TL;DR
Adds a palleting system with nearly no manual palleting/unpalleting steps to make belts competitive in late-game high-throughput short to medium distance item transportation.What ?
Adds a new Pallet processing research, probably gated behind Automation 3 and Advanced material Processing 2. Research cost should be similar to or the same as Logistic network research.Pallet processing unlocks Pallets and pallet-versions of most of the machines:
- Pallets:
- Available for most intermediates and some high-throughput non-intermediates (basically for everything required for science).
- All pallet types can hold the same number of individual items (this is important for the system to work, will become clearer later in the post). This is probably somewhere between 5 and 10, but will obviously need balancing. For the rest of this post I'll assume a pallet-size of 10, just to keep examples simple.
- Pallet stack size is 1/10 of the item's stack-size. Green circuit pallets stack to 20, iron plate pallets to 10, iron ore pallets to 5, etc. This ensures that train transportation is not affected by this change as both palleted and non-palletet items have the same density inside containers.
- Pallets are very heavy cannot be carried by bots. Ensures that bots do not profit from this change.
- Palleting is a late game automation technology and therefore cannot be done with hand-crafting.
- All pallet related recipes automatically create and destroy the actual pallets "on the fly". No empty pallets or similar needed. This will keep logistic complexity within reasonable borders.
- Pallet miners:
- Mine ores directly into pallets instead of raw ore, reducing available ore by 10 per produced pallet.
- Mining time of a pallet should be 10 times the mining time of a single ore.
- Make belt-based mining viable even on big ore patches with a high Mining productivity level.
- Pallet furnaces:
- Same specification as an electric furnace.
- Can take 10 raw ore and smelt them into a single pallet of plate.
- Can alternatively take a single pallet of ore and smelt it into a single pallet of plate.
- Both ways also work for Steel/Stone bricks, with their respective ratios.
- Crafting times is 10 times of what the recipe would normally take. This ensures that pallet based builds require same amounts of beacons/modules as non-pallet based ones.
- Pallet assembler:
- Same specification as an Assembling machine 3.
- Can only craft special pallet version of the "pallet-able" items. E.g.
- One Copper plate pallet gets turned into two Copper cable pallets.
- One Iron plate pallet and three Copper cable pallets get turned into one Green circuit pallet.
- Due to all pallet types having the same amount of items in them existing ratios and setups can be reused.
- If the resulting product cannot be palleted, pallet assemblers take pallets of input and produce 10 individual items.
- Crafting times of pallet recipes are 10 times the normal crafting times (beacon/module balance again).
- Pallet lab:
- Same specification as normal lab.
- Takes pallets of science packs and produces research.
- For beacon/modules balance, research time for a pallet of science should be 10 times the research time of a science pack in a normal lab.
- Maybe this isn't even needed. Two blue belts can already carry 4.8k items per minute.
- Palleting machine:
- Can turn pallets into their underlying items and vice versa.
- Should be very fast to avoid having whole production lines just for palleting/unpalleting.
- Not needed in most situations since the entire production chain can be palleted. Only acts as an interface to non-pallet based production:
- Combine palleting system with logistic network (Unpalleting items into passive providers, palleting from requesters, etc.)
- Only upgrade parts of existing production lines and convert between pallets and items as needed.
- Ideally has some sort of loader integrated that manages in-/output of the non-palleted goods.
- Late-game high-throughput belt-based transportation technology. Competitive with bots for short distances and trains for medium distances.
- Bots and Pallets offer different advantages to the player: Bots trivialize logistic challenges, but require energy and a complete rebuild of the base. Pallets keep the complexity of belt-based setup, but allow the existing base to be upgraded, even partial upgrades of the base are possible.
- Pallet and bot-based transports can be combined to whatever extend the player prefers.
- Assuming that this unlocks as a late-game research, early- and mid-game complexity will not be reduced.
- Of course I cannot say for sure, but to me it seems that implementation complexity should be manageable, at least compared to stacking belt ideas from the recent FFF.
- Adds several new machines which might not be very intuitive to use. This can be countered by providing a mini-tutorial though.
- Is there a need for Pallet chemical plants too(batteries, sulfuric acid, plastics)? What about coal liquefaction and refineries as well as pallet centrifuges for nuclear products?
- How to handle items that are needed both in science and for production (belts, inserters, miners, etc.)? When used in science getting pallets out of the assemblers is desirable, when produced for base-building not so much.
- What should happen when the miners have less than 10 ore under their mining area? Leaving tiles with e.g. 4 ore in them seems stupid, since many people get annoyed by patches not being mined completely.
- All the stuff that I haven't thought of yet.
Why ?
This provides an alternative to late-game bot-based (mega-)bases that is competitive in throughput and hopefully also in UPS while keeping existing bot-mechanics in place. It allows for more variability where players can choose the play-style they prefer or even combine all three late-game transportation methods (tains, bots and pallets) to their liking.PS I've checked that this specific way of handling pallets doesn't exist as a suggestion in this subforum already. However I did not read through all the reactions to the last two FFFs, since I don't have the time for that. So I hope this doesn't duplicate some other post.