So, I really like the depth and complexity the Angel's Smelting mod adds. That said, I wanted it inquire if there were plans to update it to be more like Petrochem at some point? What I mean is more realistic and diverse. Essentially all ores follow the same chain with a few small variations, mostly at the end for alloys. One of the things I love about Bob's ore processing is the variety involved; copper is different from lead is different from iron is different from Aluminum, with varied paths as well. Angel's Smelting, unlike Petrochem, makes up a bunch of fantasy ores and compresses the smelting process down to a linear universal set of steps, meaning my smelters all look the same, no matter the ore or the product. While each step is a real part of some IRL ore processing, it's certainly not the case for all, which is how the Smelting mod currently functions.
Another suggestion I have for it is to buff blast furnaces and allow them to output molten metal. Ingots are used as a method of storage rather than as a part of the actual refining process, and moreover, a blast furnace should be ridiculously fast at processing ore; IRL, there are less than 20 blast furnaces which provide for most of the entire world's new iron and steel supply (not counting recycling), so the output of the blast furnaces is a bit ridiculous.
All told though, I just want to say thank you VERY much for putting the time and effort into making this mod. I've written a few half-baked Factorio mods myself, and I know how much work it is. Just seemed odd to get so hyper-detailed and realistic with Petrochem, while Smelting is super-abstracted and glosses over a lot of potentially interesting mechanical variety in favor of a generic design.
Maybe I'll make a mod-mod which changes this, since pretty much all the buildings are there; it's just that the smelting and ore processing flows are mis-matched and/or made into scifi/fantasy materials (the reason I still don't use YI mods even though I love most of the buildings and variety). I have a bunch of compiled research into metallurgy if Angel would like some help there; that's easy for me (I'm a weirdo who enjoys reading whitepapers and such...)
Edit: Corrected that it's not less than 20 blast furnaces in the world, but that less than 20 produce over 70% of the iron and steel.
Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
Moderator: Arch666Angel
Re: Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
I think a bit more variety in the smelting process would be good. Not for realism but more for diversity. I would love to ask myself the question: "How do I smelt bronze again". 
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Arch666Angel
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Re: Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
As always I appreciate the thoughts and input. The smelting is far from done and more in a state of "it works for now" because I wanted to get rid of the old processing mod, but had to provide the new mods to take over the functions, so both the smelting mod and the bio processing are not done yet and will be extended upon. Then again I dont have that much time at the moment so I only do some little fun things in my free time.
The problem with the smelting mod now is that it is not intended as an extension/replacement to bob mods as the refining and petrochems are. My greater goal is to work towards a stand alone overhaul and the way refining and petrochem work are beneficial because I could make, finish and see where problems occur before having all the other mods in utilizing bobs mods. With smelting this becomes a bit more tedious because the materials I have in mind are not there/used. The vanilla game as well as bob use more or less the raw metal, but bob also has some alloys and that's more in the way I want to have it: Start off with using raw iron/copper/tin/lead and then the further you advance in tech the more raw materials you get, but also the more complex the alloys get you need to process. So for example an early construction material would be plain steel or manganese steel, then in the next step add cobalt to that mix and so on, so that you end up with an highly alloyed super steel.
This is the point where the ingots come into play, everything before ingots is processing raw materials, everything after ingots is alloying. The idea again is that you might want to make an ingot bus to provide them to different locations for alloying.
I made up the corresponding refining table a while ago so you get the idea
That's for materials
As it goes for processes, for the current version of smelting I did research for processes that are NOT already in bobs, if you have some knowledge into metallurgy you will know that most of the times there are a dozen ways to process a material but 1 or 2 of these processes are preferred because of economical reasons. So smelting will probably have the current chains plus the ones which are in bobs for the material with slight differences, for example in speed, yield, byproducts, amount of other materials to use, etc.
At the moment there is only the casting machine in use, the sintering oven is not used and additionally planned is a strand casting machine and a chemical furnace. So these machines then need to have their own processes, up and downsides.
