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Developer Proposal: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=10 Hidden Ores
List of related threads: See below!

-- ßilk


so i was playing the game and it felt it was missing something... once u got you're iron, copper, coal and stone ur pretty much done. maybe add some tegnologies that need diamond or an super strong drill that can drill throught the layer it makes, make it like if u use a diamond bore u get 15% more resources and for gold, well maybe some advanced electrical stuff.

First, this is not Minecraft ^^.
Second, hidden ores are planned, for later. And I guess we would need Aluminium/Nickel/Tin/Chrome/Titanium/Any others element in the middle of the periodic chart (^^) before diamonds, and even before gold ... (which is only needed for advanced circuitry/things you don't want to be oxyded).

Adding new ores and recipes for them is really easy. Actually it is not code dependent at all. Anyone can make a mod to add new type of ore / pics for it / its smelting / crafting recipes and off he goes. True the mods are not quite user friendly at the moment (copying over the files, etc.) - we will work on that one really soon. However we want to think a bit before adding loads of new content. The game is quite complex already

Gold cables as next tier requirement! :­DD

Necroing. Belongs to me to an epic "New types of resources" and is currently hard discussed:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 38&t=12358 Friday Facts #86 - Trees

My 2 cents: It won't be a good idea, to just add more types of resource-fields, as we currently have them.

I think perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn't get discussed very often is because there's quite a few mods out there that do this sort of thing, my own mod included.

And there are 2 main issues to adding more resource fields.
1. The more you add, the longer it takes to generate the map, or new chunks.
2. If you try and add too many, you end up with ground that is effectively nothing but resources. I've seen this myself before I tuned the figures for my ore generation.

Then of course, if you decide you're going to add new resources, the question becomes, what new resources do we add? You don't want to start off with anything too specialised that it only has a couple of purposes, you really want it to be used as common as Copper or Iron, and depending on how many you plan to add, possibly to be used in steel tier or higher.

I mean, there are other possibilities to add resources. Water for example. Filter water for gold? Why not?
Or take the stones, which currently are nearly everywhere, they could contain more than stone, but you cannot mine them with the mining-drill. Something else to mine them!
A new kind of mining drill, which digs out dirt, that needs to be processed in some steps, before we have iron or copper...

More ideas into that direction would be useful, I think.

1. The more you add, the longer it takes to generate the map, or new chunks.

I think this is just not very optimized code yet.

More suggestions

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=29666 New ressource: Gold
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=31249 Hidden Oil
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=31723 Lead: Reactor coolant, bullets and processing units!
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=40073 adding just a little more realism


Infinite Resources

Look at this thread viewtopic.php?f=80&t=29236 Underground Mining / Endless Resources / Hidden Ores...

@ ssilk:

How comes that there is no thread linked about someone suggesting things like Bauxite ore for Aluminium being a thing... and Sand for Silicium?

There are various recipes that could profit from both new ores and their follow-up products and it would make a lot more sense too in certain cases... didn't anyone ever suggest them or does everyone take that for being granted as it is incorporated in multiple mods already?

Would also be interesting if furnaces would actually allow multiple input resources... which then form alloys when molten together... like if you put Alumium and Silicium together in the furnace... you get glass (very abstract, but why not). But that's an entirely different idea.

I have had aluminium in my mind. It would be more rare than iron and copper and used for robot frames, flying combat robots and low density structures. Maybe in processing units and higher tier armor equipment too. But I thought that it must have been been suggested about billion times. In my opinion it should have different production path. Otherwise it would not give much to game, just one unload rail and smelting area more. But I have not good idea what it should be. It is easy to invent things which would fit into my playstyle but very difficult to invent things which would be relatively balanced on many different playstyles.

Hannu wrote:I have had aluminium in my mind. It would be more rare than iron and copper and used for robot frames, flying combat robots and low density structures. Maybe in processing units and higher tier armor equipment too. But I thought that it must have been been suggested about billion times.

I thought so too... anything where a light structure is required Aluminium would be used. I also never suggested it because for the same reason.

Hannu wrote:In my opinion it should have different production path. Otherwise it would not give much to game, just one unload rail and smelting area more. But I have not good idea what it should be.

