[0.15.x] Bob's Mods: General Discussion

[JLBShecky]

I think that fluid flow mechanics changed a bit in 0.15.x as in my limited test it seemed larger pipes were transporting fluids faster.

I haven't done tests over longer distances as my testing was just repeating the tests from the thread over in the general topics forum.



I used the same setup, just replacing the pipes.
As a result I got the following results back that at-least on shorter distances with pumps larger is better.



These results are in no way indicative that smaller pipes by themselves transfer fluids at slower speeds when used without pumps, or that over longer distances between the pumps larger pipes are still faster than small ones, but I think that it does merit a a more detailed investigation to see how things actually work. I just haven't made time to complete further testing.

[nagapito]

There is an error in that test.

That test was made to find the throughput of the pumps, so what was important was in and out of a pump.
You cant use the same test scenario here unless you actually increase the pipe distance for a reasonable amount.

As I said on previous posts, if we are talking about 1-2 pipe length, big pipes win since they act almost like source and void pipes and size will dictate the throughput.
But, once you start increasing the distance between the origin and the end, then propagation mechanics of fluids start taking effect on the results. Over a reasonable distance, large pipes will fail to propagate the fluid to the end of the pipe or just propagate a trickle while small pipes keep propagating the fluids.

And, as I also said on my previous posts, if bigger pipes fail to deliver fluids, then anything is better then nothing!
Just to give an idea, no exact numbers, but big pipes start having serious propagation issues after maybe 30 or 40 pipes or maybe even less. I know for sure that small pipes were working flawless on a section on one of my factories that was more then 250 pipes long!

[Recon777]

A little update on the search for lithia water with RSO.

I switched to the "rso radar" mod so that I could get some decent range. Having let them run for a while, I managed to find quite a few "pure water" spots. But no lithia spots. I've circled all the water in yellow for clarity. Every single one is pure water. From what I can tell, RSO puts equal weight on both pure and lithia water, yes? Either I've got phenomenally bad luck or I'm interpreting things incorrectly.

If Lithium wasn't so critical to progression, I wouldn't be as worried. But this is very strange.
Question: Do I need to start an actual NEW map for the changes to start showing up? I'm assuming not, since the procedural generation happens on the fly with the current code as new area is uncovered, right?

[British_Petroleum]

An idea for pipes: what if certain pipes would react with certain fluids. For example an iron pipe carrying acids would slowly dissolve and lose hit points.

[Zyrconia]

To test out 0.15 and Bob's too, I'm doing two runs in parallel: one vanilla and one with all of Bob's, no Angel's.

To test out game feel, progression and balance.

Up to this point I have only one observation: the change of lights using BCB instead of BEB is really good!

[bobingabout]

An idea for pipes: what if certain pipes would react with certain fluids. For example an iron pipe carrying acids would slowly dissolve and lose hit points.

not easy to do at all, it would be all scripting, which means keeping track of pipes and poling to see what is inside them.

And when you get to robots stage, it becomes a HUGE effort for effectively nothing, because the result would just be construction robots whizzing around repairing things constantly.

Up to this point I have only one observation: the change of lights using BCB instead of BEB is really good!

Glad you like the change, it was requested quite often.

[orzelek]

A little update on the search for lithia water with RSO.

I switched to the "rso radar" mod so that I could get some decent range. Having let them run for a while, I managed to find quite a few "pure water" spots. But no lithia spots. I've circled all the water in yellow for clarity. Every single one is pure water. From what I can tell, RSO puts equal weight on both pure and lithia water, yes? Either I've got phenomenally bad luck or I'm interpreting things incorrectly.

If Lithium wasn't so critical to progression, I wouldn't be as worried. But this is very strange.
Question: Do I need to start an actual NEW map for the changes to start showing up? I'm assuming not, since the procedural generation happens on the fly with the current code as new area is uncovered, right?

*** cut ***

Please post me the map string or save/mods on the RSO forum.
There is a bug currently that might cause resources to not show up on minimap properly even if they are there.
You can check for that with map labels mod that will tag all ores with their names.

[jawstrock]

About Lithia water, I just downloaded all of bob's mods + RSO, and the first thing I notice is that Lithia doesn't show up in the ressource settings tabs when making a new game.(but ground water does).

