A few hours in to full-tilt Pyanodons I said "that's my best design so far"… for one burner miner on a stone patch.

[quyxkh]

Pyanodons is not just more, not for people who can feel the attraction in the phrase "pleasingly compact". It's possible, it's *fun* for me in a way I can't feel in the base game any more, been there, done that, those puzzles are solved, to find such designs here. The puzzles are more varied and the solutions start interacting, good production layouts are more reminiscent of factory complexes.

A primitive steam engine? The simplest layout works, but I've been iterating on the form, the real tradeoffs only become apparent over time and as with everything I've seen so far get to be a constant tension. Reaching and sustaining peak achievable performance will require some clever, my best layout looks like an actual power plant.

I'm not far at all in the tech tree. I can reach simple circuits easily now. Lamps are not decorative. Roads are not bling.

It's surprisingly easy to get sucked in to a hand-carry dance that keeps you so involved you kinda lose sight of progressing. When you get something working, as you start working with it, the flaws in the setup become apparent.

This modpack is *far* better than I hoped. It's clearly been thought out and play tested, balanced and hand-tuned and reworked and iterated repeatedly. "Waste" products are buffalo parts and finding good designs that make dealing with them pleasant is a whole new level of play. It's not hard to find tedious layouts that just suck up space and have no clever, but, umm, where's the fun in that? I like it the fun way.

[Hurkyl]

I remember it being surprisingly satisfying to work out a design pattern that would let you cover an entire mineral patch with burner miners while being fully automated and not wasting too much space.

And working out how to build it efficiently by hand. Pro tip: super force build can rotate inserters. So if you make a blueprint, you can quickly click and drag a line of inserters and then use the blueprint to get them oriented properly.

This trick helps with some vanilla steel smelting designs too.

I also found it interesting that things were large enough that laying roads felt super practical.

[quyxkh]

Pro tip: super force build can rotate inserters. So if you make a blueprint, you can quickly click and drag a line of inserters and then use the blueprint to get them oriented properly.

I hope you feel the gratitude coming your way every time I use this from now on. It's… it's going to be a lot.