[MOD 1.1] Xander Mod v3.6.1

[foodfactorio]

hehe, yeah you could switch over to youtube and watch other people chop trees in their factorio video

(on a more mod topic note, i actually came to this page as the mod looked interesting too, so i added it to my playlist)
current playlist has been:

- to continue my 0.14 campaign (angels+bobs from arumba modpack + tons of other small mods) to complete the SpaceX mod.
and
- to continue my 0.15 solo game with pycoal processing (plus a few small quality of life mods),
- to then try out wear&tear on both games
- and to try your cool sounding mod too

[Repofme1]

Hi all -

The first update is out! See the changelog (edit to original post in a few minutes) for a complete list of fixes, but most of what I have mentioned recently is in. About the starting items, not only is there now a second mining drill, but I also added a bunch of parts that will come in handy throughout the very early game, for a more sustained bonus that essentially discounts many things instead of giving a few outright. I also tried to stick to things that could plausibly be salvaged from a spaceship wreck, like copper cable and titanium, although the latter is useless so early on. But also some mechanisms and motors to represent random spaceship parts.

Fortunately, old save files should not be broken on load, at least according to the one I tested. I thought that this might happen because I completed the major technology renaming campaign that I needed to fix the locale, which is also in this update. However some technologies have also changed to unlock different recipes, and there are a few of these that I forgot in the changelog, so they may result in current world missing some easier recipes that should be enabled.

Let me know how things go, I hope it will be easier!

[Repofme1]

EDIT: correct quote.

Currently finished researching steel with 50 reds and it was really hard Heading towards the assembler

(Hint: I would go for the machine tool. The new burner one is cheaper, and more useful. The assembling machine isn't quite the one you know - it spent too long staring into the impossible, twisting geometry of the XM tech tree, and hasn't been the same since. )

The machine tool makes gears, bearings, shafts, cable, and the like. The assembling machine makes full mechanisms, burner drills, science packs, and similar.
Which one do you spend more time crafting? I know for me it's the former category.

[Ratzap]

That's a big improvement. I regenerated the same map from my seed and started fresh. After 1 hour I had a couple of techs and 9 miners working away.
Fuel supply is the next big problem I think. The 900 charcoal I made is almost gone and with 4 coal miners I'll switch to coke soon.

[Repofme1]

That's a big improvement. I regenerated the same map from my seed and started fresh. After 1 hour I had a couple of techs and 9 miners working away.
Fuel supply is the next big problem I think. The 900 charcoal I made is almost gone and with 4 coal miners I'll switch to coke soon.

Yes! Coal coke is the way to go - can't really automate wood at this stage, but coal is very accessible. I intend it as a major bootstrapping step. I'm currently working on the basic organics so we can actually get some good circuits going, then comes some play testing to see if early automation is actually practical enough.

[jodokus31]

Thank you very much for the update

I must agree, it is much better now. I also started again and now after 1:45 i have 10 miners and currently researching the machine tool. I also think, that the automation of immediate products are far more important.
coke from coal make sense, if you dont want to chop down the whole map I agree, that fuel is really much needed. F.e. One coke for one iron ore smelting is kinda much.

I'm currently a bit confused how to create the steel plate. The recipe says, that you have to smelt 4 wrought iron plate in a clay furnace. But instead I get the iron castings. Is there trick or do I use the wrong furnace?

[Repofme1]

I'm currently a bit confused how to create the steel plate. The recipe says, that you have to smelt 4 wrought iron plate in a clay furnace. But instead I get the iron castings. Is there trick or do I use the wrong furnace?

Whoops, I think this is an oversight on my part. Forgot (again) how the base furnace recipes can only make one type of output from a given input. I don't like how limited they are, you can't use multiple ingredients or outputs, and you need a dedicated input item for each output. I have a steel charge item in, but I was only using it for the improved steel smelting so guess I'll patch it in to the regular one as well. I'll try to get a fix out soon because steel is pretty important, but things are not at a good braking*EDIT: breaking* point atm.

