The design idea was simple: My current factorissimo layout can hold 405 electric furnaces in a 12-beacon setup. This is a standard blueprint I use and like. The problem is, in my games, I hit a point where I had so many smelters that they were a significant UPS drain. So, I decided to look for a mod to fix it, and all the mods I found tried to make production more efficient (produce stuff out of thin air) or required fluids (which goes against the idea of saving UPS). Thus, I made my own mod.
It does exactly what it says. It takes in 405 ore, and produces 405 plate. It has 2 module slots, just like a single furnace would. The speed of the furnace is scaled down to account for the fact that you can surround it with 76 beacons instead of 12. Why is the building so large? Well, first, it makes sense for it to be large. Second, you need that much room for the kovarex process. If I didn't support kovarex as well, the building could be 38x38 instead of 50x50. But kovarex needs many more stack inserters than normal smelting, so the building got Thicc.
The kovarex process / uranium refining work the same way. They take in 405x the normal input and produce 405x the normal output. Pollution and electrical usage is scaled to match what 405 buildings in the setup I use would consume.
In case it isn't clear, this mod is NOT a throughput upgrade. 405 smelters produce 122k iron plate / minute. This building, fully beaconed, will also produce 122k iron plate/minute. The ONLY thing this mod does is save you 405 smelting buildings, ~1900 beacons, and a few hundred inserts/logistics chests.
To balance the recipes, I have the recipe consume the items you'd normally use to layout such a building (minus the beacons themselves, mostly because I was already at 6 inputs and didn't feel like requiring intermediate products to make the final result.)
Errata / stuff I'd like to fix:
- Make the recipe icon bigger. I can't figure out a way to do it
- There's either a bug with the electric furnace or some variable I don't understand, but I have to make it run 10% faster than it should need to in order for it to produce 122k/min. If anyone can tell me why, I'd love to know if I missed something, or if it's a bug.
- Better icons/art. I have the artistic skill of a dead fish. I spent 1 day making the smelters/recipes. I spent 4 days getting the (factorio default!) art assets to be the correct size and position to not look (so) stupid. >.< I'm REALLY bad at anything graphical.