Development and Discussion

[evandy]

[..]I would consider swapping around to follow the standard:

(Gray) —> yellow —> red —> blue —> purple —> green.

It seems really jarring to have yellow at the highest tier.

+1

(And back to lurking.)

That's something bob is doing indeed, angel still only does its tiers based on base game (adding orange in the middle). I can swap graphics over depending on bob settings, but I'm not doing it for now since it affects more than only the circuit graphics.

I must just be used to playing with ShinyAngelGFX too much, which adjusts everything to follow the "normal" color progression.

I guess your view of the "base game" progression depends on whether you focus on Belts or Assemblers, though I thought most things had settled on the belt topology with Yellow at the low tier.

[BlueMarkers]

Hey all, I apologize if I'm way behind on development because I've taken a short break and am just coming back.

Has there been a recent change with regards to module production? It looks like all forms of modules now require "Crystal Shards" of some sort, which at this point are only possible to produce through the biter cultivation process. Is this intended, or should there be other methods of module production that do not require bio-processing?

This is intended, but it just released in 0.18, so it might need some balancing or small tweaks for ratios, I am open for feedback on that. The design criteria were to allow production of 1 shard without having other shards as byproduct, and not holding up your game due to insufficient access to materials. Angel mentioned something about using them as 'special modules' for labs only as well, but there is nothing concrete there yet.

I've always viewed the bio-processing as an optional add on giving you an alternative way to produce certain materials, so it seems a bit out of place to me (at least with the current state of bio-processing) to force the player to go down the biter breeding path. I'm open to new designs, but especially given the nature of these modes (million different ways to craft something), being locked into bio-processing doesn't seem right. I'd personally prefer to see a few different ways to make the modules, with bio-processing adding some additional diversity to the mix.

[lovely_santa]

Another piece of feedback. Please let me know if these are not useful, I'll stop.

I'm currently researching specialist labs and this can only be done in the tech archive apparently. You get one tech archive at start and cannot craft others. FNEI doesn't tell me anything about its crafting or usage.
This tech require 64 gray and red analyzers on normal and each round takes 60 seconds. This is 1 hour of research that cannot be reduced by building more labs.
I'm playing with 10x science multiplier so this tech will take over 10 hours.

That does not seem balanced. It should be possible to scale up research by building more lab buildings. The game would otherwise be just a boring slog.

Angels idea is to have only 1 archive, we plan on adding the crashed ship to the starting area, by salvaging parts from the crashed ship, you should be able to craft 1 (and 1 only) tech archive. Also a quotes from angel:

Lovely: Should the lab archive be craftable?
Angel: As of the original idea: no. Either have it in inventory or be a thing lootable from the crushed ship.
Lovely: What if the lab gets destroyed?
Angel: Bad luck

I plan on adding some very expensive, crazy speed modules, that can only be put into the archive to speed it up. I was thinking double speed at every science pack, so base speed of 1, speed of 2 for red science, speed of 4 at green science, speed of 8 for orange, 16 for blue, 32 for yellow. There would be no point in adding 64 speed for space science, as you won't use that lab then anyway.

I am still debating on how to make that speed module, I have 2 options, craft a new tier of archive lab with a higher base research speed, or add a module to insert into the lab. With a higher base research speed, the regular speed modules and research speed will have a higher impact as well, so I might lean to that.

The lab is affected by lab research speed, allowing you to have a +250% research increase. Having a base speed of 32 will result in a research speed of 112, which will simulate 112 labs, which should be plenty for those (few) researches done in that lab.

I just noticed that chrome plates may not be enabled by angels smelting, depending on which other mods are loaded.
Can I add something like:

Code: Select all

angelsmods.trigger.smelting_products["chrome"].plate = true

to my mods (CircuitProcessing uses chrome plates) and expect it to keep working for future updates?

Yes, add that line of code in the data stage, and angel will make chrome plates available in the data update stage (assuming there are no bugs with the logic). Keep in mind, angels mods only support ENABLING more resources, so do not disable stuff that is already enabled (even if you enabled it before).

[..]I would consider swapping around to follow the standard:

(Gray) —> yellow —> red —> blue —> purple —> green.

It seems really jarring to have yellow at the highest tier.

+1

(And back to lurking.)

That's something bob is doing indeed, angel still only does its tiers based on base game (adding orange in the middle). I can swap graphics over depending on bob settings, but I'm not doing it for now since it affects more than only the circuit graphics.

I must just be used to playing with ShinyAngelGFX too much, which adjusts everything to follow the "normal" color progression.

I guess your view of the "base game" progression depends on whether you focus on Belts or Assemblers, though I thought most things had settled on the belt topology with Yellow at the low tier.

