[MOD 1.1.0] Composite Factories: PyBlock

[Sopel]

Playing PyBlock inevitably leads to placing down a huge amount of simple blueprints that locally produce the most basic products. Many entities are devoted to producing tar, electricity, tailings, saline water, and other basic things. This leads to a significant amount of entities that no one really cares about but that eat up UPS. This mod attempts to alleviate that issue while preserving balance and all other things that we love about pymods.

Composite Factories: PyBlock adds large factory buildings that specialize in producing moderate quantities of basic products or electricity. Each factory replaces tens, or hundreds, of individual buildings. The balance is ensured by:
- each factory building is backed up by a real blueprint
- the ingredients required to craft the factory closely match the parts needed in the real blueprint
- only the simplest and most common chains have dedicated factories
- the factory building has an area proportional to the real blueprint

An example factory building producing tailings and saline water

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The fixed recipe for this building

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The blueprint used as a basis for this factory

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The factories are (will be) tiered and different tiers will be gated behind different technologies. Currently only tier-0 (green science) is being worked on, with one generator for tier-1 (at circuit 2). In the future additional intermediate tiers might emerge.

The technology tree

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The design decisions result in factory building recipes that may have tens or hundreds of ingredients and it quickly becomes infeasible to craft them from the player inventory or using assembling machines. To solve this a special container is introduced that allows "crafting" the machines from within it. The container has a special GUI attached that allows filtering and searching for desired factories. It's still possible to craft from the inventory but it's made to take a long time and is not as user friendly.

The crafting interface in a dedicated container

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Library mod page: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/composite_factories_base
Library mod github page: https://github.com/Sopel97/composite_factories_base
PyBlock component mod page: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/composite ... es_pyblock
PyBlock component mod github page: https://github.com/Sopel97/composite_factories_pyblock

Contributions are welcome. If you want to provide blueprints then look into README.md in the blueprints directory in the pyblock component for instructions and guidelines.