[0.12.x] Mining Drill & Better ore storage - v1.0.3

[Kane]

Thanks for this mod once again. I have crafted the MK 6 and MK 5 Drills. I have found it to be pretty game breaking and actually not that useful sadly. The reason is because No belt can keep up at least on the one side. Even a blue using a spliter just right after 1 single belt from the drill can't keep up and gives you a pretty messy stream.

I assume there is no way to get it to place on both sides of the belt?

[hoho]

You could put a chest in front of the drill and have several inserters take items out to several belts.

[n9103]

I prefer setting up a chain of 3-4 chests and having inserters place ore onto belts running down each side, to take advantage of the stack bonuses.
Being that this problem only occurs at the top two levels, the area of each drill is large enough to deal with this extra infrastructure.

[gr0mpel]

if you're that far into the game that you can craft these mofos then you can insert it into an AM, craft it to a stack and transport via robos (or belts or whatever you prefer)

[n9103]

Right, duh. Forgot about those.
I can't wait for them to finally decide on a version to make stable so that I can justify getting back into this, and stop forgetting details about mods I enjoy.

[darkshadow1809]

Hi there TiTan!

First off i wanted to say thank you for sharing this mod with us ! My users really enjoy using it! However I got a nice request a couple of days ago. Since there is quite a lot of mods out there. Could you add Mod support aswell? So we can use the modded ores to make stacks out of that ore aswell!

Would very much appreciate it if you could do that

Thanks in advance & best of luck!

[n9103]

He'd have to do all the ores in question (which you didn't list) manually.
Not particularly practical, IMO.
Perhaps it would be possible to read all other items on load, and create compression/decompression recipes on the fly (with a generic icon mind you), but I'm pretty sure that's not possible yet.
I could be wrong, and it's been added in one of the .11.x releases, but that'd be a pretty substantial change from the way they've been handling mods so I'm doubtful.

[goblinm]

Interesting mod! I really like the idea of mining machine tiers, as the vanilla mining machine is tedious to set up.

After playing with this mod in a run-though, I think this mod was fun but very overpowered:

1) Increasing the stack size to 200 is crazy good and solves too many logistics problems by itself. This alters so much about a factory, including how chests and assemblers work with copper and iron plate, how efficient train logistics are, and how much STUFF you can hold in your inventory without having to go back to resupply. I would definitely reconsider putting this back to 100, so we still have the limitation of the 'small' stack size and have to overcome it with logistical workarounds. To put it in another perspective, if I were running around manually refilling assemblers, this stack size bonus cut my work in HALF or more, because I don't have to fill up chests/assembler buffers as often.

2) The packing/unpacking recipe seems waaaay too quick, condensing so much material into a small package should take longer than 0.5 seconds. Considering we are packing/unpacking probably for transport, increasing the time to pack/unpack would seem like an acceptable sacrifice. Maybe 6 seconds? Or 3 seconds if there is a resource cost associated with packing (see 3)?

3) There is no cost for packing/unpacking. It seems strange that you can box up a huge amount of metal/material using only electricity. Maybe use 5 units of wood for boxing material? Maybe use a steel chest as part of the recipe? Maybe for stone/coal/ore you need sulfuric acid (or water) to 'wash' the material for packing, or plastic to wrap it all together? Maybe the unboxing gives you back some resource (say, the steel chest, wood, or plastic) so that you have to be smart about sorting the output of the assembler. Maybe make the recipe slightly inefficient, packing 55 material into a stack of 50?

4) WHY CAN THIS BE HAND CRAFTED? Seriously, I mainly used the ore/plate compression to ferry around HUGE amounts of material because the material disappears when I start crafting the recipe, meaning that the items in question take ZERO inventory space until the crafting is done. INFINITE INVENTORY! Many times, what I would typically do is, have circuits and other materials in my inv, start crafting a tier 4 or 5 miner, and I could grab tons of ore/plate, craft them into the compressed version, and cancel the crafting if I wanted them back (say if I were organizing ore chests, or transporting ore to a resourced starved base from a mining outpost before trains were set up, combined with 5a below). IMHO the 'stack' recipes should ONLY be craftable in tier 2 or 3 assemblers. It doesn't make sense how a person could crunch a pile of material into 1/100th the size in his pocket.

