Development and Discussion

[ridesdragons]

@ Arch666Angel
just thought, can you add resin to bio processing mod if bob electronics is present? there is already wood board, but resin is needed also. so it will remove need for building greenhouses.

bio processing already has a function for a replacement (of sorts) for resin. the wood paste, which is made from celulose, mixed with celulose produces wood, cutting out the log as the middleman.

for resin needed in other recipes, oil resolved that: naphta to resin. there are a few other resin recipes in the oil mess, but as it uses a different graphic, I'm not sure if it's the same resin or not. haven't gotten to oil yet myself. gotta mass-produce tin first orz. in the middle of converting my starting factory into an ore-crushing/smelting facility. gonna have to move the other stuff west.

[Arch666Angel]

@ridesdragons
The big problem with arguing like that is that space is infinite, if you dont have enough space you planned poorly The other point is that of course it's nice to have a higher compression per tile with chests, but there is a limit to that set by the game engine, if you want to see that in action try the "Warehousing mod" and place down a couple of storage warehouses, they have 2k inventory slots and then watch your UPS drop when a few hundred bots and inserter interact with them. Also warehouses have the big advantage of having an unified storage with can be accessed from 6 tiles per side, so it will make some tricks like equalized loading/unloading of a row of chest superfluous.

In short my warehouses are the way they are because of game limitations and my feel of what would fit.


@Zyrconia
1. added
2. In the early part you want to use them for the cargo robots and extend the logistics zone with the expanders. For the later game you can still use them as charging HUBs, because they still have more charging ports than vanilla roboports, but I might also add upgraded versions with a regular construction/logistics grid.
3. casting machines are planned to have a requirement for cooling water somewhere in the future (and casting molds), that's why they already have 3 fluid connectors visible
4. I never intended the solid fuel research to be there, but only with my latest changes it would really remove them in (almost) all cases. If you have to much hydrogen you can still convert it: hydrogen + carbon dioxide -> synthesis gas, synthesis gas + carbon -> solid fuel
Or go almost the same route for plastic, basically you want synthesis gas and then use that according to what you need.


@BlakeMW
Thanks for the input, I took a look at KS Power myself some time ago, because I want the game to start with a burner generator and a research for actual steam engines so you have bit more of a progression there, but I wont make any changes or new things for power generation until 0.15 because of the changes that will come to power and also the nuclear stuff. I have plans yes, but it will have to wait for now.


@ridesdragons
I'm looking into wood pulp/paper/hard paper making at the moment which is basically what the basic electronics boards are, which is an interesting process, but I need to find some other uses for some of the ingredients/byproducts.

[Durabys]

@ridesdragons
The big problem with arguing like that is that space is infinite, if you dont have enough space you planned poorly The other point is that of course it's nice to have a higher compression per tile with chests, but there is a limit to that set by the game engine, if you want to see that in action try the "Warehousing mod" and place down a couple of storage warehouses, they have 2k inventory slots and then watch your UPS drop when a few hundred bots and inserter interact with them. Also warehouses have the big advantage of having an unified storage with can be accessed from 6 tiles per side, so it will make some tricks like equalized loading/unloading of a row of chest superfluous.

In short my warehouses are the way they are because of game limitations and my feel of what would fit.


@Zyrconia
1. added
2. In the early part you want to use them for the cargo robots and extend the logistics zone with the expanders. For the later game you can still use them as charging HUBs, because they still have more charging ports than vanilla roboports, but I might also add upgraded versions with a regular construction/logistics grid.
3. casting machines are planned to have a requirement for cooling water somewhere in the future (and casting molds), that's why they already have 3 fluid connectors visible
4. I never intended the solid fuel research to be there, but only with my latest changes it would really remove them in (almost) all cases. If you have to much hydrogen you can still convert it: hydrogen + carbon dioxide -> synthesis gas, synthesis gas + carbon -> solid fuel
Or go almost the same route for plastic, basically you want synthesis gas and then use that according to what you need.


