Development and Discussion

[Tante_Ju]

[…]Angel combines these three reaction steps. In my opinion it is a good choice if there is no other use for intermediate products. Adding of free compressed air does not give much interest into the fabrication chain.

it would be a good choice if there was a source of oxygen visible or implicated. so why use hydrogen as one of the educts? this seems just very counter-intuitive to me. maybe i just do not get what the hydrogen stands for here as a symbol.

[Hannu]

I forgot that hydrogen. I could not found a reaction which combines SO2 and H2 to H2SO4. It must be some kind of game balancing thing to get rid of excess hydrogen from oxygen production for SO2. I agree that it would be more intuitive to be air or O2 instead of H2, but do not see it as a significant problem in game play.

[Arch666Angel]

[…]Angel combines these three reaction steps. In my opinion it is a good choice if there is no other use for intermediate products. Adding of free compressed air does not give much interest into the fabrication chain.

it would be a good choice if there was a source of oxygen visible or implicated. so why use hydrogen as one of the educts? this seems just very counter-intuitive to me. maybe i just do not get what the hydrogen stands for here as a symbol.

That might be an actual mistake by me, I cant remember researching anything else than the contact and wet methods for sulfur production and I did also look at N-Tech Chemistry for this. I will put it on my list, thanks for the hint.

The question is to just add/change the recipe to sulfur dioxide/oxygen/water or implement the intermediates and two acid recipes like n-tech has them

[Tante_Ju]

as long as there is no other use planned for SO3 i would say the most interesting way to do this would be with a three kind educt chemical plant. this might also be interesting for some other recipes that are now two step but could be one step with a reactor building that is enabled for it.

[aklesey1]

[…]Angel combines these three reaction steps. In my opinion it is a good choice if there is no other use for intermediate products. Adding of free compressed air does not give much interest into the fabrication chain.

it would be a good choice if there was a source of oxygen visible or implicated. so why use hydrogen as one of the educts? this seems just very counter-intuitive to me. maybe i just do not get what the hydrogen stands for here as a symbol.

That might be an actual mistake by me, I cant remember researching anything else than the contact and wet methods for sulfur production and I did also look at N-Tech Chemistry for this. I will put it on my list, thanks for the hint.

The question is to just add/change the recipe to sulfur dioxide/oxygen/water or implement the intermediates and two acid recipes like n-tech has them

I like ideas with sulfur from N.tech Chemistry mod but for last time when i played with this mod + bob's mods its breaks technology tree from bob's mods and the tree became unsual, there were many deadlock branches in the electrolysis area, but of course this mod was cool, thanks to its author for his creation

[ukezi]

you should consider to implement barrels and gas cannister for your fluids and gases. For big setups with beacons to clean ore you need so much purified water, that pipes are the bottle neck. with barrels one could use bots and the pumping stations. It should be real easy to do because of your name structure for the fluids.
I know omni barrel implements barrels for everything, but thats for assemblers and not the pumping stations and compressors.

[Zyrconia]

Hi there!

I'm not sure I understand the intent of Refining mod. Taking the new ores and adding a new step, the crushing, is fairly simple, has good throughput, but only works on the 4 "main" ores. So I thought that with this mod you would have an ever expansing layered setup. The first layer is always crushing and the final layer is ore sorting. I created a setup where each ore has a modular zone for each layer with 6 (they are not all done yet) rows of ore sorters with filter inserter that merge ores at the very end of the line to consolidate all the final ores.

But I am having huge throughput problems when going to floatation processing. In the crusher phase, 3 mk3 miners can handle 1 crusher. I had 4 crushers that could fill up a red belt pretty good and that was sent to steel smelters.

Now the same 4 crushers struggle with Floatation cells. Initially I added only 2, but then I extended the line to 12. Output is still pathetic.

So I tested that one mark 2 crusher feeds 5 and a bit mark 1 floatation cells.

So I would need 20 floataion cells to keep up. And probably 4-5 Hydro Plants to handle the output. And 2 for the input.

Are these the intended ratios? To get any decent copper for this phase I would expect 60+ flotation cells to be needed. This only on one of the ore lines.

[hoho]

Yes, you will need a LOT of machines for the intermediate steps between crushing and sorting.

No idea if intended or not but that's how it has been since pretty much forever.

