[MOD 0.16] Stone Age (alpha)

[BuilderOfAges]

Name: Stone Age
Version: 0.0.1 (alpha 1)
Factorio-Version: 0.16
Description: You arrive in this alien world with only your hands and your wits. Now you have to figure out how to smelt metal.
Dependencies: base
Contributors: BuilderOfAges
Download: https://github.com/StoneAgeFactorio/Sto ... o/releases

This Factorio mod introduces a new "Stone Age" stage before the burner / electricity stage. It doesn't lock any technology, and there is no additional research. It's just that you start the game without any materials, and you need specific tools to mine resources. So the only way to get that sweet, sweet iron axe and progress to the "iron age", is to make increasingly complex tools that let you mine more and more materials. This provides a good fifteen minutes of extra content before you progress to burner miners.

Alpha release (looking for testers)

I've just finished an alpha version that showcases the gameplay. It has a lot of placeholder graphics and sounds that will eventually need to be replaced with original content. It will also need some play-testing before I release it into the wild. I'd welcome any feedback here, or at https://github.com/StoneAgeFactorio/Sto ... o/issues/4.

[BuilderOfAges]

Tips

• Stone Age Factorio is centered around tool use. Which tool you currently have equiped determines what resources you can mine, and what those resources yield.

• Your goal is building an iron axe: that will let you mine every ore, rocks, etc..

• Some of the game mechanics are somewhat different from how Factorio usually works. Keep an eye on item descriptions.

• You can't use items in your equipment slot as ingredients. Take them out temporarily to craft.

• Once you clear the Stone Age, keep a backup iron axe in a chest in case your current axe wears out and you don't have the materials to make another one.

• Stone Age technology breaks easily: always make more than one so you don't have to start from scratch if something wears out.

• Many of the items you make out of wood can be burned as fuel once you're done with them.

[BuilderOfAges]

Version 0.0.2 released.

Major changes

• The endgoal of the Stone Age is now to make an iron axe, rather than a copper
  axe. Typically the first thing I'd use a copper axe for was making an iron
  axe, so that didn't make much sense. Instead, you now need copper to make a
  copper hammer (see below).

• Achievements have been added! For now there's two: Conqueror of the Stone Age
  and Warrior of the Stone Age. I'll leave you to explore how to get them.

• The spawning of clay and sand patches has been overhauled: they now appear
  clumped together rather than spread out throughout the starting area. The
  graphics of the patches have been tinted so that they stand out clearly: no
  more looking for "special" sand patches in the desert.

• Hammering has been added as a mechanic. Smelting magnetite flakes produces an
  iron bloom that has to be hammered on an anvil before turning into crude iron. To hammer a bloom, place it in an anvil, hover over the anvil, and press "H".
  The key for hammering can be changed through settings.

• Digging has been added. If you have a stone shovel in your hand and you press
  "Z" for "drop item" (can be changed in settings), a mixing pit is dug at the
  location your hand was over (provided it is within your range).

• The water for making clay now has to be hand-carried in containers (the mixing
  pit doesn't have a fluid connection anymore). The containers don't stack well,
  so you can't craft a ton of containers and get it all done at once. There's a
  wood container, which you'll have to use at first, and a clay container that
  holds more water.

• Expensive recipe mode is now supported. If you love the grind, try it!

Minor changes

• The code for updating the world after a tool switch has been optimized to
  prevent lag (mostly).

• The item descriptions have been changed to explain the uses of each item in
  more detail.

• The items have been resorted into four rows, based on where they fit in a
  typical playthrough.

• Fixed a bug where a player with a wood stick could explore a new chunk and get
  raw wood from trees rather than sticks.

• Fixed a bug where a player with a wood stick could get raw wood from trees,
  rather than sticks, after saving and reloading the game.

• Burner miners and inserters, boilers, and furnaces can now burn any leftover
  charcoal you have at the end of your playthrough.

• You can now mine vanilla stone with a stone axe, in case you have time on your
  hands and want to get a head start on making furnaces.

• A custom graphic for wood pipes has been added, courtesy of
  darkfrei over at Factorio Forums.

Tweaks

• The yield of the charcoal pile and the efficiency and speed of the kiln have
  been carefully tweaked so that you need at least two batches of charcoal for
  a typical playthrough, three for expensive recipe mode.

