Development and Discussion

[jodokus31]

This should be fixed with next Factorio base game release 0.17.26
-> viewtopic.php?f=11&t=67857

[mrvn]

They broke 0.17.25. Go back to 0.17.24 and wait for 0.17.26.

[Alyssa]

Something that really annoyed me....

I just spent like 30 minutes trying to figure out where the heck to get Natural Gas Liquids only to discover that the mod inconsistently calls it Natural Gas Liquids in one instance and NGL in another, so I had no frigging idea that these were the same thing.





Please use the same name for the same items, either call em both NGL or Natural Gas Liquids, this mod is already complicated as it is without adding things like this.

[mrvn]

The fluid is called ngl, the translation is Natural Gas Liquids. Search only works on the internal name while shown is ever only the translation.

Big problem imho and NGL is just one thing where this goes wrong.

[Alyssa]

So it's an english translation error?

[mrvn]

Not just. Search ignores the local completely no matter which one you use. I just wanted to point out that with "ngs" you find that recipe because fluid=ngs] is one of the parts. Not because the text contains NGS.

[Alyssa]

Wow that's even a bigger problem then, you mean if I use Factorio in another language (like German) I can't search anything unless I use the internal name (which is in english) ?

[jodokus31]

What really helped me are mods like:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FNEI
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/multi-pro ... pe-details
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/helmod
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/what-is-i ... y-used-for (alternative for FNEI)

It does not address the issue directly, but you are able to go visually through the recipe chains and get more infos overall

There is also an option in 0.17 factorio settings: Settings -> Interface -> Fuzzy search (More lenient matching for GUI searches)
But honestly, I don't know, what it does exactly. Maybe it considers also locale translations?

[Alyssa]

I used "what it is used for" (the last one you linked), it's the one that made me discover that NGL was Natural Gas Liquids.

In fact, if I search Natural Gas Liquids there(just Natural since Natural gas liquids returns no results whatsoever):


The "natural gas" recipe is linked to Gas Well which is not even a recipe and doesn't bring me anywhere.

But if I search NGL it returns:


It should have returned the same result with the natural gas liquids research... that's why this was extra confusing, and that's why I think this issue should be addressed(image if this happened with 10 more or 100 more items).

[Aubog007]

I use FNEI for mods, since it has options for both searches.



and



Also this explains why I have difficulty searching for Ore.

[Termak]

Why Natural Gas fields have 5-20*yields of similar Oil fields also Thermal Water fissures have much bigger yields than Oil at similar distances. All with default settings, and if i use RSO (which i love) Natural Gas fields have 100*yields compared to Oil.
Is it just display error or what is going on. Latest versions on all mods/game.

Also are we getting energy- and pollutionvalues to the burnables like Bob has ?

[orzelek]

Why Natural Gas fields have 5-20*yields of similar Oil fields also Thermal Water fissures have much bigger yields than Oil at similar distances. All with default settings, and if i use RSO (which i love) Natural Gas fields have 100*yields compared to Oil.
Is it just display error or what is going on. Latest versions on all mods/game.

Also are we getting energy- and pollutionvalues to the burnables like Bob has ?

If there is a significant disconnect from normal gen and RSO it might be that RSO needs an update.
It depends on what are the target values for Angel for those resources. Since RSO has it's own generation numbers values might be different since they come from different sources.
Angel needs to decide what resource ratios should be and one of us will update the RSO config to match.

[Termak]

As i said without RSO its 5-20* amounts on natural gas fields compared to multiphased oil. Like 500%-2000% oilfields vs 5000%-50000% gasfields closeish spawn.
With RSO the oilfields stay similar amounts but gas just jumps to 100.000%-1.000.000% ranges. All my settings should be pretty much on default.
This massive discrepancy of fluid yields just keeps irritating my OCD so i cannot start game. I know there has been talk about resource system changes on Angel stuff but why the oil is so low if gas is so high, isnt it basically same "stuff" just in different form.

[septemberWaves]

isnt it basically same "stuff" just in different form.

Oil and natural gas are not the same substance. Both are primarily composed of molecules classed as hydrocarbons, and both are major inputs for petrochemical processes, but they are not the same substance in different states. Natural gas is typically composed of short-chain hydrocarbons (mostly methane), while oil contains more long-chain hydrocarbons (which are all "tangled" together on a molecular level, hence why crude oil is liquid even though the separated fractions can be liquid, solid, or gas). And, in anticipation of further questions on the matter, coal is not exactly comparable to oil or natural gas; it is perhaps better thought of as a carbon ore, which yields carbon if you remove the impurities (or can yield hydrocarbons with the introduction of hydrogen and certain reaction chamber conditions).

