The idea
is that wood, the rarest resource that requires the most work to acquire, would be necessary for all infrastructure. Not directly maybe, it's enough if other intermediate ingredients has raw wood as an ingredient somewhere in the chain.Specifically I'm thinking of excluding adding wood to the military and science consumables since those are used so much that it would be impossible. Though if there's a recipe that gives 10 wooden sticks for 1 raw wood and 10 wooden pellets from 1 stick or something then maybe an option for hardcore enthusiast would be to add those pellets to some consumable items as well.
Gameplay
The point would be that you would have to expand out and scavenge for wood in a larger area to be able to increase the size of your factory. I guess I'm a bit inspired by Colonel Wills challenge map where they set resources to 0.1% of regular richness. That was a bit too extreme maybe for regular play but it did force some kinds of interesting tactics. If supply chain of science packs weren't affected then the change would be that you expand slower because you have less machines but you don't run out of resources for power and science and ammo so you can progress "as normal", just slower, since there's no real minimum requirement on assembly machines to clear the game.So maybe your base is a few times smaller compared to regular playthroughs for similar tech levels if you just don't spend any time collecting wood. But then it's more like a chill game where time based evolution is the biggest threat, but pollution is a non-factor since you aren't chopping wood and since your factory is too tiny to pollute.
Or if you want to expand fast then you need to run between enemy bases and remove all the trees that prevent pollution from reaching all the far native bases and you get a bit of a challenge that way instead.
So it would be different, but not extremely painful and doesn't force any particular strategy.
Combined with a mod that regrows wood it might be pointless or maybe even more interesting, depending on how you balance it.
Implementation details
For buildings that are used in science packs etc (like inserters), the inserter recipe might be unaffected but it's not possible to place down on the surface. Instead a wooden inserter is added (with wood in recipe chain) which places down regular inserter entities on the surface when placed, and those entities give the wooden inserter item when mined. This way the mod can be added and removed to a regular playthrough without too much pain and all your placed buildings or inverntory items don't just disappear when you install or uninstall the mod. And the regular builds for science packs and some other things can look the same without adjustments.I'm also considering if coal and stone should be replacement for iron and copper for all buildings. So you would have carbon thread coils instead of copper coils, wood planks instead of iron plates and those two make up the wooden circuit board that is used instead of electronic circuit in the wooden inserter recipe.
Most of the changes should be possible to do programmatically so while it does alter a lot of things the mod wouldn't really take too long to write, maybe? (I made Capsule Ammo mod [link in signature] so I have some idea for what it would require)
.
