Development and Discussion

[evandy]

should swamps maybe take viscous mud water, instead of mud, as an input? You can always turn mud into viscous water...

And, well, swamps are kinda wet...

I feel that the water input + the mud looks "muddy" enough, especially when comparing to the other types?

Just looking at it like the soil issue - making mud is very slow; is there another way to go? The soil from sand solved everything that needed soil, but how to do the same with swamp farming?
- change swamps to take in viscous mud water instead of water + mud
- provide a high-bulk way to make mud from the water? (washing plants are very slow for making mud)
- ... etc.

[lovely_santa]

Released 2nd bugfixing patch, mainly a (big) issue with the migration script and some crashes. You can find the changelog on github or ingame for each mod seperatly.

[StormTAG]

I started a new AngelBobs game today for the first time in many months. Used the whole suite, including the technology and industry overhauls. Many parts, much stuff. Good time.

However, maybe it was just the interactions between bobs and angels, but I found myself needing to research *all* the basic technologies at the tech archive, including Basic Technology Upgrade 1 in order to get the Basic Laboratory 2 just to be able to research electric Assembler 1s. The only assemblers I could research with grey/grey tech was Basic Automation, which gives the burner assembler and the steam-powered assembler. Automation 1 required grey core/red analyzer which I seem to need a Basic Lab 2 for. Similar for Long Inserters, which is gated behind Logistics.

Assuming this is intentional, this seems a bit harsh. It *might be* unintentional, because it seems like Automation 1 is the only technology that requires red analyzers but *doesn't* have a dependency on the red science tech that enables them.

The big issue for me in this was that it was quite fiddly to get 3 ingredient recipes working without long inserters or electric assemblers, since you either need to provide fuel for the burner version or steam for the steam powered version.

FWIW, I did do exactly as I mentioned, however it felt moderately more annoying than I was expecting to get red science analyzers set up due to the lack of long inserters and electric assemblers.

[Doradan]

I started a new AngelBobs game today for the first time in many months. Used the whole suite, including the technology and industry overhauls. Many parts, much stuff. Good time.

However, maybe it was just the interactions between bobs and angels, but I found myself needing to research *all* the basic technologies at the tech archive, including Basic Technology Upgrade 1 in order to get the Basic Laboratory 2 just to be able to research electric Assembler 1s. The only assemblers I could research with grey/grey tech was Basic Automation, which gives the burner assembler and the steam-powered assembler. Automation 1 required grey core/red analyzer which I seem to need a Basic Lab 2 for. Similar for Long Inserters, which is gated behind Logistics.

Assuming this is intentional, this seems a bit harsh. It *might be* unintentional, because it seems like Automation 1 is the only technology that requires red analyzers but *doesn't* have a dependency on the red science tech that enables them.

The big issue for me in this was that it was quite fiddly to get 3 ingredient recipes working without long inserters or electric assemblers, since you either need to provide fuel for the burner version or steam for the steam powered version.

FWIW, I did do exactly as I mentioned, however it felt moderately more annoying than I was expecting to get red science analyzers set up due to the lack of long inserters and electric assemblers.

This was discussed here before, and so far the answer of the Mod Team was: "Working as intended, the Automation Tech is the last Tech you will research in the "Handcraft Age""

But I partialy agree with you, It´s not quite clear that you need a Basic Lab 2 to research Automation and that you need all the "Block" Techs first to get the Basic Lab 2. But after I realised this, getting the research done was not that hard. With the temporary status of the burner assemblers in mind, I never set up a coal feed for them, just handfeeed each 200 coal and they will run a lot longer than necessary to get the research done. If you dont need to feed coal you can use a belt cross between 4 assemblers to feed them up to 4 ingredients without the need of long inserters.

[lovely_santa]

However, maybe it was just the interactions between bobs and angels, but I found myself needing to research *all* the basic technologies at the tech archive, including Basic Technology Upgrade 1 in order to get the Basic Laboratory 2 just to be able to research electric Assembler 1s. The only assemblers I could research with grey/grey tech was Basic Automation, which gives the burner assembler and the steam-powered assembler. Automation 1 required grey core/red analyzer which I seem to need a Basic Lab 2 for. Similar for Long Inserters, which is gated behind Logistics.

