Factorio Forums

Type: Recipe
Name: Reverse Alien Engineering
Description: Adds research to allow reverse engineering of science packs to lesser ones.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
Version: 0.0.1
Release: 2016-02-26
Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.12.0
Category: Recipe
Tags: Recipe, Research, Reverse Engineering
Download-Url: download/file.php?mode=view&id=9121
My first Factorio Mod, hope you enjoy. Balancing suggestions are welcomed.

It's fun! But what's the point? What is the logic? Why?
As you play so that you have something extra?

I like the idea of the mod, but Keep in mind that Alien Science Packs are extremely cheap as soon as you have a tank and get some artefacts. You get 10(!) Sciencepacks out of ONE Artefact. And I got hundreds of artefacts by going out and killing some Alien bases.

I find the concept of this mod quite astounding.

Here's my thoughts on balance, a science pack 3 costs in the ballpark of 40 raw resources (like iron plates), one alien artifact becomes 10 alien science packs which reverse engineer down to 5 science pack 3s, which is equivalent to 200 iron plates. This is really quite a lot considering that in a sortie with the tank you can easily bring home 1000 alien artifacts.

Another way of looking at it. The science pack 3 is a very complicated build, you could (more or less) manually craft 60 science pack 3's, then go practically oilless. Especially by using defender capsules with full bullet upgrades you could steamroll nests for a very long time (until Behemoths, really) and not really bother with oil at all since Defenders are pure copper/iron.

As awesome as the idea is, I think that the reverse engineering recipes need an extra reagent, a good candidate for science pack 3 might be an advanced circuit:

4 Alien Science Pack + 1 Advanced Circuit = 2 Science Pack 3

This would create science pack 3's at half the cost in red circuits and no battery cost, making it still a big win in terms of oil and complexity reduction but not quite allowing going practically oil-less.

BlakeMW wrote: 4 Alien Science Pack + 1 Advanced Circuit = 2 Science Pack 3

I put some thought on what you were said, I've updated and released new version with Science Pack 3's requiring an Advanced Circuit now. I've also increased the Alien Science Packs to 5 from 4, my reasoning is that before the idea was 2 Alien Artifacts would give you 10x Science Pack-3's as a kind of bonus but that scales a little too well if you farm Artifacts well. Thanks for the suggestions.

If people enjoy this mod but find it a little too easy to farm Artifacts I may created a Hardcore version that requires resources on all stages of reverse engineering and make it 1:1 reverse packs (1 Science Pack-2 = 1 Science Pack-1).