[1.0] Sea Block Pack 0.4.10

[karel_evzen]

Sea block pack 0.2.13 has been released. Check first post for download link.

• Fix sea block adjusted SpaceX fusion reactor recipe not including SpaceX production multiplier.
• Updated bobpower mod rebalances boilers, steam engines, heat exchanges and steam turbines.
• Updated ScienceCostTweakerM adjusts expensive mode recipes.

Awesome, thanks Trainwreck, such a fun pack! Been refreshing this topic daily for no reason other than to grab the latest SBP!

[Trainwreck]

You must have posted that between me checking the page 1 for updates, then clicking this page to see the latest chatter.

What roughly changed in the bobs power balance? I just set up my mk2 reactor stuff >.>

Full details in Bobingabout's post here: viewtopic.php?f=51&t=54612&start=700#p375520
But briefly: The bonus efficiency from higher tier engines and turbines is gone. There's a new T5 boiler with 90% efficiency.
The ideal ratio is always 1 boiler to 2 engines of the same tier. Same for nuclear, 1 heat exchanger to 2 turbines.

[minno]

The improved boiler efficiency is still there. Was there something with the steam engines/turbines too?

[mrvn]

Is it just me playing with trains and wanting nuclear fuel for them?

Nuclear fuel needs the bright green uranium. Sorting uranium ore yields too little (too much dark green uranium) and the only other source is from spend plutonium fuel cells. It's a slow process and I'm simply not using up enough energy to have enough of them. I'm thinking of turning off the steam checking logic and just burn fuel 100% of the time even if not needed just to get enough spend plutonium fuel cells.

Any other solutions?

PS: One problem might be that I use locomotives mk3, which have a rather large fuel capacity. That's a lot of nuclear fuel per locomotive. Any tricks to only load 2 fuels per train?

[BlakeMW]

PS: One problem might be that I use locomotives mk3, which have a rather large fuel capacity. That's a lot of nuclear fuel per locomotive. Any tricks to only load 2 fuels per train?

Put wood (or any other burnable) into the other fuel slots.

[Lastmerlin]

Ok, I have finally completed the Modpack a week ago, after investing 200 hours into it (201 and a few minutes, to be precise), and I will give some sort of feedback. I know that it is in fact a mod collection and I will probably post to the threads of the single mods later, but for now this is the easiest way. I should note, that I had very little experience with bobs/angles (about 10hours and then abandoned) and any of the other mods so far, so I cannot easily distinguish, which part belongs to which mod anyway.

Positive:
If something gets you hooked for 200 hours, it must be good. In fact, this modpack is just awesome. Its like a completely new game. You can get it for free and it contains more content, than most other games overall.
The sheer amount of new recipies is astonishing alone, but the real genius are the many new types of challenges. I especially liked the geodes and the whole petrochem. Difficult, but at the end quite logical. This is, what I call a really well designed puzzle. Playing a map, where all ressources are really infinite helps too, because it allows venting/clarifying without any hesitation.

The early game is often critized as a slow drag, but I liked the pace. For players experienced with the mods, it might be too slow, but for a completely new player, there is so much to discover that you won't get bored. I guess I got a bit lucky, because I had two trees easily accessible and arboretums are the way to scale up quickly. If you want to make it a bit more consistent, you could control the amount of trees in the close (peaceful) area to a fixed value.

I also really liked the fact that you have multiple (4-6) tiers of every building. Many other seems to criticize this. For me, this is a nice way to scale up without refactoring and also an essential way to increase the throughput withouth UPS impact. Ok, for some buildings I did not use every tier, but for some other (boilers, assemblers, chem plants) every tier is a noticable step forward.

Concerning the enemies: I think they do their job well. They force you to build some military and going on the killing tour for a few minutes is in fact a nice diversion from always designing and fixing issues. They are really not diverse, but luckily, the fighting time is a very small part of the overall game time.

Negative:
There are a few issues, that can leave you puzzled: The composter and its recipes, which do not appear anywhere; the few liquids/gases, that can't be clarified/voided; a few recipies, that do not work in the type of assembler as shown (one the recipies on the path to ferrous crystals, forgot which one exactly). But these are minor issues, that you eventually overcome.