Hmm, since we did some fiddling to get the steam age of bob working, I might have forgotten to add the Automation 1 prerequisite on the red analyzers. I'll add this to my todo list.

Assuming this is intentional, this seems a bit harsh. It *might be* unintentional, because it seems like Automation 1 is the only technology that requires red analyzers but *doesn't* have a dependency on the red science tech that enables them.

It does work as intended, as this is the equivalent to bobs steam pack, corresponding to the handcrafting stage. In my opinion, the whole steam science pack from bobs mod is kinda annoying and obsolete. I do know, when you don't play with the steam assemblers and all that stuff, you'll unlock the assembling machine 1 a bit earlier.

The big issue for me in this was that it was quite fiddly to get 3 ingredient recipes working without long inserters or electric assemblers, since you either need to provide fuel for the burner version or steam for the steam powered version.

FWIW, I did do exactly as I mentioned, however it felt moderately more annoying than I was expecting to get red science analyzers set up due to the lack of long inserters and electric assemblers.

I'm not sure I can unlock long handed inserters earlier... I'll have a look at that as well.. I guess you play with bobs logistics and bobs adjustable inserters? And like Doradan answered, don't bother belting the coal, or belt it perpendicular to your other belts, for example, if you belt multiple assemblers vertical, put a horizontal belt with coal inbetween the assemblers, utilizing all 4 sides of the assembler.

[Crixomix]

Here to give my thoughts on the current garden progression.

I feel that the balancing is a bit off on trying to make NEW swamp gardens (or any other type). I know that in general you're supposed to go discover them and IIRC, back in the day you couldn't get more gardens except by exploring.

However, the current method of generation is extremely slow. Each cycle of growing 2 swamp gardens costs a swamp garden and 30 plant life samples. This means you only net 2 plant life samples PER cycle. And each cycle takes quite a bit of forever due to the 300sec crafting time on collecting the samples. Obviously you can scale up, but even at a medium scale, you're producing 1 "extra" garden maybe every 15 minutes? Because you need 15 crafts to give you enough plant life samples for an extra crafting. That's ridiculously slow IMO.

Again, I get that the plant stuff is supposed to be slow and maybe I'm just impatient, but it's a bit frustrating when I have to make this insanely massive setup to get more than a garden per 15 minutes. I feel that with a 1 farm + 4 seed extractor setup with speed modules, that should generate closer to 1 garden every 1-5 minutes.

Thanks for reading.

[valneq]

Here to give my thoughts on the current garden progression.

I feel that the balancing is a bit off on trying to make NEW swamp gardens (or any other type). I know that in general you're supposed to go discover them and IIRC, back in the day you couldn't get more gardens except by exploring.

However, the current method of generation is extremely slow. Each cycle of growing 2 swamp gardens costs a swamp garden and 30 plant life samples. This means you only net 2 plant life samples PER cycle. And each cycle takes quite a bit of forever due to the 300sec crafting time on collecting the samples. Obviously you can scale up, but even at a medium scale, you're producing 1 "extra" garden maybe every 15 minutes? Because you need 15 crafts to give you enough plant life samples for an extra crafting. That's ridiculously slow IMO.

Again, I get that the plant stuff is supposed to be slow and maybe I'm just impatient, but it's a bit frustrating when I have to make this insanely massive setup to get more than a garden per 15 minutes. I feel that with a 1 farm + 4 seed extractor setup with speed modules, that should generate closer to 1 garden every 1-5 minutes.

Thanks for reading.

Now you deterministically get 2/30 = 0.066667 = 6.667% per cycle.
Previously, the generation of new gardens was based on probability. I don't recall the exact chance, but I am sure that on average the yield (per cycle) was even lower than it is now. Maybe it used to be 5% or 6%.

So the upside is: now it is faster!
The downside is: the new garden duplication recipes require more input ingredients, one of which you can only get from farming. So you need to begin with some level of farming to kickstart the generation of as many gardens as you want. That used to be different.

[alercah]

It breaks the flow of the game a bit that I'm able to unlock facilities and recipes without having unlocked prerequisites for using them. For example, steel smelting which requires oxygen is researchable without having researched electrolysis to get the oxygen. Similarly, the crop processing plant requires electronic circuits which are not a prerequisite of researching it (I only have basic circuit boards unlocked and have no idea what techs even unlock the more advanced version.)