@BlakeMW
Thanks for the input, I took a look at KS Power myself some time ago, because I want the game to start with a burner generator and a research for actual steam engines so you have bit more of a progression there, but I wont make any changes or new things for power generation until 0.15 because of the changes that will come to power and also the nuclear stuff. I have plans yes, but it will have to wait for now.


@ridesdragons
I'm looking into wood pulp/paper/hard paper making at the moment which is basically what the basic electronics boards are, which is an interesting process, but I need to find some other uses for some of the ingredients/byproducts.

You haven't answered my question from earlier:
When will you add the names of inputs and outputs of Angel Mod recipe's? It is quite difficult to navigate through the production chain if you have to go by only icons. It is nearly like playing Factorio blind.

[hoho]

I took a look at KS Power myself some time ago, because I want the game to start with a burner generator and a research for actual steam engines so you have bit more of a progression there

Wouldn't wind turbine make more sense? In real-life it should be easier to build a turbine than a heat-powered generator.

[Xeanoa]

Wouldn't wind turbine make more sense? In real-life it should be easier to build a turbine than a heat-powered generator.

But it isn't. The part that turns kinetic energy into electricity stays roughly the same, but now you have to mount in on top of a very tall structure that has to withstand extreme weather, and capture a large amount of energy from wind without breaking. Making a 1KW windmill may still be easy, but when you try to produce reasonable amounts of electricity, you need considerable engineering.

[Zyrconia]

I have encountered a strange problem only on my latest base.

Angel's Smelting is a huge time sink and probably this is the last time I play with it, but this has caused me to reach 20 hours without blue science. I ran out of red and green science and my medium base that has 10 solar plants and can output 2 bots a second is all backed up and production is done, so everything is idle and can even go down to 8 KW power use.

In this 20 hours, all the crushed stone has been converted to stone bricks and concrete.

I designed my base to run forever and have low byproducts, so there is no slag.

So right now I have an idle base, zero crushed stone and no way to get more than a slow drip feed of Mineral Catalysts, a drip feed that comes from occasional mining. Also, there is no stone for transistors. It looks like a nasty feedback loop, where you can't smelt some resources because you are not smelting enough of the rest.

I probably need to artificially turn on parts of the factory and add intentionally slag to the system so I can use it as fuel for the rest of my factory.

We really need a new source of mineral catalysts if you wish to build a slag-less base.

[Zyrconia]

For the H2: CO2+H2-> methanol -> propen -> plastic is a possibility

That could work, but I start outputting tons of hydrogen in early game. To create such a setup would take hours and also needs green metal frames, so that's a huge infrastructure only to get plastic, something I already have plenty of from 2 sources. By the time I can create this setup, I would have probably flare stacked 100+k of hydrogen.

4. I never intended the solid fuel research to be there, but only with my latest changes it would really remove them in (almost) all cases. If you have to much hydrogen you can still convert it: hydrogen + carbon dioxide -> synthesis gas, synthesis gas + carbon -> solid fuel
Or go almost the same route for plastic, basically you want synthesis gas and then use that according to what you need.

Again, same issue. That is fairly late tech. "Solid fuel" research was green tech. I have about 10 electrolyzers turning purified water into oxygen. There is no solid fuel research and sulfuric acid no longer needs hydrogen, so I'm not using 99% of my hydrogen and it all gets flare stacked. The early game sink of solid fuel was great, because one single solid fuel plant + a buffer would create such a consistent drip feed that my entire train network would run forever on that single plant. After dozens of hours, it would even start filling a warehouse.

3. casting machines are planned to have a requirement for cooling water somewhere in the future (and casting molds), that's why they already have 3 fluid connectors visible

Oh god, please no. I tried using Smelting exclusively and I have zero "vanilla" smelting in the entire base. This has clearly crossed the invisible line from too complicated but fun into a boring job. Need a new 95% yellow belt of resources? Go grab 30+ plants from a box. Without nanobots, I would have given up on this base.