The two main things I did not like are:
The end game is too long and slow. It took me 100 hours to get all sciences running at a reasonable rate (something like 20/min) and another 100 hours to finish the game. The first half contains 95% of the new things. SpaceX is nice, but not enough new content to keep 100 hours interesting. It takes so much time, because the endgame scales so much worse than vanilla. I aimed for 500 science/min (rather got 300/min at the end), and the proportions where truly huge. Perhaps building smaller and completing it faster would have been better. Power drain was 15 GW and UPS dropped to 40. In vanilla, my computer can easily run a 3K SPM vanilla base at 60 UPS and comparable size and power demand. Here, 50% of the base are already huge copies of always the same ore generation plants (that drain massivly UPS, because the contain so many pipes). That is both boring and ensures that you are UPS capped before you reach the planned size. My proposals are: Something similar to mining productivity, that allows to cut the need in ore generation by a factor of 2 or 3. And allowing productivity in at a least one science intermediate step (or even all), to get a better scaling of science production in endgame. You just overdid the nerfing to a point, where the science/UPS (the true metric) is much worse than vanilla.

The scaling of fluid mechanic is horrible. When going for megabase, I found that hardly any of my nicely designed builds worked when adding beacons. The reason is always the same: Pipe throughput issues. Essentially, the whole endgame is pipe throughput issues. And they are everywhere, because everything is about liquids. This is 90% of the problems you face and the reason, it took 100 hours for just building the same again with really lots of beacons. They are also the most frustrating problems to solve. All other logistics (belts, bots, inserters etc) have research and multiple tiers to scale by at least a factor five. For pipes you get a dozen different types, there is absolutely no documentation what the difference is, and at the end they all suck (but at an insufficient rate). Ok, the underground distance increases, but for bridging the short gap between two assemblers, they all have the same quality: inadequate. In vanilla, throughput issues happen only for really long chains of machines, but here, often two to four is the limit. For some machines (salination, hydro plant) its a challenge to supply even a single fully beaconed machine. The only solution that really works is sending all fluids to close range with barrels. My proposals: Give a documentation for the xx pipe types, what their advantages and disadvantages are. Try to offer pipes, that really increase throughput. Alternatively, all fluid numbers could be scaled down by 2 or even 5 to fix this issue.

Overall:
It looks a bit sad, if the negative part contains more text than the positive. This is only due to the fact, that I tend to formulate criticism more elaborate and try to offer some proposals for solutions. Overall, this was a fantastic experience. Thanks to everybody who contributed and keep up the work!

[ukezi]

The scaling of fluid mechanic is horrible.

That is more of a base game problem with how fluids work. He didn't touch the fluid mechanics at all, as he can't. The pipes are all the same size an behave the same. they are base bob's content. a reasonable long pipe can carry about 2k/s, what is also a full blue belt of barrels. Pumps are your friend they increase the flow massively . use lots of them.

[Redstylt]

Hey guys i just realize something really annoying ...
Copper ore and iron ore can be able to stack by 50 but all the others ore are stacked by 200...
So it makes a huge trouble of size for warehouse (see pic) because we can stock 4 times less
Could you be able to change on your mod ?

NOTE : I asked the same question to Angel's and someone answered that it can't come from Angel because he's using and he had 200 stack in Angel and Vanilla... So i supposed it come from Sea Block...?
ores.PNG

[NeuralParity]

its a challenge to supply even a single fully beaconed machine

Hmm, it sounds like I'll need to scale up using trains and fluid wagons.

Note that even with the heavy nerfs to beacons and modules, a fully T1+T2+T3 beaconed assembler runs at 2880% and hits the game engine limit of one per tick for any recipe <= 1.5s. I don't see any viable way of feeding that beast except direct pumping from a fluid wagon. I guess the other option is to scale out but that doesn't seem like it'd great for UPS.

[Lastmerlin]

Ok, then I have to correct: I did not even fully beacon anything (which is something like 30 Beacons 3 around one machine I guess), but used the traditional alternating beacon and machine row builds. This leads to a speed boost of something like 700%. Supplying this with pipes is still an absolute pain. If you do something crazy as 2880% boost, you should expect completely new issues, but 700% is not that unusual in vanilla either.