I thought that it could be done with some electrolyte stuff or so, but if such a machinery comes into existence it would have to be used by something else too to increase the re-usability, otherwise a Chemplant would have to do, which would also be somewhat weird.

MeduSalem wrote:I thought that it could be done with some electrolyte stuff or so, but if such a machinery comes into existence it would have to be used by something else too to increase the re-usability, otherwise a Chemplant would have to do, which would also be somewhat weird.

Real aluminium is produced by electrolysis. I thought also some kind of electrolysis device with huge energy consumption. But on the other hand, it would be just another box in which you would put ore and get plates out. Energy is practically free in that phase of the game (with normal settings). Maybe there could be some side product which should be taken out of process and used to make something else. Bob's mods have such products in some production chains and they give quite interesting challenges. In my opinion also energy consumption and pollution should be properties of the recipe instead properties of the manufacturing device. That would give more variations to production.

MeduSalem wrote:@ ssilk:

How comes that there is no thread linked about someone suggesting things like Bauxite ore for Aluminium being a thing... and Sand for Silicium?

Simple lazyness.

No, it's really hard to search such an topic for old posts. It's much easier the other way around and add links.

And for me the calculation is really simple:
- For the nuclear energy we need uranium.
- And what to do with the energy? Make aluminium!

ssilk wrote:Simple lazyness.

I could go with that...

Hannu wrote:Maybe there could be some side product which should be taken out of process and used to make something else. Bob's mods have such products in some production chains and they give quite interesting challenges.

Well I have often thought about that the same way. That there might be side-products in various processing stages, also in already existing production chains, that somehow have to be taken care off... like is the case with Oil Industry with Heavy/Light Oil and Petroleum Gas as outputs.

A lot of people may initially hate that kind of fiddly stuff because as long as there is no cracking you accumulate the products that you don't really need, but eventually that's the kind of game mechanic that can be tweaked and experimented with the most later on to get the right amount of cracking etc just to suit your needs.

So if during the refinement processes of Ores there would be... side-products that either can be re-processed for additional ore (like cracking in Oil Industry) or split-off to an entirely different production chain that would put the player in front of more thought processes. But that's where most would say "you don't need to make things overly complicated just for the sake of it".

Some part of that might happen with the Dirty Ore concept that's planned for 0.16 but I don't know how far the game will take it with that.


But I also fear or at least it has been pointed out several times by kovarex and other devs that they don't really want to convulute the game with additional ores/resources... and leave that to mods. So Uranium (or whatever the devs will use as radioactive resource) is probably going to be the last ore that is added to the game. Maybe they add something with a later addon or so that brings an entirely new production chain altogether, but I doubt that anything of that will happen before such an expansion is made, if at all.

I thought of diamonds as well.
But not as a new resource from a resource spot on the map, but by compressing coal.

This would need
a) a high level factory and would therefore only be available in later game, when coal gets more and more useless or
b) a new machines that could also compress other things, e.g. wood to coal (might be interesting in early game and replaced later to get diamonds). it could also be used to compress oil to burning fuel instead of using chemical factories.

Diamonds could be used for high level factories and / or late game products such as blue chips, modules, etc.

Also, I think end game products need more use cases to produce them in mass.
Blue belts, bots, modules, latest science packs, I produce in small numbers, as the use of it is limited.

So, for example, it would be a better approach to make
- modules a kind of optional item in receipts
- give bots a kind of lifespan, so I have to refill robot hangars after some time
- use blue belts as input for science-pack

Example for "optional" modules: Producing a belt stays at is, but I can feed my factory with additional modules to speed it up (as it is now). But the module can only support a certain number of production cycles and need to be replaced then. This could be done by belts/inserters or by bots.

This would "force" me, to build up a larger production spot for modules. In my current game I have just 1 factory producing speed modules, as the use of it is limited based on the number of buildings I want to feed with modules.

I think it could be possible to kill several birds with one stone (pun-intended, as you will see), by giving a new recipe using Stone to produce Aluminium (which could be used for Low density structures, among other things) and Silica (which can be refined into Silicon for use in Processing units, among other things). This could be a Centrifuge recipe (gives that thing more uses), and would thus be unavailable until a fair ways into the game. This is actually fairly realistic, as the primary constituents of Earth's crust by mass are Oxygen, Silicon, and Aluminium (in this order; all three account for roughly 60% of total mass).