5) Upgraded miners: I love these and hate these.. The upgrades are nice, but I feel like the tiers should be changed so that there is more personality to the upgrades. Instead of being straight up better with increased pollution, manufacturing, and electricity costs, have versions of the miner that have a trade-off of speed, building footprint, and mining footprint. Say, instead of tier 2 and tier 3, have a fast miner (cost = t2, mining speed = t3, smaller mining footprint, say 3x3, smaller than vanilla miner), a 'deep ore miner' (cost = t2, mining speed = vanilla, mining footprint = 6x6), and a tier 2 version of both of those that costs the same as your current t4 miner with upgrades. Then have a final miner upgrade that that has all the benefits of your t5 and t6 miners like you want, but maybe the building size could be 6x6 instead. Maybe the large footprint miner can have a bigger building footprint too, to prevent people from clustering a bunch close together.

5a) Changing miners as per 5) above would help combat one use I found for the T4 miners: I would run to a deposit far from my base, plunk down 4 miners feeding into an assembler crafting stacked ore all with a few solar panels, and I can manually haul out entire deposits of ore with very little maintenance, setup, or overhead. Making the changes in 5) would mean I would either have to wait a long time to mine out the deposit, or visit the location more frequently to re-position fast miners. Changes in 3) would mean I would have to provide the setup with resources, or limit this strategy to places that are close to the required resource for packing.

Let's be clear, I LOVE all of the ideas in this mod, but once again, I feel like the packing/unpacking is sooo overpowered, especially when crafting in the hand. And I think having interesting choices (ie, I can put in the wide footprint miners if I want to slowly mine out the deposit, or the fast miner to tap the deposit as quick as possible) would make placing miners more interesting.

Do you know if Factorio supports buildings outputting resources into multiple locations? The final miner teir could also output ore on all 4 sides, or multiple places in the forward side, which would help with outputting too fast for a belt to handle.

Let me know what you think of my suggestions.

[Wenihal]

Hello goblinm,

I agree with your pints 1,2,3,4. That's why I changed few things in this mod for my personal purposes:

1. Vanilla game stack sizes are not changed.
2. Packing recipes take 20x time more than original, unpacking recipes take 18x time more.
3. To pack plates you need steel chest. To pack ores (iron, copper, coal, wood and stone) you need steel chest and water. Unfortunately during unpacking steel chest is destroyed and only 5 steel plates are recycled.
4. Hand packing/unpacking is disabled.

Additionally researching two technologies is necessary to unlock packing/unpacking. Also packed coal and wood has fuel value which is equal to 95% of unpacked raw material. Packing steel is not possible. I renamed this mod to Raw Materials Compression (RMC).

5. IMHO better mining drills should be moved to another mod. In my games I can only use standard drills.

If anyone is interested in my version of this mod and if TiTaN agrees, I can post it.

[ssilk]

Quite interested. Most of your changes makes sense in my eyes.
Needing steel chest for packing is in my eyes a bit expensive (5 iron to create one steel bar * 8 to create a steel chest = 40 iron! But for iron ore it's only 50 per stack, or did I misunderstood anything?)

[Wenihal]

You get 5 steel plates back in decompression process, so actual cost is 3 steel bars (3 * 5 = 15 iron plates).

[ssilk]

That is still a cost of 30% per packing... I think 5-10% would be nicer...

[TiTaN_3000]

Hello, thanks for your suggestions,

i also thought that the mod is to overpowered how it is right now.

