Development and Discussion

[Arch666Angel]

Im really loving the farming stuff, i do actually have enough oil/gas around me but i love to try the new stuff, tree arboretums feel bit cheaty though since you can get so easy early plastic from them.

You could always get early plastic from just cutting trees or using algae farms, which are arguably sooner than when arboretums produce reliable quantities of wood. They also lose their value pretty quickly when petrochem takes center stage for high yield plastic, unlike Bob's greenhouses which generate enough wood to remain relevant even for infinite science. (They're insane)

Something that would be nice to see is a comparison on how useful the bioprocessing plastic recipes are to their petrochem counterparts, since it looks like more of a pain in the ass for little to no gain. Especially considering farming is very RNG based and inconsistent whereas oil processing is not. I'd love to hear the experiences of someone who has explored into that.

Most stuff in Bio-processing is intended to start you off and supplement your "main" process, ratios for each plastic process are based on my gut feelings at the moment and open to balancing changes, for that I need some feedback on how the processes keep up against each other. So bio-plastic from arboretum to start you off, plastic from wood to supplement, petrochem for main/bulk production.

[Sauerkraut]

So, I just wanted to give some feedback.

A week ago I started my current bob's + angel's playthrough. I did a bob's playthrough in 0.11 or 0.12, so a lot has changed and angel's mods were completely new to me.

I had first minor issues installing the mods. I was constantly confused whether information was outdated or not. The Info on the mod portal seems to be okay, but when I'm browsing let's say Angel's Refining and I click the Handy link from there to another one of Angel's mods I end up in a locked thread from 2016 about that mod that has severely outdated info. Some of Angel's mods on the modportal also appear to be discontinued or not updated for 0.16 yet so I was confused if I could even play with Angel's mods or if some things may break because I am missing one important mod. I then decided to simply install every mod from archangel that was compatible with 0.16 and started with "Angel's...", however, some had "[BETA]" or "[ALPHA UPDATE]" written in their name, so i was particularly unsure about those.

What I was hoping for was a stickied thread "Angel's Modpack Megathread: What mods I need to install" that would guide me through the install process at the current state of development.

This brings me to my next question. This probably has been answered already, but I hope you forgive me for not reading all 500+ pages of forum discussions. Why are Angel's mods hidden in the "Mods for 0.12" subforum? I was really confused and certain the info here must be outdated, since other big modpacks like bob's, 5dim etc. all have their discussions in the "Mod Compilations / Complete Overhauls Discussions" subforum. Are the moderators not allowing this or is this on purpose?


So, enough talk about out-game stuff. Now let me tell you about my experience playing angel's+bob's!
I started mining, crushing and smelting saphirite and stiratide to get to red science. I did some early "dirty" bobmonium sorting to get glass for a dozen of greenhouses, as bob's basic circuit boards require a constant supply of wood. This felt incredibly unsatisfying. I am now 30 hours into that savefile and still have not setup real glass smelting, because my power generation is still pre-solar, which is the main use of glass. My suggestions to fix this would be:

• remove glass from the Greenhouse recipe and later add Mk2 Greenhouses that require glass
• remove Sodium Hydroxide and/or Chlor Methane Gas from the cellulose paste recipe, so it is possible to create wood from Green Algea early on

My next recommendation is also on Green Algea
I then started working on green science, which required Tin and Lead plates, so I setup some bobmonium and rubyte mining, crushing and smelting. I setup steel smelting from iron plates, which basically doubled my saphirite need. I now start running into crushed stone problems. I was already turning it into stone so I created a stone brick smelting area yet I still produced way more crushed stone than I was using up. I started looking into alternatives way to get rid of it, so I naturally discovered Green Algea and the possibility to basically turn crushed stone into fuel (Crushed Stone -> Mineralized Water -> Green Algae -> Cellulose Fiber -> Wood Pellets). I start designing a setup, but realize that for only one yellow belt of cellulose fiber (which translates to 1/6th yellow belt of Wood Pellets) I'd require 20 Algae Farms. The problem here is, that Algea Farms are pretty fucking huge (7x7 tiles, require pipes on two sides, so basically 9x7) so my Algae setup became bigger than the rest of my whole base, while still consuming less than one yellow belt of crushed stone. As of right now I am not even sure if generates more energy than it consumes. I can see, that Green Algae can be used for a few other things later on like Compost or an alternative way for Methanol Gas, but I would be glad if they got buffed a little. I'm okay with the ratios, I am just not okay with the required space and resources for all the algae farms.
So I would recommend either decreasing Green Algae crafting time, increase Algae Farm crafting speed or increase in and outputs of the Green Algea recipe.

