pY Coal Processing - Discussion

[nagapito]

Ok.... Maybe my playstyle is not the most recommended for Py mods and I need to adapt a little...

I like starting maps with very limited starting resources and resources very far away (I change RSO region size from 7 to 12!!) and kinda brute force the initial base to provide me with all the infrastructure needed to start a proper base heavy on trains.
Due the limited resources I need to be very picky where I spend them so, inefficient systems like quenching are something I like to avoid.
Since this is a bootstrap base (aka tier 1) to actually start building my initial base (tier 2) that will provide the resources in a affordable quantity to finally build my actual base (tier 3) which might or not might be my final base, in case I want to go crazy (tier 4, kinda thousands SPM style), I also want to avoid doing stuff like massive renewable coal infrastructure to circumvent lacking of initial resources...

PY mods went a long way to make this playstyle enjoyable while keeping other playstyles enjoyable too. I still remember when I would have to make like 30 Auogs to produce enough Urea to feed a couples F.B.Reactors... it was insane and always made me stop wanting to play.

But I still think it can be improved and some small tweaks could still be made to allow even better enjoyment of the mods for all playstyles.
And so far, the biggest issue I find is this new requirement for niobium on very early game items. The pumpjack I can live with it, since the pumpjack issue derives from the big power pole requiring niobium requiring sulfur...

But, the big power pole requiring niobium... seems something that is unnecessary and could be changed without any impact in gameplay!

[nagapito]

I might be using a different set or version of mods but my niobium production doesn't use any sulfur. It does use crude to get the organic solvent (aromatics via Naphtha) but I did that because my lubricant usage is very intermittent. The refined syngas comes from coalbed gas and I probably spent a few thousand steel on drill heads which are sitting on a belt which stretches half way across the map (I probably should have made them on site by taking iron of the nearby patch, I just realised there's a chromium patch not too far south of it as well).

Having looked at it again, it does seem that crude from the aromatics and syngas would be about 10 times more energy efficient and probably the same for space efficiency (which given the sprawl I've generated to get the first 2 science packs working is quite attractive).

Yes, you also have the saline water way to generate chlorine that requires salt at a prohibitive rate for early game. Only one mine available and it only produces at 10 units per second and 1 plate of niobium per seconds requires at least 12.5 salt per second... plus the rest of the base

[theblindironman]

inefficient systems like quenching are something I like to avoid.

Why is that inefficient? A supply of niobium without a mine, a supply of borax without syngas, a supply of saline water without needing salt or stone.
This is a mandatory usage of tar early game. This is how I make large power poles early on.

[Blokus]

1. There are workarounds for sulfur. Easiest one is to include PH and use a sulfur mine. Without PH, you can still make sulfuric acid by evaporating tailings. The only reason I don't do a ton of this is because getting any reasonable amount of throughput out of that recipe would obliterate my power supply, since it's a slow recipe and evaporators are power hungry. Also because making nexelit is faster than a sinkhole at destroying tailings (!) and this seems to be by far the easiest way to make nexelit before you can make nexelit mines. Tangent aside, oil is definitely not required to get sulfur in Py.

So, you agree the that alternatives are a killer at early game since we dont have that much power/resources and all other alternatives involve advanced tech

No, evaporating tailings is a perfectly OK method to use.

and/or travelling distances to obtain a sulfur mine which, brings again the problem of not being able to use big power poles to stretch the power to those far locations.

Sulfur mines are burner devices. Your complaint about distances is entirely self-inflicted; I happily use rails on default settings resource generation with no RSO.

One thing is, as tech advances, having better options to produce an item and redesign the base to be more efficient. Other thing is knowingly be forced to build an huge amount of infrastructure that you know will be scrapped a couple seconds later, not because you research new tech, but because you were able to produce a few items and immediately invalidate the whole infrastructure.

I just haven't experienced that anywhere in my game, but then I am using PH, so your point about hooking up vanilla pumpjacks doesn't really apply to me since the vanilla oil patches are extremely rare.

2. Honestly I have gotten by with small and medium poles, mostly small unless I needed the coverage due to tight spaces at places like train stations, until I was making niobium for sp3 anyway. It's not prohibitive, just annoying.

Not having the ability to use big power poles to expand the base is far behind annoying. Is way to restrictive and constrains the playability by a lot. They have one single function, take power to far distances but, players are forced to waste thousands of resources using small poles at early game due to a limitation that has no purpose besides being annoying.

I'm just saying that I've gotten by. You can also work around it by giving dedicated power to outposts if you are really having trouble with transmission.

3. I don't think oil is meant to be particularly easy to get out of the ground in early game once Py is "done", considering how hard it is to do it when PH is enabled. At the moment the only build I have that uses crude (which is my joint rubber/plastic build) makes it out of coal.

In my opinion, restricting oil access at early game is a bad game design choice. Its far more interesting limiting most of the outcomes from oil while still providing some beneficts of oil at early game instead of just scrapping a huge chunck of game play to a later stage. And for new players, slowly getting access to more and more capavilities of oil is more interesting then suddenly open the flood gate and be overwhelmed with all changes.

I generally agree, I'm just saying that this is how the pack seems to be drifting. On a related subject, I still feel like sp3 is too much of a cliff, considering how many of the intermediates aren't going to be useful for anything other than circuit 2 until after you already have some circuit 2 made.

Besides, if we arent supposed to have easy access to oil and requiring us to have an huge infrastructure before using it, maybe push oil tech unlocks for a later stage?

As far as I can tell PH already does this, since I have found precisely one small oil patch on my entire map, and haven't found a single vanilla oil patch except in the chunks that got explored prior to installing PH.