1) Increasing the stack size to 200 is crazy good and solves too many logistics problems by itself. This alters so much about a factory, including how chests and assemblers work with copper and iron plate, how efficient train logistics are, and how much STUFF you can hold in your inventory without having to go back to resupply. I would definitely reconsider putting this back to 100, so we still have the limitation of the 'small' stack size and have to overcome it with logistical workarounds. To put it in another perspective, if I were running around manually refilling assemblers, this stack size bonus cut my work in HALF or more, because I don't have to fill up chests/assembler buffers as often.

You're right.

2) The packing/unpacking recipe seems waaaay too quick, condensing so much material into a small package should take longer than 0.5 seconds. Considering we are packing/unpacking probably for transport, increasing the time to pack/unpack would seem like an acceptable sacrifice. Maybe 6 seconds? Or 3 seconds if there is a resource cost associated with packing (see 3)?

Increased packing to 16 seconds and unpacking to 8 seconds

3) There is no cost for packing/unpacking. It seems strange that you can box up a huge amount of metal/material using only electricity. Maybe use 5 units of wood for boxing material? Maybe use a steel chest as part of the recipe? Maybe for stone/coal/ore you need sulfuric acid (or water) to 'wash' the material for packing, or plastic to wrap it all together? Maybe the unboxing gives you back some resource (say, the steel chest, wood, or plastic) so that you have to be smart about sorting the output of the assembler. Maybe make the recipe slightly inefficient, packing 55 material into a stack of 50?

Good idea, but i dont want to make it to complicated.
I added a Iron box that is required for every stacking recipe. Iron box cost 5 iron and you get the iron back if you uncraft the stack, you now need a whole box creating factory. (no loss right now)

4) WHY CAN THIS BE HAND CRAFTED? Seriously, I mainly used the ore/plate compression to ferry around HUGE amounts of material because the material disappears when I start crafting the recipe, meaning that the items in question take ZERO inventory space until the crafting is done. INFINITE INVENTORY! Many times, what I would typically do is, have circuits and other materials in my inv, start crafting a tier 4 or 5 miner, and I could grab tons of ore/plate, craft them into the compressed version, and cancel the crafting if I wanted them back (say if I were organizing ore chests, or transporting ore to a resourced starved base from a mining outpost before trains were set up, combined with 5a below). IMHO the 'stack' recipes should ONLY be craftable in tier 2 or 3 assemblers. It doesn't make sense how a person could crunch a pile of material into 1/100th the size in his pocket.

I totally agree, no more handcrafting.

5) Upgraded miners: I love these and hate these.. The upgrades are nice, but I feel like the tiers should be changed so that there is more personality to the upgrades. Instead of being straight up better with increased pollution, manufacturing, and electricity costs, have versions of the miner that have a trade-off of speed, building footprint, and mining footprint. Say, instead of tier 2 and tier 3, have a fast miner (cost = t2, mining speed = t3, smaller mining footprint, say 3x3, smaller than vanilla miner), a 'deep ore miner' (cost = t2, mining speed = vanilla, mining footprint = 6x6), and a tier 2 version of both of those that costs the same as your current t4 miner with upgrades. Then have a final miner upgrade that that has all the benefits of your t5 and t6 miners like you want, but maybe the building size could be 6x6 instead. Maybe the large footprint miner can have a bigger building footprint too, to prevent people from clustering a bunch close together.

Mining drills were to strong, i removed tier 4,5 and 6.
There is now a "Eco Mining drill" with reduced power usage and a "Deep mining drill" who is fast but has only little area.
I would really like to add miners with a bigger footprint but i can't create models by myself.

5a) Changing miners as per 5) above would help combat one use I found for the T4 miners: I would run to a deposit far from my base, plunk down 4 miners feeding into an assembler crafting stacked ore all with a few solar panels, and I can manually haul out entire deposits of ore with very little maintenance, setup, or overhead. Making the changes in 5) would mean I would either have to wait a long time to mine out the deposit, or visit the location more frequently to re-position fast miners. Changes in 3) would mean I would have to provide the setup with resources, or limit this strategy to places that are close to the required resource for packing.

