Development and Discussion

[orzelek]

Never use crushed coal is a nice solution unless you have latest bob's installed.
There you have nasty 200% pollution multiplier on coal which makes using it pretty harsh. So it's either crushed coal or go with carbon everywhere.

Uh oh. Crushing coal and then burning it reduces pollution? How long will that last?

I think the original setup was that you have coke pellets or solid fuel for your furnaces and don't want to use the crushed coke as fuel because it's inefficient.

fuel value of crushed coal is equal to value of coal you crush. but of course there is some power consumed during process (inserters, crusher), so it's not lossless. polution is different scale tho. 1 piece crushed coal has 50% of fuel value of coal, eg. lasts only half time when used as fuel (compared to 1 piece of coal)

I've been looking into this mainly due to pollution mod from bob's on coal. It might be worth that extra energy to use less polluting fuel.

[Jackalope_Gaming]

I had some issues with current coke recipe.
While I see why it's in smelters now could you give us an option to move it to assemblers?

Having it in smelters is... dangerous. It leads to few bugs from game appearing like inserters putting crushed coal into fuel slot till full stack instead into input slot. Or the fact that using crushed coal as fuel (bob gave coal very nasty pollution penalty) is pretty dangerous for your smelting areas since when they run out of ore even for short time they will suddenly switch to coke production. And coke chasing on main belts begins after that

Any chance for some revision to this?
It can be super annoying Or did I miss one?

Unsure of any revision stuff, but there are a couple easy ways around it.

1: Never use crushed coal in smelting lines. Coal has a fuel value of 8 MJ while crushed coal has only 4, and since you get 2 crushed coal from 1 coal it's actually a net loss of energy when you take into account needing to use crushers to crush the coal. Since the only two recipes that use crushed coal turn it into coke, there is literally no gameplay reason whatsoever to use crushed coal as fuel except when it's also being turned into coke in a furnace. Even if/when you can use productivity modules, turning it into coke is much better.

2: Use metal mixing furnaces instead. You can select the recipe on them just like assemblers and they'll do only that recipe. Sure, they cost twice as much stone as regular furnaces, but the ability to only use one recipe is well worth it.

chemical or metal mixing furnaces will actually not help with issue orzelek has. since they need fuel too, so they might decide that they need crushed coal as fuel, if their fuel slot is empty.
problem disappears when you are at electric furnace level, since those don't need fuel.

Metal mixing furnaces will only keep 5 of a given fuel at a time though, thus there's no problem because the fuel stack never gets fully filled.

Considering how easy it is to have a combined ore crusher and metal mixing furnace setup (2 crushers to 3 furnaces due to the crushers being 1.5 speed) I'd say there should be no reason to be using crushed coal once you've got Mechanical Refining researched for the ore crusher and Electronics researched for the mixing furnace.

[Cardoyle]

So, to start this post, I'm playing on Seablock, so I acknowledge that I'm living life on hard mode. But...

I've noticed that there is no way to grow additional desert, temperate, or swamp trees once you find one (unlike the gardens).

It is beyond a pain to landfill my way out into the ocean, around the millions of worms, just to get one or two trees, which produces (ignoring beacons) at most 8 seeds every 30 seconds.

Keeping in mind that I have to (very,very eventually) scale up to the production levels necessary for SpaceX, it seems like the trees are basically useless.

Am I missing something?

I dont think you need that many, i to am playing see block and the only use i found for the trees was to make a tree seed generator. 1 tree = 1 tree seed generator of the same type. Each generator can provide enough trees for 8 aboretum's(with blue science research), this generates you just under 7 wood a second. So once you have found 2 trees you have the potential to make a full yellow belt of raw wood

[mrvn]

I haven't updated in a while but I'm running my whole power plant from 8 arboretums producing wood in seablock. Took some time to go out and find the trees but it's way easier than algae farms for power production.

So I think it's find that you can't produce more trees. You don't need that many and if you do then go explore. There are always other ways than trees to produce something so any tree you find is a bonus. Not a necessity.