Thanks to my new steel smelting line I was consuming saphirite really fast and also my initial stiratide deposit was running low. I thought this was the perfect time to setup some of that ore sorting and start with Angel's smelting instead of the boring stone furnace smelting. I built a huge saphirite sorting facility, able to handle 8 yellow belts of saphirite and yielding 4 iron ore belts, 2 copper ore belts and enough stone (from the slag) for my landfill needs. I wanted to smelt the different ores off-base, so I spent a lot of time tinkering with train stations and tracks. I get pretty hyped about finally being able to start some real pro-level smelting from the long and complicated ratio calculations (I can get 6.02 belts of iron plate from only 4 belts of ore!), so when I finally want to start building I am dumbstruck by a small little detail I had not thought of: The majority of smelting facilities are crafted from five or more individual components, so they have to be crafted by mark 3 assemblers or by hand. As I am still lightyears away from anything involving electronic circuits boards and my factory requires iron plates asap I bite the bullet and handcraft semi-afk ~130 smelting facilities over the course of almost half an hour.
I understand, that i could have just started smelting the iron ore in stone furnaces, but I invested so much time into large scale sorting, trains and calculations. I didn't wanted all that to be in vain. Also all the research was done ages ago and it felt like being lazy to not try the features of the mod. I mean I want to use the complicated smelting stuff, that is the reason I installed the mod after all.
So for the these reasons, I would suggest to change the recipes of the mk1 Induction Furnace and Casting Machine to only require 4 individual ingredients. After all, do they really need steel plates, steel gears and pipes?

But nonetheless, I finished my off-base iron processing array and things got going again for a while. I spent my time on getting my first mining outposts setup, upgrading my mall fixing bottlenecks. In the near future I wanted to start smelting copper the same way I now smelt iron, change my production from iron plates->steel plates to iron ingot->steel ingot and also figure out how to get sulfuric acid for batteries and slag treatment. However, before I was able to turn to any of that, my base came to a grinding halt: Iron plate shiptrainments had stopped and now my base was missing iron everywhere. Of course I was confused, I just hooked up a smelter that should provide me with 6 full belts of iron, way more than I currently use. However, the culprit was my copper consumption. It was apparently too low, copper ore had backed up to the ore sorters and now no more saphirite was sorted. I had to revive my abandoned saphirite smelting lines to produce enough iron plate for the factory to start consuming copper again.
This is maybe the biggest down I felt while playing with Angel's yet. After the huge investment in Angel's smelting everything was in vain and I had to go back to inefficiently smelt crushed saphirite. Now roughly 1/3rd of my iron comes directly from crushed saphirite.
I am reading everywhere on the internet about N to 1 ore sorting, but in the current version this requires Mineral Catalysts, which require Sulfuric Acid but also way more slag and crushed stone than I currently produce. I was about to complain how stupid that is, but as of writing this, I realized what that I just have to setup a mix of N to 1 and 1 to N, so yeah, haha.

Oh man, sometimes you just have to write down your thoughts I guess. Or talking to someone could also help. Man, this game. This mod. I need some sleep.

Nevertheless, I hope my first few points are at least constructive feedback, I may post some more thoughts in the future when I have progressed further.

[MadClown01]

...surplus copper...

Dude, copper firearm magazines and buffer silos

[ukezi]

it's the mods for 0.12+ as in 0.12 and newer. there are no other for that. That is historical from when angel's didn't have the scope it has now.
the greenhouse has the problem that for bob glas is a tier 0 material. for angel you have to get the ore first.
you can get the boards from green and brown alge.
you can make additional slag with dirt water electrolysis. or make the slury from thermal water.

[jodokus31]

So, enough talk about out-game stuff. Now let me tell you about my experience playing angel's+bob's!
I started mining, crushing and smelting saphirite and stiratide to get to red science. I did some early "dirty" bobmonium sorting to get glass for a dozen of greenhouses, as bob's basic circuit boards require a constant supply of wood. This felt incredibly unsatisfying. I am now 30 hours into that savefile and still have not setup real glass smelting, because my power generation is still pre-solar, which is the main use of glass. My suggestions to fix this would be:

• remove glass from the Greenhouse recipe and later add Mk2 Greenhouses that require glass
• remove Sodium Hydroxide and/or Chlor Methane Gas from the cellulose paste recipe, so it is possible to create wood from Green Algea early on

I try to give some tips and opinions from my experiences.