[jodokus31]

Whoops, I think this is an oversight on my part. Forgot (again) how the base furnace recipes can only make one type of output from a given input. I don't like how limited they are, you can't use multiple ingredients or outputs, and you need a dedicated input item for each output. I have a steel charge item in, but I was only using it for the improved steel smelting so guess I'll patch it in to the regular one as well. I'll try to get a fix out soon because steel is pretty important, but things are not at a good braking*EDIT: breaking* point atm.

Ah, I see. Makes sense. Thanks for the instant reply. So, I'm kinda stuck now, but its ok. Should stop anyway for today or how long it will take. No hurry.
I wonder how it will turn out later, if you try to automate the furnace recipes with belts and inserters. Will the correct smelting recipes are chosen, if you have f.e. iron ore and charcoal. Will it smelt iron or the soda. Dont know, if coke will have a next step smelting recipe. Since you have so much recipes, which are smelted in a row.
Anyway, I really like it, how things are evolve.
F.e. the wooden power pole turns out to be small challenge with the glass And belts are also a thing, which is not quite handcraftable on demand, because it takes much longer than vanilla.

[Repofme1]

Ah, I see. Makes sense. Thanks for the instant reply. So, I'm kinda stuck now, but its ok. Should stop anyway for today or how long it will take. No hurry.
I wonder how it will turn out later, if you try to automate the furnace recipes with belts and inserters. Will the correct smelting recipes are chosen, if you have f.e. iron ore and charcoal. Will it smelt iron or the soda. Dont know, if coke will have a next step smelting recipe. Since you have so much recipes, which are smelted in a row.
Anyway, I really like it, how things are evolve.
F.e. the wooden power pole turns out to be small challenge with the glass And belts are also a thing, which is not quite handcraftable on demand, because it takes much longer than vanilla.

I'd like to wait a bit longer than just 2 days on this update, maybe 3 or 4. To get more stuff in, so I can maybe call it 1.1.0 instead of 1.0.2, and to keep down a mess from a large number of versions. Finishing basic organics, more ferrous metal fixes, considering the fuel issue that has been brought up, some internal reorganization and similar stuff that will be useful in the future rather than now.

That's a good point about which smelting recipe a furnace will choose, and I had thought of it earlier but thank you for reminding me, now that furnace automation is getting to be a realistic possibility Fortunately, I don't have anything planned for smelting of coke. On the contrary, I think that furnaces will not be very good at holding a recipe, like in your example if the iron ore ran out the charcoal would start getting smelted. I'm not sure how to fix this, without adding an even bigger mess of mixed-charge items
EDIT: Yeah, if iron ore runs out then the inserter will first fill up the entire fuel slot of the furnace, then start putting the charcoal in the smelting slot to make soda ash. However because charcoal is intended as a bootstrapping fuel to get to coke (which doesn't have this smelting issue), and automation isn't really practical until after you get coke, I'll just leave this as it is for now, as another incentive to use coke over charcoal. Automating soda production should still work, with charcoal or coke as fuel. If you use only charcoal the inserter will put it in both slots, and if you give it coke and charcoal the former will only go to the fuel slot. Just don't run out of coke I guess..

I agree that power poles were annoying because of the glass, so I halved the cost of the insulator. Not sure what to do about the transport belt, I could make its recipe faster but the bearings actually are 2/3 of the current time cost, and I don't want to change those because they are used in too many places.

[Repofme1]

A Word on Fuel -

That's a big improvement. I regenerated the same map from my seed and started fresh. After 1 hour I had a couple of techs and 9 miners working away.
Fuel supply is the next big problem I think. The 900 charcoal I made is almost gone and with 4 coal miners I'll switch to coke soon.