[EFLFE]

Help please. Where can i get the Crystal Seedling?

[live22morrow]

I think I calculated it to where a 1k spm base takes around 600 arboretums (without modules) to produce the necessary wood for the boards. That's not a totally ridiculous number imo, but there probably should still be a way to get more trees without grinding out the map.

[Jackalope_Gaming]

Help please. Where can i get the Crystal Seedling?

Crystal seedlings are made from processing geodes. The tech is Geode Processing 2 and the recipe takes any of the geodes or crystal dust + sulfuric acid and turns it into crystal slurry, which is then filtered into either crystal seedlings or mineral sludge.

[EFLFE]

Help please. Where can i get the Crystal Seedling?

Crystal seedlings are made from processing geodes. The tech is Geode Processing 2 and the recipe takes any of the geodes or crystal dust + sulfuric acid and turns it into crystal slurry, which is then filtered into either crystal seedlings or mineral sludge.

Tanks!

[SajmonG]

I suggest to make alien goo possible to void. Then you can make Mushredtato processing without filling up chests with alien bacteria.

[jzenirite]

Started playing thought an Angels/Bobs game in .16 and just noticed the Induction Furnace MK1 and Casting Machine MK1 require 5 ingredients, preventing me from automating their production until I get Automation 3. Is it intended to not use the Angels smelting setup until this point? Is there a different assembler machine that is able to craft 5 ingredient machines before that tech? I remember being able to automate these machines in past versions with only Assembler 2s.

[Proculis]

Hey everyone,

I recently started playing with some mods after sticking to vanilla for quite some time. I've always liked the challenge of building and optimizing complex recipe chains, so I really enjoy the huge mess that is a bob's and angel's game Thank you for the neat mods angel!

During my playtime, I noticed a couple of things that seemed a little off for me, or some that could need some balancing imho. They are listed below, including my questions and suggestions
At the end of the post, there is also a dropbox-link (sort of) to the files I used for tinkering. So if tl;dr, you can also just download the files and test my suggestions directly in-game.

Geode washing

The recipe for geode washing predicts 1.5 red and blue geodes per washing cycle. However, my tests show, that only one red and one blue geode is actually produced. According to the code, one geode of each color should be produced with a probability of 1.5. Apparently, probabilities higher than 1 are not correctly evaluated by the game, therefore I suggest producing 3 geodes with a probability of 0.5. This should produce the correct ratio.

Fluoric waste water treatment

Apparently, fluoric waste water treatment no longer produces fluorite ore. Is this working as intended? Because now only sulfuric waste water treatment gives any benefit (sulfur), unless you count the negligible amounts of mineralized/saline water created during the treatment process. Why should I even treat waste water, if I could also just void it?

Advanced waste water treatment recipes

During my first game, and now also in the second play-through, I seem to be drowning in sodium. This was partly due to the salt+sulfuric acid -> sodium sulfate+hydrochloric acid recipe, which could previously be used to create additional sulfur. But also the paper industry produces more sodium carbonate than I can currently use. To combat this, I added some advanced waste water treatment recipes, which use sodium hydroxide/carbonate to neutralize waste water. All waste water neutralization recipes produce the corresponding salt, which can then be recycled. The recipes are designed such that, except for chloric waste water, a net loss of sodium occurs.

Voiding alien goo

Pretty much every fluid I tried to void, can actually be voided one way or the other. However alien goo can neither be voided in the flare stack nor in the clarifier. Additionally, alien bacteria cannot be composted. So unless you use the corresponding bob's mods which use alien artifacts, you will have to resort to shooting chests with alien bacteria when cultivating mushredtatos. As SajmonG mentioned above, this is quite a nuisance.

Desert tree cultivation

This has been mentioned in several threads already, eg. here or here.
According to the progression for the other tree types, advanced desert tree cultivation should produce 4 raw bio-plastic-blobs, however only two are produced, which makes the advanced recipe actually worse than the basic one, considering the effort of producing fertilizer.