You are able to get wooden board from Green Algae and Brown Algae: Cellulose Fiber + Alginic Acid as an alternative route.
Sodium Hydroxide is really easy: Saline Water from Hydroplant (clarify the purified water). Then electrolize the saline water and flare hydrogen and chlorine. That should give plenty.
I prefer the sodium hydroxide + Cellulose Fiber -> wood plates recipe, because it seems to be more efficient.

For greenhouses, you only need a small amount of glass, which can be obtain from bobmonium sorting. (Or maybe i'm wrong? Didnt use greenhouses for a while) Solar mk1 itself doesnt need glass iirc, only an obscene amount of green circuits (i play with circuit processing mod). Greenhouses make wood really easy in the long run, too easy for my taste.

My next recommendation is also on Green Algea
I then started working on green science, which required Tin and Lead plates, so I setup some bobmonium and rubyte mining, crushing and smelting. I setup steel smelting from iron plates, which basically doubled my saphirite need. I now start running into crushed stone problems. I was already turning it into stone so I created a stone brick smelting area yet I still produced way more crushed stone than I was using up. I started looking into alternatives way to get rid of it, so I naturally discovered Green Algea and the possibility to basically turn crushed stone into fuel (Crushed Stone -> Mineralized Water -> Green Algae -> Cellulose Fiber -> Wood Pellets). I start designing a setup, but realize that for only one yellow belt of cellulose fiber (which translates to 1/6th yellow belt of Wood Pellets) I'd require 20 Algae Farms. The problem here is, that Algea Farms are pretty fucking huge (7x7 tiles, require pipes on two sides, so basically 9x7) so my Algae setup became bigger than the rest of my whole base, while still consuming less than one yellow belt of crushed stone. As of right now I am not even sure if generates more energy than it consumes. I can see, that Green Algae can be used for a few other things later on like Compost or an alternative way for Methanol Gas, but I would be glad if they got buffed a little. I'm okay with the ratios, I am just not okay with the required space and resources for all the algae farms.
So I would recommend either decreasing Green Algae crafting time, increase Algae Farm crafting speed or increase in and outputs of the Green Algea recipe.

Green Algae is huge But, since it runs all the time, it is really efficient in the long run (imho)
Need more crushed stone? You can do Dirty Water Electrolysis, which yields slag, which can be crushed.

Thanks to my new steel smelting line I was consuming saphirite really fast and also my initial stiratide deposit was running low. I thought this was the perfect time to setup some of that ore sorting and start with Angel's smelting instead of the boring stone furnace smelting. I built a huge saphirite sorting facility, able to handle 8 yellow belts of saphirite and yielding 4 iron ore belts, 2 copper ore belts and enough stone (from the slag) for my landfill needs. I wanted to smelt the different ores off-base, so I spent a lot of time tinkering with train stations and tracks. I get pretty hyped about finally being able to start some real pro-level smelting from the long and complicated ratio calculations (I can get 6.02 belts of iron plate from only 4 belts of ore!), so when I finally want to start building I am dumbstruck by a small little detail I had not thought of: The majority of smelting facilities are crafted from five or more individual components, so they have to be crafted by mark 3 assemblers or by hand. As I am still lightyears away from anything involving electronic circuits boards and my factory requires iron plates asap I bite the bullet and handcraft semi-afk ~130 smelting facilities over the course of almost half an hour.
I understand, that i could have just started smelting the iron ore in stone furnaces, but I invested so much time into large scale sorting, trains and calculations. I didn't wanted all that to be in vain. Also all the research was done ages ago and it felt like being lazy to not try the features of the mod. I mean I want to use the complicated smelting stuff, that is the reason I installed the mod after all.
So for the these reasons, I would suggest to change the recipes of the mk1 Induction Furnace and Casting Machine to only require 4 individual ingredients. After all, do they really need steel plates, steel gears and pipes?

The sorting and smelting increases the yield, and you dont need so much buildings (~130) in the beginning. Steel is also far more efficient. I think its ok to need some steel in the beginning before smelting is possible, so the gain is much more visible.