This may need future balance changes.

Let's be clear, I LOVE all of the ideas in this mod, but once again, I feel like the packing/unpacking is sooo overpowered, especially when crafting in the hand. And I think having interesting choices (ie, I can put in the wide footprint miners if I want to slowly mine out the deposit, or the fast miner to tap the deposit as quick as possible) would make placing miners more interesting.

You're right.

Do you know if Factorio supports buildings outputting resources into multiple locations? The final miner teir could also output ore on all 4 sides, or multiple places in the forward side, which would help with outputting too fast for a belt to handle.

That's currently impossible.

Thank you

[ssilk]

This feels about right balanced now.

It would be really cool, if the boxing mod and this mod could come more together now, because I think, this whole boxing/packing etc. is really some kind of new sub-game for Factorio; it makes things more complex, but on the other hand it removes a lot complexity, because the transport problems changes from finetuning/little optimizations into a direction of solving primary logistic strategies, which feels much more like OpenTTD, TrainTycoon etc. Which I like, because the underlaying level don't get lost and is sometimes still useful/needed.

[XyLe]

Last changes made this mod MUCH MUCH better! Now i can tell how well this is done, finally it does not feel completely ridiculous to carry 40k of each resource on you and craft with it all you want.

Still though, come on, how can you carry that many boxes in 1 tile of your inventory with 100 plates in each box? I'd say 10 boxes per stack is A LOT and more than enough, but 25 is out of the question. And even then you can put over 50 boxes of plates in 1 tile of your inventory, i was able to hold 59 boxes (100 plates each), is that your stack size? At that point i stopped testing. It's way out of any sensible proportion.

Next, who disassembles the box and why? I understand the recipe such that unboxing ore should give you ore AND your box back. I see no reason for the box to be disassembled in the process with no loss what so ever.

Piled plates: this recipe just makes no sense to me, how do you imagine that? does a machine glue plates together or does it use a scotch tape? xD Why can't a person do it then? The idea of increasing belt throughput with such recipe is not bad but i think it should feel out of place for any experienced player. Simply because of how this game works. I don't like that recipe. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, right?

Having an extra tab was an absolutely great idea, thumbs up for that! And especially the way iron box looks - it's just pure awesomeness )) loving it. I wish it wasn't that cheap though. Why 5 plates? 5 plates don't even make a cube. I don't understand. I could understand something like "6 iron plates + 8 steel plates" or "6 steel plates + 12 iron sticks" to make it at least a little more interesting, it's a blue science tech after all...

And regarding tech, why does boxing tech depend on mining drills? how does that make any sense? Like before i can mine ore faster than normal i shouldn't be able to box stuff up? weird. I'd say as it depends on automation 3 it depends on everything it needs to depend on, being a blue science technology.

Of course i'm not gonna hesitate to tweak the mod as i see fit and play with it then making the changes i've mentioned is not hard. So from now on, i don't think the game will be good enough for me without this mod )) thank you very much for sharing it!

p.s. i also think having only 1 slot for modules in each mining drill is not cool. maybe it's ok for the worst drill, but others should be able to have more modules.

[TiTaN_3000]

Still though, come on, how can you carry that many boxes in 1 tile of your inventory with 100 plates in each box? I'd say 10 boxes per stack is A LOT and more than enough, but 25 is out of the question. And even then you can put over 50 boxes of plates in 1 tile of your inventory, i was able to hold 59 boxes (100 plates each), is that your stack size? At that point i stopped testing. It's way out of any sensible proportion.

I totally forgot about the high stack count, in the next version i will set it to 15.

Next, who disassembles the box and why? I understand the recipe such that unboxing ore should give you ore AND your box back. I see no reason for the box to be disassembled in the process with no loss what so ever.

