Mylon's Many Mods

[Light]

My first experience using Hardcore Survival Expansion was quite a shock.

After 15 minutes of starting the map and trying to get things going, the biters promptly went for the boilers. After 15 biters came in, I felt excited the biters were finally going to present a challenge... until the biters never stopped coming. 50, 60, 80 biters came and ammo was unable to keep up, eventually I died.

Using cheat mode a second time to build a perimeter defense for testing purposes, the attacks of 500+ biters swarmed in over time. A few Mk5 radars in the area revealed why, biter bases still existed and they all swarmed units the moment nests made them.

Horde mode 15 minutes in isn't exactly what I had in mind But I believe the likely case was RSO, which spawns nests that grow in size and strength the further you travel (as it does with ores)

I have Angels and Bobs installed with RSO, so it's the only thing I can think of. I'll never forget watching everything burn so quickly.

[easygo4y]

I use the BOB MOD
Natural_Evolution_Enemies_6.4.0
Rampant_0.14.8
Armageddon_1.0.13
The three MODs are playing without any problems

But if the following two or one
As long as 15 minutes I will be very slow action ...
The new file what things are not overshadowed by 15 minutes on the super LAG ....

Hardcore_Survival_0.9.6
Hardcore_Survival_Expansion_0.9.1

I use GOOGLE translation
Can you understand my question?

http://i.imgur.com/7vIgG74.jpg

[Mylon]

Survival is not intended to be played with enemy bases. I suspect RSO is causing a conflict where, even though I try to remove bases, RSO re-adds them. Other mods might cause conflicts as well if they're adding enemy bases.

[easygo4y]

Survival is not intended to be played with enemy bases. I suspect RSO is causing a conflict where, even though I try to remove bases, RSO re-adds them. Other mods might cause conflicts as well if they're adding enemy bases.

I deleted the RSO to reopen the new game
Solve the problem
thank you

[Anson]

I updated Prospector mod to offer better returns on ore.

much better now: an ore field that would give 70k in vanilla, now gives 17k from ore, then 35k from veins, 140k from seams and 192k total (ratio seems to be 1/2/8 now, or compared to vanilla: 25%, 50%, 200%, total 275%; details: see below in the spoiler)

what i don't know yet and has to be checked: how much better is this than vanilla ores would be (at first probably around -75%, then -25%, but in the end up to +175%), and will those ores be good enough to get to the stages of having prospectors:

• only 25% of normal resources to get prospectors/drills2 and mine veins
  (they need green science, steel, and green circuits)
• only 75% of normal resources to get prospectors2/drills3 and mine seams
  (they need blue science, oil industry, and red circuits)
• but after that, you get almost triple of what you would get in vanilla

at least for vanilla games or games with vanilla ores, this looks quite good. i don't know how it would work with more difficult modpacks (just thinking of my current real map, my first one with with angel+bobs :-) ...

Can you tell me the conditions behind your 45k iron ore (and then +7k when upgraded to seams)? What richness setting are you playing on? Was this very far from spawn?

i didn't take exact notes, but i think it was a testmap with default settings, and the ore patches were maybe 100 tiles from the spawn point.

here is a new test after i just upgraded to the latest version - warning - long with lots of details

new testmap, default settings (except for size of iron, copper, coal and stone very small to deplete them faster and finish the test in time, biters don't attack, and seed = 12345, map exchange string:

Code: Select all

>>>AAAOABUAAAADAwYAAAAEAAAAY29hbAMBAwoAAABjb3BwZXItb3Jl
AwEDCQAAAGNydWRlLW9pbAMDAwoAAABlbmVteS1iYXNlAwMDCAAAAGl
yb24tb3JlAwEDBQAAAHN0b25lAwEDOTAAAICEHgCAhB4AAwELU9JD<<
<

mods: creative mode, prospector, yarm, warehousing, nixies, textplates, and bucket wheel excavator.