I realized that in Factorio for me the bulk of the fun comes from creating setups that will utilize the resources you have, not from creating massive complicated setups that create those resources. I want massive complicated consumers and small simple producers. Refining is the exception since it is a logistical problem I have not fully solved yet. After so many hours of your mods, I am yet to find a single optimized setup that is clearly the de facto standard how to set up a base, the golden blueprint, like you have for vanilla. The are multiple setups with pros and cons. So I guess your mod is a massive success? Was that one of the goals?

[Broskev]

Hello,

For some reason I am unable to mine some of the new Crawler trains. It gives an error. Might be that I have some conflicting mods, but I don't know how to identify them.

When mining the locomotive or the locomotive wagon:
http://imgur.com/a/7PKOa

When placing a construction wagon:
http://imgur.com/a/vLpo0

The only thing working fine is the robot wagon.

[Arch666Angel]

Hello,

For some reason I am unable to mine some of the new Crawler trains. It gives an error. Might be that I have some conflicting mods, but I don't know how to identify them.

When mining the locomotive or the locomotive wagon:
http://imgur.com/a/7PKOa

When placing a construction wagon:
http://imgur.com/a/vLpo0

The only thing working fine is the robot wagon.

Your problem seems to be related with the "trains reader mod", all of the stuff I have in the mods are using base game mechanics and definitions so there shouldnt be any crashes while playing coming from them.

[Arch666Angel]

@Tomik
Cant say, because with refining for example it is a bit more complicated and also a very tedious task to add all outputs to the recipe names. Making it somewhat automatic process blows up the interface, so I have to think of another way that wont break localization for other languages like it is now.

@Zyrconia
There are two routes to get oxygen: one from electrolysis, the other from compressed air. If you want solid fuel and oxygen so badly I suggest you setup a hydrazine plant to process your excess hydrogen and nitrogen, which you then can turn into solid fuel. The point is that you should not rely on a single process to produce all your oxygen for example, because of this and this is the same in a few other cases, where you are expected to do a mix of processes or suffer the consequence of having to much of one byproduct. But I will look into it and maybe move a solid fuel recipe up to be available earlier in the game.
The same is true for refining, slag is the main source for mineral sludge, if you do processing with only the non-slag recipe you either have to produce crushed stone in large quantities or bring in huge amounts of mineral water to keep it running. For the mineral catalyst problem: fissures and thermal water conversion to mineral sludge, or geode processing and convert that to mineral sludge.

I have yet to come up with a system to make the smelting mod more interesting and variable, at the moment you do the one thing I do not like: You setup things in the same way over and over again, without any options to do it differently or match it to your situation.

And yes that is the goal, to provide processes that can be combined in different ways to get the same result, but the way to get there is different depending on your preferences and playstyle. There are some patterns in setting up a refining factory but each time I see screenshots the creator would do something different. It's just not like vanilla, where you have your one smelting setup that always works and I think that's the problem for most people.
But of course this is also my preferences to play pressed into a mod and forced onto you, so I can understand when someone does not like it or thinks that it is too much. It then comes down again to personal taste and your way of playing a/the game.

[MainTango]

edit: nvm

[hoho]

The part that turns kinetic energy into electricity stays roughly the same, but now you have to mount in on top of a very tall structure that has to withstand extreme weather, and capture a large amount of energy from wind without breaking.

As it's a beginner power production, it doesn't have to be all that powerful and something as simple as this can work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaXfkXB ... el=RodRead

[Xeanoa]

The part that turns kinetic energy into electricity stays roughly the same, but now you have to mount in on top of a very tall structure that has to withstand extreme weather, and capture a large amount of energy from wind without breaking.

As it's a beginner power production, it doesn't have to be all that powerful and something as simple as this can work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaXfkXB ... el=RodRead

That's a 500W engine according to the discription. You'd need 120 of those to power your first lab.