And some other ideas I just list, to prevent a WOT:
-Cooling water system for casting machines
-Casting molds
...
The problem with the smelting mod now is that it is not intended as an extension/replacement to bob mods as the refining and petrochems are. My greater goal is to work towards a stand alone overhaul and the way refining and petrochem work are beneficial because I could make, finish and see where problems occur before having all the other mods in utilizing bobs mods. With smelting this becomes a bit more tedious because the materials I have in mind are not there/used. The vanilla game as well as bob use more or less the raw metal, but bob also has some alloys and that's more in the way I want to have it: Start off with using raw iron/copper/tin/lead and then the further you advance in tech the more raw materials you get, but also the more complex the alloys get you need to process. So for example an early construction material would be plain steel or manganese steel, then in the next step add cobalt to that mix and so on, so that you end up with an highly alloyed super steel.
This is the point where the ingots come into play, everything before ingots is processing raw materials, everything after ingots is alloying. The idea again is that you might want to make an ingot bus to provide them to different locations for alloying.
I made up the corresponding refining table a while ago so you get the idea
- angels-ores-flow.png (6.62 KiB) Viewed 5439 times
As it goes for processes, for the current version of smelting I did research for processes that are NOT already in bobs, if you have some knowledge into metallurgy you will know that most of the times there are a dozen ways to process a material but 1 or 2 of these processes are preferred because of economical reasons. So smelting will probably have the current chains plus the ones which are in bobs for the material with slight differences, for example in speed, yield, byproducts, amount of other materials to use, etc.
At the moment there is only the casting machine in use, the sintering oven is not used and additionally planned is a strand casting machine and a chemical furnace. So these machines then need to have their own processes, up and downsides.
And some other ideas I just list, to prevent a WOT:
-Cooling water system for casting machines
-Casting molds
...
Angels Mods
I. Angel's Mods Subforum
II. Development and Discussion
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"should be fixed"
I. Angel's Mods Subforum
II. Development and Discussion
III. Bugs & FAQ
"should be fixed"
Re: Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
Wow, thanks for the in-depth answer Angel. That makes perfect sense both in that smelting is in an intermediate stage and that it's aimed at being alternatives rather than replacements. I look forward to the further development of the mod. I'll leave further feedback as I have it and have time; again, thanks for the detailed response!
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marginoferror
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Re: Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
I love the idea of alloying at the ingot level, that makes a lot of sense.
Maybe smelting directly into intermediate products (alloys of course but also stuff like copper wire, pipes, gears, etc.) would add interesting diversity? I run Marathon and the amount of copper wire required is simply bonkers; it could totally be worth it to smelt directly into wire even if it was expensive in space and energy. There are a lot of intermediate materials that are made out of plates, but not for any good reason -- if it doesn't need to be a "plate" maybe it can be cast directly from the molten stage!
Maybe smelting directly into intermediate products (alloys of course but also stuff like copper wire, pipes, gears, etc.) would add interesting diversity? I run Marathon and the amount of copper wire required is simply bonkers; it could totally be worth it to smelt directly into wire even if it was expensive in space and energy. There are a lot of intermediate materials that are made out of plates, but not for any good reason -- if it doesn't need to be a "plate" maybe it can be cast directly from the molten stage!
Re: Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
While I can appreciate the complexity involved with adding alloys, I feel Bobs suffers from overreach and I would caution you to avoid succumbing to the same design. Vanilla Factorio is primarily about sequential processing. Copper cabling -> Green circuits -> Red Circuits -> Module 1 -> Module 2, etc. Refining adds more steps between digging it up and putting it on the belt and I like that part. My Prospector mod adds more stops between finding the patch of ore and digging it up. Please don't add too much in the way of metals/alloys only to leave them used in 1-3 products like Bobs.