YARM shows one ore field next to the spawn at SW98 with 17346 copper ore

• estimated time with two bucket excavators for full blue belt : 8 min
• mining it empty filled a warehouse with 17346 copper ore
• prospecting with lots (around 60) MK1 prospectors took a few minutes
• to make the excavators start again i had to remove them and place them again
• YARM showed (and i also found in the next warehouse) 35869 copper ore from veins
• prospecting with lots (around 80+) MK2 prospectors took a few more minutes
  (to be exact: only three cycles until all depleted ore was upgraded)
• to make the excavators start again i had to remove them and place them again
• YARM showed (and i also found in the next warehouse) 140223 copper ore from seams
• summary: a total of 193438 copper ore from this one field
• in comparison (i restarted the map with the exchange string, without prospector):
  without prospector mod this field would have given 69547 vanilla copper ore,
  thus ore=25%, vein=50%, vanilla=100%, seams=200%, total=275%

YARM shows the other ore field next to the spawn at S76 with 56186 iron ore

• estimated time with two bucket excavators for full blue belt : 20 min
• mining it empty filled a warehouse with 56186 iron ore
• prospecting with lots (around 60) MK1 prospectors took a few minutes
• to make the excavators start again i had to remove them and place them again
• YARM showed (and i also found in the next warehouse) 114122 iron ore from veins
• prospecting with lots (around 80+) MK2 prospectors took a few more minutes
  (to be exact: only three cycles until all depleted ore was upgraded)
• to make the excavators start again i had to remove them and place them again
• unconfirmed since it would have taken too long to fill the last warehouse: ca 440k copper ore from seams
• summary: a total of ca 611k iron ore from this field
• in comparison (i restarted the map with the exchange string, without prospector):
  without prospector mod this field would have given 224988 vanilla iron ore
  thus ore=25%, vein=50%, vanilla=100%, seams=200%, total=275%

i also restarted the map and let the copper field first be treated by prospector MK2 until they were done. then i started the drills and ended up with 191173 ore. why is there a difference to the above total of 193438 ? measurement error ? error on the MK2 prospector while working on non-depleted ore and on veins ? rounding errors ? or a different total because of using a RNG which is not entirely deterministic/reproducible ?
to check for the RNG, i did it again, and this time YARM showed me 191179 instead of 191173 ...
maybe the RNG is deterministic in so far as it uses the gametime or similar variables that are the same for everybody (and thus is also MP compatible), but doing the same actions at slightly different times results in different values ...

if more tests are needed, it should be possible to use the creative mode mod. there are magic wands which can create any of the 5 types of ore (normal, depleted, vein, depleted vein, seam), even with configurable amount of resources, etc, eg to see whether your calculations on added bonus in some distance are correct (by setting up eg 4x2000 ore in 3500 tiles distance, and mine/prospect such a defined small field fast).
i just tried it and got strange results: 4x2000=8000 ore placed, but after it was depleted, prospecting with MK1 only gave 40 from veins, and after that was depleted too, MK2 prospecting only gave another 40 ore. no idea whether that is caused by the magic wand not setting all the values that are set on generating the ore at game start or when a new chunk is discovered, or whether something else caused this minimal amount of ore.

edit/PS : also tested on a testmap with angels+bobs and many other mods. here are the results for three ore fields 70-80 tiles away from the spawn :
bobmonium : 13463 ore / 27324 vein / 108217 seam / 149004 total / 53921 without prospector
stiratite : 16787 ore / 34090 vein / 134952 seam / 185829 total / 67235 without prospector
saphirite : 20571 ore / no veins and seams since depleted ore vanished / 82353 without prospector
this seems to be the same nice ratio for all three of them: 25% / 50% / 200% / 100%
(of course, only 25% / 0 / 0 / 100% for the third :-( )

measuring ratios of prospecting angel+bobs.PNG (627.87 KiB) Viewed 9310 times

no idea why prospecting works for bobmonium and stiratite, but not for saphirite ... or maybe the other way around: why prospecting doesn't work for "strange ores", but still works for two of those ores ... (i didn't test the other 3 of these ores)
strangely, the mod "auto deconstruct" (that marks drills at depleted ores for deconstruction) also works differently: on the first two of these ores, drills were deconstructed when seams were gone (btw: nice that this works well togther with prospecting), but on saphirite they stayed after the ore vanished. maybe that ore doesn't vanish but mystically only becomes invisible and inaccessible ?