• The durability of stone tools has been increased so they don't wear out even
  when playing in expensive mode, provided you're careful about what you mine.

• The yield of vines from trees has been increased, since you need a ton.

• The probability of rocks breaking during knapping has been decreased, because
  watching the same craft over and over gets boring. For the same reason, the
  number of knapped rocks needed for all recipes has been lowered.

• The smelting ratio of ore to crude metal has been changed from 2:1 to 1:1 to
  make it easier to see how much you need to mine. The amounts have been
  increased to compensate.

Known issues

• The wood reservoir and mixing pit aren't supposed to require fuel, but
  Factorio doesn't currently support unpowered buildings.
  This will be fixed in 0.17

[featherwinglove]

The hand axe has been removed from 0.17 according to FFF#266, and there is little hope of ever getting it back even to the point of being able to mod it back in. The devs have not defended the change to the satisfaction of any of their critics, and some of what they've said is quite thoroughly insane (e.g. check out Bilka's proposal for a direct circular dependency.)

I would rather have the minor problem of throwing a stick into the fuel box of the reservoir and mixing pit than not have hand tools while this mod is installed. I propose delaying support for 0.17 and concentrating on finishing the mod in 0.16. To get back on topic, I have a few suggestions/nitpicks with 0.0.2, no major complaints:

- Sand is hard to see in the desert biome and there isn't enough of it. For my first game, if I built a second fire pit before my kiln, I was screwed (I actually had to pull the MEX string and start over.) You got the shovel to spawn a mixing pit, so I'd recommend having the basket spawn a sand patch if you try to drop it on anything but grass or water (I actually attempted that.) A similar mechanism could be used to spawn clay using the stone axe.

- I like the yield progression with the tools, and I think I think tweaking the iron or steel axe to continue this progression into the early vanilla phase would be a great change.

- I like to play with Mountains (now Cross Mod), so code which turns any stone dropped from an entity break into jagged rock rather than stone, in lieu of not being able to mine large rocks at all, would be welcome if the tool is at a lower level than a stone axe. (I haven't used Cross Mod yet, but Mountains used different entities with the same sprites, and if you haven't anticipated this, I would expect them to break like normal rocks do without a tool. I'm planning to install this mod soon.)

- Please make a Stone Age recipe tab instead of putting everything vanilla intermediate.

- I think the mixing pit should be 2x2 in size; 3x3 seems huge.

A while ago, I thought of how I might do a mod similar to this one, and I had this kind of progression in mind:

- The only hand craftable item is the chopping block, made from raw wood. For the fuel box, I was thinking just now to give fish a fuel value and make that the only valid item for the fuel box; this would emulate food energy expended by the player character(s). (My rescue goldfish Goldie died two hours ago ) This could be a good idea for the reservoir, mixing pit, and anvil.

- After making the chopping block, it could make wood (plank) and sticks, which would be used to make the larger and more capable crafting bench. My idea wasn't to disable vanilla hand mining without tools, which means raw ores and stone would be accessible, although I'd probably disable tool-less mining of iron and copper. Stone and sticks would go into a stone axe which would be able to mine iron and copper. I like the "new" progression a bit better up to this point.

- Pre-vanilla research lab would be made from a generous amount of stone brick (probably 20), raw wood, iron ore, and copper ore; it would be a burner lab using 150kW. Research Pack Zero would consist of a wooden plank and copper cable. Pre-vanilla research projects would be Primitive Tools (copper axe), Primitive Logistics (wooden inserter, which is slower but less fuel energy per transfer than a burner inserter, the vanilla burner inserter, and a wooden conveyor half as fast as the vanilla first tier - there's a mod for that in 0.14.) Primitive Mining would unlock a primitive mining drill, which would be a 3x3 machine mining a 1x1 area in the middle of it and be powered by a built-in wind turbine; it would be made from wood planks and bronze gears - the latter would be made from only copper plate in vanilla, and bronze plate in Bob's. Bob's Alloy Smelting (with the five brick metal mixing furnace whose recipe must be set) would be backed up into the primitive era and use SP0 instead of SP1; this is necessary to make bronze available. Primitive Automation would unlock a burner assembler similar to that in No Hand Crafting and the 0.12-era Mojo Resource Processing, use bronze gears instead of iron, and take any fuel, not just fish. This is enough to get a zero tier automated research setup running except that the player would still need to put wood into a wooden plank machine.