I saw this mentioned before, I think, but in any case it's on my mind. I'm actually rather satisfied with the current fuel situation, so any changes are going to seed some thinking. Of course, that's exactly what my mind has been doing, so I'll list out some points:

• - I rewrought the overall fuel and carbon system throughout the game, and I rather like it. However, it still needs more tweaks.
  - I doubt I will change the 1:1 fuel:plate basic smelting. The fuel is not just to heat up the furnace, it has to chemically react with the ore and reduce the metal from oxide or sulfide to elemental metal. Plus, I like the simplicity of that ratio, where 1 standard fuel (4 MJ - coke or charcoal) gives 1 smelting recipe. I always felt that having the 1 coal belt snaking around between all the furnace lines was an awkward kludge, and I never knew how much 1 coal was really good for.
  - However some smelting is still too expensive, for example the gear blanks. I am halving the time and fuel cost for those in the next update. Ideally I would have steel blanks smelted direct from plates, but that conflicts with the forging, and we've seen what happens there... However I like the steps iron plate -> cast iron -> iron gear blank, because there is a chemical change you need for making cast iron, so iron gears from plates would not make much sense.
  - The current fuel ratios also makes transporting it annoying, there is a lot of manually handing fuel around. This creates an incentive to make a coal coking plant early on, and while I like the idea of such a plant, I wouldn't mind not needing it so badly so soon.
  - I could increase the fuel value of coal and have it give more coke, but then it starts getting close to the solid oil fuel.
  - I could double the richness and size (4x total amount) of coal deposits, which I think is what I'll do, because I foresee major fuel shortages before too long.
  - I can't just increase the value of coke because then you would be getting more energy from the coke than the coal it came from. The coking process always removes some of the mass, and hence energy content, from the coal. It is instead needed to make coal chemically pure enough to smelt iron (and other stuff) without getting too much sulfur in the product, which ruins the iron.

Let me know if you have any comments or ideas on the fuel situation. While I was not surprised by the initial way-off balancing issues, I did not really expect this fuel issue.

[Ratzap]

One thing which comes to mind from other saves is that if you have a lot of fuel usage or low fuel value items, burner inserters or sometimes even the basic inserters, cannot keep up. So you get low throughput as a best case and worst case things grind to a halt.
Example: using raw wood to fuel boilers to make electricity. Using 2 burner inserters per boiler still isn't enough to keep the steam coming and you get brown outs.

Low fuel value also means you run out of belt capacity quickly too.

You also need to bear in mind that charcoal, even as a stop gap, is hand cut trees. To get past the need for charcoal as fuel takes roughly 250 trees and you use it after that for soda. I hope to hell you have a greenhouse type building to produce raw wood at some point because hand chopping trees gets real old, real fast

[Ratzap]

Another small snag



This should be a self feeding coke unit. Unfortunately the burner inserters don't recognise coke as fuel so they won't use it and everything stops.

[jodokus31]

First, take your time. Rather have a contemplated fix than a fast, which breaks other things.

If the smelting with base furnaces gets too problematic, you could go with something like bobs metal mixing furnace (dont how difficult it is to add new entities), with explicit recipe selection:
f.e.
tin plate + copper plate -> tin-copper charge (single item for furnace) -> bronze.
tin plate + copper plate (2 items for special furnace) -> bronze
Just an idea. I actually like it somehow, how it works now.
I also dont see the charcoal smelting as problematic, because i will not feed the furnaces with hand-chopped charcoal once i have coke.

Regarding belts and such. I think its really nice, that they're not so easy to get. So you have to setup automation asap, if you want to proceed in a productive way.

Regarding fuel. I think its just unfamiliar, that it takes so much compared to vanilla. If you are aware of it, you really have to consider it in the calculations.
Usually, fueling is a annoying bypart of smelting and not considered as part of the recipe for most people and they are longing to have the electric furnaces soon.
And it feels really unusual, that you have to create a similar sized coke smelting line for each iron smelting line (maybe its only a half or a quarter of furnaces for coke, but beltwise, its the same amount). I fear, that people won't understand it, without your explanations, which sound acceptable.

And I see a problem, if you need one coal for each ore you smelt, you will need an abundance of coal on the map. I dont think, that even 4 times more will be enough.
F.e. if you smelt during the whole game 100M iron, you also need 100M coal. Same for copper and other. And you've got to feed the boilers. This makes coal the most needed resource, which is usually iron. Maybe theres an other long term replacement for coke at some point?

Im also wondering about the fuel restriction for burner inserter and stone furnaces. On one hand, its realistic, that an entity can only be feed by one type of fuel, on the other hand its really inconvinient for a setup like Ratzap's. It could be workarounded by using the electric inserter, if the fuel doesnt match.