But nonetheless, I finished my off-base iron processing array and things got going again for a while. I spent my time on getting my first mining outposts setup, upgrading my mall fixing bottlenecks. In the near future I wanted to start smelting copper the same way I now smelt iron, change my production from iron plates->steel plates to iron ingot->steel ingot and also figure out how to get sulfuric acid for batteries and slag treatment. However, before I was able to turn to any of that, my base came to a grinding halt: Iron plate shiptrainments had stopped and now my base was missing iron everywhere. Of course I was confused, I just hooked up a smelter that should provide me with 6 full belts of iron, way more than I currently use. However, the culprit was my copper consumption. It was apparently too low, copper ore had backed up to the ore sorters and now no more saphirite was sorted. I had to revive my abandoned saphirite smelting lines to produce enough iron plate for the factory to start consuming copper again.
This is maybe the biggest down I felt while playing with Angel's yet. After the huge investment in Angel's smelting everything was in vain and I had to go back to inefficiently smelt crushed saphirite. Now roughly 1/3rd of my iron comes directly from crushed saphirite.
I am reading everywhere on the internet about N to 1 ore sorting, but in the current version this requires Mineral Catalysts, which require Sulfuric Acid but also way more slag and crushed stone than I currently produce. I was about to complain how stupid that is, but as of writing this, I realized what that I just have to setup a mix of N to 1 and 1 to N, so yeah, haha.

You should take a look into Crushed Ferrous Ore Sorting, which yields iron and manganese. The manganese ingots can be combined with iron ingots to iron plates. This way you are able to produce more iron, without stockpiling copper.
Mineral Catalysts could be obtained also from Dirt Water Electrolysis, if slag is short.

Oh man, sometimes you just have to write down your thoughts I guess. Or talking to someone could also help. Man, this game. This mod. I need some sleep.

Nevertheless, I hope my first few points are at least constructive feedback, I may post some more thoughts in the future when I have progressed further.

Yeah, this modpack can really be consuming

[Zyrconia]

You are able to get wooden board from Green Algae and Brown Algae: Cellulose Fiber + Alginic Acid as an alternative route.
Sodium Hydroxide is really easy: Saline Water from Hydroplant (clarify the purified water). Then electrolize the saline water and flare hydrogen and chlorine. That should give plenty.
I prefer the sodium hydroxide + Cellulose Fiber -> wood plates recipe, because it seems to be more efficient.

Why Green Algae + Brown Algae?

Green + Sodium Hydroxide gives you boards directly. One or two electrolyzers will last you forever.

[Sauerkraut]

Thanks for all your tips, I appreciate your help!

Green + Sodium Hydroxide gives you boards directly

The problem with wood from Saline Water Electrolysis is that it requires Green Science to get rid of the Chlorine and Hydrogen Gas, and at that early point in the game I have no use for either. I guess I was just too overwhelmed with the content of the mods that I did not realize I could rush Green Science to unlock the Flare Stack

Need more crushed stone? You can do Dirty Water Electrolysis, which yields slag, which can be crushed.

Woah!I did not even think about looking for alternatives way to produce slag! I thought it was just a pesky byproduct that I have to get rid of. That is a great tip, thanks a lot!

The manganese ingots can be combined with iron ingots to iron plates

Huh, that is also helpful. However, I setup advanced iron smelting (with coke), so I would currently produce too few manganese ingots

Dude, copper firearm magazines and buffer silos

Well, I already have a full silo and I doubt that I will ever need more, as I want to go for those sweet sweet laser turrets

[jodokus31]

Thanks for all your tips, I appreciate your help!

Green + Sodium Hydroxide gives you boards directly

The problem with wood from Saline Water Electrolysis is that it requires Green Science to get rid of the Chlorine and Hydrogen Gas, and at that early point in the game I have no use for either. I guess I was just too overwhelmed with the content of the mods that I did not realize I could rush Green Science to unlock the Flare Stack

Need more crushed stone? You can do Dirty Water Electrolysis, which yields slag, which can be crushed.

Woah!I did not even think about looking for alternatives way to produce slag! I thought it was just a pesky byproduct that I have to get rid of. That is a great tip, thanks a lot!

The manganese ingots can be combined with iron ingots to iron plates

Huh, that is also helpful. However, I setup advanced iron smelting (with coke), so I would currently produce too few manganese ingots

Dude, copper firearm magazines and buffer silos

Well, I already have a full silo and I doubt that I will ever need more, as I want to go for those sweet sweet laser turrets

I think you could skip wood from green + brown algae, if you chop down enough trees This makes me think, what the point of the whole paper chain. Maybe, in the future, this will be only way to get wood?