A note is that unprospected ore does not immediately go to seams, it first gets upgraded to veins and then upgraded to seams.

and it always adds those new resources to the ore patch instead of computing and setting the new values only? i didn't know/read this from your description, and only saw that ore had (apparently directly) turned to seams after i came back hours later while MK2 prospectors were running. but it would be nice.

I can increase the range of prospectors so you can place more around the field also.

since they have no display of their range, what about using the existing chunks to limit their range ?
there is already a debug display ingame, and you can set the chunk grid to appear when the game is paused too. very easy to see in which chunks an ore patch is and where prospectors for it can be built.

The design goal is that, in late game, a player uses a design with drills and prospectors together at the initial setup to increase the lifetime of the ore patch.

that didn't work when i did the test in the other post (edit: still doesn't work in the current version). i had depleted ore patches and left the drills on them, and when a prospector had turned them all into seams, the drills still were not working. thus i assume that drills must be updated or built again after a spot was upgraded, which currently makes it impossible to have prospectors and drills working at the same time on the same ore field.
the opposite effect might also apply: if a prospector is done before ore is depleted and it doesn't continue to convert non-depleted ore to veins and non-depleted veins to seams, it will stop and probably not restart on ore becoming depleted later. thus you need to trigger prospectors when some ore spot is depleted, or convert all ore to veins and then seams even when it is not depleted yet, adding the amounts instead of replacing them (which seems to be the case, but not obvious from your description)

It might be as simple as doing miningdrill.active = true when ore gets prospected.

something has to be done, or your design goal won't work.
but if the drills don't stop working and/or start again by themselves, and if the additional ore is just added (and doesn't replace) the currently still available amount of ore, there is no need to skip the veins phase.

I've noticed that veins and seams mine super slowly. ...
Maybe if I nerf the mining power of Mk 1 drills and then buff their mining time I can bring the numbers more in line.

to me, it is most important to have a nice method to increase the amount of ore from a field (instead of simply setting the richness to very high), and that it is compatible (no name conflicts etc) with other mods.
since i use quite a few other mods too, i have lots of alternatives (almost too many) for these drills, three sets of tiered drills, one set of tiered mini-drills, excavators, one or two robot mining methods, etc. and with this flood of drills from different mods, there are so many options that no mod can achieve perfect balance with all other mods anyway. thus i think that balancing the amounts of ore in vanilla, in your mod before prospecting, and the total ore from your mod, would be more important (which you pretty much achieved with the latest update).

[Mylon]

That's a lot of testing. Thanks for taking the time to help.

I made a big assumption in 0.8.0 that the vanilla map gen is being used to place ore. I suppose certain mods (like RSO) might place ore after the chunk is officially generated and thus interrupt how I determine ore should be handled. This is a tricky process as before I was guesstimating the ore that should be in a given patch and I was very wrong. The current method provides better numbers, but may run into some conflicts with other mods.

I think I'll also need to look into dynamic item availability so I can either turn the drills off if other mods are present or allow them to turn my drills off. But I rely a lot on hardness so I need to make sure the other mods drills have a high enough hardness to mine higher tier ores.

I'll test placing a mine and then prospecting.

