[MOD 1.1] Xander Mod v3.6.1

[Repofme1]

Hi all -

After more work and testing, version 1.2.0 is ready. This update has more new content to make the burner era actually functional, like:

• - Burner assembling machine
  - Burner ore sluice
  - Second burner inserter using chemical fuel
  - Tier 0 transport belt, with underground and splitter

I actually had time to test this one a bit, so I got rather a bit further in my test world. 6.5 hours in I can say that things should be working much better. I've got automation set up for: coal coke, all 4 basic metals, iron gears, steel parts (forgings, gears rods), clay bricks and bronze, copper cable and basic coils, and a few other half-done odd ends. Most of my test worlds haven't gotten past 3-4 hours (and then get stalled due to my impossible difficulty XD), so it feels like a big step up from the previous update.

As usual, many problems likely remain, so be sure to comment and let me know what you find - good or bad.

As a heads-up, I'll be leaving next Wednesday for a week of travel, so I likely won't have Internet. I wanted to put this update out now so I have some time for more testing, and squashing more bugs that come up. I hope to get a smaller fix update out by Tuesday, before I leave.

[Repofme1]

It is usually handled via Github. It also allows people to easily fork your project and help you fix bugs.
Great thing, whole Linux development is done like that.

Ah, that makes sense as to why I see Github everywhere. I'm not sure if/how to make one of my own, would it be worth it for this project? I don't think there's any reason I *couldn't* put it on Github, I just don't know how any of that works

[Airat9000]

bob angels mods compartible?

[Ratzap]

bob angels mods compartible?

And there he is, a few pages late No, it's not and don't expect it any time soon (or ever probably).

[Airat9000]

hello cobalt and Lead, zinc, is there mercury?

find bug mod
SigmaOne_Nuclear_1.0.0

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Sigma1/SigmaOne_Nuclear

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[Repofme1]

hello cobalt and Lead, zinc, is there mercury?

find bug mod
SigmaOne_Nuclear_1.0.0

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Sigma1/SigmaOne_Nuclear

2017-08-27_0-20-03.png

No mercury haha, sorry I guess the similarities end there. I got some vanadium and platinum for ya though, if you like that. And a few other fun alloys in the OP.

Sorry about the bug with SigmaOne's Nuclear, I think it happens because XM is designed entirely from the base game and SigmaOne's Nuclear specifically (and I quote it's mod portal page) "The mod also removes Kovarex Enrichment Process". It seems that SigmaOne (if installed) completely removes the recipe from existence, and when my mod tries to access it, there's the problem. I can't promise a fix because this is currently waaay future stuff for me - Xander Mod is still stuck in the burner era, although I think we'll get past that soon. Ultimately, if I have time, a compatibility patch or something between Xander Mod and SigmaOne's Nuclear would be nice. But you'll find XM currently has its own version of the nuclear industry, no plutonium like SigmaOne but more detailed uranium (yep, including HF, UO2(NO3)2, various grades of UF6, UO2 for reactors, and U metal for weapons ). I love a detailed and realistic nuclear industry , I just didn't have time to overhaul things to the point of replacing the Kovarex process.

[Airat9000]

You know, I started to play, mod, yours.
I will say with the bob and the angel did not give any mistakes but it became even steeper .. now I have no place on the map from resources and resources very much !!! as well as variations in the production of things.
Very cool! Good mod!

worked!! extreme

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Вы знаете, начал я играть, модом, вашим.
Скажу с бобм и ангелом ошибок не выдало но стало еще круче.. теперь у меня на карте нет места от ресурсов и ресурсов очень много!!! как и вариации производства вещей.
Очень классно! Хороший мод!

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[Repofme1]

bob angels mods compartible?

And there he is, a few pages late No, it's not and don't expect it any time soon (or ever probably).

Check the tiny discussion page on the mod portal, first thread from like a day after the first ever version published

Sorry about Bob's/Angel's, tl;dr all the mods are too big and have too much overlap; some more details in earlier posts.

[Airat9000]

bob angels mods compartible?

And there he is, a few pages late No, it's not and don't expect it any time soon (or ever probably).

Check the tiny discussion page on the mod portal, first thread from like a day after the first ever version published

Sorry about Bob's/Angel's, tl;dr all the mods are too big and have too much overlap; some more details in earlier posts.

but I think it will be at least part of the alignment to do with Bob and yangels modes, although I see that all 3 modes work well for me !!
It became even harder and steeper but the computer needs a powerful one.