I was refering to angels circuits following angels colors of science packs, which follows vanillas science pack colors. The ones between brackets are the ones angel is adding:

(grey) -> red -> green -> (orange) -> blue -> yellow -> white

Note that there is no purple and military science anymore (it's somewhere hidden in the data cores).

Hey all, I apologize if I'm way behind on development because I've taken a short break and am just coming back.

Has there been a recent change with regards to module production? It looks like all forms of modules now require "Crystal Shards" of some sort, which at this point are only possible to produce through the biter cultivation process. Is this intended, or should there be other methods of module production that do not require bio-processing?

This is intended, but it just released in 0.18, so it might need some balancing or small tweaks for ratios, I am open for feedback on that. The design criteria were to allow production of 1 shard without having other shards as byproduct, and not holding up your game due to insufficient access to materials. Angel mentioned something about using them as 'special modules' for labs only as well, but there is nothing concrete there yet.

I've always viewed the bio-processing as an optional add on giving you an alternative way to produce certain materials, so it seems a bit out of place to me (at least with the current state of bio-processing) to force the player to go down the biter breeding path. I'm open to new designs, but especially given the nature of these modes (million different ways to craft something), being locked into bio-processing doesn't seem right. I'd personally prefer to see a few different ways to make the modules, with bio-processing adding some additional diversity to the mix.

I feel that I cannot agree with that.. refining is forcing you to refine your ore into usable stuff, angels smelting is forcing you to make ingots , angels petrochem is forcing you to do an alternative extended oil setup, because it is now almost complete, bio starts forcing you for modules/power armor. Just like industries will force you to use blocks for buildings and new science packs for tech. It's just not forced yet as it is not into final development. Angel even suggests to merge all mods into 1 single mod when it is finished (which I discourage him from doing, but it's his choice, choice hasn't been made yet, so don't start arguing over this).

I know it might be rough to do the biters, that's why I am open for feedback about it, just like I'm open for feedback over any part of the mods. It just became more or less implemented and it felt right to finally add it into modules. I know this will also force some feedback, which will only help to improve it for future releases.

[Hellspawn]

Hi Santa,

thank you a lot for updating the angels mod!

Here is a feedback to the Angel Bio (current version with B+A & Seablock):

I´m just (try to) build a working Biter production to get the shards for the modul production and installed some biter refugiums.... Dear Lord i hope you plan to update the sound of them at a later point!

That sounds like you farted in the mic

I´m lookinig forward to finish that build so i can walk FAR away, until then i have to switch off ingame sound, so anoying after some time

Best regards,
Hellspawn

[zamolxis]

Another piece of feedback. Please let me know if these are not useful, I'll stop.

I'm currently researching specialist labs and this can only be done in the tech archive apparently. You get one tech archive at start and cannot craft others. FNEI doesn't tell me anything about its crafting or usage.
This tech require 64 gray and red analyzers on normal and each round takes 60 seconds. This is 1 hour of research that cannot be reduced by building more labs.
I'm playing with 10x science multiplier so this tech will take over 10 hours.

That does not seem balanced. It should be possible to scale up research by building more lab buildings. The game would otherwise be just a boring slog.

Angels idea is to have only 1 archive, we plan on adding the crashed ship to the starting area, by salvaging parts from the crashed ship, you should be able to craft 1 (and 1 only) tech archive. Also a quotes from angel:

Lovely: Should the lab archive be craftable?
Angel: As of the original idea: no. Either have it in inventory or be a thing lootable from the crushed ship.
Lovely: What if the lab gets destroyed?
Angel: Bad luck

I plan on adding some very expensive, crazy speed modules, that can only be put into the archive to speed it up. I was thinking double speed at every science pack, so base speed of 1, speed of 2 for red science, speed of 4 at green science, speed of 8 for orange, 16 for blue, 32 for yellow. There would be no point in adding 64 speed for space science, as you won't use that lab then anyway.

I am still debating on how to make that speed module, I have 2 options, craft a new tier of archive lab with a higher base research speed, or add a module to insert into the lab. With a higher base research speed, the regular speed modules and research speed will have a higher impact as well, so I might lean to that.

The lab is affected by lab research speed, allowing you to have a +250% research increase. Having a base speed of 32 will result in a research speed of 112, which will simulate 112 labs, which should be plenty for those (few) researches done in that lab.

I think I didn't get my point across. The inability to speed up the initial required 1h of research goes against the spirit of Factorio, which is if something is too slow, the player can add more miners, more belts, more smelters, more assemblers, more labs. With the tech archive, as cool as the idea is, you just run into a wall where you have to wait for some key researches with no way of speeding it up. Lab research speed or modules are not options at this point, since it's all grey science.
Additionally, playing with science multipliers makes things unbearable. In my case, I was faced with a wait of 10h so I said "fuck it" and decreased the cost in the data files. Long unskippable wait times are not fun gameplay.