[ukezi]

You need a lot of hydro and thermal refining. go take a look at the spreadsheet in my signature.
@ANGEL you should consider to change the the mixed sorting of tin from Stiratite/Bobmonium to Bobmonium/Jivolite since both Stiratite and Bobmonium are starting ores.

[Zyrconia]

Well, I set up 2 train linked mining outposts and one mixed ore sorting outpost.

In this outpost I put a single mixed ore sorter to get copper and the output is now more than double than the whole 12 floatation setup.

Now I have 6 and I fill more than 1 red bar of copper. Hard to tell how much because while my base is huge, pretty much the largest I ever had, it barely does anything. Figuring out the new gas recipes is really hard. Now I'm searching for salt water...

Edit: found the saline water. It was right under my nose. I was disposing it via water void for hours now.

[Arch666Angel]

Refining is a bit special in it's design because it differs from the base game, because the next tier doesnt always mean it is better, higher tiers only provide your with more options and variety. Itended is a use of all/most of the avaiable processes in a sort of priority driven process, but if you do it like this or come up with another way is entirely your choice to make.

---
I'm at the moment unsure how to progress further, not idea wise but more with the structure of the mods, the thought hit me to consolidate them into fewer but bigger packs, but that would mean a lot of restructuring. That's also one of the reason why I havent released the vehicles I made yet.

In the meantime something I did in my free hours.
Tech Labs

[mexmer]

Refining is a bit special in it's design because it differs from the base game, because the next tier doesnt always mean it is better, higher tiers only provide your with more options and variety. Itended is a use of all/most of the avaiable processes in a sort of priority driven process, but if you do it like this or come up with another way is entirely your choice to make.

---
I'm at the moment unsure how to progress further, not idea wise but more with the structure of the mods, the thought hit me to consolidate them into fewer but bigger packs, but that would mean a lot of restructuring. That's also one of the reason why I havent released the vehicles I made yet.

In the meantime something I did in my free hours.
Tech Labs

looks to me like big airvent.
it's nice graphic, but don't think it's good for tech lab.

[ukezi]

Not really tech labs, but really nice generators
For the way to go on I would would suggest more steps in smelting to get the productivity to at least 300% so you get on par with max furnace with max prod 8 Moduls. I would also like to request that clearivier are affected by speed Moduls /beacons since that gives nice scalable designs.

[Northgate]

I'm at the moment unsure how to progress further, not idea wise but more with the structure of the mods, the thought hit me to consolidate them into fewer but bigger packs, but that would mean a lot of restructuring. That's also one of the reason why I havent released the vehicles I made yet.

I wouldn't consolidate them. I think the way the mods are separated now is very good. And I personally don't see the benefit of consolidating.

In the meantime something I did in my free hours.
Tech Labs

Nice! Are they supposed to replace the existing Tech Lab? Would you mind telling us a little bit more on how they will work?

[thurak126]

I have been wondering, what is the main use of the smelting mod? It says to give increased yields from ore but what I see a lot of it is 5 ore goes in, goes through several different stages and 5 plates come out.


EDIT: Just ran through it with copper, looks like I was not doing the maths properly. 16 ore in, and while 18 plates came out with that, along with a few part stacks of ingots or pellets.

[TerraSleet]

Been using this mod as part of the Farlands modpack, really enjoying the added complexity though there are a couple balance issues:

Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) production is too difficult. I've looked into the recipe chain through the Foreman app and this seems to be caused by two main problems, 1st that the recipe gives too little NaOH (10 Saline = 1 NaOH) and 2nd that saline water is a pain to produce (only reliable method is purifying water, you get 2 saline and 10 pure water with 15 water, meaning you need an insane amount of hydro plants and clarifiers to process the water and dump all the excess pure water). In its current state, a single hydro plant mk2 + 5 clarifiers can produce... 0.4 NaOH per second.

I noticed earlier in this thread you mentioned brine pools. When are you planning to implement this? It seems to be high priority right now since this issue alone ruins endgame megabases due to the rocket fuel recipe needing 30 NaOH and 120 Cl per unit (you need entire lakes pumped and literally hundreds of hydroplant + clarifier setups to get anywhere close to 1 rocket/min!)

I also suggest increasing the number of NaOH you get from electrolysis by lowering the amount of saline water you need and increasing the amount of NaOH you get per electrolysis. In bobs mods it's a 1:1 ratio of NaOH and Cl which works fine and in situations where you get excess production of either you can easily burn the NaOH or vent the Cl. Personally I think ' 4 saline > 2 NaOH 2Cl 2H ' would work best and saline water would come from brine pool pumps.

