Alternate way to gather resources

[Tixout]

Hello everyone,

I've been lately playing Factorio with a lot mods (around 150 of them) including the Bob's pack and the full Angel's pack. Now that the game is finished for me, i was looking for other mods adding more complexity to the game in order to "step up".
Unfortunately there's no really any other mod adding complexity to the game. Most of the "difficulty mods" are just tweaking game numbers to increase difficulty, creating indirectly complexity. For example, Marathon increases the number of iron plate for every recipe, which forces the player to make more, and to have a bigger logistic system. And having a bigger logistic system may not fit your current way to design your base, and then force you to rethink everything.

But this is not the complexity I'm looking for. I'm looking for depth. Bob and Angel packs add depth because they add a lot of recipes, new ores, new electronics etc. Basically more tiers, each tier involving some byproducts (for Angel) or more materials needed (for Bob).
The problem is that i don't think that you can add more depth to the game by adding a few tiers after Bob's electronics or more refining steps after Angels or it would almost come down to number tweaking, and the player wouldn't feel like it is challenging or even fun.

So i started thinking about what i find boring / redundant in the game, to see if any improvement could be made, and through these improvement, a way to add depth.
Two things came to my mind : Resource gathering and Power production.

Both of them are pretty much straight forward and once you've figured out the way to do it, you're simply replicating what you've done once, a lot of time, and so during your whole playthrough. For mining, you just lay down mining drills, gather up ores in chests and transport them back to your factory with trains. Going further in the game, you'll have better mining drills, bigger chests, more trains but that's all. That's number tweaking, not complexity. So this is a subject, i feel, a lot of work can be done and hasn't been that much explored yet. On the other hand, if you think about power production, it feels the same. The only complexity comes when you get solar panels and accumulators, but that's basically a one step progression which doesn't feel, still, like depth.

I decided to start thinking of alternates ways to produce raw resources (ores, fluids, wood).
The wood production is already covered by a few mods (Bio Industries and Bob Greenhouses come to my mind) pretty well, and i don't intend to propose any alternative.
But when it comes to fluids (including water) and ores, there's not that much out there.

Water is the "Free resource incarnation". You don't even need electricity to get it, and you can get it from the ground itself through a lot of mods (that i play with because it is very convenient to be able to have water where you want). And as i said before, mining doesn't feel complex at all too.

So my goal is to provide a more "challenging" way to produce fluids and raw ores.
Unfortunately, I'm not really good for innovation and i don't like the ideas I've got so far. But i will still expose mine to you in order to start a discussion, and maybe, we will be able to come up with good ideas on how to make this part of the game complex and challenging (basically fit what the Factorio spirit is).


I got the following idea when playing with the Energy Replicators mod. To sum up what it is about, this mods allows you to "create" item for almost nothing except energy, and the materials needed to build the replicator. Back then, i used to play maps without any resources and just generate them forcing me to do it abroad, to not avoid the logistic challenge of resource gathering.
So my idea is to create a complex way to generate resources.

The main material would be some kind of dust (i though about MoonDust first) which would have some magical properties and it would be possible to turn it into any kind of ore, or fluid involving a few (or a lot of) steps.
Going further into the game, you would be able to unlock better recipes that would produce more raw ore but would bring more complexity to assembly lines, byproducts, etc.

Even if this sounds right and would be fun to play with, this sounds like Angels Refining. And the player would only feel like he has to go through Angel refining, twice. This is not the purpose of this mod, even if crafting things more and more complex is the purpose of Factorio. I still have the hope to be able to bring a new kind of complexity to this awesome game. I'm still working on it and exploring other ways to do it.

So here is my open question : Do you have any thoughts, ideas, on how to improve the current resource gathering mechanics ?
I'm open to any suggestion, the craziest it is.

PS : English is not my native language and my grammar might not that good in several sentences. Feel free to PM me on the forums or on the Factorio Discord Server for any suggestion !