I want to still combine with Mining Tools Mods
Later I'll add resources but I need graphics and an exact resource name ..

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но я думаю получится хотя бы часть совмещения сделать с Bob и янгелс модами, хотя я смотрю что все 3 мода у меня работают хорошо!!
стало еще сложнее и круче но и компьютер нужен мощный.

я хочу еще совместить с Mining Tools
позже я добавлю ресурсы но нужна будет графика и точное название ресурсов..

[Airat9000]

question
how to produce the pack 0 package? I would like to automatically

[jodokus31]

I think the update is really successful from what ive seen.
The assemblers and plant are able to craft most of the early game items.
The belts are quite funny. Those 2 wide undergroundbelts...
I even found the plant to craft the clay, which was a bit much, if you are setting up furnace lines.
Really like it so far....

question
how to produce the pack 0 package? I would like to automatically

The assembler machine can do it, which is locked behind some science "Crude Automated Assembly" (not equal to the machine tool, which is also an assembly shaped entity for intermediate products.)

[Repofme1]

You know, I started to play, mod, yours.
I will say with the bob and the angel did not give any mistakes but it became even steeper .. now I have no place on the map from resources and resources very much !!! as well as variations in the production of things.
Very cool! Good mod!

worked!! extreme

Вы знаете, начал я играть, модом, вашим.
Скажу с бобм и ангелом ошибок не выдало но стало еще круче.. теперь у меня на карте нет места от ресурсов и ресурсов очень много!!! как и вариации производства вещей.
Очень классно! Хороший мод!

2017-08-27_0-56-18.png

Holy shit, it actually worked!?!? Bob's+Angel's+Xander didn't crash on load! Honestly a huge surprise! Although I imagine it is broken in non-crash ways, like impossible tech/recipe loops, that need themselves to make themselves. And even with only those three (Bob's+Angel's+Xander), the game would be insanely steep, plus all of the other mods you have used make it even more difficult! May Sol have mercy on you, because that mod set won't! XD And that massive resource spasm everywhere, ooooohhh man! Crazy!

And thank you, I'm glad you like it!

[Repofme1]

I think the update is really successful from what ive seen.
The assemblers and plant are able to craft most of the early game items.
The belts are quite funny. Those 2 wide undergroundbelts...
I even found the plant to craft the clay, which was a bit much, if you are setting up furnace lines.
Really like it so far....

question
how to produce the pack 0 package? I would like to automatically

The assembler machine can do it, which is locked behind some science "Crude Automated Assembly" (not equal to the machine tool, which is also an assembly shaped entity for intermediate products.)

Thank you! I like this update too, I think finally cracked the burner era. Burner stuff is probably not all done, but we're over the top of the mountain.

I somehow like the early machines and transport belt, it makes an interesting design challenge Here is my test world G (It took a lot of these to get it right! ), 7hr 40m in:

Test world G, 7hr 40m in

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Here is almost all the automation I mentioned in the update post, just really zoomed out. Miners, smelting, some chemistry & ore plant, machining, crafting. I would have has science 1 automated by 5 or 6 hours, except for my bad design choices... oh well. That is now my next goal.

Probably not the best idea to automate science 0, you might spend more time hand-crafting the automated machines & belt than you would hand-crafting science 0. Not much science 0 is needed, and by the time you have the burner assembling machine, you probably don't need science 0 anymore. *shrug*

[Airat9000]

the only problem is when I press the letter K on the keyboard, the game crashes ..
I'm right now like working normally 118 mods .. (while 25 mods still deleted)

единственная проблема - когда я нажимаю на клавиатуре букву К, игра крашится..
у меня щас вроде нормально работают 118 модов.. (при этом 25 модов еще удалил)

[houkime]

I actually don't like an approach of burner universal assemblers and inserters.
Both actually suggest some sensorics and programmability involved which actually cannot be true on this stage. Also they introduce balance issues.

Instead I personally would suggest reducing early recipe count to minimum and introducing a special non-universal machine for each type of operation. This way you need not really to balance things - they become obsolete naturally because they are purpose-built and cannot be used for anything else other than old ineffective recipes. They can even be quite fast and propel early game in a realistic way.
Because they are individual they also can have custom special behavior (not always pleasant) and variable sizes.