Also a more minor issue, coal pellets and petrochem solid fuel recipes are useless since carbon is more energy efficient. Someone also mentioned this earlier in the thread so I won't repeat what he said.

Thanks for your great work on these mods

[Affly]

I have been wondering, what is the main use of the smelting mod? It says to give increased yields from ore but what I see a lot of it is 5 ore goes in, goes through several different stages and 5 plates come out.


EDIT: Just ran through it with copper, looks like I was not doing the maths properly. 16 ore in, and while 18 plates came out with that, along with a few part stacks of ingots or pellets.

Every added step except melting/casting is a +25% to output.

100 ore -> 100 plates
+processed -> 125 plates
+pellets -> 150 plates

[Zyrconia]

Refining is a bit special in it's design because it differs from the base game, because the next tier doesnt always mean it is better, higher tiers only provide your with more options and variety. Itended is a use of all/most of the avaiable processes in a sort of priority driven process, but if you do it like this or come up with another way is entirely your choice to make.

Thanks for the answer. Sorry I didn't answer up until now, I restarted my map twice since .

I think choice for choices's sake is not that good and all choices should have designed and well balanced trade offs or just to be inherently interesting and have a nice flow that one can discover. Angel's Petrochem is a good example of this: with only two inputs for your refining area, you get oil and gas processing, free flamethrower ammo and you finally get a chance to do something with your excess crushed stone without external sources of sulfur.

Your Refining mod gives a lot of choice and I tried multiple designs. And some of them did not perform to my expectations. The question is if I had wrong expectations or if something is not as balanced as it should be.

My third map using your mods is fairly low tech so it is the perfect point to test out what each choice is good for and what are its performance characteristics. In a balanced system, I think that each time you increase the complexity of your setup, there should be some sort of advantage to it. It could be anything: higher throughput, more diverse production, disposal of unwanted byproducts, ...

As a starting point I'll take the miner => ore crusher => smelter setup. This is the simplest setup. While I'm assigning roles to each of them, I would rate this setup as the most basic one that needs to be replaced. But does it really? Here is where the interesting choice bit comes in. This setup is compact, has decent throughput and is almost enough to get you to blue science. All you need is quarts ore. So a first choice would be where to get quarts? You can take the simple route of replacing one simple plate production line with an ore crusher => ore sorter one to get quartz. Or you can use your waste recycling setup to get trace amounts of quartz and continue with your simple setup.

So the next question is: could you finish the game with a simple setup + trace amounts from recycling. I don't know. But it would be interesting if you could. Pretty much by design such a setup would be very inefficient and would have very low throughput, but maybe it could be a baseline setup.

I'll get back with the results of the testing. Unless you are against it and want to keep the forum "spoiler" free.

[ukezi]

I have been wondering, what is the main use of the smelting mod? It says to give increased yields from ore but what I see a lot of it is 5 ore goes in, goes through several different stages and 5 plates come out.


EDIT: Just ran through it with copper, looks like I was not doing the maths properly. 16 ore in, and while 18 plates came out with that, along with a few part stacks of ingots or pellets.

I have one the math hier. also I have some spreadsheets in my signature.

[hoho]

all choices should have designed and well balanced trade offs or just to be inherently interesting and have a nice flow that one can discover.

I'd say the current way of how it is done already has that.

E.g ore->crush->smelt is easiest and with least amount of byproducts
Add in sorting for secondary ores + extra byproducts you can process to whatever you want.
Alternatively, combine two of the correct types of crushed ore to get pure ore of a single type without side effects and maximum efficiency.
If you want more types of secondary ores without recycling, just keep going down the processing line.


My setups so far have been only doing crushing+sorting on iron and copper. If either clogs up, I'll run the crush+combine lines for the other type to unclog it.

With secondary ores I go the full processing chain. I would do the combining there too but thanks to my quirk of layering all the mods that make science more expensive, I've rarely got deep enough into the game to get enough types of ore for the combining before I decide to restart the map again


While I'm not against seeing changes, I don't know what those changes might be.

So the next question is: could you finish the game with a simple setup + trace amounts from recycling.

Pretty sure you could if you can dump the primary ores/metals somewhere to get enough byproducts for recycling.