There is also no settings to enable Lithia water like other ores/ground water in the options.
Any relations?

While on the subject of Lithia, couldn't the map color of Lithia be a much different color then the ground water one. Right now they are like two shades of a similar blue(Lithia is more greyish but yeah). When you have ground water and Lithia mixed up together it's really hard to see which is which onthe map.
Orange would really stand out, but maybe greenish hue?

[British_Petroleum]

can you allow productivity modules for heat tiles? they work with all other rocket parts

[British_Petroleum]

Have you considered swapping silver and lithium batteries? ie make silver the tier 2 battery. I think they're easier to produce, and more importantly, they're a nice sodium hydroxide sink, so it'd be good to have them used in high tech science. At the moment, producing enough chlorine for one of each science pack produces more sodium hydroxide than is needed for 1 of each science pack, so during the late game when techs get super expensive, the sodium hydroxide builds up very fast. If it was the other way around, it would be ok, because we can vent the excess chlorine.

[jawstrock]

I always found silver batteries so much more easier to make then lithium. Silver is easier to come by(I either find a silver patch really early game, or usually switch to lead with silver production anyways.)

Lithium batteries needs 2 rare resources: Lithia water and cobalt.(Well cobalt used to only have 1 real use(who seriously ever made and used cobalt armor?), and the copper with cobalt residue recipe is still annoying to make with so many input/output.) Technically cobalt is supposed to be mid game if you look at the tech, but most people(as in youtuber) never bothered making cobalt until they needed to make the batteries anyways.

Going by memory, but switching both batteries would be a nice move I think, or maybe switch some ingredients around.
Lithia water is only used for the batteries right? so it can easily be the late game batteries material.

[Recon777]

Have you considered swapping silver and lithium batteries? ie make silver the tier 2 battery. I think they're easier to produce, and more importantly, they're a nice sodium hydroxide sink, so it'd be good to have them used in high tech science. At the moment, producing enough chlorine for one of each science pack produces more sodium hydroxide than is needed for 1 of each science pack, so during the late game when techs get super expensive, the sodium hydroxide builds up very fast. If it was the other way around, it would be ok, because we can vent the excess chlorine.

I really like this idea. Getting a cobalt line plus a lithia line working is significantly harder than the silver/zinc batteries. Li batteries are considerably more difficult to make. Swapping these would probably be a winner idea. And I especially like how they are a Sodium Hydroxide sink. That stuff builds up like crazy in the mid game.

Having said that, I should point out the rather surprising change that Cobalt is now needed for the SECOND TIER of large-area mining drills. That being the case, I need to get that up and running as soon as I can anyway. But yes, Lithium processing is a much bigger pain in the ass, especially considering it's spawn issues, suggesting that tech swapping might be for the best.

[rhyser9]

I'm having a problem where whenever I blueprint an adjusted inserter (different pickup/dropoff/offset), the blueprint ghost shows the correct settings, but when the item is actually placed, the inserter reverts back to default settings. This is especially frustrating with large blueprints, as I have to go through and fix the settings for ~50 long inserters. The only info I can find about this is back from ~9 months ago during 0.13, and nothing more recent. Any suggestions?

[jawstrock]

Have you considered swapping silver and lithium batteries? ie make silver the tier 2 battery. I think they're easier to produce, and more importantly, they're a nice sodium hydroxide sink, so it'd be good to have them used in high tech science. At the moment, producing enough chlorine for one of each science pack produces more sodium hydroxide than is needed for 1 of each science pack, so during the late game when techs get super expensive, the sodium hydroxide builds up very fast. If it was the other way around, it would be ok, because we can vent the excess chlorine.

I really like this idea. Getting a cobalt line plus a lithia line working is significantly harder than the silver/zinc batteries. Li batteries are considerably more difficult to make. Swapping these would probably be a winner idea. And I especially like how they are a Sodium Hydroxide sink. That stuff builds up like crazy in the mid game.

Having said that, I should point out the rather surprising change that Cobalt is now needed for the SECOND TIER of large-area mining drills. That being the case, I need to get that up and running as soon as I can anyway. But yes, Lithium processing is a much bigger pain in the ass, especially considering it's spawn issues, suggesting that tech swapping might be for the best.