Then I hit another snag: The first Logistic research that gives you underground belts and splitter requires Logistic Datacore 1, which requires logistic block 1 which cannot be assembled by any of the grey science machines available at that point. So I'd have to handcraft 64 of them (640 with the 10x science multiplier, which will take 10 minutes (1.5 hours with the science multiplier). This also goes against the spirit of Factorio.

And as a more general impression, the beginning of the game is fantastically slow. On the positive side, I was forced to design assembly lines without having splitters or underground belts which was...interesting. The whole algae tech for producing paper is nice, especially without splitters or filter inserters. The whole block design makes for interesting assembly complexes, unusual for vanilla or classical Angel.
On the negative side, I finished half of my starting patch of iron with burner inserters because the relevant techs to update from them are so far away. I'm speaking about splitters, which give you the option of sending the stone separately. And again,the lack of splitters made for a very manual factory, where I kept running around to move materials from A to B to C back to A because topologically it was impossible to automate without underground belts.
As I mentioned above, I also didn't like the forced tech choke points.

Given all of this, I decided to take a break from my playthrough until the Industries mod is more mature. Good luck with realizing its vision and thanks for the work on the mods!

[Xeorm]

Is it possible to make the science archive techs agnostic in regards to the research multiplier? Or at least changed to only increasing the number of beakers needed? I like my research being longer than the base times, but the thought of that first research taking 3-4 hours sucks.

[jnzsblzs]

Hey, everyone first comment here!
I just downloaded all the latest versions of bob and angels for 0.17 I noticed there are settings for Thorium and oil patches that shouldn't be there because of Angel's stuff. Is that going to be adressed in any way or is it already adressed I should just upgrade for 0.18.
Originally I wanted to play on 0.17 because I heard 0.18 Angels is very much a wip. But I can I guess look past one ore. (though I admit the oil looks much more cubersome already even on a cursory glance.)

Anyhow what version of B+A should I play in general (I much prefer 0.17+ because it has the new biter and belt graphics and longer reach all of which I very much like. I know there are mods for some of these but I prefer not do something I with mods I can get without them)

[Molay]

+1 to science cost multiplier issue with data archive. It's very similar to the bio token issue with tech multiplier. Need some way to make it approachable with cost multiplier. It's just unreasonable otherwise. I play with 5x. I wasn't going to wait 5 hours, sorry. Would consider it unplayable unless a solution is found.

[lovely_santa]

Hi Santa,

thank you a lot for updating the angels mod!

Here is a feedback to the Angel Bio (current version with B+A & Seablock):

I´m just (try to) build a working Biter production to get the shards for the modul production and installed some biter refugiums.... Dear Lord i hope you plan to update the sound of them at a later point!

That sounds like you farted in the mic

I´m lookinig forward to finish that build so i can walk FAR away, until then i have to switch off ingame sound, so anoying after some time

Best regards,
Hellspawn

I didn't notice the sound of the biter refugium (I mostly develop with sounds off, coz it's annoying while coding that factorio sound in the background). I guess you refer to the puffers that fart? All credits go to angel, he developed them as shredguy gave him the idea, it's a mix of 6 commonly found fart sounds, and that playing in a loop. If you're building it, it gets quite annoying yes, but I have that feeling with all buildings (stand in a smelting setup, the squeeking is quite annoying to me). However, while passing it once in a while still gives me a giggle

I think I didn't get my point across. The inability to speed up the initial required 1h of research goes against the spirit of Factorio, which is if something is too slow, the player can add more miners, more belts, more smelters, more assemblers, more labs. With the tech archive, as cool as the idea is, you just run into a wall where you have to wait for some key researches with no way of speeding it up. Lab research speed or modules are not options at this point, since it's all grey science.
Additionally, playing with science multipliers makes things unbearable. In my case, I was faced with a wait of 10h so I said "fuck it" and decreased the cost in the data files. Long unskippable wait times are not fun gameplay.

I had a discussion last night with angel about it, we came to the conclusion to have the researches done in the archive lab to have a research duration of 15 minutes (tech multiplier 1). This means for example the green ones will have a base duration of 30 minutes, but have the ability to upgrade your labs to speed it up to 15 minutes again, without counting the research speed technologies and not counting beacons for the higher tiers.

Since it is still in development, we won't take the tech multiplier into account yet, meaning if you play with 10x tech, it will take you 150 minutes instead of 15. There are however marathon settings to increase the tech cost, which is an angel setting. This affects all researches. When using this, there is no need to use the base game tech multiplier anyway. That way we can take the increase in science packs amounts into account, without increasing the total duration cost. As I said, it should already be 'kinda' working, but fine tuning and full implementation will only happen when the base implementation is working. (There would be no point anyway in implementing it now when it will change in the future).

