Conversion mod: play a terraforming robot

[Quantumtroll]

I've only read a couple of guides about modding, but I haven't been able to figure out of my mod idea is possible. I'm a programmer and can probably figure this out eventually, but I figured I would ask the community about feasibility before jumping in head-first, so to speak.

What I would like is to change the game's goal and a few gameplay elements so that the player will play a robot sent to an alien planet to prepare it for human habitation. A colony ship is on its way, and the planet needs to be ready by the time the ship arrives.

Besides this time limit, the main necessary modification is the victory condition — enough "atmospheric transformers" have been active for long enough to make the atmosphere breathable.

My main question, then, is whether it is possible to change the game's victory and failure conditions. A victory that depends on some atmospheric quality counter, and a failure that is an exceeded time limit?

There are secondary aspects to this mod that are may or may not be possible. If you've read this far, I would appreciate comments to the question posed below.

For instance, I dislike the mid- to late-game combat and I would like the atmospheric transformation to simply poison all the enemies to death. Ideally, this would be done with a new form of "pollution", but I haven't seen any discussion of pollution prototypes or modifications to pollution behaviour, so I doubt it's possible. Can you think of another way of handling this?

I've also thought about building "biomes" and "arcologies" for the human masters. One can envision the colonisation robot as positively gigantic, making an apartment building the size of an assembler, or the robot can be smaller and the human habitats would be enormous (perhaps modular?) structures. Are there limits on the size of a structure?

As a PS, I can add that I would make substantial changes to the tech tree as well. For a colonisation bot, it makes no sense to have to research how to make steel. It might, however, need to learn how to deal with the native atmospheric and geological chemistry.

[Quantumtroll]

After a bit more reading, I figured out some answers to my own questions:

game.set_game_state{gamefinished = true, playerwon = true}

will let me code in new win or lose conditions. So that's the main requirement all squared away.

Since I still haven't come across any information about modding pollution, I'm going to assume that's not in the API (yet). But it should be possible to code up some invisible "atmospheric oxygen" level that kills spawners within a given radius, or perhaps even some new entity that spreads by diffusion like pollution.

I now regret my choice of thread title, because the questions part of the post is done with while I'm still curious about what people make of this mod idea... and lo: this BB lets you change a thread's name after creating it!

[Factorio2016]

It will be very interesting.

Look at these modifications. Get inspired.
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viewtopic.php?f=94&t=23170
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