Vanilla Factorio always avoids this and it makes playing the game a lot more pleasant when you don't have to guess what you're missing or check everything manually in advance. Something to bear in mind perhaps. It's especially problematic with so much increased tech tree complexity.

(I'm playing with most of Bob's & Angel's mods, only the ones by the official authors. The two above examples were listed as part of Angel's mods.)

Big second on this post.

[valneq]

It breaks the flow of the game a bit that I'm able to unlock facilities and recipes without having unlocked prerequisites for using them. For example, steel smelting which requires oxygen is researchable without having researched electrolysis to get the oxygen. Similarly, the crop processing plant requires electronic circuits which are not a prerequisite of researching it (I only have basic circuit boards unlocked and have no idea what techs even unlock the more advanced version.)

Vanilla Factorio always avoids this and it makes playing the game a lot more pleasant when you don't have to guess what you're missing or check everything manually in advance. Something to bear in mind perhaps. It's especially problematic with so much increased tech tree complexity.

(I'm playing with most of Bob's & Angel's mods, only the ones by the official authors. The two above examples were listed as part of Angel's mods.)

Big second on this post.

There are many such cases. It is quite some work to go through it and list all the inconsistencies (with given settings). Someone else started to do that for Angel+Bob (with default settings) over in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=185&t=85969

[Chapeau-Claque]

Please seriously consider making a version with less expensive techs. This below is what is needed for the first electric assembler, the 0.5 crafting speed one. 4800 plates and loads of other items. Well, you also need 64 Red Science analysers, but they cost a fraction of these 128 production Datacore 1's.
More reasonable would be x/16, that is 4800/16 = 300 plates. Say by increasing yield by times 4 and quartering number needed per tech.
This is my 3:rd go and this time I set the starting area to max size since there is no way to produce enough defensive structures to resist any biters. Everything is expensive in material and production capacity, even walls.
The current cost structure can be labeled marathon.

I do like the block concept but currently too much time is spent watching grass grow.

assembler.png (18.38 KiB) Viewed 6840 times

[valneq]

Please seriously consider making a version with less expensive techs. This below is what is needed for the first electric assembler, the 0.5 crafting speed one. 4800 plates and loads of other items. Well, you also need 64 Red Science analysers, but they cost a fraction of these 128 production Datacore 1's.
More reasonable would be x/16, that is 4800/16 = 300 plates. Say by increasing yield by times 4 and quartering number needed per tech.
This is my 3:rd go and this time I set the starting area to max size since there is no way to produce enough defensive structures to resist any biters. Everything is expensive in material and production capacity, even walls.
The current cost structure can be labeled marathon.

I do like the block concept but currently too much time is spent watching grass grow.
assembler.png

I don't think it is recommended to play component mode (or tech overhaul) with biters. This combination is entirely unbalanced, as you ralize. This might be addressed with Angel's Exploration mod in the future. See also this issue on github: https://github.com/Arch666Angel/mods/issues/291

[edit] In the mean time, when (or if) you start a 4th attempt, you can decrease the biter settings to values similar to the ones posted in the github issue. That might make it a bit more bearable. Or if the situation in your 3rd attempt is not out of control yet, you can do that in a running game with the lua console. As explained in the Wiki over here:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Console#Enemy ... on_scripts

[Chapeau-Claque]

Thanks for the settings tips.

I still think there is a case for Current becomes Marathon & New Light as Normal.

[Doradan]

A little bit of Feedback to the "Switch Silver with Zinc Combo Sorting" Discussion which was going on a few month back:

I´ve spent about 160 Hours on a (Biter free) Bob´s/Angel´s Map with all the Overhaul Options (Industries, Blocks, Science) active. This is my third try with the Overhaul, been playing Factorio for 4 Years now and about 3 of those Years only with Bob`s/Angel`s. In my first try i restarted after finishing the grey Science because i realised that a rework of my factory at that time to actually work with the science overhaul would take as long as just restarting. My second restart was because I was running out of ressources in my starting area (no more saph) before I was able to build a railway system (Which was actually wrong, I did not see that the crawler trains only need motor 1, I just checked the "vanilla" trains which needed motors 2). For my third map I massively increased the starting ressources and am still playing on that map.

