NEW TAGS: Recipes [Electricity Usage Multiplier] and Events [On Building Recipe Change]

[BosoBr0]

PREFACE: I'm new to these forums. If this is the wrong place to post this request, please let me know and I'll move the post elsewhere. Thanks!

So, recently I have started looking into writing my own mods, as I wanted to look into creating a mod that both created and incentivised newer power production means and methods, and asked a question on the Modding discussion forum on steam prevalent to these two topics:

1. Custom Electricity Usage on Specific Recipes
Something like this would be used to say, for example, though the base Assembler 1 uses 103kW of energy, making a recipe such as Low Density Structures would actually require 2x that energy input for 100% speed. This could be useful for some mods (such as one that I'd look into making) to incentivise investing in better power for upscaling particular production lines, such as complex items like engine units. It would also allow less need for new buildings or locking recipes behind exclusive tiers of assembler, and instead just soft-gatekeeping certain recipes in mods behind the power grid.

Now I'm aware you can use 1x1 invisible beacons with custom modules to increase or decrease power usage of assemblers (mentioned in that thread I was in), however another problem occurs with using this semi-solution, which is the second part of this post.

2. Event Triggers for Changing Recipes in Buildings
With the beacon method mentioned above to 'artificially make power variable in recipes', a big problem comes with UPS. Beacons themselves aren't the issue, but rather, there's no good way to detect if a recipe changes in an assembler or other building, at least from what I've delved into the documentation. Yes, there exists 'player' and 'robot' place and destroy functions, but in the case of, say, placing a blueprint on top of an existing building simply changes the recipe. The mod using beacons as an artificial means would essentially require routine checking every assembler to see if the beacon needs to be re-applied, and exploits using mods such as Recursive Blueprints could be used to circumvent this as well (combinator trigger to time recipes and trigger blueprint replacements on assemblers to keep an 'optimally low' power requirement recipe on each beacon trigger check before switching the recipe to an otherwise high-power recipe).

Now since I'm new to modding Factorio, I wouldn't even think of using these features for a good long while from now; but, in the forum, it seems like a few people would actually like to see the idea of variable power dependent recipes and also recipe change events for buildings.