And for early inserters I actually have a realistic way to implement them without sensorics and whatsoever involved.
Imagine two spinning rotor like in helicopter but with sticks instead of blades. They overlap and are slightly out of phase.
To load and unload things they just spin)
You can have an example of this kind of a loader in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m029tGxeDR4

Just as fast as inserter would be BUT!
They spin no matter what and consume fuel constantly.
When they are set to grab things from belt they will grab till they clog and even clogged they prevent passing by things to bypass them.
So in order this to work you need a crude random beltsplitter - It can be done simple as pie. Imagine a car's windowcleaner thing that just goes right-left And pushes things to two separate belts as they go in.
Works constantly without any electronics and sensors whatsoever.
Consumes fuel no matter what
Cannot balance between lines And either pushes everything to the outer lines or just messes around randomly.

I just want to illustrate that early game disadvantages need not to be about SPEED, things can just have behavioral or geometrical drawbacks because of their crude nature. Inconvenient, sometimes funny and sometimes even useful - engineering is always about objects and their behaviour.
You know, belts that can spill over, lathes that require water cooling and produce tons of garbage metal chips that fly everywhere...

[Airat9000]

Yes by the way the author I have a mistake in the resource, I for some reason have copper-colored iron, and iron-colored copper, all the way around

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[houkime]

Some illustrations to my concepts.
Note that steam belt is effectively one-sided by the pipe at all times.

[Repofme1]

I actually don't like an approach of burner universal assemblers and inserters.
Both actually suggest some sensorics and programmability involved which actually cannot be true on this stage. Also they introduce balance issues.

Instead I personally would suggest reducing early recipe count to minimum and introducing a special non-universal machine for each type of operation. This way you need not really to balance things - they become obsolete naturally because they are purpose-built and cannot be used for anything else other than old ineffective recipes. They can even be quite fast and propel early game in a realistic way.
Because they are individual they also can have custom special behavior (not always pleasant) and variable sizes.

And for early inserters I actually have a realistic way to implement them without sensorics and whatsoever involved.
Imagine two spinning rotor like in helicopter but with sticks instead of blades. They overlap and are slightly out of phase.
To load and unload things they just spin)
You can have an example of this kind of a loader in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m029tGxeDR4

Just as fast as inserter would be BUT!
They spin no matter what and consume fuel constantly.
When they are set to grab things from belt they will grab till they clog and even clogged they prevent passing by things to bypass them.
So in order this to work you need a crude random beltsplitter - It can be done simple as pie. Imagine a car's windowcleaner thing that just goes right-left And pushes things to two separate belts as they go in.
Works constantly without any electronics and sensors whatsoever.
Consumes fuel no matter what
Cannot balance between lines And either pushes everything to the outer lines or just messes around randomly.

I just want to illustrate that early game disadvantages need not to be about SPEED, things can just have behavioral or geometrical drawbacks because of their crude nature. Inconvenient, sometimes funny and sometimes even useful - engineering is always about objects and their behaviour.
You know, belts that can spill over, lathes that require water cooling and produce tons of garbage metal chips that fly everywhere...

Wow, quite a good idea drop there! I appreciate your creativity and effort here, and I applaud your dedication to realism! I especially like the idea of making very varied and interesting advantages and disadvantages, how you mentioned flying chips and belts/inserters that are too dumb to turn themselves off. It is much more realistic and limited, rather than items somehow backing up like fluid on a constantly moving belt... Also I totally agree that the inserters imply some sort of fancy sensors, which would be impossible until the advanced circuit in the base game. I explain the assembling machine as basically just a bunch of inserters putting things together, and that seems to solve the realism problem of assemblers, but doesn't really - it actually just consolidates the assembler issues with the question of how inserters work. Although you can put a fair bit of mechanical programming into non-electric machines, which is why I personally don't have a problem with the burner machine tool or chemical reactor. Switching recipes is like re-tooling and exchanging parts, which is just stuff the Factorio character does off camera and skips ahead to Any real scenario would have TONS of grinding and stuff, this is why it has taken humanity so long to progress!

Unfortunately, while I would love to add a lot of what you said to Factorio, the reality is.. most of it is beyond my ability! I don't actually know any of the game's API, so I don't know what variable names to use to reference anything. This *really* limits my ability. However I feel that it would take quite a bit of effort to learn, and would result in lots of bugs, so it's low on my priority list. Also, many of these hardcore realism features would make even basic automation quite impractical. As you noticed, you would have to run everything at a locked constant throughput, or face tons of jams that you have to clear manually. This is kind of a problem with science for one thing, because some techs take more or less time, and sometimes a miner runs out resulting in decreased throughput.