Of course there are solutions, but these only highlight, that something is not well designed. And I am not searching for any hints anymore, I completed the mod pack. I am just describing how my player experience was during the play. It was most of the time very good, but in this particular area it was not. This testimonial wont change by giving (not really surprising) hints like *use pumps* (guess what I already did everywhere).

The huge variety of pipe tier pretends that they provide a considerable improvement. Ok, there is no documentation claiming this (in fact no documentation at all), but this what a player assumes. The tiers of pumps also promise big improvements. Unless you pump between fluid tanks, they all do the same (tested this many times). Together with the fact, that traditional pipe layouts are absolutely inadequate for the late game, this is just a big trap. Of course, you can avoid the trap - once I decided to haul everything close range by bot, these issues were solved. However, I believe that a) it is sad, that the solution is so bland and b) for best player experience you should avoid laying such traps at all.

My proposals: First of all, wait what the promised fluid rewrite brings. If it offers a possibilities to create _really_ better pipes, then do that to make sure that pipes stay a viable solution for beaconed machines. If not, scale all fluids down by 2, this should help as well. Anyway, maybe cut the huge number of pipes and document what they exactly do.

Finally: I dont believe I will play this modpack so soon again. Hence, I am not particularly sad if nothing is changed. I just wanted to offer this feedback for the case somebody likes to hear it.

[mrvn]

The two main things I did not like are:
The end game is too long and slow. It took me 100 hours to get all sciences running at a reasonable rate (something like 20/min) and another 100 hours to finish the game. The first half contains 95% of the new things. SpaceX is nice, but not enough new content to keep 100 hours interesting. It takes so much time, because the endgame scales so much worse than vanilla. I aimed for 500 science/min (rather got 300/min at the end), and the proportions where truly huge. Perhaps building smaller and completing it faster would have been better. Power drain was 15 GW and UPS dropped to 40. In vanilla, my computer can easily run a 3K SPM vanilla base at 60 UPS and comparable size and power demand. Here, 50% of the base are already huge copies of always the same ore generation plants (that drain massivly UPS, because the contain so many pipes). That is both boring and ensures that you are UPS capped before you reach the planned size. My proposals are: Something similar to mining productivity, that allows to cut the need in ore generation by a factor of 2 or 3. And allowing productivity in at a least one science intermediate step (or even all), to get a better scaling of science production in endgame. You just overdid the nerfing to a point, where the science/UPS (the true metric) is much worse than vanilla.

Using beacons you can speed up the washing plants a lot. Make a row of washing plants with one for vicious mud water and 4 for geodes. Then add beacon mk3 around it as many as you can place in range and populate everything with speed modules mk3. Note: You don't need all the beacons for the vicious mud water plant. I think the pipe limits the speed there, which is why you only need 4 plants for geodes instead of 5. Anyway, you get 75 times the output from a normal 1+5 washing setup.

[minno]

My proposals are: Something similar to mining productivity, that allows to cut the need in ore generation by a factor of 2 or 3.

I made a mod that does exactly that: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/seablock-mining

It makes mining drills work like crystallizers, so mining productivity research affects them. I'm not sure if the infinite research cost is low enough to be worth it in this mod pack, but at least levels 1-15 give you about 30% extra ore.

[Lastmerlin]

My proposals are: Something similar to mining productivity, that allows to cut the need in ore generation by a factor of 2 or 3.

I made a mod that does exactly that: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/seablock-mining

It makes mining drills work like crystallizers, so mining productivity research affects them. I'm not sure if the infinite research cost is low enough to be worth it in this mod pack, but at least levels 1-15 give you about 30% extra ore.

Good job! Too sad I already finished it, I would have used it definitely. Perhaps it should be in the default pack or at least advertised as recommended addition.
The realization seems a bit complicated, but I guess its the only way. And complicated is exactly the style of seablock...

Regarding other comments: I can help it, I am rather irritated because the assumption behind these tips seems to be, that I am really incompetent. Like: Use pumps! Use beacons! Do you really think, that anybody who did not figure out what pumps and beacons do, will be able to finish this modpack? Perhaps you could announce this as new challenge: Beat seablock without pumps, beacons and barrelling. There are always masochistic madmen, that are underchallenged by marathon .

[Selvek]

I've got a bit of a problem while running this mod:

All the terrain (land and water) is black! Entities are visible normally - if I place a light, it's visible.

