Add a late-game tier for smelting

[XYZT]

TL;DR

Smelting doesn't scale with ever-increasing mining productivity. It should.

What?

A new tier of electric furnace (everything else has tiers that go faster, but furnaces just change fuel type) that has a faster smelting speed and four module slots.

Let's call it "Electric Blast Furnace" or "Electric Arc Furnace" and give them crafting speed 2 times that of the Electric Furnace (so that iron smelts at 1.25 per second). The four module slots will help with further scaling.

Why?

As you reach the late-game and possible start pumping science into mining productivity, your mining operations quickly get out of hand (in terms of output), however smelting stacks never scale beyond the electric furnace that's unlocked quite early in the game. So, you are forced to have large and many smelting stacks to accommodate this.

It would be nice to have some late-game improvement to smelting. As an additional benefit, this might help with UPS for large bases since smelting quickly ends up being a significant chunk of large bases.

Why not?

One argument against this suggestion could be that it simply moves the goalpost. No higher tier of furnace will ever scale with an infinitely increasing mining productivity. So, there's no reason to arbitrarily add another fixed tier.

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PS: A lot of suggestions tend to have people who reply with "just use mods!". The point of this suggestion is to potentially improve the vanilla experience.

[slippycheeze]

PS: A lot of suggestions tend to have people who reply with "just use mods!". The point of this suggestion is to potentially improve the vanilla experience.

I don't think this *is* the vanilla experience for most players. Perhaps Wube know, but you can "win" the game well, well before this becomes a significant limitation -- especially as empty ground is approximately free as you get on to the high end of the military tree.

Anyway, if it helps: I often suggest mods that do something because I think you might like to solve your problem right now, regardless of the ultimate introduction of the feature into the base game. So, perhaps keeping that in mind will help make those comments feel a bit less "you are a fool" and a bit more "I am trying to help you out, I hope it does."

[Darinth]

I think you're talking about the infinite mining productivity research? If your goal is to have comparable scaling on the smelting, the only way to really do that would be with an infinite scaling 'smelting speed' research, which doesn't seem like a terrible idea. Though it'd throw off everybody's calculations for how many smelters it takes to consume a belt of product, I don't think many people are gonna complain about needing a few less smelters.

Just to double-check, you've already looked into beaconed smelteries? They can substantially reduce the amount of space needed to smelt materials.

[McDuff]

Surely the way forward is to increase the module tiers/slots? If you can get an electric smelter with more slots and, like, level 5/6 modules, you can increase speed that way, without having to mess up everyone's belt calculations for smelter lines with incremental increases.