I usually start out with a bootstrap bus Base which in this case made grey, green and red science analyzers and all Datacores (so I automated all Lvl 1 Blocks), then switch to a LTN based city block design. The switch has been made, and now I´m making orange Data analyzers as well and automated all Blocks to Lvl 2. As my base is now LTN based I have massive buffers of all Ores (I usually fill up 2 Angels Warehouses per LTN Block Station) except for Silver. My only way of generating Silver is sorting Crotinnium Chunks as there is no other way possible pre Orange Science. Combo Sorting for Silver is still miles off, i think at least 2 Scince levels above me (so blue & yellow). I assume part of my problem with silver is that I´m trying to have a buffer of about 70k orange circuit boards (again, the LTN Buffer Stations...), but as I have just as big buffers of all other ressources this should not matter that much! I use prioritys to first use the lead, copper and Iron I get from the crotinnium chunks instead of the ores I get from direct sorting & ferrous & cupric but I still have too much of those Ores and not enough Silver.

I would prefer to get the silver combo sorting earlier than it is now possible, because I will need Gold & Platinum before I am able to directly sort for Silver & Silver will only show up on 2 more mixed sorting recipes (the ones after chunks). Maybe I am over reacting, but the only production chain in my base that is ressource starved is the silver processing, and my OCD cant take "There is no source of Silver Ore in the Network" Message any longer =)

[343N]

Why does Angel's Refining (I haven't checked other Angel's mods) hide so many settings from bob's mods? Isn't this a little invasive? Couldn't you at least leave them allowed with a giant warning (i.e "Incompatible with Angel's" or "Not intended to be changed with Angels") or something? I just wanted to enable Bob's water pumps, and I have to go through your code to disable the hiding of the Bob's mod setting in settings-updates.lua.

[lovely_santa]

Why does Angel's Refining (I haven't checked other Angel's mods) hide so many settings from bob's mods? Isn't this a little invasive? Couldn't you at least leave them allowed with a giant warning (i.e "Incompatible with Angel's" or "Not intended to be changed with Angels") or something? I just wanted to enable Bob's water pumps, and I have to go through your code to disable the hiding of the Bob's mod setting in settings-updates.lua.

The only use for the water bore is to pump water out of the ground, which in the next release won't even have the recipes for it anymore ingame. We're thinking of adding something else in order to allow pumping water up. I think other than that single setting, the other ones have no impact on your bob angels playthrough at all (aka they do not have any effect as angels already disables the content of that setting).

[DarkShadow44]

When using Angel's Infinite Ores, you can place a miner partly on both infinite and normal ore. When not giving the miner the fluid for the infinite ore, the miner stops sometimes (missing fluid) instead of continuing to mine the normal ore. Is there a way to prevent those stops?

[valneq]

When using Angel's Infinite Ores, you can place a miner partly on both infinite and normal ore. When not giving the miner the fluid for the infinite ore, the miner stops sometimes (missing fluid) instead of continuing to mine the normal ore. Is there a way to prevent those stops?

The same happens in a vanilla game, if uranium is next to a normal resource, say coal. This can easilty happen with mods that mess around with resource placemeent. Most easlity seen with danOreus.

Hence, this is a base game limitation. I don't think that anything can be done on that front from the Angel's devs.

As a workaround, make sure that the miners you place don't have fluid connections and don't have infinite ore in range as long as you cannot provide the fluid they need.

[alercah]

Would you be willing to accept patches to improve item organization on the inventory screen?

[lovely_santa]

Would you be willing to accept patches to improve item organization on the inventory screen?

Yes, but make sure you start from the dev version on github, as I already took another look at them.
I guess the issue lies with bobs items/recipes? Assume you play with the full angels pack, then everything should be sorted from angels and bobs...

Any suggestions are always welcome!

[alercah]

Mostly yes, but there are a few cases where Angel's seems to throw things on one line or not inconsistently. And some other ones that are maybe a bit subjective but I think would improve things (electrolyser should go on water treatment, for instance, filters I think should go on the same line as filtration recipes generally, etc.)