Also about keeping the recipe count to a minimum, this kind of contradicts the realism of uniquely limited machinery because then everything would have to be made of the same simple. unrealistic parts. Like how most everything in base is just circuits, gears, and iron plates. For example, my brother's 3 meter metal lathe from 1920 has hundreds of parts, and it could itself make probably a quarter of them. Many of them are made with other processes like casting, flat milling, slot shaping, etc. The result is that one needs an entire smeltery, foundry, and machine shop to completely re-produce the parts for all the machines used - and that's not even counting assembly, which is actually the much more intelligence-heavy process. Ultimately, if I made the part/recipe/machine count really high and had each machine do a super specific job, then it would be way too much work to add and maintain, and make progression even more slow & complicated. I've tried to go for a large handful of machines & parts, each of which represents a superposition of many similar pieces or jobs. For example the iron castings in XM, one of them could be a leg for a lathe, or the headstock (holds the spinning bit), or the apron (holds the work), or the ways (track for sliding back and forth), etc. This applies to size too, where if a machine really needs one giant cast piece, I would just put like 5 of them in the reciepe, or if a machine needs a few medium sized cast parts and a great many small ones I would just put 2 castings in. Again, I'm limited by the practicality of maintaining a mod within a reasonable size, and the goal of he game to be fun automated production. It feels like I'm pushing the edge as is.

As for the sort of overpowered universality of burner machines, I also think this is a problem, which was part of why the burner era was so difficult for me to work out. However I managed to largely nullify the problem by indeed making the burner machines become obsolete, like you suggested. I did this through using different recipe categories to limit burner machines to making only burner-level and electric-1-level things. This alone is enough to make them obsolete, because you literally can't finish the game on them, and adding their slow speed & awkward fuel requirement gives even more reason to upgrade as soon as possible. Overall I'm happy with the current set of burner machines.

In the end, I think these issues come from the structure of the Factorio game itself, just like I remember you mentioning a week or so ago. Ultimately, while I would also like to vastly improve this stuff, it would require completely re-inventing a new game (also like you said). If I was going to do that (or was even capable of it), at that point I would almost certainly make a new game instead of changing any existing one.

[Repofme1]

Yes by the way the author I have a mistake in the resource, I for some reason have copper-colored iron, and iron-colored copper, all the way around

Ah, I see what's going on! I apologize for the confusion, but I modified iron and copper to hematite (Fe2O3, iron) and chalcocite (Cu2S, copper), which look like that. Check Google Images if you're curious. If you want to explore some more, I made the textures of things like this (ore name - realistic main component): lead ore - galena, granitic ore - cassiterite, sulfidic ore - chalocopyrite, iron ore - hematite, copper ore - chalcocite, and heavy mineral sand - ilmenite. The other ores are a bit simpler in appearance, but they still all have multiple refining products.

Many of the ores also contain traces of other useful metals, so I had to use the more generic "xyz-ore" names for the stuff that generates in the world, and contains the useful impurities. The items with real mineral names are reserved for the main components (chalcocite, hematite, etc.) once they have had all the other metals extracted. Those processes come later in the game - beyond what I've fixed so far.

[Airat9000]

Yes by the way the author I have a mistake in the resource, I for some reason have copper-colored iron, and iron-colored copper, all the way around

Ah, I see what's going on! I apologize for the confusion, but I modified iron and copper to hematite (Fe2O3, iron) and chalcocite (Cu2S, copper), which look like that. Check Google Images if you're curious. If you want to explore some more, I made the textures of things like this (ore name - realistic main component): lead ore - galena, granitic ore - cassiterite, sulfidic ore - chalocopyrite, iron ore - hematite, copper ore - chalcocite, and heavy mineral sand - ilmenite. The other ores are a bit simpler in appearance, but they still all have multiple refining products.

Many of the ores also contain traces of other useful metals, so I had to use the more generic "xyz-ore" names for the stuff that generates in the world, and contains the useful impurities. The items with real mineral names are reserved for the main components (chalcocite, hematite, etc.) once they have had all the other metals extracted. Those processes come later in the game - beyond what I've fixed so far.

good thanks!
1 screen to work in angels mod

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