[Anson]

I rely a lot on hardness so I need to make sure the other mods drills have a high enough hardness to mine higher tier ores.

a short overview of mining power/speed/area and electrical power usage for the drills on my current map, to give some general idea of what range of drills are available:

prospector: 3/1/5x5/180, 5/1/7x7/540
bobmining: 3/0.5/5x5/90, 4.5/1/5x5/256, 6/2/5x5/648, 8/3/5x5/1200, 10/4/5x5/1900
minimachines: 2.5/0.4/4x4/60, 4/0.8/4x4/170, 5.25/1.6/4x4/432, 6.5/2.4/4x4/816, 8/3.2/4x4/1200
excavator: 3/7/11x11/1600, 8/7/12x12,2800, 24/7/13x13/4000
advanceddrills: 3.5/0.8/5x5/600, 4.4/1.2/7x7/210, 5/2/7x7/300
factorioextended: 6/1/5x5/90
logisticsmining(robots): 3/0.4/2x2/200 (or really 1x1 only?) each mine acts as an active providerr
robotminingsite (robots): simply marks ore for deconstruction and lets bots do the collecting, but currently buggy
aai vehicles: programmable miner vehicle with 5 tiers

looking at all the power, only (one? or both?) the robot mods have not enough power for veins and seams, and i have no idea yet about the aai miners.

maybe that could be added as a separate addon mod (or optional dependency if it is not too complicated to include directly) which has two more tiers of mining drills if both that mod and angel/bob are available. then it would be really matching: those drills are made from normal drills and batteries, and this could be changed to use the three tiers of drills from prospector and the three tiers of batteries from bobs (don't know which chemical to use for recharging those tiered batteries). but it probably also would require to change something in that other mod so that it can determine which mine to place for which ore hardness.
maybe that could be suggested to the other mod's author ...

the advantage of that mod would be that there is a mining tower which scans resources and sends construction bots to place new miners. thus mining automatically would start again for all ore spots which are successfully prospected.
in the meantime, maybe those mining drills could simply be patched to be able mining bigger hardness (or people edit that one number themselves.

otoh, there are so many drills that i also can easily use some other method for mining. no need to stress yourself :-)

[Mylon]

Okay, I upgraded Prospector to 0.8.1

It now places nicely with mods that alter ore spawning and drills sitting atop depleted ore will reactivate when that ore is prospected.

[Anson]

while writing the following, you posted the update 0.8.1, but this probably still applies also to the new version which i will test soon.

some time ago, i asked

some minor improvement: the prospectors and advanced miners should get different icons (for crafting window as well as inventory). ... i don't expect fancy new graphics, but another unique recolor and/or a simple "P" in the corner would be nice to find those four new items, and to distinguish prospectors from drills.

as a reply to fff-174, Klonan told that it's already possible to give icons some tint by simply adding one line :-)
and no graphical editing is needed.

i exchanged the four lines in prototypes/item.lua

Code: Select all

old :             icon = "__base__/graphics/icons/electric-mining-drill.png",
new : icons = { { icon = "__base__/graphics/icons/electric-mining-drill.png", tint = {r = 0.4, g = 0.4, b = 1} } },

it is not perfect and not an icon of its own, but very simple to do, and i now can much more easily find the two prospectors (btw: i also changed their icon to radar.png) and the two drills in my crafting window as well as in my inventory. of course, choice of icons and colors is up to you if you decide to do it; they should be a lot different from other recolored tiered drills and items.

then i thought, why not try the same parameter on the entities themselves ?
and it works ! :-)
(adding tint behind "filename" in prototype/entities.lua)

now i have light blue and dark blue radar icons and radar graphics for the prospector, and also new colors for mining drill icons and graphics ...

ps: some things in entities.lua seem to be copy&past-ed a bit hastily? eg two copies of the definition for depleted prospectors mk1, unused animation definitions of mining drills for prospectors, etc

[Anson]

Okay, I upgraded Prospector to 0.8.1
It now places nicely with mods that alter ore spawning and drills sitting atop depleted ore will reactivate when that ore is prospected.

a quick test of the new version :