Re: Smelting vs Petrochem Design decisions
This is the same issue I have. I think the ore refining and petrochem mods are great additions to Bob's mods. I enjoyed them so much, I started over so that I could add the smelting mod. I tried to only use vanilla/bob's smelting in the beginning until I was able to smelt iron, copper, and steel to get a red/green factory up and running. Then I went to expand to the next tier of science and ran into two problems.
1. Iron and copper require massive output to move past green science. With the current output potential of the full smelting process, I have to build a massive smelting configuration just to meet basic iron/copper demands. It doesn't scale well, unlike a vanilla furnace setup, where you just add a few more furnaces and extend the belts to meet new demand, the smelting mod requires re-configuring the layout, and adding multiple machines in the chain from start to finish. When coupled with the refining mod, it's very easy to paint yourself into a corner when you have to expand/change the refining chain and the smelting chain all at once. The best example I can give is when you leave the starting area and transition iron to the stiratite/jovilite 2/2 mix and try to double your smelting output.
2. Adding bob's ores beyond iron, copper, tin, lead creates even more problems. First, the higher tier ores are byproducts (which I like) of the refining process. Because I already have a massive refining area and a massive smelting area...and hopefully a massive petrochem area, smelting the higher tier ores requires moving the resources a great distance. Most of these ores in the mid-game are used in such small quantities by bob's mods compared to the tier 1 ores, that it's not worth it to even bus them/train them back to the core of my base. I find when I run out of something, I just drive over with a pocket full of raw zinc or bauxite to the edge of my smelting area, throw them in, come back 15 minutes later and pick up the end product.
Please know that I really like the meta game created out of mixing bob+angel's mods! I used to play bob's mods, but stopped playing factorio all together months ago. Angel's mods has renewed my excitement and enjoyment of factorio. I am still very excited about what's to come with further updates to the smelting mod. But in the current state, it's difficult to incorporate smelting into the mix because of the max/min output requirements of iron/copper and bob's ores.
*Note: Some of this could be remedied with additional recipe adjustments in bob's mods to more evenly use his ores across the game. I say this to acknowledge that drawbacks in bob's mods are not angel's responsibility to fix/improve.
1. Iron and copper require massive output to move past green science. With the current output potential of the full smelting process, I have to build a massive smelting configuration just to meet basic iron/copper demands. It doesn't scale well, unlike a vanilla furnace setup, where you just add a few more furnaces and extend the belts to meet new demand, the smelting mod requires re-configuring the layout, and adding multiple machines in the chain from start to finish. When coupled with the refining mod, it's very easy to paint yourself into a corner when you have to expand/change the refining chain and the smelting chain all at once. The best example I can give is when you leave the starting area and transition iron to the stiratite/jovilite 2/2 mix and try to double your smelting output.
2. Adding bob's ores beyond iron, copper, tin, lead creates even more problems. First, the higher tier ores are byproducts (which I like) of the refining process. Because I already have a massive refining area and a massive smelting area...and hopefully a massive petrochem area, smelting the higher tier ores requires moving the resources a great distance. Most of these ores in the mid-game are used in such small quantities by bob's mods compared to the tier 1 ores, that it's not worth it to even bus them/train them back to the core of my base. I find when I run out of something, I just drive over with a pocket full of raw zinc or bauxite to the edge of my smelting area, throw them in, come back 15 minutes later and pick up the end product.
Please know that I really like the meta game created out of mixing bob+angel's mods! I used to play bob's mods, but stopped playing factorio all together months ago. Angel's mods has renewed my excitement and enjoyment of factorio. I am still very excited about what's to come with further updates to the smelting mod. But in the current state, it's difficult to incorporate smelting into the mix because of the max/min output requirements of iron/copper and bob's ores.
*Note: Some of this could be remedied with additional recipe adjustments in bob's mods to more evenly use his ores across the game. I say this to acknowledge that drawbacks in bob's mods are not angel's responsibility to fix/improve.