There are also some unimplemented, unseen ideas on the table that would have an influence on the archive, which could result in a better solution in the (far) future, for now you just get 1 archive at the start of your game, for now this will appear in your inventory, just like your initial burner and crusher.

Then I hit another snag: The first Logistic research that gives you underground belts and splitter requires Logistic Datacore 1, which requires logistic block 1 which cannot be assembled by any of the grey science machines available at that point. So I'd have to handcraft 64 of them (640 with the 10x science multiplier, which will take 10 minutes (1.5 hours with the science multiplier). This also goes against the spirit of Factorio.

And as a more general impression, the beginning of the game is fantastically slow. On the positive side, I was forced to design assembly lines without having splitters or underground belts which was...interesting. The whole algae tech for producing paper is nice, especially without splitters or filter inserters. The whole block design makes for interesting assembly complexes, unusual for vanilla or classical Angel.
On the negative side, I finished half of my starting patch of iron with burner inserters because the relevant techs to update from them are so far away. I'm speaking about splitters, which give you the option of sending the stone separately. And again,the lack of splitters made for a very manual factory, where I kept running around to move materials from A to B to C back to A because topologically it was impossible to automate without underground belts.
As I mentioned above, I also didn't like the forced tech choke points.

That is a bug. I already fixed this for the next release. It will only require gray science analyser and gray data core to unlock the first tier of undergrounds and splitters.

Is it possible to make the science archive techs agnostic in regards to the research multiplier? Or at least changed to only increasing the number of beakers needed? I like my research being longer than the base times, but the thought of that first research taking 3-4 hours sucks.

As mentioned above, yes, the idea is that angels tech multiplier would increase the amount of ingredients, without increasing the time or global amount. For example:
tech multiplier 1: requires (1 analysers + 2 cores + 15 seconds) x 20 amount
tech multiplier 10 (base game): requires (1 analysers + 2 cores + 15 seconds) x 200 amount
tech multiplier 10 (angel game): requries (10 analysers + 20 cores + 15 seconds) x 20 amount

This way you increase the amount of ingredients, without affecting the time. At least that's the idea.

Hey, everyone first comment here!
I just downloaded all the latest versions of bob and angels for 0.17 I noticed there are settings for Thorium and oil patches that shouldn't be there because of Angel's stuff. Is that going to be adressed in any way or is it already adressed I should just upgrade for 0.18.
Originally I wanted to play on 0.17 because I heard 0.18 Angels is very much a wip. But I can I guess look past one ore. (though I admit the oil looks much more cubersome already even on a cursory glance.)

Anyhow what version of B+A should I play in general (I much prefer 0.17+ because it has the new biter and belt graphics and longer reach all of which I very much like. I know there are mods for some of these but I prefer not do something I with mods I can get without them)

I think you mean for starting a new map? In 0.18 the thorium is fixed, and I only see the 3 wells of angel? (Fissure, Gas Well and Crude oil) So I'm not sure what you refer to when you say oil patch settings.

Capture.PNG (345.95 KiB) Viewed 7289 times

[jnzsblzs]

I think you mean for starting a new map? In 0.18 the thorium is fixed, and I only see the 3 wells of angel? (Fissure, Gas Well and Crude oil) So I'm not sure what you refer to when you say oil patch settings.

Yes, exactly that, but I thought oil patches were not part of angel's mod. Like it was merged with something into something. It looks like I was wrong. All the better.

[Lgk]

Hey I've got this error I think you can simply add a null check.

[lovely_santa]

Hey I've got this error I think you can simply add a null check.

Thanks for the report. I'm working on the industry overhaul at this point. I am currently (almost finished) working on angels only, so I've added it to my todo list when bob mods are present.

[danyax]

There is large debate on bots vs belts value UPS-wize for megabases, especially after round of belt performance improvements. I assume that that duscussion is about vanilla bots and belts. The general consensus is that bots better, but difference in not dramatic.

How all these changes for B&A play with Angel bots? Ability to carry full stack of 200 should move balance to bots being much better for UPS than belts. Is this correct assumption?

[evandy]

Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?

EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...

EDIT2: Also, why can't I make crystal powder from crystal dust? (alternatively, why do we have both items)? Seems like we should either be able to turn dust into powder, or they should be the same thing.

Screen Shot 2020-03-05 at 10.36.08 PM.png (435.35 KiB) Viewed 6872 times

[Xeorm]

Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?

EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...

EDIT2: Also, why can't I make crystal powder from crystal dust? (alternatively, why do we have both items)? Seems like we should either be able to turn dust into powder, or they should be the same thing.