Well if we have a switch of batteries, we can also make cobalt a late tier material, so that it could be moved to say mk4-5 miners instead of mk2

[Recon777]

Well if we have a switch of batteries, we can also make cobalt a late tier material, so that it could be moved to say mk4-5 miners instead of mk2

I definitely approve of this. Making people get cobalt processing going that early is a bit too much of a burden I think.

[iamwyza]

(not a chemist, using a wiki, treat accordingly) With sodium hydroxide, it appears it is most commonly used in its aqueous state. It also appears that it can be used in that state to scrub oil of sulfur dioxide. I know there is a sulfur processing option in bob's oil, but what if that version required aqueous sodium hydroxide to work and be used as a sink for it?

[Mobius1]

(not a chemist, using a wiki, treat accordingly) With sodium hydroxide, it appears it is most commonly used in its aqueous state. It also appears that it can be used in that state to scrub oil of sulfur dioxide. I know there is a sulfur processing option in bob's oil, but what if that version required aqueous sodium hydroxide to work and be used as a sink for it?

Aqueous sodium hydroxide is already in-game, its the saline water. Saline water is a water solution highly concentrated with sodium chloride (NaCl), sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is a spontaneous reaction that occurs slowly on the saline water, but it has the byproduct of chloridric acid (hydrochloric acid or HCl). So if the "aqueous" state of sodium hydroxide were to be used, it would need a chemical step of "sodium liquefation" where you add pure water to the NaOH to make it in aqueous state since the pure H2O won't react with the NaOH without a catalyst.
It could be interesting to have another cracking option like that but is Bob willing to go Angel mode?

[bobingabout]

I'm having a problem where whenever I blueprint an adjusted inserter (different pickup/dropoff/offset), the blueprint ghost shows the correct settings, but when the item is actually placed, the inserter reverts back to default settings. This is especially frustrating with large blueprints, as I have to go through and fix the settings for ~50 long inserters. The only info I can find about this is back from ~9 months ago during 0.13, and nothing more recent. Any suggestions?

My suggestion is... post in the bug reporting section. That part of the system is entirely handled by base game mechanics, and I'm sure it worked perfectly fine in 0.14, so it must have been broken in 0.15.

on other notes mentioned.
I could just add sodium hydroxide to the oil processing with sulphur recipe.

And for the batteries, I could just put silver oxide batteries on the high tech pack without changing it's tier within the game.

One of the reasons why Cobalt is a mid game material, not endgame material, is that in RL, progression goes along the lines of...
High speed steel -> Cobalt steel -> Titanium coated steel -> Tungsten Carbide. Convert that into game mechanics, and that goes Steel -> Cobalt -> Titanium -> Tungsten carbide.
Although they're not all on the same branch of the tree, those materials are placed in the right slot of how things look on the rest of my tree. I'll include my notes for reference.
Now, I might not use that exact mechanic, but if you assume Iron being T1, that puts Steel at T2 and Cobalt at T3.
So depending where things are right now (I would need to look it up) the best I would do there is move the cobalt steel requirement from MK2 to MK3.
On the note of Cobalt being too hard to get though, I did add the steel mixing furnace (burner powered) for the specific reason of being able to make cobalt easier.

Code: Select all

T1 is anything that doesn't require research to be made.
  Iron, Copper, Stone blocks, Tin, Lead, Silver and Glass.
T2 is anything that requires only red science, or a T1 material to make.
  Steel, Nickel and Bronze.
T3 is anything that requires Green science
  Plastic, Zinc, Brass and Gunmetal, Aluminium, Gold, Silicon, Invar, and Cobalt/Cobalt steel
T4 is anything that requires Blue science
  Titanium, Tungsten, Electrum, and Ceramic(Silicon Nitride)
T5 is anything that requires Alien science or science pack 4, or just T4 materials as a component.
  Nitinol, Tungsten Carbide and Copper Tungsten Alloy.

[NewSwiss]

Ok, I just now got into a 0.15 Bob's (+Angel's) campaign after not playing for a few months and I need to know: what is the deal with space science packs? How do I get them? Are they an output of rocket silos? And how many do you get per rocket launched?

Also, is there still no chemical process for wood-to-coal conversion? Is that still on the to-do list?

Thanks!

[solntcev]

Space science packs appears in rocket silo after launching rocket with satellite. you get 1000 science for 1 launched satellite.