Instead of using a flare stack/clarifier, you could also place some pipes (f.e. stone pipes with a big volume), which holds the unused gases/fluids. And then pick them up to destroy the gas once in a while. 10 pipes already hold 2000 units. And fluid handling with storage tanks should only be red science?

with manganese, the excess iron ore should not be a problem, because it can be smelted into steel, which doesnt allow manganese until blue science. Can also be supplemented by saphrite sorting, to get some more and also have a bit of copper.
Steel smelting is very important, because steel from iron plates yields only half. (8 plates -> 1 steel), with smelting (4 iron ingots -> 1 steel ingot).

[Termak]

You can just smelt the "extra" iron as is if you dont have same level manganese smelting, the new splitter options make this super easy.

[Zyrconia]

Well I'm stubborn and gave 1 to N sorting another go.

I'm afraid it is not for me, to say the least.

To reiterate the problem, using saphirite sorting you get a really low an extraordinary unsatisfying trickle of iron and a smaller but completely useless stream of copper. For at least 10-15 hours you constantly produce copper, and have nothing to do with it. I'm talking about warehouses over warehouses of copper. I'm talking about at least 300k iron.

I want iron. Period. I want streams over stream of iron. I want to drown in iron. Iron is the be all end all of Factorio and saphirte sorting is just not good for this goal. With 0.15 you could. With 0.16 you can't.

To make things worse, a single yellow line of crushed saph will not give a line of iron ore. Even with smelting, it is not good enough.

This was not a problem in 0.15. Because you would rush trains and do a single Jivolite train and you would replace your saphirite sorting with iron sorting. Or play without RSO and get Jiv with a bit of luck near your base and belt it.

But in 0.16 you can't do that. You need catalysts for iron sorting. For catalysts you need sulphuric acid. For sulphuric acid you need a relatively late green science, a science that first you must research oil for. Only after that can you build your coke plant that gives you sulphuric acid.

Now Angel's was always a really slow start. Having to research all these techs and building up even more infrastructure pushes the point where you have enough iron back by at least two hours. Two hours in which you are iron starved. I can't play in an iron starved fashion. I'm the kind of Factorio player that even with Angel's has full speed belts automated by 30 minutes. Doubling iron with saphirite sorting won't do, it is just not enough, but if you do, you also increase your already endless stream of copper. Plus you are building a really large temporary solution which will be taken down as soon as the catalysts are flowing.

To reiterate, the problem is that in 0.15 tier 1 ores did not require catalysts, while in 0.16 T1 ores require them.

IMHO 0.16 has crossed the line from a fun logistical challenge into tedium. Last week I was playing 0.15 and had enough iron thanks to iron sorting. Now I'm looking at the output of 8 sorting plants with saphirite sorting, which eat a whole line of crushed saphirite and produce a negligible amount of iron.

With this design, you might as well ignore sorting and smelting, set down 8 lines of direct insertion of crushed saphirite into steel smelters and delay the whole infrastructure building to a later stage where you will be swimming in sulphuric acid by-products or have naturally reached that stage of research and base building. That is the only was to have instant early game big iron.

[ukezi]

you can get acid from lead and nickel. that is red tech. you can do hydro refining and get some acid that way. but I think clean coal should be earlier.

[mrvn]

Theres little point of storing the infinite stuff what you get from air and water (H, N, O, Cl,water) but i do make couple tanks for butane since its yellow science and takes a while since i dont really rush it. Syn/residual is pretty fast to get into since they are just blue science.
Im really loving the farming stuff, i do actually have enough oil/gas around me but i love to try the new stuff, tree arboretums feel bit cheaty though since you can get so easy early plastic from them.

I use arboretums for wood, mostly to run the steam engines and now trains. My map has little coal and where there is more the aliens are squatting. So far I get my plastic using green algae. Also a very easy to build.

[jodokus31]

Now Angel's was always a really slow start. Having to research all these techs and building up even more infrastructure pushes the point where you have enough iron back by at least two hours. Two hours in which you are iron starved. I can't play in an iron starved fashion. I'm the kind of Factorio player that even with Angel's has full speed belts automated by 30 minutes. Doubling iron with saphirite sorting won't do, it is just not enough, but if you do, you also increase your already endless stream of copper. Plus you are building a really large temporary solution which will be taken down as soon as the catalysts are flowing.