Screen Shot 2020-03-05 at 10.36.08 PM.png

It looks like the issue is more that the options selected were bad for producing what you want, more than anything. From what I can see, the process works like this: Get fish going. Either using the breeding or petting option. Petting option produces fish water in half the time, but results in less fish. Breeding takes longer, but produces fish. Alternatively, farm for mushredtato's. Much quicker that way than fishing. Either way, this produces alien bacteria. You use the bacteria to make eggs, which are then hatched into biters. Then you have two options from there. You can butcher the biters immediately for .9 splinters per biter, or keep them in a zoo, costing .1 biter per splinter, but requiring raw meat. Meat coming primarily from either extra fish or extra puffers.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm betting if you breed fish, and use the biter zoo option, you'd get drastically different results. You wont' need to make as many eggs, which is the main bottleneck. Any replacement eggs you'd need would be generated by the fish breeding necessary for the raw meat. Unless I'm mistaken, santa ray breeding should yield the most raw meat too, if you're lost on which to use. You'd still need 400+ biter refugiums for 10 shards a second, but that's an improvement at least! You'd need massively less aquariums as well.

[Hellspawn]

Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?

EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...

It get´s even worse when you start to calulate how many of the crystas you need to build a single tier 3 Module.... You need 160 of them, not counting the ones you need as a intermediate product (e.g. whetstone, big biter production etc.).

I have (spagetti) setup up and running, but it really takes ages to get the first crystals dribble out of that. I would sign the motion to get a productivity boost for some facitlitys.

[evandy]

It looks like the issue is more that the options selected were bad for producing what you want, more than anything. From what I can see, the process works like this: Get fish going. Either using the breeding or petting option. Petting option produces fish water in half the time, but results in less fish. Breeding takes longer, but produces fish. Alternatively, farm for mushredtato's. Much quicker that way than fishing. Either way, this produces alien bacteria. You use the bacteria to make eggs, which are then hatched into biters. Then you have two options from there. You can butcher the biters immediately for .9 splinters per biter, or keep them in a zoo, costing .1 biter per splinter, but requiring raw meat. Meat coming primarily from either extra fish or extra puffers.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm betting if you breed fish, and use the biter zoo option, you'd get drastically different results. You wont' need to make as many eggs, which is the main bottleneck. Any replacement eggs you'd need would be generated by the fish breeding necessary for the raw meat. Unless I'm mistaken, santa ray breeding should yield the most raw meat too, if you're lost on which to use. You'd still need 400+ biter refugiums for 10 shards a second, but that's an improvement at least! You'd need massively less aquariums as well.

I tried this... if you discount the Lithia Salt vs Lithium Chloride bug I found, I was able to reduce things down to ~ 500 Fish Farms, 500 Puffer Refugia and 500 Biter Refugia for 10 Crystal Shards/sec. It also brought power down to about 500MW. I still think this is out of balance, but not by an order of magnitude.

Santa, you said way above that you are open to comments on balance issues with the new bio stuff, consider a request for rebalancing made. There is not enough throughput in bio. I wouldn't simply increase Bio machine speed, as it wouldn't help the things like 80 Assemblers & 10MW required to produce 1 biter egg per second. In order to keep Bio firmly "different" I make the following suggestion:
- Increase the inputs/outputs of all the Farming/Breeding recipes by a factor of 3x, keep their times as is.
- Don't increase output of seeds/eggs/etc though, this will keep the slow ramp-up as you grow your bio base in place as-is
- This will not change your ratios, but make Bio firmly "different" by creating in bulk at low power, but it takes a while
- Add Tier 2 & 3 versions of all the buildings that don't have one yet that run faster.

Based on other conversations, this generally applies to EVERYTHING bio production - BioPlastic is so limited throughput as to be useless, same with BioResin and BioRubber. Bio just needs more throughput across the board.

Only real exception to that is algae, which is much closer to in-balance as much as seablock has been banging on it. However, with the new Algae1 change, and the power consumption bump from Algae 2, I would suggest only modestly increasing output of algae farms (by 1.5x maybe).

[lovely_santa]

Finally a first thoughtful feedback about bio! (Thanks)

Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?

EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...

Screen Shot 2020-03-05 at 10.36.08 PM.png

So you need 370.4 alien spores, which you get from fish. My recommendation is to use Levac Fish Petting and/or Durflurp Jellyfish Petting. These will give the same amount of spores, in half the time (30 instead of 60 seconds). They also have a much higher survival rate (3 + 85% instead of ( + 75% + 50%). The small loss in fish is easily compensated by the fish breeding in combination with the Green Algae I recipe, which produces brown and green algae. If you have a lot of saline water, you can opt to make brown algae directly, and then only focus on Levac Fish. I just want to note, if you have excess meat, you can always use santa rays to get more fish water and consume your meat. Factorian fish were just added as completion so you can breed them for your own purposes, without being an addition to bio, hence why they are tougher to pet.