Angel's mods represent the difference rather well in terms of what chemicals you can obtain from the different hydrocarbon sources. Refining natural gas provides methane, ethane, and butane (the first three hydrocarbons), refining crude oil provides several liquid fractions as well as a solid fraction, and coal can only be turned into hydrocarbons using special processes. As for why natural gas wells may provide more gas by default (even without RSO), my best guess is that it is an attempt to represent the difference in density between oil and natural gas. Either that, or it could just be a bug where a number was input incorrectly.

[Termak]

Thank you for "explanation". My bad shouldnt have used funny term.
The number difference is definitely bug / unintended feature.

What i meant with "stuff" was "liquid resource" which should most likely be similar yields since it used to be roughly same before, and is used in same amounts ingame roughly.

[septemberWaves]

Whether oil and natural gas are used roughly the same amounts in-game partly depends on your factory. If the change is intentional (at least with default settings; I can see no reason for the enormous discrepancy in the RSO values), perhaps it is intended to encourage players to use Bio Processing as a secondary of fuel oil and base mineral oil, to account for the lower available amounts of crude oil; and naphtha can be alternatively obtained from coal cracking (if I remember correctly), which is a process that otherwise may not see much use. Of course, that is all still based on the assumption that the default higher gas values are not a bug, which they probably are.

[otakushowboat]

Okay, I might be blind and missing something obvious, but this seems a little bit strange to me.

So Bob recently changed the basic steel smelting to require oxygen by default in new games. Now, at least with Angel's mods, steel production-related tech starts with the basic yellow science only. While this is a Bob's change, I'm posting this here because I believe it to be a balancing issue with changes to chemical production and elimination methods in Angel's mods.

So here's what I've been having some trouble with on my streams lately: Trying to figure out how to actually get oxygen production to make steel without first having access to steel and red science. The method I first thought of was to use an electrolyzer to make Oxygen and Hydrogen from regular water. We can convert slag to something useable, but nothing seems to use hydrogen at this point in the game. Storage for it requires steel. Flare stacks are red science and require steel and BEBs. Clarifiers also require steel and BEBs. Chemical plants also require steel and BEBs.

So, it appears to me that the only method to kick off steel production is to put down pipes on the hydrogen line, delete them when they're full, and put them down again. I mean, even if I made the small inline tank, I would have to do the same thing with the tank. At least I can get a non-zero amount of steel while I work on getting BEB production going so that I can finally get a flare stack.

But then, you know, it really does bother me that steel is a yellow science tech, yet now I feel like I "need" red science tech to actually make it without manual intervention. And if I have red science, I will have access to metallurgy, making the process near enough a moot point, because if I'm automating oxygen, I may as well only use the chemical furnaces to make the absolute minimum amount of steel necessary manually with that pipe exploit to make the metallurgy buildings for Angel's steel production.

So, am I missing something quite obvious? Do we just have to change that setting to be off now in the map startup settings while we wait for some balancing change? Is there actually a way of getting oxygen without being exploitative with pipes or tanks to clear hydrogen prior to getting BEBs and a non-zero amount of steel for flare stacks? Once the transition to Angel's metallurgy techs is made, this issue becomes moot. It just really bugs me at the moment.

[MageKing17]

TBH, even before Bob made that change, I ran into the same problem because, in order to avoid the 8:1 ratio, I skipped straight to using metallurgy to get steel and had to do exactly that: plop down a bunch of pipes and then pick them up to dispose of Hydrogen. Still, maybe it would make sense for... Metallurgy? Refining? Whichever mod would be most appropriate to change the default value of that setting to "false" (I'm pretty sure mods can change the default values of settings of mods they're dependent on... even if I have no idea how, exactly, you'd do that).

[randomdude]

Angel, don't know if this has been already asked/mentioned, but I didn't see any line stating the change from 1:4 wood-fiber to 2:4 wood fiber, which basically halves the power output of things like arboretums. Is that right?

[IanRaven]

Hi Angel,

I have a "few" questions:

1. Doesn't it make more sense to have the hybrid catalyst made in an assembler than in a crystallizer? I mean the mineral and crystal catalysts are already crystallized, they just need be assembled together into an hybrid catalyst, not to mention the unused fluid input on the crystallizer when making the the hybrid catalyst.
Another idea would be to use some fluid (for example pure water) on the crystallizer together with the mineral and crystal catalysts, to dissolve the input catalysts and recrystallize into the hybrid catalyst.

2. Another question is if you have any hogger eta and teases?

3. Have you though down the line to be able to use the biters as an army as in the Robot Army mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/robotarmy or as in the Total Automization https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Total_Automization, Unit Control https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Unit_Control mods?

4. And finally, will we some day have a use for the alien goo?

Thank you for your hard work and amazing mods.