I installed the entire mod pack via the download link, after cleaning my mods folder out completely. I had this problem with all the mods in the pack enabled, so I went through and disabled everything that wasn't a required dependency (P.S. looks like bobplates is required, even though it's not listed as a dependency anywhere). Unfortunately, I have the same result.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[orzelek]

I've got a bit of a problem while running this mod:

All the terrain (land and water) is black! Entities are visible normally - if I place a light, it's visible.

I installed the entire mod pack via the download link, after cleaning my mods folder out completely. I had this problem with all the mods in the pack enabled, so I went through and disabled everything that wasn't a required dependency (P.S. looks like bobplates is required, even though it's not listed as a dependency anywhere). Unfortunately, I have the same result.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It looks like your GPU might be having problems with amount of textures or just driver issues.
Try updating drivers and/or change graphic quality to lower in settings.

[Selvek]

I've got a bit of a problem while running this mod:

All the terrain (land and water) is black! Entities are visible normally - if I place a light, it's visible.

I installed the entire mod pack via the download link, after cleaning my mods folder out completely. I had this problem with all the mods in the pack enabled, so I went through and disabled everything that wasn't a required dependency (P.S. looks like bobplates is required, even though it's not listed as a dependency anywhere). Unfortunately, I have the same result.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ok, it's working now. I played with some graphics settings, which cause the game to fail to load. So I deleted "crop-cache.dat" and did a "Verify Integrity of Game Files" from Steam, which didn't fix the game not loading. So I deleted "config.ini" and overwrote it with a copy of "default_config.ini". And now it works. Yay! Now I can get utterly destroyed by this mod for the RIGHT reasons

[Grize]

Hi,
There whas a update in angels petrochem. But now comes an error by loadinhg the Game with a mesage: File not found __angelspetrochem__/graphics/icons/solid-resin-1.png after reloading i activate the mods one by one and SeaBlock at last. With loading the SeaBlock-mod the error occours again. In development thred of angels it says that trhe error comes from changes that SeaBlock does. Angel has done a rearrangement of the resin recipe.
Could You Please fix the problem? Thank you

[minno]

Hi,
There whas a update in angels petrochem. But now comes an error by loadinhg the Game with a mesage: File not found __angelspetrochem__/graphics/icons/solid-resin-1.png after reloading i activate the mods one by one and SeaBlock at last. With loading the SeaBlock-mod the error occours again. In development thred of angels it says that trhe error comes from changes that SeaBlock does. Angel has done a rearrangement of the resin recipe.
Could You Please fix the problem? Thank you

If an updated mod doesn't work with the pack, go back to the old version. It will be included in one of the next packs, along with whatever updates are needed to make it work.

[Trainwreck]

Sea block pack 0.2.14 has been released. Check first post for download link.

• Update to latest Angel's mods. Includes migration script to spawn new bioprocessing puffer-nests and fish in existing saves.
• Bugfix for Angel's bioprocessing alien artifact creation.

The new bioprocessing production chains are clearly still a work in progress, I don't know how balanced they are or even whether it's possible to craft all items.

On a different topic, anyone playing map which has been migrated from factorio 0.15 to 0.16 will need to explore a large distance to discover new chunks which have a chance of spawning gardens and trees. Running a mod like DeleteEmptyChunks can allow nearby chunks to regenerate for easier access to those resources. I should have mentioned this months ago when 0.16 was released, but only recently realised the issue and solution.

[mrvn]

I tried migrating a 0.2.11 SeaBlock game to 0.2.14 resulting in:

Code: Select all

  45.224 Applying migration: Sea Block: SeaBlock_0.2.14.lua
  47.493 Warning Scenario.cpp:221: Map loading failed during migrations processing: Error while applying migration: Sea Block: SeaBlock_0.2.14.lua

__SeaBlock__/migrations/SeaBlock_0.2.14.lua:23: bad argument #-1 to 'find_entities_filtered' (string expected, got table)
  47.967 Error AppManagerStates.cpp:1304: Error while applying migration: Sea Block: SeaBlock_0.2.14.lua

__SeaBlock__/migrations/SeaBlock_0.2.14.lua:23: bad argument #-1 to 'find_entities_filtered' (string expected, got table)

This requires factorio 0.16.40.