As you get an average of 37.5 Alien spores / 100 polluted fish water, you require that recipe 9.877 times, which translates into 987.7 fish water as your picture already shows. Now using the fish breeding that I recommended, that roughly translates into 50 times that recipe, or 1500 buildings (actualy a bit less since you get some fish water from the breeding as well).

So now for some better balancing. I'll increase the fish water requirement for petting and breeding from 20 to 100, which is an increase of x5. However this results in a huge increase of sulfuric waste water production, so I'll compensate the Alien spores production to generate 30-40 waste water and 70-80 alien spores (increase of x2 the spores). A last balancing tweak on this part is that alien bacteria only require 50 spores instead of a 100 (increase of x2) and 1 alien bacteria can make 5 seeded dishes (increase of x1.667). This will have a total increase of (5x2x2x1.667=) x33.333, which will reduce your fish tanks from 1500 to 45.

I have similar reasoning for your biters. Butchering biters will give you a 90% chance of getting you crystals. You should keep them in the zoo in order to get a guaranteed crystal and only have 10% chance of loosing a biter (meaning you get 10 shards/biter) on average. This again will only take 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds, which is already a x2 increase and you won't require as many puffer breedings. How you obtain the required meat is up to you, I would opt for hatching the other puffer eggs that you don't use and butcher them to obtain the meat. (which would most likely be gaseous puffers I believe). This should decrease the amount of biter eggs you require, resulting in less alien spores required as well.

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Now to balance this out a bit, I think it would be good to increase the crystal production to 1/biter instead of 1/recipe, so the zoo keeping gives 4 crystals at once, which is a boost of x4. To make it a little easier, puffer breeding might have a higher chance of creating their own egg, but make sure the sum = 100%.

Finally I am thinking of adding 3 tiers of the buildings, similar speed progression as refinery has (0.75 > 1 > 1.5).

EDIT2: Also, why can't I make crystal powder from crystal dust? (alternatively, why do we have both items)? Seems like we should either be able to turn dust into powder, or they should be the same thing.

Powder is the small bits coming from grinding, while the dust is coming from crushing. They both end up in crystal slurry. The powder doesn't require sulfuric acid, which the dust does...

Looking through all the new Bio stuff on my Seablock. Trying to determine how I can get a supply of "small biters" to start my biter zoos, given that seablock turns off everything but worms? I can't find any recipes in FNEI to create them (just cut them up into meat, and to breed them). Am I missing something in the recipes, or is this something that Seablock needs to modify/fix?

EDIT: Okay, I found the recipes after going through Helmod. I need WHAT now? 4,000 Fish tanks and 900 Biter Refugiums just to make 10 crystal shards a second? And no upgrades to the buildings to produce faster? This seems ... a little out of balance somehow. Is this intended, or should I file as a balance bug? Off the top of my head the ingredient ratios look okay, so I propose the recipe durations (or machine speeds, which is the same thing) are off. If you increase speed by about an order of magnitude (10x) then you're talking a couple hundred to 1,000 machines to get 10/sec which is still an investment, but much more reasonable than on the order of 10,000 machines (all types, total). The power consumption looks way out of whack too, as the whole process takes 1GW? If we speed it up by 10x I think that'd reduce down to 100MW, which again is a lot but approaching sanity. I haven't even looked at the higher tier crystals yet...

It get´s even worse when you start to calulate how many of the crystas you need to build a single tier 3 Module.... You need 160 of them, not counting the ones you need as a intermediate product (e.g. whetstone, big biter production etc.).

I have (spagetti) setup up and running, but it really takes ages to get the first crystals dribble out of that. I would sign the motion to get a productivity boost for some facitlitys.

As I said above and evandy said to you, keeping biters in a zoo will be the highest increase of your setup, and using different fish. The small tweaks to puffers and building tiers should also help down the line.

It looks like the issue is more that the options selected were bad for producing what you want, more than anything. From what I can see, the process works like this: Get fish going. Either using the breeding or petting option. Petting option produces fish water in half the time, but results in less fish. Breeding takes longer, but produces fish. Alternatively, farm for mushredtato's. Much quicker that way than fishing. Either way, this produces alien bacteria. You use the bacteria to make eggs, which are then hatched into biters. Then you have two options from there. You can butcher the biters immediately for .9 splinters per biter, or keep them in a zoo, costing .1 biter per splinter, but requiring raw meat. Meat coming primarily from either extra fish or extra puffers.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm betting if you breed fish, and use the biter zoo option, you'd get drastically different results. You wont' need to make as many eggs, which is the main bottleneck. Any replacement eggs you'd need would be generated by the fish breeding necessary for the raw meat. Unless I'm mistaken, santa ray breeding should yield the most raw meat too, if you're lost on which to use. You'd still need 400+ biter refugiums for 10 shards a second, but that's an improvement at least! You'd need massively less aquariums as well.