Stuff is so high compressed, the box can not be opened without destroying them. No loss because iron does not evaporate right?^^

Piled plates: this recipe just makes no sense to me, how do you imagine that? does a machine glue plates together or does it use a scotch tape? xD Why can't a person do it then? The idea of increasing belt throughput with such recipe is not bad but i think it should feel out of place for any experienced player. Simply because of how this game works. I don't like that recipe. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, right?

Needs testing, if it doesnt make any sense i am going to remove it.

Having an extra tab was an absolutely great idea, thumbs up for that! And especially the way iron box looks - it's just pure awesomeness )) loving it. I wish it wasn't that cheap though. Why 5 plates? 5 plates don't even make a cube. I don't understand. I could understand something like "6 iron plates + 8 steel plates" or "6 steel plates + 12 iron sticks" to make it at least a little more interesting, it's a blue science tech after all...

"6 iron plates + 8 steel plates" thats 46 iron per box!
If you want to store 100.000 Coal you need 2000 boxes, that would cost 92.000 iron ^^
46 iron for 50 ore thats a cost of 92 %

Right now its 5 iron for 50 ore means 10%, i think its clear now.

And regarding tech, why does boxing tech depend on mining drills? how does that make any sense? Like before i can mine ore faster than normal i shouldn't be able to box stuff up? weird. I'd say as it depends on automation 3 it depends on everything it needs to depend on, being a blue science technology.

Good point ! i removed that dependency.

p.s. i also think having only 1 slot for modules in each mining drill is not cool. maybe it's ok for the worst drill, but others should be able to have more modules.

I thought that would be good in terms of balance, needs testing.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[XyLe]

I totally forgot about the high stack count, in the next version i will set it to 15.

//I would like to see 20 for copper and iron plates, and 10 for other things like ore, stone and coal. As different as their stacks are. Makes sense to me.

Actually, i've reconsidered that idea. Even though a plates stack = 100 , and ore stack = 50, it doesn't necessarily mean a stack of boxes should have different limitations for those two things. Boxes are the same, they can hold 1 stack of whatever you put in there, so maybe a stack of boxes should be just a stack of boxes no matter what's inside. 15 is an "unbeautiful" number though try to make it 10 or 20, still better than current 200

Stuff is so high compressed, the box can not be opened without destroying them. No loss because iron does not evaporate right?^^

1. I don't think it's cool. In my opinion it should work like barrels do. Pack stuff = use barrel, unpack stuff = get barrel back. How is it compressed in such way i don't know. Well, your mod, you do what you like of course. Who am I to judge...
2. First you say: "box can not be opened without destroying them", and then you point out that destroying the box gives you back clean iron plates it's been made of. Good luck with that understanding in real life. I'd assume that iron is not gonna be preserved through such insane transformation, but it's just a computer game, whatever, right? ))

Piled plates: this recipe just makes no sense to me, how do you imagine that? does a machine glue plates together or does it use a scotch tape? xD Why can't a person do it then? The idea of increasing belt throughput with such recipe is not bad but i think it should feel out of place for any experienced player. Simply because of how this game works. I don't like that recipe. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, right?

Needs testing, if it doesnt make any sense i am going to remove it.

well, that's why i pointed that out. because it doesn't.

I could understand something like "6 iron plates + 8 steel plates" or "6 steel plates + 12 iron sticks" to make it at least a little more interesting,

"6 iron plates + 8 steel plates" thats 46 iron per box!
If you want to store 100.000 Coal you need 2000 boxes, that would cost 92.000 iron ^^
46 iron for 50 ore thats a cost of 92 %

Right now its 5 iron for 50 ore means 10%, i think its clear now.

You took my words extremely too literally to make a joke out of it? i'm not fond of it tbh.

It's not a coincidence that i said "something like". the next example of mine had 6 steel plates and 12 sticks which is 6x5+12/2 = 36 iron per box. Your calculations are wa-a-a-a-y off for such case and don't mean anything balance-wise.