To reiterate, the problem is that in 0.15 tier 1 ores did not require catalysts, while in 0.16 T1 ores require them.

IMHO 0.16 has crossed the line from a fun logistical challenge into tedium. Last week I was playing 0.15 and had enough iron thanks to iron sorting. Now I'm looking at the output of 8 sorting plants with saphirite sorting, which eat a whole line of crushed saphirite and produce a negligible amount of iron.

I think, its a question of personal taste. In my opinion, the 0.16 is balanced better, while being a descent amount slower in early game compared to 0.15. Saphirite + Jivolite for pure iron ore always seemed too trivial.
I think, for your playstyle, you could bridge the starvation time by hooking up a big amount of direct saphirite furnaces?

[mrvn]

Now Angel's was always a really slow start. Having to research all these techs and building up even more infrastructure pushes the point where you have enough iron back by at least two hours. Two hours in which you are iron starved. I can't play in an iron starved fashion. I'm the kind of Factorio player that even with Angel's has full speed belts automated by 30 minutes. Doubling iron with saphirite sorting won't do, it is just not enough, but if you do, you also increase your already endless stream of copper. Plus you are building a really large temporary solution which will be taken down as soon as the catalysts are flowing.

To reiterate, the problem is that in 0.15 tier 1 ores did not require catalysts, while in 0.16 T1 ores require them.

IMHO 0.16 has crossed the line from a fun logistical challenge into tedium. Last week I was playing 0.15 and had enough iron thanks to iron sorting. Now I'm looking at the output of 8 sorting plants with saphirite sorting, which eat a whole line of crushed saphirite and produce a negligible amount of iron.

I think, its a question of personal taste. In my opinion, the 0.16 is balanced better, while being a descent amount slower in early game compared to 0.15. Saphirite + Jivolite for pure iron ore always seemed too trivial.
I think, for your playstyle, you could bridge the starvation time by hooking up a big amount of direct saphirite furnaces?

Would it make sense to include some jivolite (and maybe crotinium) in the starting area so one can make ferrous and cupric ores? I'm playing with RSO and both jivolite and crotinium are far away and covered by aliens which makes it hard to scale up pure iron production.

[jodokus31]

Would it make sense to include some jivolite (and maybe crotinium) in the starting area so one can make ferrous and cupric ores? I'm playing with RSO and both jivolite and crotinium are far away and covered by aliens which makes it hard to scale up pure iron production.

Thats a good idea. This would make ferrous ore sorting more viable in early game.

[Zyrconia]

Now Angel's was always a really slow start. Having to research all these techs and building up even more infrastructure pushes the point where you have enough iron back by at least two hours. Two hours in which you are iron starved. I can't play in an iron starved fashion. I'm the kind of Factorio player that even with Angel's has full speed belts automated by 30 minutes. Doubling iron with saphirite sorting won't do, it is just not enough, but if you do, you also increase your already endless stream of copper. Plus you are building a really large temporary solution which will be taken down as soon as the catalysts are flowing.

To reiterate, the problem is that in 0.15 tier 1 ores did not require catalysts, while in 0.16 T1 ores require them.

IMHO 0.16 has crossed the line from a fun logistical challenge into tedium. Last week I was playing 0.15 and had enough iron thanks to iron sorting. Now I'm looking at the output of 8 sorting plants with saphirite sorting, which eat a whole line of crushed saphirite and produce a negligible amount of iron.

I think, its a question of personal taste. In my opinion, the 0.16 is balanced better, while being a descent amount slower in early game compared to 0.15. Saphirite + Jivolite for pure iron ore always seemed too trivial.
I think, for your playstyle, you could bridge the starvation time by hooking up a big amount of direct saphirite furnaces?

Would it make sense to include some jivolite (and maybe crotinium) in the starting area so one can make ferrous and cupric ores? I'm playing with RSO and both jivolite and crotinium are far away and covered by aliens which makes it hard to scale up pure iron production.

Yes, that was the original grand challenge: first get a low but steady production of BEBs and then rush trains and radar or explore until finding Jiv. Sounds simple enough when written down, but was indeed quite the initial hurdle and took many hours.

Then you had a lot of freedom to build up your base and infrastructure the way you wanted, never starved for any resource. Read iron. That is all you need.