I prefer using fish to to get the alien spores, doing it with farming is a nice option if you don't want to do fish however. Santa ray can both be used as a meat generator and a meat sink (depending on what recipes you use). Fishing will definitely require less buildings with the suggestions I made, similar to the higher yield of the biter zoo keeping. I am still a bit lost on the puffers tho. Like I said a while back already, I do think making cross-breeding puffers to get a specific type of egg would be a better way of breeding, and have similar yields as the fish/biters.

...

I went tried this... if you discount the Lithia Salt vs Lithium Chloride bug I found, I was able to reduce things down to ~ 500 Fish Farms, 500 Puffer Refugia and 500 Biter Refugia for 10 Crystal Shards/sec. It also brought power down to about 500MW. I still think this is out of balance, but not by an order of magnitude.

Santa, you said way above that you are open to comments on balance issues with the new bio stuff, consider a request for rebalancing made. There is not enough throughput in bio. I wouldn't simply increase Bio machine speed, as it wouldn't help the things like 80 Assemblers & 10MW required to produce 1 biter egg per second. In order to keep Bio firmly "different" I make the following suggestion:
- Increase the inputs/outputs of all the Farming/Breeding recipes by a factor of 5x, keep their times as is.
- Don't increase output of seeds/eggs/etc though, this will keep the slow ramp-up as you grow your bio base in place as-is
- This will not change your ratios, but make Bio firmly "different" by creating in bulk at low power, but it takes a while

For sure this is exactly what I wanted, feedback. I do think multiple machines could help to scale the setup for late game, when you get to crank out lvl 3 modules at higher rate, even when you productivity/beacon your bio setup. I do think the main issue with biters is the egg output, which I do not have a good solution to at this point.

Based on other conversations, this generally applies to EVERYTHING bio production - BioPlastic is so limited throughput as to be useless, same with BioResin and BioRubber. Bio just needs more throughput across the board.

Do you mean increase the bio yield on the Raw bio X (seed to tree)? Or do you mean the yield from Raw bio X to liquid X (X being plastic, resin, rubber) I was maybe thinking that you get 6 (tier 1) and 9 (tier 2) raw bio X from the seeds, and leave it to produce 5 of the liquid X for each raw bio X.

Only real exception to that is algae, which is much closer to in-balance as much as seablock has been banging on it. However, with the new Algae1 change, and the power consumption bump from Algae 2, I would suggest only modestly increasing output of algae farms (by 1.5x or 2x maybe).

For green algae I, I don't want to increase the brown algae anymore, since I don't want you to end up with stacks of brown algae... I could increase the green algae II to 50 or maybe 60 algae per cycle, but I rather just decrease the input from 100 to 80 and require 16 seconds instead of 20.

[evandy]

Finally a first thoughtful feedback about bio! (Thanks)

So you need 370.4 alien spores, which you get from fish. My recommendation is to use Levac Fish Petting and/or Durflurp Jellyfish Petting. These will give the same amount of spores, in half the time (30 instead of 60 seconds). They also have a much higher survival rate (3 + 85% instead of ( + 75% + 50%). The small loss in fish is easily compensated by the fish breeding in combination with the Green Algae I recipe, which produces brown and green algae. If you have a lot of saline water, you can opt to make brown algae directly, and then only focus on Levac Fish. I just want to note, if you have excess meat, you can always use santa rays to get more fish water and consume your meat. Factorian fish were just added as completion so you can breed them for your own purposes, without being an addition to bio, hence why they are tougher to pet.

As you get an average of 37.5 Alien spores / 100 polluted fish water, you require that recipe 9.877 times, which translates into 987.7 fish water as your picture already shows. Now using the fish breeding that I recommended, that roughly translates into 50 times that recipe, or 1500 buildings (actualy a bit less since you get some fish water from the breeding as well).

So now for some better balancing. I'll increase the fish water requirement for petting and breeding from 20 to 100, which is an increase of x5. However this results in a huge increase of sulfuric waste water production, so I'll compensate the Alien spores production to generate 30-40 waste water and 70-80 alien spores (increase of x2 the spores). A last balancing tweak on this part is that alien bacteria only require 50 spores instead of a 100 (increase of x2) and 1 alien bacteria can make 5 seeded dishes (increase of x1.667). This will have a total increase of (5x2x2x1.667=) x33.333, which will reduce your fish tanks from 1500 to 45.

Yes, this sounds much more interesting. Definitely will want to play around with it in helmod / reality when it gets rebalanced, but it seems on the right track.

I have similar reasoning for your biters. Butchering biters will give you a 90% chance of getting you crystals. You should keep them in the zoo in order to get a guaranteed crystal and only have 10% chance of loosing a biter (meaning you get 10 shards/biter) on average. This again will only take 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds, which is already a x2 increase and you won't require as many puffer breedings. How you obtain the required meat is up to you, I would opt for hatching the other puffer eggs that you don't use and butcher them to obtain the meat. (which would most likely be gaseous puffers I believe). This should decrease the amount of biter eggs you require, resulting in less alien spores required as well.