But even then, the way i suggested it to be would return the empty box after unpacking, so who cares how much it would cost to make such box? you get it back every time you unpack things. It should be intended for compact transportation and of course there should be a price to pay. Even if you needed to make a box of 1 stack of iron plates to carry around another 1 stack of iron plates, what's wrong with that? craft like 100 boxes and then use it for the rest of your life. I don't understand how it matters that box is worth 100% of it's content. Content will be gone, the box will be usable forever.

With all of the above - i'll point out again that the way i like it is 36 iron per box in a form of 6 steel plates and 12 iron sticks. I don't appreciate twisting my words, your wrong calculations and i stand by what i've said. It's not only clear now but it was indeed clear to me before.

p.s. i also think having only 1 slot for modules in each mining drill is not cool. maybe it's ok for the worst drill, but others should be able to have more modules.

I thought that would be good in terms of balance, needs testing.

It does not need testing. All the testing is in my game experience. And absolutely any experienced player with good understanding of the game will tell you exactly the same. In many scenarios you want to have better output in terms of productivity. Unless your map is super rich with resources but trust me, not everybody plays like that. Being able to put 1 module = +10% outcome. Which doesn't help too much. +40% is something for a "better drill" mod. That's exactly why i'd like a mod like that - to have better productivity possible. And instead i get less productivity, this is ridiculous but thankfully so easily adjustable.

My opinion so far : Drill 1 = 1 module, Drill 2 = 3 slots, Drill 3 = 4 slots, Eco = 3 coz made of drill 2, Deep = 2 slots coz shouldn't be OP.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Thank you for your mod )

[ssilk]

I totally forgot about the high stack count, in the next version i will set it to 15.

I would like to see 20 for copper and iron plates, and 10 for other things like ore, stone and coal. As different as their stacks are. Makes sense to me.

We should compare that with boxing mod, where it is 10 for anything. 15 seems to be fair, 10 is "OK".
Why 20 for copper?

Stuff is so high compressed, the box can not be opened without destroying them. No loss because iron does not evaporate right?^^

1. I don't think it's cool. In my opinion it should work like barrels do. Pack stuff = use barrel, unpack stuff = get barrel back. How is it compressed in such way i don't know. Well, your mod, you do what you like of course. Who am I to judge...

I think it is fair. If you want to have that, use the boxing mod...

2. First you say: "box can not be opened without destroying them", and then you point out that destroying the box gives you back clean iron plates it's been made of. Good luck with that understanding in real life. I'd assume that iron is not gonna be preserved through such insane transformation, but it's just a computer game, whatever, right? ))

Hehe. I think it's about ok like it is. But what I really didn't understand was, why we need a special "Iron box". Side joke: I made about 10.000 Iron chests until I checked, why that stuff doesn't work.
"But that stupid thing need an iron chest! Dammend!" rereading, clicking, "Iron Chest... Why didn't he want me to build an extra iron chest?" more clicking "Iron Che.... ? Iron Box???? Dammed! Fuuuuu....."
<bringing all iron chests together in some iron chests> "Diiiiiieeeee stupid iron boxes!", flamethrower did the rest.

Why not just take the current iron chest? Maybe we have an "advanced recipe", which changes the current 8 Iron after research to 5.

And that matches also into the boxing mod, which needs currently one steel bar = 5 iron and a plastic bar, so that mod needs to be changed just from steel bar to iron chest (+ plastic) to make out of an iron chest a transport box.


...
What I also would recommend: I measured that we need four assembly3 (the yellow ones) to box the content of a fully loaded basic belt.