I also think, that a wood production/greenhouse is needed, if there are unique products for the long run, which uses wood. I don't see me harvesting wood, even with bots. If a greenhouse is available, then it could help with the coal shortage (then we have the problem again with the charcoal smelting recipe)

[Ratzap]

3 hours played: I've researched all grey science now and harvested all trees/rocks on my island.

I'm going to stop at this point for now and wait for the next developments.

jodokus31 - electric inserters are a hell of a lot of work to get to. A lot more research and considerable amount of resources, at the point you need to automate coke production they are very far away.

[jodokus31]

jodokus31 - electric inserters are a hell of a lot of work to get to. A lot more research and considerable amount of resources, at the point you need to automate coke production they are very far away.

Thats true. You need to research electricity, craft steam engines and power poles. And research the first electric inserter. (80 Science Packs 0)
Otherwise. if you put 10 coal into an inserter, it runs really long alone

[Repofme1]

Long couple of posts coming up!


Fuel Throughput -

One thing which comes to mind from other saves is that if you have a lot of fuel usage or low fuel value items, burner inserters or sometimes even the basic inserters, cannot keep up. So you get low throughput as a best case and worst case things grind to a halt.
Example: using raw wood to fuel boilers to make electricity. Using 2 burner inserters per boiler still isn't enough to keep the steam coming and you get brown outs.

I had something similar happen where I actually needed 2 electric inserters to take all the coke OUT of a brick furnace, which was problematic because it didn't leave room for the inserter to re-fuel the coking oven. Although I'm not sure why one would run a boiler on wood, given how annoying it is to chop.

Regarding fuel. I think its just unfamiliar, that it takes so much compared to vanilla. If you are aware of it, you really have to consider it in the calculations.
Usually, fueling is a annoying bypart of smelting and not considered as part of the recipe for most people and they are longing to have the electric furnaces soon.
And it feels really unusual, that you have to create a similar sized coke smelting line for each iron smelting line (maybe its only a half or a quarter of furnaces for coke, but beltwise, its the same amount). I fear, that people won't understand it, without your explanations, which sound acceptable.

I like this about learning new fuel and belt ratios, especially how smelting fuel in vanilla feels like kind of an afterthought. This is close to the feel I am going for in the early game, shit tier is inefficient, and worse, labor-intensive. And the entire mod is a learning experience for players used to traditional Factorio, I reached that level of complexity where I was making major departures from base patterns long ago. So I thought "Screw it, I'll just go all the way and make a huge overhaul mod in my own style." But this results in exactly the problem you mentioned, it's very unfamiliar to people without all the in-depth explanation of how I've worked out things in my head...

Fuel Categories, Burner Inserters -

This should be a self feeding coke unit. Unfortunately the burner inserters don't recognise coke as fuel so they won't use it and everything stops.

I feel your frustration here, I really do. I ran into the same problem, and I had to use electric inserters for the coke. The burner inserters, and all other burner machines for that matter, really out to be able to use wood, coal, coke, charcoal, heck even wooden chests. All they need is something that can make heat by burning. Unfortunately, I don't actually know how to fix this problem - the energy source section of an entity prototype only accepts one fuel category So for now I guess we'll just have to deal with it. Honestly, I feel that electric inserters are not too far off; I managed them distinctly before I needed a coke plant.

Smelting Recipes -

If the smelting with base furnaces gets too problematic, you could go with something like bobs metal mixing furnace (dont how difficult it is to add new entities), with explicit recipe selection:

It's actually pretty easy to add new entities, as long as they fit one of the base game types (furnace, assembling-machine, accumulator, lamp, etc.). Several months ago, I did try to add a bob-style furnace that had specific recipes and did multiple in/outputs, but ran into some problems. This kind of furnace actually has to be prototyped as an assembling machine, due to the limitations of the base type "furnace". And this resulted in no fire glow or flicker for the burner furnace, which felt really awkward. Maybe something hidden in the base game has changed since then, but honestly, I also kinda like the style of smelting a mixed charge in the early game. However, I did prototype the electric furnaces as assembling machines, so they can take copper and tin straight to bronze (and a ton of other fun alloys besides), so you can look forward to that improved efficiency (eventually).