[Light]

3. casting machines are planned to have a requirement for cooling water somewhere in the future (and casting molds), that's why they already have 3 fluid connectors visible

Oh god, please no. I tried using Smelting exclusively and I have zero "vanilla" smelting in the entire base. This has clearly crossed the invisible line from too complicated but fun into a boring job. Need a new 95% yellow belt of resources? Go grab 30+ plants from a box. Without nanobots, I would have given up on this base.

I realized that in Factorio for me the bulk of the fun comes from creating setups that will utilize the resources you have, not from creating massive complicated setups that create those resources. I want massive complicated consumers and small simple producers. Refining is the exception since it is a logistical problem I have not fully solved yet. After so many hours of your mods, I am yet to find a single optimized setup that is clearly the de facto standard how to set up a base, the golden blueprint, like you have for vanilla. The are multiple setups with pros and cons. So I guess your mod is a massive success? Was that one of the goals?

I tried the same thing, but the cost typically outweighed the rewards. Trying to fuel very iron and copper demanding machines required a full continent of smelting machines just to keep up, with little ore saved compared to just finding a new ore patch and using furnaces.

It's practicality in my view is for things like tin, lead, aluminum, and silicon. Where a smaller setup would suffice and payoff is greatest for what little you need. Using it for high demand materials like iron and copper is just punishing yourself.

Adding more to smelting isn't necessarily a bad thing either, given it's easy to blueprint a single design and just change the recipes as you plop it down. Seldom does any setup look different, as they're almost all identical copies of each other which is boring visually and design wise.

@Zyrconia
I have yet to come up with a system to make the smelting mod more interesting and variable, at the moment you do the one thing I do not like: You setup things in the same way over and over again, without any options to do it differently or match it to your situation.

The best thing I can give here is just my opinion of smelting and why it may not be any fault of yours why it's not really that useful.

I think the main underlying issue is that it's generally not needed and often serves as a bottleneck to production.

Why? Well given we typically have infinite ores and RSO increasing yields, making ores isn't exactly a problem since supply is damn near endless. Even though smelting is meant to get more out of a single ore, it's not exactly like we're hurting for them already. As such, I only use smelting for bypassing certain recipes by simplifying them a bit, such as instant aluminum plates or tungsten which are seldom needed to begin with and can utilize a tiny setup rather than a continent and 1 million stone bricks.

With that said, I'm not entirely sure you can make smelting compelling unless a player forcefully restricts themselves to it or plays on a size restricted map where every ore counts. Increasing the rate of return severely might help, but it's still impractical to depend upon it when furnaces can keep up with demand a lot faster, cheaper, and more compact.

Still, I do like the concept and don't want to discourage looking at alternate possibilities to get something more out of it, but that's just how I see it after using it all these months.

[Razhan]

Still, I do like the concept and don't want to discourage looking at alternate possibilities to get something more out of it, but that's just how I see it after using it all these months.

Yup, I also like the idea, but seems like a waste of space/resources, as using regular furnaces is most of the time way more wasteful.

I had an idea (which probably is impossible to mod), but that could give those smelting furnaces extra purposes (and the whole refining stuff. The way I see it, every time we process something with Angels mod, we are increasing the purity of the materials (Yup, you can put crushed saphirite in a furnace and you get "iron", but it can't be as good iron as when you crush, clean and sort the saphirite and later put that through the smelting process).

It could work if every entity in the game had a "Quality" value. The quality of an objects depends on the quality of the raw materials and in part on the process used to create it. So for most of the stuff, using low quality iron plates would be good, but for very specific recipes you will need very high quality components. Quality on weapons and ammo can increase the damage, on assembly machines can make them faster/more energy efficient and some very niche things may not work at all if the desired quality is not met, for example, portable fusion reactors or other nuclear stuff that will come with 0.15, modules or a very high tier science pack

If you end up crafting some of these entities without achieving the minimal quality, they will not work. That way, you wouldn't try to use the advanced smelting process for all your production, but you will have a very small, very high quality part of the factory.

As I said, this is probably impossible to achieve within the current game engine, I am a developer, but my modding and LUA knowledge will throw a NullPointerException. Sadly.