Crop farming

I very much like choosing between so many recipes for farming! However, the actual yields between the different crops vary greatly. I think, the differences should not be so pronounced, otherwise players feel punished for not choosing the "best" recipe. I gave the balancing a shot, though this appears to be more difficult than I initially thought. Using a excel spreadsheet (see link at the end of the post), I tried to adapt the recipes to give roughly similar amounts of products. Most notable changes include:
- reduced crafting time for desert crops to make up for the lower yield
- increased the amount of crops per cycle for temperate crops
- greatly increased the amount of leafs produced by the corresponding recipes
- increased the amount of cellulose fibers produced to get closer to the tree farming recipes
- changed energy consumption for all upgraded farms to 150kW
It's probably still not balanced enough, though it goes into the right direction I presume.

What I'm not sure about is the crystal dust. What is the intention for producing crystal dust with plants in the first place? Additional resources from filtering/crystallizing? If so, you are currently better off washing for geodes and crushing them to dust. Or is it just additional logistic effort?

At first, I only wanted to correct some minor bugs or QoL-stuff like the desert tree recipe and voiding alien goo. However, the scripts didn't seem to be very complicated, so I tried to implement my other ideas as well. You can download the modified files and the spreadsheet here.

Anyway, thanks again angel, for spicing up our factory-building

Cheers, Proculis

[ukezi]

the geodes are known. Angel promised a fix in the next update. Whenever that will be. I did a fix for that a while back. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ukezi_fix ... els_geodes

[Arch666Angel]

@geode washing
As ukezi said it will be in the next update

@Fluoric waste water treatment
That is still in, might be that some other mod changes this and/or you are using a combination where fluorite is not added

@Sodium
there are several recipes for burning of sodium, most beneficial might be turning it into hydrazine and using hydrazine as fuel

@alien goo
added composting of alien bacteria and alien spores for the next update

@desert tree
I havent fully decided yet what desert trees will yield in the end so this is not finished yet and might change in the future

@farming
higher plants are supposed to be better but also much rarer, a mushredtato will yield a lot more material per cycle than say a binafran, also some materials like crystal dust are only in higher tier plants

[TheSAguy]

Why is the "Chemical Plant" stronger than the "Advanced Chemical Plant"?

Chemical Plant Craft Speed = 1.75 - Power usage 250KW
Adv. Chemical Plant Craft Speed = 1.5 Power usage 300KW

Thanks.

[aklesey1]

Wow new building from Bio Processing - is that algae with new graphics? Or is it something can relate to the cultivation of small artifacts?

[live22morrow]

While we're on the subject of farming yields, might I suggest that Mushredtato processing is incredibly overpowered compared to filtering alien spores? It seems to have around six times the energy efficiency and requires much less buildings, and that's before considering that farming repays its energy cost 30 times over with pips. This makes the alien spores recipe obsolete long before you even get it, when it's much higher in the tech tree and has a much more complex production chain.

For balance I'd suggest that the alien bacteria yield is massively reduced. Maybe something like 10% (.1) per processing.

[Termak]

Why is the "Chemical Plant" stronger than the "Advanced Chemical Plant"?

Chemical Plant Craft Speed = 1.75 - Power usage 250KW
Adv. Chemical Plant Craft Speed = 1.5 Power usage 300KW

Thanks.

You use advanced one only for the recipes which need over 2 in/outputs.

[Zyrconia]

Exploration Tokens are no longer needed for farming science?

[mrvn]

@desert tree
I havent fully decided yet what desert trees will yield in the end so this is not finished yet and might change in the future

Things hardly grow in a desert so I would expect them to take longer and/or have lower yield. Is that so wrong?

[mrvn]

Why is the "Chemical Plant" stronger than the "Advanced Chemical Plant"?

Chemical Plant Craft Speed = 1.75 - Power usage 250KW
Adv. Chemical Plant Craft Speed = 1.5 Power usage 300KW

Thanks.

The Adv. Chemical Plant is advanced because it can handle more complex recipes, more inputs. Handling that extra complexity cost you speed and power. Simply don't use it where a simple Chemical Plant is sufficient.