[Repofme1]

Part the second:

Wood -
Wood gets ENTIRELY replaced by the mid-game, which is why I don't have a greenhouse. I've always thought it's a relatively low-quality building material and fuel. The idea is that it takes some finite amount of wood to reach a point where you need zero more wood. Although with the current state of things this point probably takes way too long to achieve (finite can still be very large), so I'll definitely think about shortening it. Either by earlier intermediate ways to replace wood-derived products, or balancing ratios to decreasing the total amount of wood needed.

Advanced Progression -
Everything we've discussed so far is the first half of the first age, which is burner. We haven't even really gotten to the second half, which is steel furnaces, although I've put it some fixes for those while I was doing them for the early burner age. Once electric processing is established, nearly everything burner becomes completely obsolete. Coke is still required as a chemical reducing agent throughout the mid and late game, but there are some other sources that get unlocked later. I even snuck in a way to make coke from nothing but electricity, see if you can find it Hint: coke is just carbon, and XM is all chemistry, where is there a ton of carbon all around us? Hint: it's not plants. As for the lack of coal compared to the huge loads of metals lying around, I had noticed this potential problem a while ago, but had too much mass feature adding and not enough play testing to properly acknowledge it. This 'energy crisis' is now getting closer on the radar, and seems worse than I thought. This will also need pondering. My intent was to essentially force solar or nuclear, but this only does electricity, and my electric smelting still has a lot of coke demand. Maybe I'll just increase the net amount of coal energy like 10- or 20-fold, this would actually be plausible as humanity mines way more coal than iron ore. Also, a general concept I've designed according to is that using carbon and organics for fuel is broadly a bad idea, and that they should be saved for construction instead - not of buildings, but of parts like circuit boards and plastic.

Current plans -
Double energy value of coal by, 8 -> 16 MJ. Double yield of coke to 4 per coal instead of 2. I would double the fuel value of coke too, and keep the ratio from coal -> coke the same in order to decrease belt throughput needs, but then all my advanced smelting recipes would not get the increase, so I probably won't do this. The number of coke items they use is based on the chemistry, and coke as 1 carbon I would have to re-work everything there because a bunch of them use odd numbers of coke, so I would have to double all the other ingredients, and some of these are already huge 400-second recipes that make like 40 units of stuff because I couldn't split them any more.
(?) Increase solid fuel to 32 MJ to balance, increase high-octane fuel to 40 MJ.
Add a bunch more coal to the ore generation. RSO will be especially helpful here.
Go through and check that wood can get phased out soon enough.

First, take your time. Rather have a contemplated fix than a fast, which breaks other things.

I'm going to stop at this point for now and wait for the next developments.

Thank you both for going slowly so as to not waste too much time on broken mechanics. I agree that slow, quality work is much better than rushed, sloppy work.

[Ratzap]

I had something similar happen where I actually needed 2 electric inserters to take all the coke OUT of a brick furnace, which was problematic because it didn't leave room for the inserter to re-fuel the coking oven. Although I'm not sure why one would run a boiler on wood, given how annoying it is to chop.

Since you asked... the Toxic forest scenario is one place. Every clear space is filled with trees, you end up with a mountain of wood before you can even clear to a coal patch. More recently I looked at a map scenario with low hydrocarbons but in heavy forests. Coal needs to be saved for plastics etc so power and smelting has to come from wood.

I even snuck in a way to make coke from nothing but electricity, see if you can find it Hint: coke is just carbon, and XM is all chemistry, where is there a ton of carbon all around us? Hint: it's not plants.

I did chemistry at University for a couple of years so yeah, you're talking about CO2 in the air I would say.

There's a mod called burner leech, I may look into that and see if there's a hint on how to shuffle fuels around to burner gear.

[jodokus31]

I like this about learning new fuel and belt ratios, especially how smelting fuel in vanilla feels like kind of an afterthought. This is close to the feel I am going for in the early game, shit tier is inefficient, and worse, labor-intensive. And the entire mod is a learning experience for players used to traditional Factorio, I reached that level of complexity where I was making major departures from base patterns long ago. So I thought "Screw it, I'll just go all the way and make a huge overhaul mod in my own style." But this results in exactly the problem you mentioned, it's very unfamiliar to people without all the in-depth explanation of how I've worked out things in my head...