EDIT: Oh, and BTW, I play with Angels + Bobs, and thanks, you are amazing guys. Keep up, the good work, we will do our best with the chocolate fund.

[Exasperation]

Still, I do like the concept and don't want to discourage looking at alternate possibilities to get something more out of it, but that's just how I see it after using it all these months.

Yup, I also like the idea, but seems like a waste of space/resources, as using regular furnaces is most of the time way more wasteful.

I had an idea (which probably is impossible to mod), but that could give those smelting furnaces extra purposes (and the whole refining stuff. The way I see it, every time we process something with Angels mod, we are increasing the purity of the materials (Yup, you can put crushed saphirite in a furnace and you get "iron", but it can't be as good iron as when you crush, clean and sort the saphirite and later put that through the smelting process).

It could work if every entity in the game had a "Quality" value. The quality of an objects depends on the quality of the raw materials and in part on the process used to create it. So for most of the stuff, using low quality iron plates would be good, but for very specific recipes you will need very high quality components. Quality on weapons and ammo can increase the damage, on assembly machines can make them faster/more energy efficient and some very niche things may not work at all if the desired quality is not met, for example, portable fusion reactors or other nuclear stuff that will come with 0.15, modules or a very high tier science pack

If you end up crafting some of these entities without achieving the minimal quality, they will not work. That way, you wouldn't try to use the advanced smelting process for all your production, but you will have a very small, very high quality part of the factory.

As I said, this is probably impossible to achieve within the current game engine, I am a developer, but my modding and LUA knowledge will throw a NullPointerException. Sadly.

EDIT: Oh, and BTW, I play with Angels + Bobs, and thanks, you are amazing guys. Keep up, the good work, we will do our best with the chocolate fund.

I can think of a couple of ways you could do something like this. The simplest is probably the "quantity has a quality all its own" method. Consider the following changes: for each purification step, increase the output by 50% (so, for every two crushed ore you get three chunks, for every two chunks you get three crystals, for every four crystals you get six purified). Do something similar for ore processing (8 ore -> 3 processed ore, 1 processed ore -> 9 pellets). Leave the rest of the resource processing recipes alone.

This means that if you go all the way to purified+pellets, every crushed ore results in ~11.3 plates (or more depending on the specific ore). If you just go crushed ore -> single ore sorting recipe (i.e. 2 saphirite + 2 jivolite -> 4 iron ore) -> vanilla furnace you're getting 1 plate per crushed ore (single ore sorting -> pellets would be 3.375+ plates per ore, about 1/3 the efficiency of purified -> pellets or about the same as purified -> furnace).

Now for the demand side. For every MK2+ machine, double the cost. Also, double the cost of t2 science and quadruple the cost of t3 science. There are probably more recipes you'd want to adjust (and these adjustments are a little crude), but that will do for a start.

The result is that if you don't go past crushed ore + vanilla furnaces, the production/cost ratio for t1 machines is the same as now. Moving up to higher tier sorting methods makes getting the resources for low-tier items trivial, but while you can now make 11 mk1 assembling machines for the same amount of raw ore, making 1 mk4 assembler requires 8 mk1 assemblers and making 1 mk6 assembler requires 32 mk1 assemblers. While you could still make the higher-tier items with the lower-tier processing methods, it would greatly increase the raw materials required.

Basically the idea behind this method is that, instead of trying to model how usable the outputs are, you assume that each process can result in usable materials at the cost of throwing away some/most of what would be usable with a better process (you could make this more explicit by increasing the amount of slag produced by the lower tier sorting recipes; the extra slag is stuff you could have turned into plates with a better purification process).

[Light]

Still, I do like the concept and don't want to discourage looking at alternate possibilities to get something more out of it, but that's just how I see it after using it all these months.

Yup, I also like the idea, but seems like a waste of space/resources, as using regular furnaces is most of the time way more wasteful.