• drills restart nicely now
• even bucket excavators restart nicely
• saphirite turns invisible when depleted, but it still can be prospected, and Saphirite veins are visible again
• depleted saphirite veins turn invisible too, and are named "depleted angels-ore1 vein"
• edit: only some ore types become invisible, but all angels ores seem to be named "depleted angels-oreX vein (X=1-6)
• invisible "depleted angels-ore1 vein" can be prospected, and the Saphirite seams are visible again
• prospectors mk1 and mk2 are fast-replacable, but not the depleted versions of them, and it would be of most use to fast-replace depleted mk1 prospectors with new mk2 prospectors

about the speed of MK2 drills when used on seams:
they are a bit slow, even when used with 4 creative speed modules for +1000% speed :-)
but since you already got 75% of the vanilla amounts from ore fields when you upgrade from veins to seams, and the seams then work until you get a total of 275% of the vanilla amounts, this might be considered well balanced. if you want to get more than normal amounts (even almost triple amounts), it takes a while, and you have enough time to look for new fresh fields with better speed while NOT running out of ore completely.
or you simply "cheat" this mod by using bucket excavators which still work full speed and fill blue belts (or even faster belts) with max compression :-)

[Mylon]

I was going to look into tint options for items/entities but I wanted to make sure the mod functions first and foremost. Since you seem to have done the hard work for me, that makes it easy and I'll see about swapping Mk 2 and Mk 3 and prospector colors.

The mod now includes some data with the (approximate) output of the different tiers of drills on different kinds of ores. Tier 3 drills on tier 1 ore is incredibly fast, but tier 3 drills on tier 3 ore is somewhat slower than tier 1 drills on tier 1 ore. Which I guess is is acceptable. Just a weird way about how it all works. The tier 1 drills are faster than they should be only because tier 1 Angels ore has a higher hardness than vanilla ores and I haven't spent a lot of time focusing on the balancing and aesthetics.

Thanks again for all of your feedback.

[Mylon]

I tried tinting the mining icons and it didn't work. Literally replaced icon line with, "icons = { { icon = "__base__/graphics/icons/electric-mining-drill.png", tint = {r = 0, g = 0, b = 0.4} } }," and saw no change in the list. Also tried tint "{r=1, g=0.4, b = 0.4}"

[Anson]

I tried tinting the mining icons and it didn't work.

i tried it again, even taking the line from your last post, and it worked !
did you try it only with the mining drills MK2 and MK3 ? and in which file did you do the changes ?

as i understood (but not tested), you might be able to change both (all graphics and all icons) in entity.lua, and they are used as default for displaying icons too, but if you specify icons in item.lua then those will have precedence.

I'll add the modified files to my dropbox (link via PM). this is how it looks to me:

prospectorcolors.PNG (433.26 KiB) Viewed 9225 times

in entity.lua, i have tinted the drills in different shades of green and the prospectors in shades of red (third/darkest tint for depleted prospectors). in item.lua, i have used the same shades for the icons (standard grey for mk1 drill since there is no new definition for the vanilla drill).

when you select colors, maybe green is not the best choice since some other mod recolors its drill icons including a very similar green.

[Mylon]

So lately I've been considering tinkering with Angels to make it work with vanilla. I've got some ideas that would make for a simple change to Angels so it would be playable without Bobs, but Angel's no-derivative license would mean I couldn't distribute it. I'll see what Angel says.

[Mylon]

Prospector mod updated! Now with fracking!

[DRY411S]

The Belt Upgrader needs 2 improvements in my opinion please.

1. It should not put down ghosts if there is no actual belt/splitter/underground available. This breaks the belts.
2. It should send the old belt/splitter/underground to storage.

[Mylon]

I'm still working on Belt Upgrader. It's pretty finicky to make it work right but I have a method to simulate fast-replace with bots. Right now it's just fine tuning some of the details. One notable bug (which Rseding fixed for 0.15) is fast-replacing belts doesn't cause the belt to drop on the ground so I either need to publish with the bug or wait for a fix.

[Mylon]

So far Bluebuild, Prospector, Global Warming, and Dirtpath have been upgraded to Factorio 0.15

[Mylon]

Finally updated Belt Upgrader. Should be much more reliable at doing its job, as well as covering inserters and assemblers.

[British_Petroleum]

Hi,
Bluebuild is one of my favourite mods, but my game crashes every time I place a blueprint containing modules. Can you fix this?