I absolutely support this. Maybe you should add a short explanation to the mod description, what's the philosophy. So people dont think its a bug or balancing issue like i initially thought.

but honestly, I also kinda like the style of smelting a mixed charge in the early game. However, I did prototype the electric furnaces as assembling machines, so they can take copper and tin straight to bronze (and a ton of other fun alloys besides), so you can look forward to that improved efficiency (eventually).

Yeah, its really interesting. If it changes later, then its nice for me. I dont see the whole picture, only messing around in the early game without any clue, what will happen

Double energy value of coal by, 8 -> 16 MJ. Double yield of coke to 4 per coal instead of 2. I would double the fuel value of coke too, and keep the ratio from coal -> coke the same in order to decrease belt throughput needs, but then all my advanced smelting recipes would not get the increase, so I probably won't do this. The number of coke items they use is based on the chemistry, and coke as 1 carbon I would have to re-work everything there because a bunch of them use odd numbers of coke, so I would have to double all the other ingredients, and some of these are already huge 400-second recipes that make like 40 units of stuff because I couldn't split them any more.
(?) Increase solid fuel to 32 MJ to balance, increase high-octane fuel to 40 MJ.
Add a bunch more coal to the ore generation. RSO will be especially helpful here.
Go through and check that wood can get phased out soon enough.

If coke can be produced later without coal, then the problem is maybe not so severe. Add more coal to ore generation would definitly help. And 4 coke per coal is a also a huge buff.

[Repofme1]

Since you asked... the Toxic forest scenario is one place. Every clear space is filled with trees, you end up with a mountain of wood before you can even clear to a coal patch. More recently I looked at a map scenario with low hydrocarbons but in heavy forests. Coal needs to be saved for plastics etc so power and smelting has to come from wood.

Good point. I've had that happen, but it was so long ago that I forgot. I guess I'm pretty out of touch with actually playing the game...

I did chemistry at University for a couple of years so yeah, you're talking about CO2 in the air I would say.

There's a mod called burner leech, I may look into that and see if there's a hint on how to shuffle fuels around to burner gear.

Yep, correct. It's not really that sneaky I guess, I just never hear about it because it's energy-intensive and not economical. But in Factorio we're not limited by puny economics! It's a pure technical challenge, and that we can solve. That's part of my inspiration for this mod, to apply Factorio automation to semi-realistic chemistry and see what can be achieved there. Maybe even show some things that would be possible in reality, in principle, if we all decided to work on it. But I digress.

I'll have to look up burner leech too, if its author figured out two fuel categories for one machine that would really be something!
EDIT: from a quick look at the code it *looks* like BurnerLeech does tell burner inserters that they can use anything that burns, but I'll have to try testing it.
EDIT 2: Very briefly tested the BurnerLeech 0.15 patch that niki12339 updated from Klonan's original. It helps in some cases but not others. I found that burner inserters would now take valid fuels (like coal) from anywhere they had access to, like the fuel slots of furnaces. This would fix your coking setup, because the burner inserters for coke extraction could get coal from the furnaces smelting that coal into coke. However, it bugs out when there are only fuels that the burner inserter can't use because of fuel category conflicts. For example, when I tried to use a burner inserter to put coke from a belt into a brick furnace for general smelting, it got stuck in an endless loop of swinging back and forth until it ran out of its initial energy buffer. It looked like it would take coke out of the furnace to try to fuel itself, but then turn right around because it can't burn coke. This also resulted in duplicating the coke as the inserter ran... I suspect this happened because the original mod was written for 0.14, before fuel categories. But it didn't crash, so I guess it's good to use. I'm sorry it doesn't fix the fundamental problem, but I don't consider that to bee *too* bad. It makes burner inserters more limited than the electric ones, which I feel is appropriate, and you can still just dump like 10 coal in a burner inserter to run it for a long time. Even longer than doing so in base because I cut the burner inserter power consumption to 1/4 of its base value.