This initial hurdle from 0.15 is still there, but this time in 0.16 you have to:
- go though quite a bit of science to get to sulfuric waste water byproduct from coke. Lead smelting is not a good substitute since lead need is near 0. I would rather have a more involved system that produces early sulfuric acid forever than a lead setup that will stop in a couple of minutes and then only sporadically turn on.
- crush slag
- go though the fairly boring but large and massively pipe heavy process of setting up the mineral sludge and catalyst setup. With you initial iron production who has time to wait for pipes, plus I use steel pipes, so more waiting.
- have 3 distance inserters researched and valves and flare stacks.
- in the meantime you can't even easily supercharge your production with MK2 buildings because they require clay bricks, something you really don't have time to set up
- this all on top of the original challenge, that includes BEBs, trains, steel, purified and salt water, 3 coal products and two algae products. And not having resin at this stage because you have no wood, so you either periodically cut down trees or go with early game solder smelting.
- things are so drawn out and large now that even with the largest starting area you can't avoid biters. Another big iron drain for ammo.
- you no longer have Angel's bots in 0.16 for your build everything and building 50 different building types while having to run around the map is kind of tedious. In 0.15 I had a huge array of 81 assemblers and Angel's bots in my build everything. Green science! I know this is temporary, both the bots will return and Angel foreshadowed the industry bit where you will be able to break down buildings into their parts. That sounds like a fantastic idea. I would go with T1 buildings having 2 structural components (or 1 structural and 1 mechanic component) and one circuit one, and each tier adding one structural and one circuit based. Each component should take like 3+ seconds, but assembling a building should take 0.1 seconds. This way you would want to automate the components and not the buildings. One of the components should take iron sticks, so there is more than 2 recipes in the game that uses iron sticks and I don't feel silly for routing iron sticks and stone to the build everything.

All this to get a satisfying amount of iron for early to mid game. And you are still at level 2 molten iron recipes, out of 7 or 8, whatever the maximum is in 0.16.

And this without strand casting, something you really don't have time for and am not able to try because there are so many things to build before.

There is nothing wrong with complexity, but things just don't flow. There needs to be more flow. Reaching early temporary green science and having a check list of 10 things to do ASAP (read hours) to get reasonable iron that don't have anything to do with old school complexities of green science (how you going to feed gray science and red logistics with iron, how you going to set up oil, how will you manage your low need ores in a rhythm that lines up with your research speed, how you going to get white boards) while constantly producing a bit over half a yellow belt of iron while at the same time almost producing constantly a full yellow belt of stone (until you diversify your crushed stone usage) is not particularly fun.

But I do agree with jodokus31: 0.16 is much more balanced. Smelting really helps with fixing iron a bit, you get 12 iron/second with one module. Too bad you can barely feed that with sorting. Bricks are now used everywhere, not just sorting machines, which makes sense both logically and as game design, but I was never fond of bricks. Lime is great. I like lime. Side product ores are much easier to dispose off, except for copper. 1 to N and N to 1 sorting are more balanced.

All this complexity is fine, but the initial pacing of it is not. With all these changes, especially if you go into gardens, will leave you at the 20 hours mark when you can begin blue science in a well designed non-temporary fairly large base. You can probably speed run a temporary base in a lot shorter time span, but I don't do temporary.

Compared to the initial setup cost, is there any comparable complexity left for mid-late game? Mid-late game you have your high need ores settled, your low ores are handled again. I will tell you more when I reach end-game in 0.16. So strand casting and modules, but pretty much everything else you handled early game. Oil is another big step, but once you done it a few times, you realize it is a single "mega module", very blueprintable. Tiny when compared to sorting.

The overall balance is changing with these mods. Now, I like Bob's mods very much and don't mean this an offense, but while most parts of it where really excellent, some parts felt like complexity for the sake of complexity (modules are too complex, nevermind that they are OP; do we need 6 tiers of assemblers? do we need 4 tiers of boilers? how about petitioning the devs to add module support in mods to boilers? the ore list is probably two ores too much. bots? overkill. large area mining? who uses that?). Angel's was the alternative to this: complexity for the sake of interesting builds and challenges. Or build variance: Angel's always had the strength of having multiple solutions with no apparent right answer. Plus each ore could be Smelted in a slightly different way, so your iron setup is different from you aluminium one and that is great. Is Angel's getting into complexity for the sake of complexity? Do we need 3 types of catalysts? Do we need to worry about catalysts in the first 4 hours of the game? How about we worry about catalysts at blue or post blue tech? Do we need all those bricks? Rather than producing all these side products at once and then draining them into bricks, wouldn't it be better to produce them naturally, one by one, in order to get higher yields? First lime. Use your lime setup for hours. Then feel the need to enhance a different resource, so you do that with sand, and so on. Do we need two ways of sorting, 1 to N vs N to 1, which even with 0.16 balancing, N to 1 is endlessly scallable and balanceable while 1 to N is temporarily balanceable without any storage.