Now to balance this out a bit, I think it would be good to increase the crystal production to 1/biter instead of 1/recipe, so the zoo keeping gives 4 crystals at once, which is a boost of x4. To make it a little easier, puffer breeding might have a higher chance of creating their own egg, but make sure the sum = 100%.

Again, all of this is looking good. I think you are missing something though: Biters should have a breeding recipe (likely with a queen, which is a low% chance to acquire). Puffers shouldn’t be the long-term source of biter eggs, though you could go all “alien” and have the queens lay their eggs inside the puffers (require puffers for biter egg production). This would even justify the initial eggs - wild puffers might already be incubating new eggs. Does that sound at all interesting to you?

Finally I am thinking of adding 3 tiers of the buildings, similar speed progression as refinery has (0.75 > 1 > 1.5).

Yes please, though we need to watch the power consumption (see below)

Powder is the small bits coming from grinding, while the dust is coming from crushing. They both end up in crystal slurry. The powder doesn't require sulfuric acid, which the dust does...

Yeah, I know. But can’t we use the ore powderizer (which is underused) to turn the crushed into dust?

I prefer using fish to to get the alien spores, doing it with farming is a nice option if you don't want to do fish however. Santa ray can both be used as a meat generator and a meat sink (depending on what recipes you use). Fishing will definitely require less buildings with the suggestions I made, similar to the higher yield of the biter zoo keeping. I am still a bit lost on the puffers tho. Like I said a while back already, I do think making cross-breeding puffers to get a specific type of egg would be a better way of breeding, and have similar yields as the fish/biters.

Concur with this idea; not sure how the recipe would work out, but makes much more sense than the random % distribution.

For sure this is exactly what I wanted, feedback. I do think multiple machines could help to scale the setup for late game, when you get to crank out lvl 3 modules at higher rate, even when you productivity/beacon your bio setup. I do think the main issue with biters is the egg output, which I do not have a good solution to at this point.

See my above suggestion for queens…

Based on other conversations, this generally applies to EVERYTHING bio production - BioPlastic is so limited throughput as to be useless, same with BioResin and BioRubber. Bio just needs more throughput across the board.

Do you mean increase the bio yield on the Raw bio X (seed to tree)? Or do you mean the yield from Raw bio X to liquid X (X being plastic, resin, rubber) I was maybe thinking that you get 6 (tier 1) and 9 (tier 2) raw bio X from the seeds, and leave it to produce 5 of the liquid X for each raw bio X.

I don’t have a specific suggestion on this one, just a general malaise of bioplastic/biorubber/bioresin being not even close to worth the effort. I’ll noodle on it and get back to you.

Only real exception to that is algae, which is much closer to in-balance as much as seablock has been banging on it. However, with the new Algae1 change, and the power consumption bump from Algae 2, I would suggest only modestly increasing output of algae farms (by 1.5x or 2x maybe).

For green algae I, I don't want to increase the brown algae anymore, since I don't want you to end up with stacks of brown algae... I could increase the green algae II to 50 or maybe 60 algae per cycle, but I rather just decrease the input from 100 to 80 and require 16 seconds instead of 20.

Concur don’t increase the Brown output in Green Algae I, so let’s just increase the green and leave the time alone? Decreasing time implicitly increases brown. Not sure if it’s a change for Angels to make, or Trainwreck in Seablock, but with the addition of the brown side-effect in Algae I, Algae II should probably see a corresponding bump in the output of green Algae too. Since Green is the main source of Seablock power in the early game, and electrolyzing for slag to make mineral water gives such a small positive feedback loop with the current balance. I am curious what Trainwreck thinks, if he is listening.

I am not sure if Red/Blue Algae need a bump too, or are okay as is. Brown actually seems okay, unless you want paper to be more competitive with boards from Arboretum? Thoughts?

Which segues into the final issue: power. It’s possible all the changes above will fix this (time will tell). But right now Bio looks to be very power-intensive; should a modest bio setup be eating 50% of the power of a modest sized base? Modules will just exacerbate this issue (as will higher tier machines). If the recipe changes do not bring it way down, then all the Bio machines’ power requirements should be lowered. Also on me module front: Will bio machines take productivity modules at all? If it’s just speed, then the power issue is really concerning.

[Xeorm]

Feedback on bio design: I really liked the idea of it being slow to start but consistent to keep going. The seeds are a good example where getting one set of the harder seeds is rare, but once you do you can keep up production on that set. Then after there's an additional chance to get more seeds for more production, and so on. That's pretty different from the rest of the design, where you're trying to max out capacity on an ore field or building out to get something unlocked.