To me, makes no sense forcing a player to waste huge ammounts of resources to be able to finally access niobium, be forced to build a very unificient chain so he can produce a couple plates (more precisly, 10) and immidiatly scrap the ineficient sulfur production for a oil based one. And once he produces a couple more plates, re-wire the whole access to niobium mine since he can now build large poles...

Sulfur mining is honestly the easiest way to make large amounts of sulfur and it's not that hard to access.

[Blokus]

I might be using a different set or version of mods but my niobium production doesn't use any sulfur.

You're right, actually. You do need sulfur for cladding when you go to make optical fiber, but just the plate only needs the ore, some processing that doesn't need ingredients, organic solvent, hydrogen chloride, ammonia, and salt. And getting the ore even with refined syngas doesn't need any sulfur, either...and of course there's always quenching if you only want a little bit for big power poles.

[Boardy]

Crash on load multiplayer when first player enters the game. The game was saved with the previous version of pY Coal Processing. Downgrading to version 1.2.3 is a workaround.

Code: Select all

Error while running event pycoalprocessing::on_nth_tick(30)
__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/tailings-pond.lua:89: bad argument #1 of 2 to 'is_valid' (number expected, got table)
stack traceback:
	[C]: in function 'is_valid'
	__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/tailings-pond.lua:89: in function 'set_fluid_level_image'
	__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/tailings-pond.lua:123: in function 'handler'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:300: in function 'pcall'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:319: in function 'dispatch_event'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:389: in function <__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:353
  38.904 Error ServerMultiplayerManager.cpp:92: MultiplayerManager failed: "The mod Pyanodons Coal Processing caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event pycoalprocessing::on_nth_tick(30)
__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/tailings-pond.lua:89: bad argument #1 of 2 to 'is_valid' (number expected, got table)
stack traceback:
	[C]: in function 'is_valid'
	__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/tailings-pond.lua:89: in function 'set_fluid_level_image'
	__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/tailings-pond.lua:123: in function 'handler'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:300: in function 'pcall'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:319: in function 'dispatch_event'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:389: in function <__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:353>
  38.904 Info ServerMultiplayerManager.cpp:776: updateTick(6683850) changing state from(InGame) to(Failed)
  38.904 Quitting: multiplayer error.

[Dragony]

^^^^^^ Also happens when loading a single player game after upgrade. Prior to that message I get the message "Removed objects: tailings-pond-sprite"

[pyanodon]

new update should fixed it.

[morcup]

I got a non recoverable error when generating a new chunk. Attached are the save file, log, and a screenshot of the error. It happens prettry reliably on the northern edge of the base, near the stop named "temp." Not entirely sure if this has anything to do with it, but I skipped the previous version of PyCoal because I had some tailings ponds handling steam, and the newer version did not like it. The chunk error happened when I updated to latest version. Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help diagnose the problem.

[the_ave]

I have just ran into the same issue:

Code: Select all

The mod Pyanodons Coal Processing caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event pycoalprocessing::on_chunk_generated (ID 12)
__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/resource-generation.lua:242: bad argument #2 of 2 to 'random' (interval is empty)
stack traceback:
	[C]: in function 'random'
	__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/resource-generation.lua:242: in function 'nonstartspawn'
	__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/resource-generation.lua:477: in function 'handler'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:300: in function 'pcall'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:319: in function 'dispatch_event'
	__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:389: in function <__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:353>

[zizzleswomp]

I could get this error very consistently yesterday. I noticed there was an update to the mod and after grabbing that, haven't seen it again. Maybe double-check if you have latest update?

[Pridesfall]

The mod Pyanodons Coal Processing caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event pycoalprocessing::on_chunk_generated (ID 12)
__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/resource-generation.lua:297: bad argument #2 of 2 to 'random' (interval is empty)
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'random'
__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/resource-generation.lua:297: in function 'nonstartspawn'
__pycoalprocessing__/scripts/resource-generation.lua:477: in function 'handler'
__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:300: in function 'pcall'
__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:319: in function 'dispatch_event'
__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:389: in function <__stdlib__/stdlib/event/event.lua:353>

Here's another case of it I just got. My mods are all up to date. I tried playing again and it crashed after the same amount of time had passed again.

[zizzleswomp]

Yeah, I started getting it again and dug into it a bit. In PyCP's resource-generation.lua, it sets up some lists of resources in two different functions - ore_gen.on_init() and ore_gen.on_configuration_changed(). I added some logging and found that neither of these functions are getting called when I load my save. So when it tries to randomly pick a resource to generate, the list of resources is empty. That in turn leads to asking for a random number between 1 and 0, which is not allowed (second number must be >= first number).

There is already a check against 0 in one case. Adding that protection to the other cases at least makes the exception no longer trigger. Of course, it also means any new chunks generated will never have any ores on them either.

[pyanodon]

were working on it

[katalex]

Hello,

Sorry, your latest version incompatible with PyCoalTBaA and another big mods. 1.2.3 - ok.

[Pridesfall]

The latest crash is fixed but now resources rarely spawn and when they do they are always a perfect square. On new game creation no resources spawn because there are no resources listed on the resource tab.

[katalex]

I find stupid method for make new maps: used 1.2.3, generate new world, after change 1.2.3 to latest version...
It is a pity that the author does not want to maintain compatibility with other mods

[Pridesfall]

Compatibility problems with what mods? I only have ones like alien biome and LTN that shouldn't effect resource spawning.

[the_ave]

@katalex: just go with RSO and you should be perfectly fine (aside from some extra patches spawned in the start area when you enable RSO). That's the approach I have used.

If RSO's feault settings seem too... difficult for you, you can start tweaking them. I used a Sandbox game to check the outcome of my setup until I found some settings I enjoy. Perhaps I will tune them down just a bit, it seems that the 500M+ patches are too close to the start area even for train-based layouts...

[katalex]

After latest update of author I can't use another big mods, bob-angels-aai.