Angel's Petrochem was traditionally the "hard" one of the mod pack, but that mostly because of the initial learning curve and designing an oil setup that never locks up, has enough throughput and gets rid of all the byproducts.

But now I believe that Angel's Refining is the most complex one of it and by a large margin. Or more precisely, the whole cross mod problem of setting up pure ores is the most complex part.

I'm really curios how Bob's + Petrochem + Smelting + Bio would play. A more streamlined subset of all these mods, with less building types, less OP modules, about 20% less products overall, no sorting in its current form and Smelting picking up the slack of the module nerf?

Please excuse the rant: after playing so much Factorio, with probably 30% vanilla, 10% Bob's and 60% Angel's, I have a lot of strong feelings about different parts and versions of the mods.

[mrvn]

If you choose a large starting area (like I always do, should try a small one sometime) does that cause crotinium and jivolite to be further away compared to a small aread when using RSO? Or does RSO not care about the starting area size?

For pipes I use stone pipes. Lots of crushed stone to get rid of at the start and stone pipes is an excelent use for it.

Instead of Angels bots I use Bluebuild rewritten. You still have to run around but you don't have to click to build every item. Just blueprint and it gets build as you stand next to it.

I also found that the new filter and priority options for splitters are a huge help. No need to wait for filter inserters and build tons of them before you can sort ores, crushed stone and slag. No need to build the whole crush, sort and smelt factory without belts so every item gets transfered directly to the right sorter, furnace or assembler depending on recipes.

[mrvn]

Would it be possible to register the ores and intermediate products with Deadlocks stacker and crating mods?

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockStacking
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockCrating

Both provide a hook to register items and will generate stacked icons automatically if no better ones are supplied.

[Zyrconia]

If you choose a large starting area (like I always do, should try a small one sometime) does that cause crotinium and jivolite to be further away compared to a small aread when using RSO? Or does RSO not care about the starting area size?

I have no idea. But here is what I do: Angel's bases are big, so by the time you need Jiv, you will probably have 4 radars in the corners. MK2 works best. Upgrade this to a grid of 4x4 radars (you can do only the outer ring) with medium poles connected between and leave them working for a bit. On most maps you will find both Jiv and Crot this way fairly soon. On some maps you may need another ring. Sometimes you find only Crot so you need to expand.

For pipes I use stone pipes. Lots of crushed stone to get rid of at the start and stone pipes is an excelent use for it.

I like steel for the added distance. But stone might be smaller and I read that smaller pipes are better.

Instead of Angels bots I use Bluebuild rewritten. You still have to run around but you don't have to click to build every item. Just blueprint and it gets build as you stand next to it.

I use Nanobots. It is not about building, but logistics.

My 9x9 build everything grid is large enough as it is with Angel's logistic bots. It would be great if early requester chests would be smaller . And a pain to walk though. Maybe balance them by small capacity?

Creating the same build everything with 81 assemblers and belts and undergrounds will be even larger and super inserter heavy.

I also found that the new filter and priority options for splitters are a huge help. No need to wait for filter inserters and build tons of them before you can sort ores, crushed stone and slag. No need to build the whole crush, sort and smelt factory without belts so every item gets transfered directly to the right sorter, furnace or assembler depending on recipes.

Yeah, I did that at first, and is a great way to start off you base, but there are throughput issues. Generally you need one extra building to get a fully saturated line, or at least that was my experience. But if you don't mind the extra building, you can use that and it is a lot easier.

Or you can stagger your inserters and spliters but this only works on larger buildings.

[mrvn]

Radars? Are you insane? Do you know how much iron you need to research and built 4 radars?

For me the problem isn't so much finding the ores. I explored far enough while searching for the new trees and gardens. Problem are the aliens that start at the same distance as the jivolite and crotinium patches. You won't get at them without a fight.