- Vanilla capabilities would begin with Basic Smelting for iron ore, Basic Tools for the iron axe (and a new bronze axe if Bob's; it would be as strong as, but less durable than, the iron axe.) Basic Logistics would unlock first tier conveyor and electric inserter. Basic Electronics would unlock the vanilla green circuit (basic circuit board if Bob's), Steam Power would unlock the boiler, steam engine, offshore pump, small power pole, and, if KS-Power, the burner generator and wind turbine. Basic Drilling would unlock the vanilla burner drill, and Basic Mining (requiring Basic Electronics) would unlock the vanilla electric mining drill. Basic Science would unlock the vanilla lab, SP1 and SP2, and mark the transition to the vanilla early game.

The combination of Bob's alloy furnace being pulled back into the primitive era allows construction of a pre-vanilla fully automated Hard Crafting back end because the alloy furnace sets a recipe, and that sets filters on any inserters leading to it. It would be painfully slow automation, but that might be preferable to fast manual work in a lot of circumstances.

[featherwinglove]

I've had a couple of observations that may indicate bugs:

1. I'm able to break Cross Mod mountains right when the game starts, but not after getting my first stick. I prefer it behaving this way because if I can't break mountains, the essential ores (stone, iron, copper) may become inaccessible at the start of the game. The in-character excuse is that we have a piece of wreckage from the lander pod which gets discarded so we can carry wood (I'll just tuck the accumulating stack of raw stone under the lamp shade.)

2. When the inventory was full (I loaded up with inventory expansion research and equipment for later, then pulled it all the way back to 10 slots for the early game), vanilla copper ore started dropping on the ground while I collected the malachite in the inventory. If there's a mod interfering with this, it could be Hard Crafting, and I wouldn't worry about it if it's not happening with just Stone Age installed.

[BuilderOfAges]

- Sand is hard to see in the desert biome and there isn't enough of it.

I've since removed sand entirely.

- I like to play with Mountains (now Cross Mod), so code which turns any stone dropped from an entity break into jagged rock rather than stone, in lieu of not being able to mine large rocks at all, would be welcome if the tool is at a lower level than a stone axe.

I'll put Cross Mod in the list of mods to check for compatibility, but I want to finish the mod as a stand-alone first before I begin work on compatibility with other mods.

- I think the mixing pit should be 2x2 in size; 3x3 seems huge.

Good idea.

A while ago, I thought of how I might do a mod similar to this one, and I had this kind of progression in mind:

I can tell you've put a lot of thought into it, and I'd love to see it realised someday. For Stone Age, I'm very happy with no research, and I'm not planning on changing that.

When the inventory was full (I loaded up with inventory expansion research and equipment for later, then pulled it all the way back to 10 slots for the early game), vanilla copper ore started dropping on the ground while I collected the malachite in the inventory.

Yeah, that's because I can only intercept an event after the mining is done. Probably in that case the events work differently. Some things are going to improve with 0.17, I'll try out a full inventory and see if I can fix that case.

I propose delaying support for 0.17 and concentrating on finishing the mod in 0.16.

I'm not going to put time into the mod right now, and I expect by the time I want to develop the mod further 0.17 will at least be out. Hopefully I can then adapt the mod for 0.17 while staying backwards compatible.

Thanks for the feedback!

[featherwinglove]

I've since removed sand entirely.

I just bumped its drop up to 2.

- I like to play with Mountains (now Cross Mod), so code which turns any stone dropped from an entity break into jagged rock rather than stone, in lieu of not being able to mine large rocks at all, would be welcome if the tool is at a lower level than a stone axe.

I'll put Cross Mod in the list of mods to check for compatibility, but I want to finish the mod as a stand-alone first before I begin work on compatibility with other mods.

I thought there might be a generic method of checking, something like, in pseudo code:

On entity breaking with a hardened stick:
-If what we're mining drops stone
--drop one jagged rock instead
--put the entity back

That kind of method should also cover Alien Biomes, and anything else which adds some other big rocks.

[BuilderOfAges]

See https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/eve ... ned_entity