Introduce replacement ingredients for recipes

[Lav]

TL;DR

Introduce fallback replacements for recipe ingredients.

What ?

Allow some resources to function as replacements for other resources in game recipes. Like feeding steel into your assembler instead of iron, red circuits instead of green, or metal ore instead of stone.

For more esoteric products (like science packs) might allow even greater variety of possible ingredients while maintaining overall cost (like allowing liquid ingredients for red/green science).

The overall objective is to allow player more freedom with how to design the factory. He might be able to use a plentiful resource, or just one that's available locally, getting around local shortages. Additionally, supply can be simplified (just feed blue circuits to your factory instead of green/red/blue in specific ratios) at the cost of resource expenditure.

Why ?

Right now all Factorio production is that same from game to game. Same blueprints are stamped over and over again, which is getting repetitive. This would hopefully open up some new building strategies and designs.

[Koub]

You can already mod this by adding recipes with the same result but different ingredients.
This is even present in vanilla (kinda) with oil products.

Should it be generalized in vanilla ? I don't think so.

[bobingabout]

I would actually love to have a "This or that" type of recipe in factorio.

Thinking of Terraria, on the big 1.3 update that added the alternate materials, Tin, Lead, Tungsten and Platinum (which made the tree go Copper, Tin, Iron, Lead, Silver, Tungsten, Gold, Platinum), with a few exceptions like the lead anvil (lol), most of the recipes changed to accept either Copper OR Tin, Iron OR Lead, etc.

it would be great if it was possible to do that in factorio. Having 2 recipes that are identical except for 1 ingredient being a different item, but same quantity is... alright, but it does mean that you have to choose the recipe for your specific ingredient, rather than just one recipe that uses any of the options for that ingredient.


And while we're talking about a "This or That", it would be good if you could expand on some other things. The ability for a "This or That" on the technology tree. EG, a Roboport MK2 research that requires Logistic robots OR Construction robots, rather than picking one up front or requiring both.

[Hedning1390]

First of all recipes are super easy to mod, but more importantly what's the point? Resources are balanced for a specific chain. There aren't that many intermediates, so wouldn't one of the recipes just be always better?

In Terraria those ores were reskins, along with crimson/corruption, to make each new world feel different from the one before. It doesn't make that much sense for factorio unless spawning on a world with lead instead of iron actually changes the layout of some production lines.

[bobingabout]

First of all recipes are super easy to mod, but more importantly what's the point? Resources are balanced for a specific chain. There aren't that many intermediates, so wouldn't one of the recipes just be always better?

In Terraria those ores were reskins, along with crimson/corruption, to make each new world feel different from the one before. It doesn't make that much sense for factorio unless spawning on a world with lead instead of iron actually changes the layout of some production lines.

There were a bit more than just reskins, if you look at armor and weapons for example, it was very clearly tiered to be a plus half tier from the original version, so stats on Tin armor were slightly better than Copper armor, so Tin armor was like, Tier 1.5 rather than Tier 1.

And I have been in situations where I've added in a second recipe for an alternate intermediate on several occasions, such as anything using Synthetic wood for example. I really wanted a method to set that one single recipe to use wood OR synthetic wood. I wanted synthetic wood to only be allowed to be used in certain recipes, not anything that requires wood, because it is effectively plastic. Unfortunately I ended up using two recipes instead, which brought about no end of problems down the road to the point where I eventually removed synthetic wood as an item. Now the "Synthetic wood" recipe just makes the wood item which can be used in anything.