MK1 items required. With such a huge power it means that all technologies for improved solar panels and accumulators, for electrum and lithium – all that stuff becomes absolutely useless. A big part of the game is just thrown out. I can believe that something very high-tech could be so much efficient, but THIS – this is very bad balance, nothing more.

Compare with "Omega-drill" mod. Idea is the same: tired of building dosens of drills and connecting them with belts on each new mining outpost – let's build our HUGE MOTHERFUCKING SUPERDRILL which alone will cover the entire mining site and instantly produce a full belt of ore. But to build it, we need a lot of electric motors, MK3 belts (blue ones), and MK2 circuits (which are goddamn pain in bob's mod). It takes a lot of time before you automate producing of all these components – so it is HARD to build your first Omega-drill. It's huge power is justified. And even then – when mining some special hard ores like rutile even this monster produces not so much ore to make a belt constantly full (when loading a train), so you still may need to build standard drills to assist it. Small drills never become useless, and it still makes sense to upgrade them. This is good balance.

Both the Solar Farm and Accumulator is more a space saver than anything else...I obviously can't make it a 20x20 building....
I'll look at the output of the Solar farm and maybe tone it down a little. Same with Accumulator.

Also, as of the last update these are optional in the settings.

So, in general: nice mod, and I definitely want to have it installed – but some things here are totally broken, which doesn't allow me to call it a true masterpiece.

Please keep giving me feedback and also ideas/solutions to stuff you don't like, want to change or add.
You've given me a lot to think about and I've just briefly replayed to everything. Keep the discussion going!
Thanks.

[d3x0r]

idea in greenhouses - could require a (few) landfill ? because you can't keep growing in the same dirt without replenishing it? later to be replaced with fertilizer?

[Veni]

@ d3x0r

Most greenhouse growth like this would be hydroponic and not need dirt.

@TheSAGuy

I attached an image to this post. Its of a small loop I have producing wood. I think those components, when put together, produce about 1.5 to 2 MW worth of wood. This bumps to 2.5-3 MW with the charcoal conversion. This is a net calculation. The area is approx 60 tall by 20 wide. This power is similar to what is produced by 40 solar panels. The 40 solar panels would take up about half the space. This makes bio-industry for wood fuel very unappealing in the early game. I will add a fertilizer next and let you know.

[ZombieMooose]

@TheSAGuy

I attached an image to this post. Its of a small loop I have producing wood. I think those components, when put together, produce about 1.5 to 2 MW worth of wood. This bumps to 2.5-3 MW with the charcoal conversion. This is a net calculation. The area is approx 60 tall by 20 wide. This power is similar to what is produced by 40 solar panels. The 40 solar panels would take up about half the space. This makes bio-industry for wood fuel very unappealing in the early game. I will add a fertilizer next and let you know.

How much with coal cracking to oil products for solid fuel?

[Veni]

Less. IT takes 80 MJ worth of coal for cracking. You get 2.5 Solid Fuel out. If you add in the cost to run the machines to do this and the creation of 50 units of steam; you really only get 2 Solid fuel approx. This is 50 MJ; 62.5% efficiency.

[TheSAguy]

V1.8.0 - Some Big changes. Totally redid Bio-Fuel section. Thanks to Veni for a lot of help here.
Added Greenhouse to grow seeds that can then be turned into seedlings for trees.
Balancing to Solar Farm and Bio Accumulator, both nerved.

I'll need some feedback from the community on balancing.

Thanks.

[Light]

What I don't like:

1. Bio-farm. Although it looks visually impressive, and has a couple of realism in recipe (with flashlights required) – if you ever played with "Bob's greenhouse" mod, you will understand how ridiculously useless bio-farm is.
Just a few numbers:

(basic recipe)
Bio-farm: 450 s -> 40 wood
Greenhouse: 60 s -> 15 wood

(with fertilizer)
Bio-farm: 260 s -> 75 wood
Greenhouse: 45 s -> 30 wood

(with advanced fertilizer)
Bio-farm: 150 s -> 150 wood
Greenhouse: (n/a)

It's easy to see that greenhouse is 2.5+ times more effective. With advanced fertilizer bio-farm wins one-to-one duel, but here is a fatality: one bio-farm takes same place as SIX greenhouses with their pipes, belts and inserters. No way. Just no way.