I had an idea (which probably is impossible to mod), but that could give those smelting furnaces extra purposes (and the whole refining stuff. The way I see it, every time we process something with Angels mod, we are increasing the purity of the materials (Yup, you can put crushed saphirite in a furnace and you get "iron", but it can't be as good iron as when you crush, clean and sort the saphirite and later put that through the smelting process).

It could work if every entity in the game had a "Quality" value. The quality of an objects depends on the quality of the raw materials and in part on the process used to create it. So for most of the stuff, using low quality iron plates would be good, but for very specific recipes you will need very high quality components. Quality on weapons and ammo can increase the damage, on assembly machines can make them faster/more energy efficient and some very niche things may not work at all if the desired quality is not met, for example, portable fusion reactors or other nuclear stuff that will come with 0.15, modules or a very high tier science pack

If you end up crafting some of these entities without achieving the minimal quality, they will not work. That way, you wouldn't try to use the advanced smelting process for all your production, but you will have a very small, very high quality part of the factory.

Refining Angel's ores into more pure forms to get more ores is a great system and I did think about it when contemplating an idea for smelting. Basically to use iron plates for low level stuff, ingots for higher level stuff, then the later sheet metal coils for the very best items late game.

I could see the tier system being a staple of Angel's where purity provides greater rewards across all mods and not just ore refinement alone. Where a small smelting setup with faster crafting speeds could produce ingots and coils at a fast enough pace to satisfy higher tier production as the factory evolves over time.

That way furnaces can be used for plates which are used in most things and advanced stuff requires the refined material without being a programming nightmare, just a bunch of recipe changes to fit the concept of progression. That alone would cut down the smelting size considerably, but question is, would it be interesting or more cumbersome to craft things this way?

Ex.
- Inserter (1 Iron Wheel, 2 Iron Plate, 1 Circuit Board)
- Fast Inserter (2 Electric Board, 2 Iron Ingot, 1 Inserter)
- Stack Inserter (15 Iron Wheel, 15 Electronic Board, 2 Iron Sheet Coils, 1 Fast Inserter)

- Floatation Cell (10 Steel Plate, 10 Stone Brick, 5 Electronic Board)
- Floatation Cell Mk2 (10 Steel Ingot, 10 Aluminum Plate, ...)
- Floatation Cell Mk3 (10 Titanium Plate, 10 Steel Sheet Coil, 10 Aluminum Ingots, ...)

You get the idea. Because science packs use early game items, simple plates and furnaces suffice for keeping research flowing quickly; Whereas structural upgrades require the investment. That alone eliminates a lot of the hassle of keeping up with plate output by a massive margin, allowing for smaller setups and fewer bottleneck issues. In theory anyhow.

[NewSwiss]

So I finally got around to setting up slag processing and WOW is it slow. For context, I'm 35 hours into a Bobs/Angels campaign, so I've got max-tier everything. The slag-processing area consists of the ideal ratio of max-tier chemical plants, filtration plants, and crystallizers, about 24 buildings in all, which take up ~10% of my whole factory. It outputs ~80 ore per minute.

-_-

I'm fine with the low ore yield per slag input, but when you're in the late-game in Bobs, there really should be faster slag/waste processing buildings. At least give us a ton of module slots to speed up the machines. As it stands I'm going to have to landfill an ocean or clear-cut some forests to make room for more slag processing.

Otherwise, I'm quite enjoying the Angels' experience. Thanks!

[hoho]

That's a 500W engine according to the discription. You'd need 120 of those to power your first lab.

Considering we have solar panels that are orders of magnitude better than the panels we have on Earth, I don't think it's too bad to scale up wind power in similar scale.

[mexmer]

That's a 500W engine according to the discription. You'd need 120 of those to power your first lab.

Considering we have solar panels that are orders of magnitude better than the panels we have on Earth, I don't think it's too bad to scale up wind power in similar scale.

considering there is no such mechanic as wind in factorio while sun at least partialy is (fixed cycles of light/darkness), how exactly it will work?
please refer to suggestion part of forum regarding "wind" energy, there have been numerous discussions about that.