I think that is too slow. This is my calculation:
16 seconds / 1.25 speed factor = 12.8 seconds.
12.8/4 assembly3 = 3.2 or 0.3125 boxes per second.
0.3125 * 50 items = 15.625 items per second or 937.5 per minute, which is of course enough to handle a basic belt, with about 700 items per minute. https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... ts/Physics

I think it should be so, that one assembly can handle one basic belt. That means (to be on the sure side):
750 items per minute = 12.5 items per second
50 / 12.5 = 4 seconds per filling (who ever wondered about that?)

Remember, that is the calculation for an assembly3! I think that 4 seconds should be for the basic assembly! (Basic assembly1 is only 0.5 speed, one filling takes currently 32 seconds! In that time I can use a car, which is faster. )

Unpacking: In my opinion the unpacking could be much, much faster. Just 1 second. See boxing mod.

Thank you for your mod )

Dito. I had some fun with it on sunday.

[XyLe]

We should compare that with boxing mod, where it is 10 for anything. 15 seems to be fair, 10 is "OK".

No we should not. There's no reason to compare this mod to any other mod. I'm not even remotely interested in "boxing mod".

Why 20 for copper?

I said "plates", not "copper. what i wrote was intended for the mod author and he understood me (i'm pretty sure), you didn't, but it doesn't matter.

I think it is fair. If you want to have that, use the boxing mod...

I will use what i want to use. And i suggest you do the same if you'd like.

But what I really didn't understand was, why we need a special "Iron box". Why not just take the current iron chest?

Because the existing iron chest can be placed down on the ground and can hold in fact many stacks of plates/ore/stuff. It wouldn't make sense. I'm really liking the "iron box" and it looks amazing. It's just way too cheap and too simple to make.

Maybe we have an "advanced recipe", which changes the current 8 Iron after research to 5.

You can't change recipes with research, you can only add more recipes.

And that matches also into the boxing mod, which needs currently one steel bar = 5 iron and a plastic bar, so that mod needs to be changed...

No it doesn't HAVE to be changed. Any other mod is irrelevant to the story. Mods should make vanilla game better and have good reasoning, "matching also into" other mods is not necessary.

...which is of course enough to handle a basic belt...

Packing boxes is a blue science tech, by that time using basic belts is ridiculous and considering it's throughput is not even worth the time as well as adjusting the mod to work well with basic belts.

I think it should be so, that one assembly can handle one basic belt. That means (to be on the sure side):
750 items per minute = 12.5 items per second
50 / 12.5 = 4 seconds per filling (who ever wondered about that?)

Your calculations are correct. But do you understand that you're gonna need to use 6 fast inserters with 1 machine lvl3, it's not even beautiful to have a layout like that.

Having 2 machines, 3 inserters for each would make a much prettier layout.

But even then - you want to have 4 sec/box - use speed modules. Lvl 3 machine has 4 slots and it's +200% speed if maxed, which matches your criteria if i understand the math correctly.

Remember, that is the calculation for an assembly3! I think that 4 seconds should be for the basic assembly!

Again completely ridiculous and unreasonable it would be to even consider lvl 1 machines in a blue science tech stage.

In my opinion the unpacking could be much, much faster. Just 1 second.

You're saying that taking 50 or 100 units out of the box should be 16 times faster than putting that stuff in, considering current balance. It's just a joke imo. Only possible if you literally imagine the box to be opened and turned upside down so the stuff can just fall down on the floor. Then yeah, it's possible to do unpacking 16 times faster than packing.

See boxing mod.

Again, irrelevant. We want mods to be different so people could use what they like better and have a choice instead of what you're trying to suggest to make the same recipe and same balance for every mod that implies packing stuff.

[Nagshell]

I don't really see a problem. I'm just using several unpacking machines if one is not enough.
And in my opinion the real value of this mod is not about transporting tons of materials with trains etc, this works fine without packing. The thing that makes most sense is use boxes for carrying materials with robots, which let's dodge their biggest problem - limited inventory of robot.

I'm still thinking about it, but modular logistics smelting could finally be viable setup with this mod.

Graphics are great.