Maybe, it was also done in favour of realism – i.e., growing trees is obviously not a fast process, and requires a lot of space – but for those who plays with bob's mod (for me, for example, it looks as a standard must-have addon at all) the only reason to ever build bio-farm is a desire to add more difficulty to game.

Okay, I've not played with out Bob's since 0.12, and love his work. But the one mod I don't play with is his greenhouse mod. Not because it directly clashes with this one , but because I feel like his tree growing is way to fast... A tree takes a long time to grow.
Basically one is creating a resource out of thin air. In theory one does no longer need coal or oil in the game with the ability to grow trees and turn coal into oil...
So I made it that you have to work for it! This is something I will probably not change and if someone want's it easy, go use Bob's greenhouse.

I'm going to agree with you on how Bob's greenhouses make trees way too fast and with little real estate. However I want to throw my 2 cents in here since wood production is a severe bottleneck I suffer a lot early on.

I love this mod due to the realistic slow growth of wood, but the amount of land required to make a small amount of trees is quite frustrating when you're looking at 20+ bio farms taking up a massive amount of land. My suggestion is to leave the speed as is, but buff the number of trees that are created so that wait is far more worthwhile than it is currently. This would help balance things out a lot more since it also eats 10% of its own wood to keep running, lowering the available wood supplies and requiring more farms to compensate for that loss.

Using helmod, it's quite apparent how much you have to do just to keep things going. This is based on producing 1,000 wood per minute, using the best recipe available for their respective tier.



Regular - 125 bio farms (10% loss)
Fertilizer - 38 bio farms (18% loss)
Adv Fertilizer - 12 bio farms (11% loss)

It's clear that regular suffers a massive disadvantage, but the fertilizer method also consumes 8% more wood which sort of ruins the appeal of that line too since it's eating other resources alongside it. Advanced is totally fine though.

So for the early game you're basically unable to use the mod for more than just a tiny pittance of wood, which takes a few hours unless you can dedicate a ton of land towards it and to defend it from biters if enabled. This is why I feel the amount of wood should be buffed to be near identical for all three, since the fertilizer should only be decreasing their production time, not also doubling their yields which is the root cause of this heavy imbalance.

[d3x0r]

Had a crash upgrading rails. deconstructing a rail gives name as 'curved-rail-scrap' which isn't an item prototype, only an entity prototype....
(Hmm this is probably because upgrade builder and planner is emitting the wrong name) deconstructing the rail normally gives 'scrap-rail' as the item name there. maybe don't worry about this, providing a fix anyway

on line 531 of control.lua

replace
local tile = game.item_prototypes[tile_name].place_as_tile_result
with
local tile = game.item_prototypes[tile_name] and game.item_prototypes[tile_name].place_as_tile_result

fixes the issue.

[TheSAguy]

The size of the mod has greatly been reduced due to the help from Darkfrei!
Before it was 26MB, now it's 4MB!

Added a Large Wooden Chest in 1.8.3.

Any Balancing thoughts/feedback since 1.8.0?

Thanks.

[TheSAguy]

V1.8.4 - HD rail typo fix
Tested 1.8.3 on my laptop that can't do HD....

[d3x0r]

Can't make a greenhouse without crushed stone; can't get crushed stone until fertilizer; why even have aresearch for 'bio-farm' when you can't do anything with it?
Also Factorio refactored its own technologies to only require 1 of every type instead of different counts... any reason you have 2 red for fertilizer?

[TheSAguy]

Can't make a greenhouse without crushed stone; can't get crushed stone until fertilizer; why even have aresearch for 'bio-farm' when you can't do anything with it?
Also Factorio refactored its own technologies to only require 1 of every type instead of different counts... any reason you have 2 red for fertilizer?

You should also get crushed stone at Automation 2.
I released V1.8.5 moving it up to Automation 1 and also adjusted Tech cost to all be 1 per like Vanilla.

[michaelncguy]

Hi TheSAguy/all. I'm loving the mod, but I have a crazy question.

Is it possible to edit a file in the mod and increase the range on the Bio Cannon? I'm fine with editing a file myself if someone can tell me where to change the value. I tried making some changes myself, but all I'm ending up doing is updating the test/description files.... it's not shooting at anything farther away.

Thanks in advance!